105. Radical Candor: The Communication Shift That Can Transform Your Career | Think Fast Talk Smart: Communication Techniques

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I loved it, hated it, that sucked.

Feedback is critical to improving our communication skills, but how do we do it right so it's meaningful?

I'm Matt Abrahams. I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business and welcome the ThinkFast TalkSmart, the podcast.

Today I'm really excited to speak with Kim Scott.

Kim is an executive, an author, and a speaker.

She wrote The New York Times Best Seller Radical Candor, be a kick-ass boss without losing your humanity, and just work how to root out bias, prejudice, and bullying to create a kick-ass culture of inclusivity.

Kim also held important senior leadership and development roles at Google and Apple, and she's also an executive coach.

Welcome Kim, I'm super excited to talk to you and our former guest and friend Bob Sutton speaks super highly of your work.

Shall we jump in? Let's do it, thanks so much for having me.

Awesome. To begin, can you share your definition of Radical Candor?

Sure, Radical Candor is just caring personally and challenging directly at the same time.

That caring and challenging don't sound so radical.

Why do I call them radical?

They're radical because they're rare.

As an explanation of why they're rare, I want to explain what happens when we fail on one dimension or another.

In order to do this, I love a good visual.

I'm going to draw in words a two by two framework.

When the vertical axis is care personally, on the horizontal axis is challenged directly.

When you do both in the upper right hand quadrant, that's Radical Candor.

When you challenge directly, but you fail to show that you care personally, that is obnoxious aggression.

Obnoxious aggression is a big problem.

It's a problem because it hurts other people.

It's a problem because it's a waste of breath.

If I am obnoxious to you, if I'm a jerk to you, you go into fight or flight mode and then you can't hear what I'm saying.

It's also a problem because I don't know about you, but for me, at least when I realize I've acted like a jerk, when I realize I've landed in the obnoxious aggression quadrant, it is not my instinct to go the right way on the care personally dimension.

That is my instinct to go the wrong way on challenge directly.

Then I wind up in the dreaded bottom left hand quadrant, the worst place of all, manipulative insincereity.

If obnoxious aggression is front stabbing, manipulative insincereity is back stabbing.

It's where manipulative insincereity is where back is where political behavior, all of the worst passive aggressive behavior, all of the worst kinds of behavior creep in.

It's also where there's a lot of drama.

There's drama in obnoxious aggression.

There's drama in manipulative insincereity.

If you watch the office, you're going to see a lot of episodes about both of those things.

But it's not where the most mistakes get made.

It's just where the drama is.

The vast majority of us make the vast majority of our mistakes.

We do remember to show we care personally, so we're now in the upper left hand quadrant because we're failing to challenge directly.

We're caring, but we're not challenging.

That I call ruinous empathy.

That is what happens when we don't tell someone something they'd be better off knowing in the long run because we don't want to hurt their feelings.

That is perhaps the best definition of a concept we've had on this podcast.

It's very clear to me. I'm curious to learn where that came from because I think it had to do with filler words.

I learned about all this shortly after I moved to California to take a job at Google.

I had to give a presentation about how the AdSense business was doing to the founders and the CEO.

I walked into the room and there in one corner of the room was one of the founders on an elliptical trainer wearing bright blue toe shoes, stepping away, and also wearing a bright blue matching, super tight, spandex, unitarred, not what I was expecting or frankly wanting to see in the room.

There in the other corner of the room was the CEO doing his emails like his brain had been plugged into the machine.

Really like all of your listeners in such a situation, I felt a little bit nervous.

How was I supposed to get these people's attention?

Luckily for me, the AdSense business was on fire.

When I said how many new customers we had added over the last couple of weeks, the CEO almost fell off his chair.

Why did you say this is incredible?

You need more marketing dollars, you need more engineers.

I'm thinking that the meeting is going all right.

In fact, I believe that I am a genius and I walked out of the room when the meeting was over.

I walked past my boss and I'm expecting a high five, a pat on the back and instead she says to me, why don't you walk back to my office with me and I thought, oh wow, I screwed something up.

I'm sure I'm about to hear about it.

I wasn't totally dreading hearing about it because she had already multiple times solicited feedback from me and seemed to really appreciate it.

I knew that she thought of feedback as a gift.

Of course, that didn't help that much.

I was still nervous. We start off walking and she starts by telling me about the things that had gone well, not the things that had gone badly, but of course not really in the feedback sandwich.

They're really seeming to mean what she said.

Of course, all I wanted to know was what I had done wrong.

Then Chile, she said to me, you said, I'm a lot in there.

Were you aware of it? With this, I braised a huge sigh of relief because if that was all I had done wrong, who can't?

I kind of made a brush off gesture with my hand and she looked at me again and she said, I know this great speech coach.

Are that Google would pay for it?

Would you like an introduction?

Once again, I made this brush off gesture with my hand.

I said, I know, I'm busy.

I don't have time for a speech coach didn't you hear about all those new customers?

Then she stopped. She looked me right in the eye and she said, I can tell when you do that thing with your hand that I'm going to have to be a lot more direct with you.

When you say every third word, it makes you sound stupid.

Now she's got my full attention.

Some people might say it was mean of her to say that I sounded stupid, but in fact it was the kindest thing she could have done for me at that moment in my career because if she hadn't used just those words with me, and by the way, this is a really important point.

She never would have used those words with other people on her team who were perhaps a better listener than I was.

But with me, she knew me well enough to know that if she didn't use just those words, I never would have gone to see the speech coach.

And I wouldn't have learned that she was not exaggerating.

I literally said every third word.

And this was a big shock to me because I had been giving presentations my whole career.

I'd raised millions of dollars for two different startups giving presentations.

I thought I was pretty good at it.

This almost got me to thinking.

It was almost like I had gone through my whole career with a giant hunger spinach between my teeth.

And nobody had had the common courtesy to tell me it was there.

And it got me to thinking why had no one told me, but also what was it about my boss and her leadership style that made it so seemingly easy for her to tell me.

And as I thought about her leadership style, I realized it boiled down to these two very simple things.

They're personally challenged directly.

How did I know that she cared about me not just as an employee that is a human being?

When I moved from New York to California to take the job, I was really lonely because I didn't know anyone out here.

And she could tell that I was lonely.

She introduced me to a book group and I'm still friends with a bunch of those people to this day.

I went about a couple months after I took the job at Google.

My father was diagnosed with late-stage cancer.

I was devastated. And she knew I was devastated.

And she said, Kim, you need to get on a plane.

Fly home to Memphis. You need to be with your family right now.

Your team and I will sit down and write your coverage plan.

That's what great teams do for one another.

We've got your back. And those were the kinds of things.

She didn't do just for me.

She did for everyone who worked closely with her.

But of course, she couldn't do those kinds of things.

We're all 5,000 people in her organization.

No matter how talented a leader is, sort of relationships don't scale.

But culture does scale.

When a leader treats their direct reports with that kind of care, it's much more likely in turn that their direct reports are going to treat their direct reports with that kind of care.

And that does create a culture of caring.

But of course, it wasn't all sunshine and roses.

I also do, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that if I messed up, she was going to tell me in no uncertain terms, so that I could fix it.

And that really was all there was to it.

Absolutely. So I love that you had a direct experience.

It was sort of your epiphany to look into that.

And I have to comment and compliment you.

No ums and eyes and that entire story.

So I'm curious to get very tactical in how you give the feedback.

You refer to the feedback sandwich where you say something positive and then the real crux to the feedback and then you say something positive.

What's the structure or advice you give in radical candor for giving feedback?

Yeah. I think the first thing to remember is you should never start by giving it.

You should start by soliciting it.

Like there's a real order of operations to radical candor.

And that's not to say this is like some kind of six sigma process.

This is something you can do in one conversation.

It's fast, it's free, all it takes is enormous emotional discipline.

That's what's in short supply I think.

But remember that you don't want to dish it out before you prove you can take it.

You always want to start by soliciting it.

And then you want to give it, but one of the mistakes I think that I've made in the way I talk about, I'll be self radically candid for a moment.

Is that I've often leave people with the sense that radical candors all about the boss criticizing the employee?

And it's not. It should always start with soliciting.

And then the next step is to give praise, not criticism.

Again, not in the feedback sandwich sense of the word, but in the gratitude sense of the word, in the generosity sense of the word, you want to make sure that you're taking a beat to give voice to the things you appreciate about working with this person.

And not one beat, but a beat, you know, on a daily basis, a daily beat.

You want to focus on the good stuff.

And then when it comes time to offer the criticism.

So if now you've solicited it, you've given voice to what you appreciate.

And this can happen in one conversations or multiple.

But once you've done that, now you've kind of gotten yourself into the right frame of mind to give criticism that is helpful.

You know, you want to state your intention to be helpful.

You want to make sure that you're being humble.

You could be wrong. Omniscience is not a requirement for radical candor.

Thank goodness. You could be wrong.

And that's okay. The reason why I call it candor and not truth is that to me, candor kind of implies a dialogue.

Here's how I understand the situation.

I also am curious to know how you understand the situation.

We're going to talk about it.

And then you want to offer both praise and criticism sort of immediately.

If the purpose of praise is to tell a person what to do more of, the purpose of criticism is to tell them what to do less of, why wait?

It doesn't do any good. And also I find in the case of criticism, if you wait, it kind of piles up.

It piles up. We're in Silicon Valley.

People talk a lot about technical debt.

Here, I think sometimes we have feedback debt.

And feedback debt, what happens is it winds up exploding kind of in unpredictable ways.

And before times, I used to say, had these conversations in person.

Now that's often impossible.

But I think you want to have these conversations synchronously.

You don't want to send a text.

Slack is a feedback, train wreck, waiting to happen because Slack is often like public criticism in writing, asynchronous.

Like it's all the wrong notes.

So you want to make sure that you're having a conversation with a person.

And there's increasingly, there's evidence that it's better to pick up the phone and just have a voice conversation and not do a video conversation.

You also want to make sure that you're praising and public criticizing in private.

And that you're not giving somebody praise or criticism about their personality.

Right? Instead, you want to focus on having a growth mindset, giving people praise and criticism about things that they can either do more over, do less of.

So the best way I know to do that is to think about your praise and your criticism in terms of context observation result next steps.

So in the meeting, when you said every third word, it made you sound stupid, go visit the speech coach or in the meeting, when you offered both sides of the argument, it earned you credibility, do more of that.

So those are some thoughts.

Now, but you're not done.

You're not done. You're not done.

I wish you were not the radical candor lady.

And immediately this wave of parental guilt washed over me.

I thought I knew what the feedback was.

I thought she was telling me I was spending too much time at work.

She wanted more time with me.

But then I thought, well, I should make sure I understand.

So I said, well, who do you wish I were?

And she said, I wish you were the lady who minded her own business.

Totally different kind of people.

So you want to make sure you're asking some follow-up questions.

Totally different kind of people.

So you want to make sure you're asking some follow-up questions.

So you're asking some follow-up questions.

You talked about risk. And there is a lot of risk in giving radically candid feedback.

How as leaders, as managers, do we set up a culture and an environment that supports and rewards that kind of feedback?

I'm sure modeling it is important.

But what else do you do? I think one of the things you can do is to remind yourself that your number one priority as a leader is to solicit feedback and to make it to reward speaking truth to power, not to punish speaking truth to power.

And this is hard because very often when people think about leadership and radical candor, they assume boss criticizing employ.

And that's, again, not where it should start.

It should always start with boss soliciting feedback.

So go back to that order of operations.

There's a couple of things you can do to make this sort of normal.

One is you can prevent backstabbing.

You want to create a norm on your team of what Fred Kaufman calls clean escalation.

And so clean escalation is basically just means don't talk badly about someone buying their back.

It's not a complicated idea.

And yet so often, if you're frustrated with someone on your team, it's tempting to go to your boss and talk to them.

And it's tempting as the boss to listen because you feel like you're being the empathetic leader.

This is the one time when listening is counterproductive as a leader.

Because if you listen, all you're doing is during the political pot.

You want to say to that person, go talk, you know, if you have James talking badly about Jane that you want to say, James, go talk to Jane directly.

And there's exceptions, of course.

It's a sexual harassment thing.

Don't do that. But if it's in the normal kind of conversation, you want to encourage people to talk to each other directly.

And then if they can't work it out, you want to offer them your conflict resolution services.

In other words, ask them to come talk to you together.

You are not a Shuttle diplomat.

As a manager, you're more like a marriage counselor.

And that means you can't talk to one person about another person who's not in the room.

This has been wonderful, Kim.

I really appreciate your insight and your feedback.

Before we end, I'd like to ask you the same three questions I ask everybody.

All right. Here we go. Question number one.

If you were to capture the best communication advice you've ever received as a five to seven word presentation slide title, what would it be?

The words I don't know. Okay.

And the power of those words, tell us.

So the reason why I don't know is so important is that very foundational to all of this is to be humble.

And the whole goal of radical canter is to learn.

And to learn what we don't know.

And to help other people learn what they don't know.

And so being willing to say, I don't know, it earns.

It just takes all of the tension out of the room sometimes.

It's something that we don't say nearly often enough.

It feels very risky. And it feels, you make yourself vulnerable.

But in that is a ton of possibility.

And it also can level power and status.

Yes. And I think that's really important.

Question number two. Who's a communicator you admire and why?

So I love novels. Okay. To me, a novel teaches us empathy, really, and compassion.

Not ruin a sympathy, but productive empathy and compassion.

And I think that Toni Morrison is probably the communicator I admire most deeply.

I was lucky enough to take a course with her in college.

Oh, wow. And I learned so much about language and how to use language for good, not for evil.

It's funny. As soon as you mentioned Toni, I thought of language.

Yes. You're absolutely right.

Question number three.

What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?

There's only two. All right.

Carrying and challenging.

Very good. And not surprising at all coming from you.

I had one extra in there just in case.

Kim, this has been fantastic.

Thank you. I will give you praise.

This was very helpful to really put feedback in its proper place as a critical skill.

The specific process and steps are very helpful.

And really allowing us and giving us permission to open ourselves up to receive the feedback.

And do so in a way that can set examples for others.

Thank you for your time and thank you for your input.

Thank you. And can I end by walking the talk and soliciting a little criticism?

Sure. Because I want some radical candor on radical candor.

Because it's so easy to say be radically candid.

It's so easy to say be radically candid.

This podcast was produced by Jenny Luna, Kevin Patel, and me, Matt Abrahams, with special thanks to Podium Podcast Company.

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[Mastering Radical Candor: A Guide to Effective Feedback and Leadership]-[105. Radical Candor: The Communication Shift That Can Transform Your Career]

📋 Summary

Radical Candor: The Art of Caring Personally and Challenging Directly

The Four Quadrants of Feedback

The Epiphany: Why Directness Matters

Tactical Implementation: The Order of Operations

Creating a Culture of Candor

Conclusion: The Power of Humility

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript