How to lead with radical candor | Kim Scott | TEDxPortland

thanks, how can they say what they want to say without being mean? I started thinking about this in 1999. I had started a software company and one day I came into the office and about half the people in the company had sent me the same article about how everyone would rather have a boss who was really bad. but competent, a total idiot but confident, than one who is really kind but incompetent and I thought, God, are they sending this to me because they think I'm an idiot or because they think I am? incompetent and surely those are not my only two options now I went to business school and there I learned exactly nothing about management, but I did learn one really important thing: all of life's most difficult problems can be solved with a good framework of two by two, so that's how I started thinking about this problem.

I wasn't willing to let go of my desire to show that I cared personally. That's what gave meaning to the work for me, but I also had to learn to challenge directly and I had to learn to do both at the same time. At the same time and over time I came to think about caring and challenging as well as

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Sincerity. Now the easiest way to understand what Radical Sincerity is is to think about what happens when we make mistakes in one dimension or another, since we are all obliged. do from time to time, sometimes we remember to directly challenge but forget to show that we care personally and this I call unpleasant aggression.

Anyone has ever seen unpleasant aggression and this is a problem. Nasty aggression is a problem because it primarily hurts people. It's a problem because it hurts people, but it's also a problem because it's inefficient, if I act like a complete jerk to you, you're likely to go into fight or flight mode in your brain and then you literally won't be able to hear what I'm saying. saying, so I'm just wasting my breath and then there's a third, more subtle problem with nasty aggression. I don't know about you, but for me, when I realize I've been acting like a jerk, it's not my instinct to go down the high road when it comes to self-care. instead it's my instinct to go the wrong way by directly challenging him oh no big deal it doesn't really matter and then I end up in the worst place of all the manipulative insincerity if nasty aggression is a frontal stab manipulative insincerity is a stab behind the back is passive passive aggressive this is where all the most toxic types of workplace behavior or, frankly, behavior at home come in, in any relationship you have anywhere in your life, and it's fun to tell stories about nasty aggression and manipulative insincerity because this is where the drama arises.

However, the vast majority of us make the vast majority of our mistakes in this last quadrant where we remember to show that we care personally because you know most people are actually pretty nice people so we remember to show that we care personally, but we are so worried about not hurting someone's feelings or offending someone that we don't tell them something that they would be better off knowing in the long run and this is what I call ruinous empathy. Empathy is a good thing. Ruinous empathy does not exist. In order to explain to you what I mean by this I want to tell you a story about possibly the most painful moment of my career.

I had just hired this person Alex, we'll call this person Alex and I really liked Alex Alex was smart Alex was charming Alex was funny Alex was doing things like we were with an off-site manager playing one of those endless get-to-know-you games and Alex was the person who had the courage to raise his hand and say: I can tell that everyone is very stressed. I have an idea that will help us get to know each other better and it will be very quick. Whatever Alex's idea was, if it was fast, we were depressed. Alex says let's just go around the table and confess what candy our parents used when they potty trained us really weird but real quick even weirder yet we all remember Hershey's kisses here and then for the next 10 months , whenever there was a tense moment in the meeting, Alex would bring out just the right candy for the right person at the right time, so Alex brought a little levity to the office.

Everyone loved working with Alex. A problem with Alex. Alex was doing a terrible job, something absolutely creative and unusual, but tons of sloppy mistakes. He was very puzzled. I couldn't understand what Alex was going through because Alex had an incredible resume, a great history of achievements. I found out much later that Alex smoked marijuana in the bathroom three times a day, which maybe explained all the candy he had, but not me. I didn't know any of that at the time, all I knew was that Alex was handing me things with shame in his eyes, I knew his work wasn't good enough and I was saying something like, oh Alex, you.

You're so smart, you're so amazing, everyone loves working with you, this is a great start, maybe you can do a little better, which of course you never did well, so let's pause for a moment, I what was happening there, part of that was. really ruinous sympathy. I really liked Alex and I didn't really want to hurt his feelings, but if I'm honest with myself, there was also something more insidious going on because Alex was popular and Alex was sensitive and there was a part of me that was afraid that if I told Alex in clear terms that his work wasn't good enough, he would get angry and might even start crying and then everyone would think I was a big you-know-what and therefore the part of me that was worried about my reputation as a

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er, which was the manipulative and insincerity part of me, the part of me that was worried about Alex's feelings, which was the ruinous sympathy part, so this kind of toxic mix goes on for about 10 months and eventually the same thing happens. inevitable and I realized that If I don't fire Alex, I will lose all my best players because not only have I been unfair to Alex by not telling him so he could fix things.

I have been unfair to the entire team, their deliveries were late because their deliveries were late, they couldn't spend as much time on their work as they needed to because they constantly had to redo their work and the people who were the best on my team were just going to quit, They wanted to be able to work in a place where they could do their best work, so I sat down to have a conversation with Alex that frankly should have started 10 months earlier and when I finished explaining where things were, he pushed his chair back. at the table he looked me straight in the eyes and they told me why didn't you tell me and since that question was spinning around in my head without a good answer he looked at me again and said why didn't anyone tell me what they thought You all cared about me and now I realize that by not telling Alex thinking he was being so nice avoiding his feelings he now gets fired as a result of him not being so nice after all it was a terrible time in my career but it was too much late.

In order to save Alex, even Alex at that time agreed that he should leave because his reputation in the team was destroyed. All I could do at that moment was make myself a very solemn promise that he would never make that mistake again and that he would do everything he could. my power to help other people avoid making that mistake and that's why I'm here talking to all of you today. I want to talk to you not only about how this works, about how ruinous empathy is. It works in one-on-one relationships, it works too. in the team culture or it doesn't work often I will work with the team and they start with a small group of

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ly sincere people, they know each other very well, it's easy for them to show that they care and challenge each other and then because of that , they find some success and grow and then they succumb to the gravitational pull of ruinous empathy and then things start to go wrong but no one wants to be bad, no one wants to talk to anyone else, everyone gets very agitated and finally someone bursts out and says the same.

Does anyone ever see that happen maybe not in the best way but it works and because it works they do it again but maybe they do it a little more and because everyone else is so determined to be nice they say things like oh she didn't mean to say any harm or oh he's a good guy and then the next thing you know this person gets promoted and anyone who's seen this happen there comes a time in every team's history where the idiots start winning and that's it when culture starts to lose because what? What happens next is everyone descends into manipulative insincerity, they are badmouthing this person behind their back, but they are not talking to that person, it doesn't have to be that way folks, if you notice this happening, your equipment is becoming dilapidated. empathy it is possible to move to a radical sincerity that is not going to solve all the problems, people will still make a mistake, but you can inform them about that mistake in a way that allows them to improve things, now it is not just the culture in the teams where this happens sometimes it happens in an entire society sometimes it turns out that an entire society is polarized anyone ever know a society like this we are polarized and we are not talking to each other, we are talking about each other and we get stuck with the people who agree with us and I'm no better than the rest of us at this.

I was recently invited to give a talk at a company whose policies I disagreed with quite vehemently and I was tempted not to go and then I thought yes. It doesn't seem like I'm in the spirit of radical sincerity, in fact I deeply believe that undisputed beliefs become prejudices, so I needed to go to this place and talk to these people, not because I was prepared to change my mind, if I'm honest . He wasn't, but he wasn't going to try to change their minds either. I was thinking that if I understand their point of view, it will help me deepen my thinking and maybe I can find something in common with these people you're going with.

To hear more about common ground, maybe I can learn to like these people and as I was giving the talk I got to the question and everything was going great, we were having a great conversation, there was a voice inside my head like screaming at me saying Kim, these people are not your enemies, they are your fellow Americans and that really made me take a deep breath. I wondered why he wouldn't have come to talk to these people after the conference was over, someone came up to me and said, Kim. Do you believe this? Do you think I said yes?

I did, they kind of cocked their head and said, hey, you don't seem like an evil person and I would have thought that person was ridiculous, except I had just more or less had the same thing I thought five minutes before, so how does this work? Some of the best relationships of my career have occurred with people I disagree with and because I care about these people, it is easier for me to challenge them and because I challenge them, it is easier Caring is a virtuous cycle of Sincerity radical and the reason it works is that we both believe that the floor in the self-care dimension of Radical Candor is respect.

Respect is something we owe everyone and when we can show respect and be a common human. decency, we actually end up loving the people we work with, not in the human resources disaster sense of the word that we read so much about today, but in the true sense of collegiality, so to understand how to do this, I want explain the radical meaning to them. can or order of operations returning to this story from Alex. I failed on virtually every dimension with Alex. I was not able to request comments. Radical

candor

, no matter who you are, you should always start by asking for feedback.

Don't hand them out before you prove you can take. but I didn't do that with Alex, so let's give me a report card. I didn't ask for praise and I didn't ask Alex what he could do or not do to make it easier for him to work with me, maybe just maybe me. She was doing something that frustrated Alex so much that he was forced to go to the bathroom three times a day. I don't know because I never asked him properly, so he asks for feedback. You should also praise the kind of praise I gave Alex.

Actually, it was just a lie and you should tell people when his work isn't good enough, but since I didn't do that, I couldn't evaluate how my comments were. Landing, so I'm going to give myself an incomplete there. So what do I mean by measuring feedback? This is where you can use this framework. Remember that radical sincerity is not measured in the mouth of the speaker but in the ear of the listener. So how do you know what's going on inside someone else's ear? You can use this framework. If the other person seems sad, that's your cue to move up the Self-Attention Dimension.

If the other person seems angry, that's also your cue to move up the Self-Attention Dimension, but it's pretty hard to care personally about someone you care about. is screaming. So what can you do right now? You are probably angry when you are furious. Be curious or be curious. Don't be angry if you arebatting above average. Try to move forward. Why is this person so angry? Last but not least, there are times when you say something, you will gather your courage to say it and then the person will just ignore you, this is your cue to move beyond what you are comfortable with to face the challenge head-on. dimension, so if everyone can move forward and be radically sincere they will have better relationships one-on-one relationships can help build a better culture at work and can help build Confluence in society thank you very much everyone thank you very much thank you thank you