Kim Scott shares how managers should approach giving feedback with their team and how to build a culture of trust.
Kim has been an advisor at Dropbox, Twitter, and several other Silicon Valley companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University and before that led AdSense, YouTube, and Doubleclick Online Sales and Operations at Google.
She's taken her deep management experience and developed a framework called Radical Candor that's aimed at improving how employees provide feedback to each other. Too often employees are scared to share how they really feel, and, often times, procrastinate sharing feedback. This dynamic is detrimental to the employee-manager relationship — according to Kim, criticizing your employees when they screw up is not just your job, it's actually your moral obligation.
To help teach people how to be more radically candid, Kim has created a framework that's focused on the ability for managers to both "challenge directly" (x-axis) and "care personally" (y-axis) for the their direct reports. Successful managers are able to share feedback that has both of these attributes, and that's where Radical Candor lives.
Radical Candor results from a combination of caring deeply for your employees, while also not being afraid to tell the hard truth. This is a far cry from the old saying, "if you don't have something nice to say, don't say it all.'" But for Kim, the worst thing you can do is sugar coat or procrastinate sharing feedback, as it ultimately hurts your employees.
If you'd like to learn more about Radical Candor, order Kim's new book here.
I'm here today with Kim Scott, who is the founder of Candor Inc. She's also been CEO, coach, and board member to companies like Qualtrics, Twitter, Dropbox, and many others. She's developed a framework called Radical Candor and, in fact, has a book a book out on the subject now, which we're gonna talk about today.
She knows quite a lot about managing people, about giving feedback. It's a real honor to be here with you, Kim. Thank you so much.
It's fantastic to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
Kim, so I wanna spend most of our time today talking about how to actually give great feedback and this framework you've developed. But to start, I'd love to hear the backstory. How did you become passionate about this subject?
You know, it it happened in the worst moment of my career. I had hired this guy, we'll call him Bob, and I really liked Bob. Bob was charming and he was funny. He would do stuff like I remember we were at, one of those management all sites that are endless where you're playing some stupid get to know you game that everybody hates, but nobody dares to put up their hand and say this is ridiculous.
And finally, Bob said, I have a really I have an idea that'll be much faster. Why don't we just go around the table and everybody confess what candy their parents used when potty training them. Weird, but fast. So we did it.
And then for the next ten months, every time there was a tense moment in a meeting, Bob would whip out just the right piece of candy for the right person at the right moment. Right? So I don't know. I found this funny and charming.
I liked Bob.
One problem with Bob, he was doing terrible work. The work just absolutely sucked. And I couldn't understand what was going on because he had this amazing resume. He had done all this great stuff.
I I learned later the problem was that he was smoking pot in the bathroom every day, which maybe explained all that candy. But anyway, I didn't know any of this in the moment. And so I kept telling Bob. I gave him the kind of head fake praise.
I was like, Bob, you're so great, you're so smart. This is a great start. Maybe just work a little harder on it. It could be a little better.
And this went on for ten months, and then the inevitable thing happened, and I realized that I was gonna lose half my team if I didn't fire Bob. Everybody was so fed up with his subpar work. And so I sat down and had the conversation that I should have had with Bob months ago.
And when I explained to him where things stood, he sort of pushed the chair back from the table. And he looked right at me and he said, why didn't you tell me?
And as that question is going around in my head with no very good answer, he says, why didn't anybody tell me? I thought you all cared about me.
And I realized in that moment that I have failed Bob in six different ways. I failed to solicit feedback from him. I never asked him how things are going from his perspective. Maybe I was doing something that was driving him so crazy.
It was forcing him to toke up in the bathroom every day. I don't know. I didn't find out. Right?
So that was I failed to get praise. I failed to get criticism more importantly from him. And I also failed to give him praise that was meaningful. The the kind of praise I gave him was just a head fake, and I failed to tell him when his work wasn't really good enough.
So two more failures. And I also, probably worst of all, I had failed to create the environment on the team where everyone would tell Bob what was really good and when he was going off the rails. And because I had made these mistakes, Bob is getting fired. I'm having to fire Bob, and it was too late to fix it for Bob.
All I could do in that moment was to make a really solemn promise to myself that I would never make that mistake again, and that I would work really hard to help everyone around me also avoid making that mistake. So that was sort of the the birth of radical candor. Right?
And that's so relatable because it's so it's so easy when you like somebody like you. Like, you obviously liked Bob, and you you wanna be nice to them.
Yeah.
And then it turns out that being nice to them in the moment is actually Mean.
Quite the opposite. Yeah.
For a long time, I called it cruel empathy, which was too confusing.
And how do you build that culture then where people can give the constructive feedback that they need to people that they like, where where people are able to, you know, speak openly? How do you make that culture?
The the most important thing you can do to create that culture of radical candor, where people do see that it is that it is an act of kindness to give feedback, is to start by soliciting feedback. Don't dish it out until you prove you can take it. Right? So start by asking for feedback and proving that it helps you.
Right? And there's four simple steps that that I like to keep in mind when asking people for feedback, especially people who work for you because it's awkward for them. Like, people hate a boss hates to give the employee feedback. The employee really hates to give the boss feedback.
So the first thing you do, if you're if you're a manager to ask for feedback, is you come up with a question that you're comfortable asking. Right? So for me, mine was mine is not gonna be yours. You have to come up with your own question.
But my question was, is there anything that I could do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me? Right? So number one, come up with a go to question. Andy Grove once told me that his go to question was he would he would ask for feedback at the end of a one zero one.
After the after the other person had gotten through all their list of things, he would say, there's one more thing. And everybody knew from him that that was a signal that that was the most important thing. And I made the mistake of saying, oh, did you get that from Steve Jobs? That he no.
He said they both got it, in fact, from Columbo, the detective show. So there you go. A little Silicon Valley gossip.
So come up with your go to question. That's step number one. Step number two is and this is the counterintuitive part. You have to embrace the discomfort.
Right? I always feel like I if I make people comfortable, then they'll tell me. But the thing that makes people comfortable when you've asked them for feedback is silence, and that's the one thing you can't afford to get. So you have to make silence more uncomfortable than telling you that whatever it is.
Yeah. It's so common. You ask a question and then a little bit of silence and you just break into, well, actually, you know, blah blah blah. Yeah. But really just letting that sit and giving them a chance to answer.
So practice counting to six in your head. It's shocking how long six seconds is. Let's do it right now. Okay.
That's a long time. Like, you were dying to say something. You were dying to tell me something. Right?
So count to six in your head. If they still don't if you still don't get anything out out of the other person, give them a week or a day. Say, I'm gonna cut but go back and say, you really have to tell me. I know I'm not perfect.
And it's you're gonna help me by doing it.
So we mentioned radical candor. Can you tell me just quickly what is this framework at a high level? How can people understand what radical candor means so they can start using it in their own life?
It's really important to understand that there are two dimensions to radical candor. The first is the more obvious one, you challenge directly. You've gotta you've gotta be very clear with people when you're giving them feedback, either praise or criticism. But the second dimension, equally as important, is care personally.
So if you imagine two axes, the vertical one is care personally, the horizontal one is challenged directly. And when you do both at the same time, that's radical candor. When you challenge somebody, but you fail to show that you care personally, that is obnoxious aggression. And there's a world of difference between obnoxious aggression and radical candor.
Now, the most common mistake that people make is actual people like to talk about obnoxious aggression because there's usually funny stories and painful stories. But the most common and insidious mistake that people make, especially here in Silicon Valley, is actually ruinous empathy. That's what I did to Bob. That's where you care personally and you show that you care personally, but you're so worried about hurting somebody's feelings that you don't challenge them directly.
Right? And then, of course, when you neither care nor challenge, I call it manipulative insincerity.
And the really important thing about this framework is to use it to to not to judge yourself, but as a guide and a conversation, because we all find ourselves in all of these quadrants all of the time. So just be aware when you're veering towards ruinous empathy. You're telling somebody something and maybe you see them getting upset, and so you just back off your challenge. Right? Instead of moving up on the care personally axis and acknowledging the emotion, but continuing along with your challenge.
And how do you how did you come to realize how important this was? Did you, you know, receive this yourself and, you know, just click through that, oh my god, this is the most important type of feedback I've gotten. How did you arrive at this?
You know, it was really interesting. I have been very lucky to have some wonderful bosses, a lot of great bosses.
And the feedback that they gave me helped me so much in my career. So a really simple small example.
Shortly after I joined Google, I had to give a presentation to the founders of Google and the CEO, and like any normal person in that situation, I was a little nervous.
And then when I said I was leading the AdSense online sales and operations team. When I said how many new customers we had added over the past month, Eric Schmidt sort of almost fell out of his chair and sort of said, what resources do you need? Do you need more engineers? So I I felt like the presentation had gone okay.
In fact, I kinda felt like a genius. And as I'm leaving the room after it's over, I walk past my boss who was Sheryl Sandberg at the time, and kind of expecting a high five or a congratulations or a great job. And instead she says, why don't you walk back to my office with me? And I think, oh, boy.
I did something wrong and I'm sure I'm about to hear about it. And she started off doing the right thing, telling me not kind of feedback sandwich praise, but a couple of things that that I didn't know I had gone well that so it was informative, but of course, what I really wanted to hear was what I had done wrong.
And and she eventually said to me, you said omelette. Were you aware of it? And I kinda breathe a huge sigh of relief and made this brush off gesture with my hand. And I said, yeah, I know.
I do that. It's verbal take. It's no big deal really. And then she said to me, well, I know this great speech coach and Google would pay for it.
Would you like an introduction? And I kinda did this brush off thing with my hand again. And I said, no, I'm busy. Didn't you hear about all these customers?
I I I don't need to go to a speech coach. And she stopped, and she looked right at me, and she said, I can tell when you do that brush off thing with your hand that I'm gonna have to be a lot more direct with you.
When you say, every third word, it makes you sound stupid.
Now she has my full attention. Right? Cardinal sin at Google is stupidity.
And a lot of people would have said that it was mean of Cheryl to put it to me just that way, but it was actually the kindest thing she could possibly have done for me in that moment. And if she had been talking to somebody else on her team who maybe wasn't as bullheaded as I am, then she wouldn't have had to say it that way. She she could have left it, or they would have gone to see the coach immediately. But with me, she had to break through, and she knew she had a break through. And even though it was hard for her, she was willing to break through. Right? And when I went to see the speech coach, I realized that they filmed me and and I, you know, had to watch myself, one of life's painful experiences.
And I realized she wasn't exaggerating. I really did say, every third word.
And this was news to me because I had been giving presentations for fifteen years. I had done a start up and raised thirty five million dollars giving presentations. I thought I was pretty good at it. And and, you know, nobody the interesting thing really to me in that moment was that nobody in all that time had told me that I had this problem.
It was as though I had been walking around for my whole career with a giant hunk of spinach between my teeth, and nobody had done me the courtesy of saying you've got spinach between your teeth. So so that got me to thinking, what was it that made it so easy for Cheryl to do this? And why had nobody else done it for all those years? And I realized that it was care personally.
I knew that Cheryl cared about me. She had showed shown it to me and to everyone who worked directly for her in a thousand different ways. When I moved from New York to California and didn't know anybody, she knew I loved books. She invited me to join her book group, so on and so forth.
But she but she didn't let her concern for my short term feelings get in the way of telling me what I needed to improve in the long run.
That's a great story.
Very simple.
And that and that base layer of trust just seems so important to doing this right.
Yes.
And, you know, I hear that I hear that time and again. That's what makes it work. One of my favorite quotes, from an article of yours was this. I would argue that criticizing your employees when they screw up is not just your job, but it's actually your moral obligation. And I thought that was so interesting because it actually takes it beyond just the workplace and what makes you successful as a manager, but it even elevates it to a place of this is something that you owe them from an ethical standpoint.
It's part of our humanity. Part of there's a great quote from John Stuart Mill, and I I won't get it exactly right, but but basically what Mill says is that what makes human beings great is that we can fix our mistakes. But the only way that we fix our mistakes is if other people tell us about them. Right?
Our errors are corrigible, but only if we talk about our errors, because it's very hard to know if you're making a mistake in the in the short run. And and he says it's what makes us great both intellectually and morally. Right? Both on both dimensions.
So a key part of what we owe each other as human beings is to point out to each other when we've got it wrong. I had an employee once. I was making a mistake that was that was verging on unethical, and I said, why should I do that? And he looked at me.
He was sort of shocked, and he said, because it's the right thing to do.
And I was defensive and pissed off in the moment, but I've been grateful to him ever since for for holding up a mirror. And that's the kind of thing that I mean. We owe it to each other to to point out when we're screwing up. It's the only way we get better.
Absolutely. I wanna ask you one final question, which is if you could just give one piece of advice to new managers, what would you tell them?
The most important thing you can do as a manager is to offer feedback in one to three minute call it a two minute conversation in between meetings. Don't save it up for a one on one. Don't save it up for a performance review. When you see something great, say it right away.
When you see something bad, say it right away. That prevents stuff from building up and blowing up. Right? You help people just in the moment.
All the best feedback I've ever gotten in my career has happened in between meetings in two minutes.
It's it's great advice. I'm so excited to read your book. Thank you so much for having me here.
Thank you so much.
Appreciate it.
Thanks. Thanks.
