Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Radical Candor: From theory to practice with author Kim Scott
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if you say do you have any feedback from me you're wasting your breath the other person is going to say oh no everything's fine the question that i like to ask is what could i do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me do not write down my question because if you sound like kim scott and not like yourself then other people are not going to believe you want to answer needs to sound authentic to you and if everybody can write down their question who they're going to ask it up and then pop it into their calendar right now. This will be one of the most productive podcasts in all of podcast land. Today my guest is kim scott kim is the author of radical candor which is the single most referenced book on this podcast the book is sold over one million copies has been translated into twenty three languages it was such an honor to have kim on the podcast. Prior to this book kim was a co coach at drop box Qualtrics twitter and many other tech companies she is a member of the faculty at apple university before that she led at sense youtube and double click teams at google prior to that kim managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo and started a diamond cutting factory in Moscow she's also working on a new book you can preorder now called radical respect in our conversation we get very practical and very tactical about practicing radical candor. Kim briefly describes the core idea shares language and phrases and words you can use to get better at practicing radical candor she shares tips for people pleasers like myself also a lot of very concrete advice for how to get feedback also what to do if your culture is on the ruinous empathy side of the spectrum or even worse obnoxious aggression. And so much more I guarantee listening to this episode will make you a better leader and a better employee with that every new kim scott after a short word from our one featured sponsor for this episode. You fell in love with building products for a reason but sometimes the day to day reality is a little different than you imagine instead of dreaming up big ideas talking to customers and crafting a strategy you're drowning in spreadsheets and road map updates and you're spending your days basically putting out fire. 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Say goodbye to your spreadsheets and the never ending alignment efforts the old way of doing product management is over rediscover what's possible with Jira product discovery try for free at Atlassian.com/Lenny that's Atlassian.com/Lenny Kim thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me I'm excited for our conversation. Your book radical candor is the single most recommended book on this podcast. I don't know if you know this podcast well but at the end of the podcast I ask every guest what are two or three books you recommend most to other people and your book has come up the most of any book mentioned on the podcast. Amazing well tell your listeners I love them and I'm grateful to them okay they will hear this so I'm really excited to have you on chat about all the things that you teach and your book. For people that have heard the term radical candor have maybe skim the book maybe read the book a while ago but don't like truly remember or understand the concept could you spend like just a few minutes giving a high level overview of the concept of radical candor. Absolutely radical candor is just what happens when you care personally and challenge directly at the same time I think it's probably best understood by what it's not because we all fail on one of those two dimensions or both of them multiple times a day. So if you can think about it as a two by two framework on the on the on the vertical axis is care personally the horizontal axis is challenged directly. What happens when we remember to challenge directly but we forget to show that we care personally bad is what I call obnoxious aggression. And it's really important to distinguish between radical caner and obnoxious aggression I think one of the mistakes that people often make about and I've got a lot of you write a book about feedback you're going to get a lot of other. And I've heard a lot of feedback that that sometimes teams will be rolling out the idea of radical caner and someone will charge into the room and say the spirit of radical caner and then they act like a garden variety jerk. And that is not the spirit of radical caner that's a spirit of obnoxious aggression. And obnoxious aggression is a big problem it's a problem because it hurts other people. It's also a problem because it's inefficient if I'm a jerk to you Lenny then then I'm going to send you into fight or flight mode and then you literally cannot hear what I'm saying so I'm wasting my breath. But I don't know if this is true for you but for me there's a third problem and the third problem is that when I realize I've acted like a jerk when I realize I've landed in obnoxious aggression. It's not actually my instinct to go the right way on care personally. Instead it's my instinct to go the wrong way on challenge directly and to pretend that I agree when I disagree and then I wind up in the worst place of all manipulative and sincerity. And it's kind of fun to tell stories about obnoxious aggression and manipulative and sincerity. If you watch The Office or any show about problems at work or problems in any kind of relationship really you're going to see a lot of episodes about obnoxious aggression and manipulative and sincerity. But I think the real rub comes in the fact that these even though this is what we like to talk about these two problems or what we like to talk about these are not the most common problem. By far and away the most common problem occurs when we do remember to show that we care personally because you know what most people try to be 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 them that we failed to tell them something they'd be better off knowing in the long run and that is what I call ruinous empathy. So that is radical candor in a nutshell that's the TLDR but please do read. Amazing and we'll link to a diagram of this two by two for people that aren't visual the gursing like one actually see it. So just to make it super clear if you're challenging directly basically being very candid with feedback but it's not clear you're care deeply about the person you call that obnoxious aggression. And if you make it clear you care a lot about the person but aren't actually giving them direct candid feedback you call that ruinous empathy. Yes exactly which of these buckets you find most people fall into is there like a percentage of like people or companies. Yeah I mean I would say 90% of us make 90% of our mistakes in that ruinous empathy bucket. It's by far and away the most common problem but I think all of us make mistakes in the other quadrants as well and very often we kind of I think one of the one of if I'm going to offer some self criticism of this framework. It's much easier to notice when one has been ruinously empathetic it's almost like you know, give yourself some critical feedback I work too hard you know, but it's very it's much harder to notice when we've been very intuitively intensively intensively intensively aggressive and maybe I could have named those things I mean because very often manipulative intensity is sort of self protective intensity. Very often obnoxious aggression is just you know extreme frustration you know so so I want us you know I want people to use this framework not to judge themselves or other people harshly but like a compass the guide specific conversations specific people to a better place and they help us understand when we're going in the wrong direction which we are all bound to do on a daily basis. I want to talk about all those things and also how to get better at these things but before we do that. It's very hard to change and it's also hard just to challenge directly and lately it's hard for people to be candid just to give people a little motivation to invest in this skill. What sort of impact do you see when people develop the skill of being better at radical hander. When we get better at radical candor I mean I'll tell you a story in fact about the impact it had on my life some radical candor but but the sort of abstract answer to your question. Is we build better relationships and we do better work and we're more successful and we're happier. You ready for a story.
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