Category: Powerful Perspectives

Last week, Kim Scott joined us for a Q&A. She’s not only the author of Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss without Losing your Humanity, but also co-founder and CEO of Candor, Inc. To read the first part of this interview, click here. 
Paul: With more and more employees preferring to get home as quickly as possible, after-hours connecting is less available. How can we master the art of socializing at work?
Kim: After-hours connecting is not a good way to build the boss-employee relationship—it’s just a way to destroy work-life balance.
The best way to build a good relationship with your employees is to remember to care personally and challenge directly in the way you give, get, and encourage feedback; in the way you build the team and assign roles and projects; in the way you work with the team to set goals and achieve results. A great way to get to know your employees is to have “career conversations” during your regularly scheduled 1:1 time once a year. Remember, your employees really don’t want to go out drinking with you; they’d rather be with their friends or family.
Sometimes people like to socialize at work, and an occasional office party is not a bad thing. Just remember that it can feel mandatory and like a waste of time to people if you organize it, so let others take the lead there. The best thing you can do to keep these events fun is to provide budget and make sure people can opt out—that everyone understands these are voluntary, not required, events. Also, limit the alcohol consumption at work social events. I’ve seen so many disasters there.
Paul: Kim, I like your work on getting things done without telling people what to do. It seems to fit perfectly with the notion of “less domination—more connecting.” Can you expand on your thinking here, including the importance of listening?
Kim: I think this excerpt from the book provides that answer:
The art of getting stuff done without telling people what to do
Both Google and Apple achieved spectacular results without a purely autocratic style. This leads to important questions: How did everyone in the company decide what to do? How did strategy and goals get set? How did the cultures at these two companies, so strong and so different, develop? How did tens of thousands of people come to understand the mission? It played out very differently at both companies—more orderly at Apple, more chaotic at Google—but at a high level, the process was the same.
The process, which I call the Get Stuff Done “GSD” wheel, is relatively straightforward. But the key, often ignored by people who think of themselves as “Get Stuff Done” people, is to avoid the impulse to dive right in…. Instead, you have to first lay the groundwork for collaboration.
When run effectively, the GSD wheel will enable your team to achieve more collectively than anyone could ever dream of achieving individually—to burst the bounds of your brain. First, you have to listen to the ideas that people on your team have and create a culture in which they listen to each other. Next, you have to create space in which ideas can be sharpened and clarified, to make sure these ideas don’t get crushed before everyone fully understands their potential usefulness. But just because an idea is easy to understand doesn’t mean it’s a good one. Next, you have to debate ideas, to test them more rigorously. Then you need to decide—quickly, but not too quickly. Since not everyone will have been involved in the listen-clarify-debate-decide part of the cycle for every idea, the next step is to bring the broader team along. You have to persuade those who weren’t involved in a decision that it was a good one, so that everyone can execute it effectively. Then, having executed, you have to learn from the results, whether or not you did the right thing, and start the whole process over again.
That’s a lot of steps. Remember, they are designed to be cycled through quickly. Not skipping a step and not getting stuck on one are equally important. If you skip a step, you’ll waste time in the end. If you allow any part of the process to drag out, working on your team will feel like paying a collaboration tax, not making a collaboration investment.
You may very well be in a situation where your boss is skipping steps and just telling you what to do. Does that mean you have to do the same with your team? No, of course not! You can put these ideas into practice with the people who report to you even if your boss doesn’t subscribe to this method of getting things done. When your boss sees the results, things may change. But, if they don’t, you may have to change jobs. When more people insist on a positive working environment, not only will results for your company improve, your happiness will.
 
Paul: What would you tell project leaders about building teams?
Kim: Your job in building a team is to understand not only who is good at what, but also who is motivated by what. Your job is to know each person well enough to know what gives work meaning for them. Your job is not to “provide purpose.” A great technique for doing this is Career Conversations, described in the Radical Candor podcast (www.radicalcandor.com/blog/podcast-episode-5), and on our website, www.radicalcandor.com/blog/problem-career-conversations.
Paul: I’m thinking that sincerity trumps polish when it comes to speaking or conversation. What is your take on sincerity?
Kim: Polish really doesn’t matter that much, and too much focus on it is a sure-fire path to manipulative insincerity. Focus on saying what you think, but also on being attentive to how the person reacts. Your goal is to say it clearly—not clearly from your perspective, but in a way that is easy for the other person to understand. If you say it too harshly, you may make it impossible for the other person to hear you because they are so sad/mad/defensive. If you say it so gently that they don’t hear you at all (the more common problem), you’ve just wasted your breath and confused them.
Paul: What can you tell us about empathy?
Kim: Empathy, like intelligence or beauty or any other human attribute, can be enormously helpful, but it can also be abused. Sometimes we can even be the victim of our own empathy. If you see a person drowning and feel the panic just as acutely as the drowning person, you may not be able to help that person. I have seen people be so paralyzed by their empathy for how others feel that they fail to say things that need to be said. I have seen really empathetic people use their skills at understanding how others feel to be unnecessarily cruel. Sometimes people use their empathy to manipulate others. Empathy is a wonderful attribute if used wisely.
Paul: What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned while living a life full of candor?
Kim: Our instincts around candor are wrong. More often than not people really appreciate it, and it’s the path to building better relationships. However, we are so afraid of a possible negative emotional reaction (which does sometimes happen) that we fail to be candid. This is a big mistake.
Paul: And finally, what are your thoughts about valuing technology but not allowing it to undermine our ability to be attentive or focus?
Kim: The worst thing about technology is that we spend so much time in email, on Facebook, on our phones that we fail to care personally about the person sitting right next to us. In my family, we have a strict no phones at the table, no phones/computers in the bedrooms.
At work, I try hard not to look at my email/phone when I’m meeting with people. I often fail and I’m deeply ashamed of it. Rather than caring personally, I’m indicating that I care more about whatever is on my screen than the person I’m sitting in the room with. That is a terrible thing.
Furthermore, we often use technology to say what we think in a way that is obnoxiously aggressive, not radically candid. The reason is that it’s so easy to hide from emotions or just to be unaware of them when you’re sending an email, a text, a tweet. It’s hard to remember there are other living, breathing human beings on the other side of those messages.
Another danger of technology is that we often present a happy, rosy picture on it that is not real—it can move us toward manipulative insincerity. You often see this on Facebook. People rarely share their most vulnerable screw ups there.
I recommend taking 24 hours a week and not turning on your computer or your phone. If you find it impossible to do, you know you have a problem! There’s nothing you can do that will improve your relationships at work—and in all aspects of your life—more than learning to master your devices, rather than letting them master you.

 
You would be surprised at how many questions and emails I get each week on the topic of difficult conversations – giving and getting feedback and the general discomfort that goes along with being candid with employees, teams, and family members. 
That’s why I am so happy to have Kim Scott here this week for a Q&A. She’s not only the author of Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss without Losing your Humanity, but also co-founder and CEO of Candor, Inc.
Let’s dive in!
Paul: Why did you choose the title Radical Candor for your book and what are intending to communicate with it?
Kim: Radical Candor is the ability to care personally at the same time that you challenge directly. That doesn’t sound so radical, does it?
And yet it is. I chose the word “radical” because so many of us are conditioned to avoid saying what we really think. This is partially adaptive social behavior; it helps us avoid conflict or embarrassment. But when you’re trying to have a difficult conversation or give a boss, a peer, or an employee feedback, that kind of avoidance is disastrous.
Why “candor?” The key to getting everyone used to being direct when challenging each other (and you!) is emphasizing that it’s necessary to communicate clearly enough so that there’s no room for interpretation, but also humbly. I chose “candor” instead of “honesty” because there’s not much humility in believing that you know the truth. Implicit with candor is that you’re simply offering your view of what’s going on but that you expect people to offer theirs. If it turns out that in fact you’re the one who got it wrong, you want to know.
Paul: One phrase that struck me seems to be a foundation for everything else—Care Personally.   Will you expand on this idea for us?
Kim: It seems obvious that good bosses must care personally about the people who report directly to them. Very few people start out their careers thinking, I don’t give a damn about people, so I think I’ll be a great boss. And yet, it happens all too often that employees feel they’re being treated as pawns on a chessboard, or as inferiors—not just in a corporate hierarchy but on a fundamental human level.
Part of the reason people fail to “care personally” is the injunction to “keep it professional.” That phrase denies something essential. We are all human beings, with human feelings, and, even at work, we need to be seen as such. When it doesn’t happen, when we feel we must repress who we really are to earn a living, we become alienated. That makes us hate going to work. To most bosses, being professional means: show up at work on time, do your job, don’t show feelings (unless engaged in “motivation” or some such end-driven effort). The result is that nobody feels comfortable being who they really are at work.
Fred Kofman, my coach at Google, had a mantra that contradicted the “just professional” approach so destructive to so many managers: “Bring your whole self to work.” This saying has become a meme; Google it and you’ll get more than eight million results. Sheryl Sandberg referred to it in her 2012 commencement address at Harvard; author Mike Robbins devoted a TEDx talk to it in 2016; and Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s CEO, has made it a priority for his company. Bringing your whole self to work is one of those concepts that’s hard to define precisely, but you develop a feel for it when you start to open up to it. This often means modeling the behavior yourself by showing some vulnerability to the people who report to you—or just admitting when you’re having a bad day—and creating a safe space for others to do the same.
In addition to the obsessive devotion to “professionalism,” there’s another, less virtuous reason people fail to “care personally.” When they become a boss, some people consciously or unconsciously begin to feel they’re better or smarter than the people who work for them. That attitude makes it impossible to be a kick-ass boss; it just makes people want to kick your ass. There are few things more damaging to human relationships than a sense of superiority. That’s why I detest the word “superior” as a synonym for “boss.” I also avoid the word “employee.” Of course, if you are a boss, there is some hierarchy involved. There’s no use pretending otherwise. Just remember that being a boss is a job, not a value judgment.
Caring personally is the antidote to both robotic professionalism and managerial arrogance. Why do I say “caring personally” instead of just “caring”? Because it’s not enough to care about the person’s work or the person’s career. Only when you actually care about the whole person with your whole self can you build a relationship.
Caring personally is not about memorizing birthdays and names of family members. Nor is it about sharing the sordid details of one’s personal life, or forced chitchat at social events you’d rather not attend. Caring personally is about doing things you already know how to do. It’s about acknowledging that we are all people with lives and aspirations that extend beyond those related to our shared work. It’s about finding time for real conversations; about getting to know each other at a human level; about learning what’s important to people; about sharing with one another what makes us want to get out of bed in the morning and go to work—and what has the opposite effect.
It isn’t simply a matter of allowing your approach to your responsibilities show that you care, however; you must also care deeply about people while being prepared to be hated in return.
The movie Miracle, which is centered around the head coach of the 1980 U.S. men’s Olympic ice hockey team, depicts this really well. Head coach Herb Brooks unifies his team by pushing them so hard that he becomes the common enemy. In the movie it’s clear how much he cares about each player, and it’s painful to watch how long it takes the players to see it. Being the boss can feel like a lonely one-way street at times—especially at first. That is OK. If you can absorb the blows, the members of your team are more likely to be good bosses to their employees, when they have them. Once people know what it feels like to have a good boss, it’s more natural for them to want to be a good boss. They may never repay you, but they are likely to pay it forward. The rewards of watching people you care about flourish and then help others flourish are enormous.
Paul: What are the two principles that a great boss follows when approaching relationships with employees? 
Kim: Care Personally and Challenge Directly. The best bosses apply these principles as they build a relationship with each employee, and also in the way they conduct their three responsibilities as managers: create a culture of feedback, build a cohesive team, and achieve results collaboratively.
Paul: I love the notion of asking for public feedback from your team. It seems like a wonderful way to demonstrate that you care about feedback and that it’s safe to have these conversations. Would you share your thinking about this?
Kim: When you ask for public criticism (you’re not fishing for compliments here), it does three things for you.
Most importantly, it gives you the opportunity to model how to respond to feedback. No matter how hostile the question may feel, remember this is NOT the time to criticize the criticism you get. It’s the time to show how to master one’s natural defensive reactions and to treat feedback like a gift.
Also, inviting public criticism makes it more likely you’ll hear it. As a manager it’s easy to get so busy that it’s hard for people to get on your calendar. That’s why the “criticize in private” mantra doesn’t always apply to you.
Finally, it saves you time. When you are a leader, you usually have more than one direct report, and sometimes hundreds or even thousands or tens of thousands. Usually a lot of people have the same feedback for you, and it’s faster/more efficient to hear it and respond once than it is to respond lots of times.
 
Tune in next week for Part II.