How to lead with radical candor | Kim Scott | TEDxPortland

Summary

In her TEDxPortland talk, Kim Scott delves into the concept of "radical candor," illustrating its significance in fostering better communication both in professional and personal relationships. Scott discusses the pitfalls of failing to be candid, sharing her experiences in which not practicing radical candor led to negative outcomes. Through her personal anecdotes and framework, she defines various communication missteps, such as "obnoxious aggression" and "ruinous empathy," emphasizing the balancing act of caring personally while challenging directly. Her insights propose that by adopting radical candor, individuals and teams can foster more respectful, productive, and honest environments.

Highlights

• Kim Scott emphasizes the importance of saying what you mean without being mean, which inspired her creation of the radical candor concept. 🗣️
• She introduces a two by two framework to explain the communication pitfalls like "obnoxious aggression" and "ruinous empathy." 🗺️
• The talk highlights a personal story about an employee named Alex, illustrating the dangers of avoiding candid feedback. 📖
• Scott shares how societal polarization can benefit from radical candor, encouraging communication between differing viewpoints. 🌍
• The radical candor order of operations starts with soliciting feedback, which Scott admits to neglecting in the past with adverse effects. 🔄

Key Takeaways

• Radical candor involves caring personally while challenging directly—it's the sweet spot between being overly aggressive and too empathetic. 🎯
• Mistakes like obnoxious aggression and manipulative insincerity occur when one dimension of radical candor is missing, leading to ineffective communication and workplace tension. 😬
• Through radical candor, you can improve one-on-one relationships, team dynamics, and even societal interactions by promoting honesty and respect. 💬

Overview

Kim Scott's TEDx talk navigates the intricate dynamics of communication through the concept of radical candor, a term she coined to describe the delicate balance between being direct and being caring. This approach stems from her personal experiences in leadership where she learned the hard way that avoiding directness under the guise of kindness often backfires. Through storytelling and humor, she breaks down the nuances of her communication framework, making it engaging and relatable.

Scott provides insightful examples of communication missteps that many can relate to, such as obnoxious aggression and ruinous empathy, where either too much directness or excessive empathy hampers effective communication. She uses the story of Alex, a well-loved but underperforming employee, to exhibit the real-world consequences of failing to implement radical candor. Her anecdotes serve not only as cautionary tales but also inspire leaders to adopt more candid approaches for better teamwork and productivity.

Beyond professional realms, Scott expands the usefulness of radical candor into societal interactions, suggesting it can bridge divides and promote a culture of respect. She challenges the audience to engage with differing opinions and emphasizes that through listening and respect, radical candor can foster a more harmonious society. Her talk ultimately asserts that with radical candor, we cultivate honesty, integrity, and kindness central to thriving relationships and communities.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:30: Introduction and Context This chapter serves as the introduction and provides the context for the material that follows. It includes acknowledgments to the audience, expressed through musical appreciation and applause.
• 01:30 - 03:00: Radical Candor Framework Introduction The chapter explores the challenge of honest communication in leadership roles. It begins with the author's personal experience from 1999, when starting a software company. Half of the employees shared an article about preferring a mean but competent boss, highlighting the importance of balancing directness with care.
• 03:00 - 04:30: Examples of Quadrants in Radical Candor The chapter titled 'Examples of Quadrants in Radical Candor' dives into the different dynamics within management structures. It presents archetypes like being confident yet inconsiderate ('jerk but confident') and being agreeable but lacking skills ('nice but incompetent'). The chapter stems from a personal anecdote where the author reflects on receiving such feedback, fretting about how they are perceived. This realization surfaces a key insight: traditional business education often overlooks practical management skills but emphasizes the utility of conceptual frameworks, such as the 'two by two' matrix, to address complex interpersonal challenges.
• 04:30 - 07:30: Ruinous Empathy Explained The chapter 'Ruinous Empathy Explained' discusses the concept of balancing personal care with direct challenge. The speaker reflects on their own journey of retaining personal care in their work, which was meaningful to them, while learning to directly challenge others. This balance of caring personally and challenging directly is described as radical candor, a crucial concept for addressing work-related issues effectively. The chapter sets the stage for understanding what radical candor entails.
• 07:30 - 11:00: Impact of Ruinous Empathy on Team Dynamics The chapter explores the negative consequences of displaying 'Ruinous Empathy' in team dynamics. It acknowledges that individuals sometimes fail to balance challenging directly and showing personal care, leading to what is termed as 'obnoxious aggression.' This aggressive approach can be detrimental to team members, as it mainly causes harm and disrupts the team's harmony.
• 11:00 - 15:00: Broader Societal Implications The chapter titled 'Broader Societal Implications' addresses the negative repercussions of obnoxious aggression, focusing on its impact on interpersonal communication and societal efficiency. The text illustrates how aggressive behavior triggers a fight or flight response, rendering the recipient unable to process the conveyed message, hence, making the interaction futile. Additionally, it explores the natural inclination of individuals to refrain from correcting their behavior when they realize they've acted offensively. These elements collectively reflect on broader societal patterns where ineffective communication and personal resistance to behavioral change pose challenges to social harmony and productivity.
• 15:00 - 16:00: Radical Candor in Practice and Conclusion The chapter discusses the concept of 'Radical Candor,' emphasizing the importance of balancing direct challenge and personal care in communication. The narrator shares a personal tendency to avoid challenging directly, leading to 'manipulative insincerity,' which is akin to backstabbing or passive-aggressive behavior. The chapter highlights how such behaviors are detrimental in both professional and personal relationships, being the root of toxic behaviors.

How to lead with radical candor | Kim Scott | TEDxPortland Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] thank you [Applause]
• 00:30 - 01:00 how can you all say what you mean without being mean I started thinking about this back in 1999 I had started a software company and I came into the office one day and about half the people in the company had sent me the same article about how everyone would rather have a boss who is really mean but competent a total
• 01:00 - 01:30 jerk but confident then one who is really nice but incompetent and I thought gosh are they sending me this because they think I'm a jerk or because they think I'm incompetent and surely those are not my only two choices 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 hardest problems can be solved with a good two by two
• 01:30 - 02:00 framework so that is how I started thinking about this problem I was unwilling to let go of my desire to show that I cared personally that is what for me gave work meaning but also had to learn how to challenge directly and I had to learn how to do both at the same time and over time I came to think about caring and challenging at the same time as radical Candor now the easiest way to understand what radical Candor is
• 02:00 - 02:30 is to think about what happens when we mess up on one dimension or another as we are all bound to do from time to time sometimes we remember to challenge directly but we forget to show that we care personally and this I call obnoxious aggression anybody ever seen any obnoxious aggression and this is a problem obnoxious aggression is a problem because it hurts people primarily it's a
• 02:30 - 03:00 problem because it hurts people but it's also a problem because it's inefficient if I act like a total jerk to you then you're likely to go into fight or flight mode in your brain and then you literally cannot hear what I'm saying so I'm just wasting my breath and then there's a third more subtle problem with obnoxious aggression I don't know about you but for me when I realize I've acted like a jerk it is not my instinct to go the right way on care personally instead
• 03:00 - 03:30 it's my instinct to go the wrong way on challenge directly oh it's no big deal it doesn't really matter and then I wind up in the worst place of all manipulative insincerity if obnoxious aggression is front stabbing manipulative insincerity is backstabbing it's passive passive aggressive behavior this is where all the most toxic kinds of workplace Behavior or frankly Behavior at home in any relationship that you have in any part of your life creep in
• 03:30 - 04:00 and it is fun to tell stories about obnoxious aggression and manipulative insincerity because this is where the drama is however the vast majority of us make the vast majority of our mistakes in this last quadrant where we do remember to show that we care personally because you know what most people are actually pretty nice people so we do remember to show that we care personally but we're so worried about not hurting someone's feelings or not offending someone that we fail to tell them
• 04:00 - 04:30 something they'd be better off knowing in the long run and this is what I call ruinous empathy empathy is a good thing ruinous empathy is not 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 liked Alex a lot Alex was smart Alex was Charming Alex was funny Alex would do stuff like we're at a manager
• 04:30 - 05:00 off-site playing one of those endless get to know you games and Alex was the person who had the courage to raise their hand and to say I can tell that everyone is really stressed out I've got an idea it'll help us get to know each other better and it'll be really fast whatever Alex's idea was if it was fast we were down with it Alex says let's just go around the table and confess what candy our parents used
• 05:00 - 05:30 when potty training us really weird but really fast weirder yet we all remembered Hershey kisses right here and then for the next 10 months every time there was a tense moment in the meet in a meeting Alex would whip out just the right piece of candy for the right person at the right moment so Alex brought a little levity to the office everybody loved working with Alex one problem with Alex
• 05:30 - 06:00 Alex was doing terrible work absolutely sort of creative and unusual but tons of sloppy mistakes I was so puzzled I couldn't understand because Alex what was going on because Alex had this incredible resume this great history of accomplishments I learned much later that Alex was smoking pot in the bathroom three times a day which maybe explained all that candy that he had but I didn't know any of that at the time all I knew is that Alex would hand
• 06:00 - 06:30 stuff into me with shame in his eyes he knew his work wasn't nearly good enough and I would say something to him along the lines of oh Alex you're so smart you're so awesome everybody loves working with you this is a great start maybe you can make it just a little bit better which of course he never did okay so let's pause for a moment what was going on there part of it was truly ruinous sympathy I really did like Alex and I really did not want to hurt his feelings but if I'm honest with myself
• 06:30 - 07:00 there was something more Insidious going on as well because Alex was popular and Alex was sensitive and there was part of me that was afraid that if I told Alex in no uncertain terms that his work wasn't nearly good enough he would get upset he might even start to cry and then everyone would think I was a big you know what and so the part of me that was worried about my reputation as a leader that was a manipulative insincerity part the part of me that was worried about Alex's feelings that was
• 07:00 - 07:30 the ruinous sympathy part so this kind of toxic mixture goes on for about 10 months and eventually the inevitable happens and I realized that if I don't fire Alex I'm going to lose all my best performers because not only have I been unfair to Alex not to tell him so that he could fix things I've been unfair to the whole team their deliverables were late because his deliverables were late they couldn't spend as much time on their work as they needed to because they were constantly having to redo his work and the people who were the best performers
• 07:30 - 08:00 on my team they were just going to quit they wanted to be able to work in a place where they could do their best work and so I sat down to have a conversation with Alex that I should have started frankly 10 months previously and when I finished explaining to him where things stood he kind of pushed his chair back from the table he looked me right in the eye and they said why didn't you tell me and as that question was going around in
• 08:00 - 08:30 my head with no good answer he looked at me again and he said why didn't anyone tell me I thought you all cared about me and now I realize that by not telling Alex thinking I was being so nice sparing his feelings he's now getting fired as a result of it not so nice after all it was a terrible moment in my career but it was too late to save Alex even Alex at this point agreed he should go because his reputation on the team
• 08:30 - 09:00 was just shot all I could do in that moment was make myself a very solemn promise that I would never make that mistake again and that I would do everything in my power to help other people avoid making that mistake and that is why I'm here talking to you all today now I want to talk to you not only about how this works how ruinous empathy Works in one-on-one relationships it also works on team culture or doesn't work often I'll work with the team and they
• 09:00 - 09:30 start out radically candid small group of people they know each other really well it's kind of easy for them to show they care and Challenge and then because of that they find some success and they grow and then they succumb to the gravitational pull of ruinous empathy and then things start going wrong but nobody wants to be mean nobody wants to talk to anybody else everybody's getting really agitated and then finally somebody bursts out and says the thing anybody ever see that happen maybe not in the best way but it works
• 09:30 - 10:00 and because it works they do it again but maybe they do it a little more and because everybody else is so determined to be nice they say things like oh she didn't mean any harm or oh he's a good guy and then the next thing you know this person is promoted now anybody ever see this happen there comes a moment on every team's history when the jerks begin to win and that is when
• 10:00 - 10:30 the culture begins to lose because what happens next everybody moves down to manipulative insincerity they're talking badly about this person behind this person's back but they are not talking to the person it does not have to be this way folks if you notice this happening your team's sort of drifting over to ruinous empathy it's possible to move over to radical Candor that's not going to solve all problems people will still make a mistake but you can tell them about that
• 10:30 - 11:00 mistake in a way that allows them to make things better now it's not only the culture on teams where this happens sometimes it happens in a whole society sometimes it turns out that a whole society is polarized anybody ever know such such a society we're polarized and we're not talking to each other we're talking about each other and we're sticking with the people who agree with us and I am no better than the rest of us on this I recently
• 11:00 - 11:30 was invited to give a talk at a company whose policies I disagreed with pretty vehemently and I was tempted not to go and then I thought that does not seem like it's in the spirit of radical Candor in fact I believe very deeply that unchallenged beliefs become prejudices so I needed to go to this place and talk to these people not because I was going in prepared to change my mind if I'm honest I was not but I also wasn't going in
• 11:30 - 12:00 trying to change their mind I was going in thinking if I understand their point of view it will help me deepen my thinking and maybe I can find some common ground with these people you're going to hear more about common ground maybe I can learn to like these people and as I gave the talk I got to the Q a and it was going really well we were having a great conversation there was this voice inside my head like screaming at me saying Kim these people are not your enemies these
• 12:00 - 12:30 are your fellow Americans and it really made me take a deep breath I was like why would I not have come to speak with these people after the after the conference was over somebody came up to me and said Kim do you believe this do you believe that I said yes I did they kind of cocked their head and they said huh you don't seem like an evil person and I would have thought that person was
• 12:30 - 13:00 ridiculous except that I had just had pretty much the same thought myself five minutes previously so how does this work uh some of the best relationships of my career have happened with people who I disagree with and because I care about these people it's easier for me to challenge them and because I challenge them it's easier to care it's a virtuous cycle radical Candor and the reason why it works is that we both of us believe that the floor on the care personally
• 13:00 - 13:30 dimension of radical Candor is respect respect is something we owe to everyone and we when we can show respect and common human decency we actually wind up loving the people who we work with not in the HR 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 to explain to you the radical can or order of operations going back to this Alex story I failed pretty much on all Dimensions
• 13:30 - 14:00 with Alex I failed to solicit feedback radical Candor no matter who you are should always start with soliciting feedback don't dish it out before you prove you can take it but I didn't do that with Alex so let's give me a report card I failed to solicit praise and I failed to ask Alex what I could do or stop doing that might make it easier for him to work with me maybe just maybe I was doing something that was frustrating Alex so much he was forced to took up in the bathroom three
• 14:00 - 14:30 times a day I don't know because I never asked him right so solicit feedback you also need to give praise the kind of Praise I gave to Alex was really just a head fake and you need to tell people when their work isn't nearly good enough but because I failed to do that I couldn't possibly gauge how my feedback was Landing so I'm going to give myself an incomplete there so what do I mean by gauge the feedback this is where you can use this framework remember radical Candor gets measured not in the speaker's mouth
• 14:30 - 15:00 but at the listener's ear so but 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 is your cue to move up on the care personally Dimension if the other person seems mad that is also your cue to move up on the care personally Dimension but it's pretty hard to care personally about someone who's yelling at you so what can you do
• 15:00 - 15:30 in these moments you're probably mad back when you're Furious get curious or get curious not Furious if you're batting above average try to move up on why is this person so mad last but not least there are times when you'll say the thing you'll work up your courage to say the thing and then the person will just brush you off this is your cue to move out further than you're comfortable going on the challenge directly dimension so if you can all go forth and be
• 15:30 - 16:00 radically candid you will have better relationships one-on-one relationships you can help build a better culture at work and you can help build Confluence in society thank you all so much [Applause] thank you thank you thank you [Applause]