These ideas apply to all social interactions, not just workplace communication. Think back to our discussion of friendships and toxicity. When you sincerely care about others, they’ll be less likely to get defensive when you approach them with concerns about your relationship. Or, on the other hand, if you never give positive feedback to your friends and loved ones, they’ll never know the extent to which you care. Remember, positive feedback tells others what you value.
So in the workplace, how do you show you care? We’ve already mentioned one way, which is to always try to set them up for success. Another is to ask for teammates’ feedback, whether you’re an employee or an employer. Really listen to it. This demonstrates that you value their opinions and expertise.
Another strong way to demonstrate that you personally care is to try to understand your teammates’ long-term goals for themselves and their lives. You may find that the reasons they’re in their role aren’t the ones you’d assume, and you may be able to support their goals in a mutually beneficial way. If you can do that, your team members will work harder and happier. Everyone wins.
Don’t Schmooze
The biggest thing “caring directly” isn’t is schmoozing. Don’t kiss ass, make fake smalltalk, or pay lip service to teammates’ personal lives in ways that feel false. Whatever you do, don’t take center stage in organizing frequent after-work social outings.
I’ve got an acquaintance who’s in a managerial position. I’ll keep it vague so as not to out her, but her company requires her to hold a weekly review meeting with her team. So, in an attempt to be nice, cool, and caring, she holds those meetings after work at a nearby bar. Unbeknownst to her, her employees hate it. It essentially extends their work day. They have their own lives, friends, and loved ones outside of work, and these weekly bar meetings take time away from that. What’s more, since she’s the boss, her employees don’t feel comfortable saying no. In essence, she’s just ensuring they’re working part of their Wednesday nights in addition to their normal work hours. Don’t be that kind of boss.
How to Receive Feedback
If you buy into Kim Scott’s logic—which I do—then a necessary take-away is that most people who give you feedback are doing it poorly. Chances are, they’re not saying what they need to be saying. They’re doing some sort of mental calculus to find a line where they can communicate enough of what they need to get across without offending you or stepping outside of the established social norms of your shared environment. The other insidious part about this is that there can also be baggage built right into the power dynamic that adds a whole new dimension to the communication. When members of one race speak to another, or one gender to another, or any other form of difference, the fact that one person’s in a position of power and the other one isn’t takes on additional weight. The same acquaintance I just mentioned, for example, the one who schmoozes with her team over beers? She has far more trouble giving feedback to the male members of her team, because she feels as though they don’t take her seriously or really acknowledge that she’s in a position of authority. I have no way of knowing if that’s true; for all I know they may have the utmost respect for her. I don’t know them. What matters is that she feels like this is the case, and it colors her interactions with them whenever the conversation is unpleasant.
For Radical Candor to work, all the parties involved have to know (really know) that no feedback is made from a position of bad faith. That means it takes two to tango. Most likely, many of you are in positions where you have a boss right now. Even if they don’t subscribe to this methodology, and even if their feedback is completely unhelpful, you still gain from assuming good faith. It can help you turn their garbage feedback into something positive, and it helps you keep an optimistic and healthy mindset about the work you’re doing. Feeling picked on, on the other hand, sours the entire endeavor, and you should never let anyone sabotage your work life like that, even if it’s unintentional. We spend way too much of our waking hours at work to tolerate them being consistently awful.
Breathe: What Feedback Do You Give the World?
Spend a few minutes reflecting on the feedback you send into the world, both literally and also through your behavior and body language. How often are you ruinously empathetic, sparing someone’s feelings when you’d really be helping them better by speaking directly? How often do you fail to mean what you say and say what you mean? How often do you stick up for yourself?
Think of the people in your life that you care about the most. How often do you give them feedback, and how often do you solicit theirs? That is to say, how often do you express your appreciation for them? And how often do you ask them about their own lives and really listen to the response?
You’re a walking, talking electronic billboard, flashing away, sending messages out into the world through everything you d o
Focus: Affecting Change
This “Focus” is going to be more active than others. Here’s what I’d like to encourage you to do: rearrange a room in your house. You don’t have to spend all day moving furniture, but switch some things up. Redecorate a little. What we’re trying to do is affect change in our environment in a literal sense—moving our possessions around, changing the look of a space.
While you’re doing that, picture the change you’d like to see in either your workplace or your social circle. Imagine the version of your job in which the office is a “no bullshit zone.” There are plenty of things at work to worry about and plenty of ways to occupy your time, but once you decide to try to bring Radical Candor to life in your workplace, you need to prioritize it and set aside some of the lesser concerns. In other words, focus .
When you’re done changing up a room, I think you’re going to be surprised at how you feel. By now I sound like a broken record, but I’ll say it again: the most important step is the first one, and most people never take it. That includes changing the environment they live in. Many people haven’t ever changed things since they’ve moved in, but bam! —in just a few minutes you’ve transformed your situation in a small but concrete way.
Attack: For Bosses
For each of your employees, map out a plan to have three conversations. Kim Scott endorses having each of these:
A conversation about their past.
A conversation about their future.
A conversation about how their current role can help them get from their past to their future .
If you have these conversations, you’ll understand your employees’ motivations, hopes, and goals. Aligning their work life with those goals will turbocharge their performance and job satisfication.
So, make a plan. Do it now. Find some paper or open a window and make a checklist of the people you need to have these conversations with and some opportunities you can create (i.e. lunch on Tuesday, meeting time next Thursday) to get them rolling. Don’t do it later—remember, around here we like to be proactive, because knocking these things out becomes the habit.
Attack: For Employees
It can be dangerous giving feedback to your bosses unsolicited, and it can be tricky asking for feedback. Do it anyways. If you’re not getting the kind of information you need to be effective at your job, ask your boss what you can do to further drive the team’s goals.
This second part’s more important: start giving specific feedback to your co-workers. For now, just focus on calling out the positives. When they do something that helps the team, tell them right away. Acknowledge it. I’d bet serious cash that others start acknowledging each other, too. Through setting an example, you can create a culture of constant feedback, even if your boss isn’t doing it. Take those first steps, and others will take them, too. And when you do that, do you know what happens? You become a leader.
* * *
9 . Scott, K. M. (2017). Radical candor: How to be a kickass boss without losing your humanity . New York: St. Martin’s Press.
10 . “Radical Candor With Strangers.” https://www.radicalcandor.com/
blog/radical-candor-with-strangers/
Chapter Eight :
Relentless Self-Reflection
Remember the Hans Christian Andersen story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes?” In this story, the titular Emperor gets naked for the entire kingdom because he’s led to believe he’s wearing magic clothing—though a child in the crowd isn’t fooled and calls him out in public. Many people misremember the details, thinking it’s only about the emperor’s own stupidity and vanity, forgetting the mechanic of the clothing: the weavers who promise the Emperor his clothing tell everyone that the clothing will appear invisible only to people who are stupid or unfit for their jobs. So it’s not just that the Emperor’s subjects are too afraid to speak truth to power, or that the Emperor himself is an utter dumbass—it’s that they’re afraid everyone around them will think they’re stupid, too. They assume the clothing is visible to others. The child, meanwhile, is unconcerned. She knows what she sees. When we see references to this story made in popular culture, it’s almost always in reference to the Emperor’s ignorance: we’re talking about someone who looks stupid to everyone but doesn’t realize it. In actuality, there’s a whole second layer to it: that everyone believes the situation is ridiculous, but they believe that others don’t think that way and know better than them, so there’s a collective ignorance at play.
Radical Candor would’ve saved the Emperor from this situation, by the way. Just saying .
In your own life, you’re both the Emperor and a peasant. The Emperor should have been able to take a long, honest look at himself in the mirror, see what was right in front of him, and think, oh God, these weavers are headed to the dungeon for sure. Instead, he chose to take the path of least mental resistance and buy into the lie that no funny business was going on. Whenever you pass on an opportunity to take an honest look at yourself, you’re that guy. Congratulations. The whole kingdom’s seen you naked.
Likewise, whenever you know an observation’s true but are afraid to voice it because you think others will think you’re dumb, you are being dumb. And I know that’s not what you want.
A New Concept: Hansei
Every piece of this book is meant to strengthen the other pieces. They’re all component parts of a whole that, hopefully, will add up to something more than the sum of its parts. That’s why I wanted you to learn to become more aware of being intentional about saying “yes” and “no” to things. It’s also why I wanted you to learn to sit still and meditate, even if it’s only for a few minutes. It’s why I wanted you to learn how to intentionally form new habits, ones that create positive changes in your life.
I’ve mentioned Lean business principles before. In the world of Lean and Six Sigma 11 , there’s a concept called hansei that’s worth looking at. This, like many other modern business terms is borrowed from Japan. Hansei means “self-reflection,” and it’s closely tied to the Japanese notion of “kaizen”—continuous improvement. I don’t want to drill down too deep into the business strategy and terminology here, but suffice it to say that hansei sessions are about leaders taking some time out to reflect on how they’re spending their time and energy and trying to improve upon that, just as they’re looking to improve processes within the company, eliminate wasted time and money, etc. (Did you think it was a coincidence that I talked about a Japanese businessman in our first chapter? There are no coincidences here.)
This is good for everyone to do. Most of us know it at various points in our lives, though few of us make a conscious practice of it. Especially when we’re younger, we’re often faced with these “come to Jesus” moments, times when we’re defeated or shocked or scared out of our routine and we have to step back and just ask ourselves, “How the hell did I get here?” When things are hard, reflection is easy. When we’ve got a problem, we want a solution. When we’re sick, we want medicine. It’s when there’s not a particular ill that we let our healthy habits slip out of use, and that opens us up to failure. This is where the work of devoting just a little time for self-reflection proactively rather than reactively becomes invaluable.
An aside: This couldn’t be more important when you’re pushing yourself hard to succeed or just starting to hit your creative stride. It gets easy to become a workaholic, to be consumed by your ambition. In those times, things can be great, but you can lose a bit of your connection to the broader world and the larger arc of your own life story, and it’s important to keep your perspective, or things can get messy.
So, Radical Candor was in large part about trying to cultivate a continual feedback loop between members of your team. And in business, kaizen is all about constantly taking stock of strategies and processes and making incremental improvements. The last piece of the puzzle is you. Radical self-reflection is about constantly taking stock of yourself, giving yourself feedback, and adjusting course accordingly.
Humble and Kind
In 2013, author George Saunders gave the convocation speech at Syracuse University, where he currently teaches Creative Writing. As far as writers go, Saunders is probably about as successful as you can get. In addition to enjoying his status as one of America’s most revered voices, he’s won countless awards, including a MacArther “Genius Grant,” which comes with a nice bonus of a million dollars. Saunders spoke at length about regrets, and how he didn’t regret a lot of the things he’d done in the past that others might, like working as a knuckle-puller in a slaughterhouse or swimming naked in a river in Sumatra only to realize it was full of monkey feces. After all, these experiences helped get him to where he is now. He did, however, relate one short story about something he did regret:
In seventh grade, this new kid joined our class. In the interest of confidentiality, her Convocation Speech name will be “ELLEN.” ELLEN was small, shy. She wore these blue cat’s-eye glasses that, at the time, only old ladies wore. When nervous, which was pretty much always, she had a habit of taking a strand of hair into her mouth and chewing on it.
So she came to our school and our neighborhood, and was mostly ignored, occasionally teased (“Your hair taste good?” — that sort of thing). I could see this hurt her. I still remember the way she’d look after such an insult: eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, as if, having just been reminded of her place in things, she was trying, as much as possible, to disappear. After awhile she’d drift away, hair-strand still in her mouth. At home, I imagined, after school, her mother would say, you know: “How was your day, sweetie?” and she’d say, “Oh, fine.” And her mother would say, “Making any friends?” and she’d go, “Sure, lots.”
Sometimes I’d see her hanging around alone in her front yard, as if afraid to leave it.
And then — they moved. That was it. No tragedy, no big final hazing .
One day she was there, next day she wasn’t.
End of story. 12
Saunders went on to explain that he was basically nice to Ellen, but that more than forty years later he still felt a nagging sense of guilt. Why? Because here before him stood a human in pain, and he responded, as he described, “sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.” Saunders refers to moments like these as “failures of kindness.”
For the most part, I’d argue that nobody sets out to be unkind. We know it comes from a place of smallness inside of us, something ugly and ego-driven, but we’re still hard-wired to behave this way at times. Unless we train ourselves out of it, we as humans tend to forget that everyone else is as human as we are, that we’re all just trying to get by, that we’ve all got our own bullshit to deal with. Saunders goes so far as to call our self-centeredness “Darwinian,” arguing that we’ve evolved to think of ourselves as the center of the universe because it has afforded us an evolutionary advantage. That certainly makes sense—selflessness by definition works against our own interests, even if it’s undoubtedly good for the soul.
You’ll recall that Radical Candor only works if it comes from a place of kindness and humility, too. Learn to give a damn about the people you surround yourself with both in your
personal life and your professional life. Those are the people that are making you successful or bringing you down. You’re on this journey together.
Kindness and humility, like most true virtues, are skills. They’re not something you are, they’re something you do. They’re habits you build, and by now you should know something about cultivating new habits. If you look at yourself honestly and criticially, you’ll also start recognizing the times in your life that your natural inclination is to be kind and the ones when your instinct is to lash out—or, maybe even worse, to behave “sensibly, mildly” in the face of something wrong.
As you become more successful, there may be a tendency to become more egotistical, too. You will have worked to get where you are. You’re doing that work right now, by reading this book and trying the things I suggest. Decide now to try to foster a greater sense of humility. Going forward, it will serve you well. The concrete benefits are never-ending: you’ll stay true to your own mission, and people will naturally want to ally themselves with you.
Here’s my suggestion for forming the habit of kindness. Chances are that every day, you interact with several strangers. They could be restaurant staff, other drivers on the road, or customers at businesses. Anyone, really. Start going out of your way to be kinder than you need to be at least once a day. Invite that weird co-worker out to lunch. Look a barista in the eye and smile when you get your coffee. Do something nice for your neighbor, even if they’re a jerk. Especially if they’re a jerk. Form the habit.
Breathe: Ignoring the Ego
Odds are good that you’re not going to want to do some of the things I’m suggesting in this chapter or others. I’ll repeat a fact I mentioned in an earlier chapter: the mind essentially “prefers” familiar routines and resists new things. The ego will tell you that what you’re doing is working just fine, even though the higher-order parts of your mind already know it’s not. If it were, you wouldn’t be reading this book, would you? It’s a little like eating your vegetables. When I was a kid, the idea of finishing that plate of broccoli was excruciating, something I had to be cajoled into. Now I’m an adult, and I like to eat my vegetables. I’ve evolved. Go figure. The point is that you should actually do these exercises, even when your mind tells you to glide over them and keep reading. Always remember: be proactive and take that first action step .
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