Radical Candor / Kim Scott

Be a Kick-Ass Boss without Losing your Humanity

In an effort to create a positive, stress-free environment, I sidestepped the difficult but necessary part of being a boss: telling people clearly and directly when their work wasn’t good enough. I failed to create a climate in which people who weren’t getting the job done were told so in time to fix it.

You don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings; that’s because you’re not a sadist. You don’t want that person or the rest of the team to think you’re a jerk. Plus, you’ve been told since you learned to talk, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Now all of a sudden it’s your job to say it. You’ve got to undo a lifetime of training. Management is hard.

As you probably know, for every piece of subpar work you accept, for every missed deadline you let slip, you begin to feel resentment and then anger. You no longer just think the work is bad: you think the person is bad. This makes it harder to have an even-keeled conversation. You start to avoid talking to the person at all.

And of course, the impact of my behavior with Bob didn’t stop with him: others on the team wondered why I accepted such poor work. Following my lead, they too tried to cover for him.

As I faced the prospect of losing my team, I realized I couldn’t put it off any longer. I invited Bob to have coffee with me. He expected to have a nice chat, but instead, after a few false starts, I fired him. Now we were both huddled miserably over our muffins and lattes. After an excruciating silence, Bob pushed his chair back, metal screeching on marble, and looked me straight in the eye. “Why didn’t you tell me?” As that question was rolling around in my mind with no good answer, he asked me a second question: “Why didn’t anyone tell me? I thought you all cared about me!” It was the low point of my career. I had made a series of mistakes, and Bob was taking the fall.

Rather than focus on “giving feedback” to my team, I encouraged them to tell me when I was wrong. I did everything I could to encourage people to criticize me, or at least simply to talk to me. After a false start (more on that later) the team started to open up. We began to debate openly, and we had more fun together.

Then a leader at Apple pointed out to me that all teams need stability as well as growth to function properly; nothing works well if everyone is gunning for the next promotion. She called the people on her team who got exceptional results but who were on a more gradual growth trajectory “rock stars” because they were like the Rock of Gibraltar on her team. These people loved their work and were world-class at it, but they didn’t want her job or to be Steve Jobs. They were happy where they were. The people who were on a steeper growth trajectory—the ones who’d go crazy if they were still doing the same job in a year—she called “superstars.” They were the source of growth on any team. She was explicit about needing a balance of both.

“At Apple we hire people to tell us what to do, not the other way around.” At Apple, as at Google, a boss’s ability to achieve results had a lot more to do with listening and seeking to understand than it did with telling people what to do; more to do with debating than directing; more to do with pushing people to decide than with being the decider; more to do with persuading than with giving orders; more to do with learning than with knowing.

In Managing at Apple, we often played a video of Steve explaining his approach to giving criticism. He captured something very important: “You need to do that in a way that does not call into question your confidence in their abilities but leaves not too much room for interpretation … and that’s a hard thing to do.” He went on to say, “I don’t mind being wrong. And I’ll admit that I’m wrong a lot. It doesn’t really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing.”3 Amen! Who could argue with that?

Relationships may not scale, but culture does.

Being a good boss is hard for everyone, no matter how successful they appear on the outside.

I hope you’ll also feel the optimism that comes from knowing that 1) you are not alone and 2) a better approach may be less difficult than you fear. Your humanity is an asset to your effectiveness, not a liability.

You do need to spend time with your direct reports to be a great boss, but you don’t need to spend ALL your time with them.