Kim Scott: belief

Transcript context

…So in this example of Bob, say you were to do it now, what would you do differently other than give him feedback earlier? Is there something you've learned about just how you would've phrased it or approached it? I think probably what I would do, and I would love to hear what you would've said to Bob too, I certainly don't have all the answers, but probably what I would've said is let's go back to the first time Bob handed work into me with shame in his eyes. I would've said, "Bob, maybe I'm misinterpreting the expression on your face, but it looks to me like you are not happy with this. What's going on?" And so I would've asked him to diagnose it himself and I want to pause on that because that can be very risky. He might have said to me, "I think this is awesome. This is my best work," and now I've kind of made my job of giving him feedback a little bit harder. So it's not always the right thing to ask questions, but I would've tried to ask it before I had examined the work when I noticed that he looked uncomfortable himself. And I think also another thing I've learned about noticing, I said earlier that there's a lot of evidence that we often misinterpret each other's facial expressions and body language. So I would've tried to say that with some humility, it seems like you're not, maybe I'm wrong, but you don't look to me like you're happy with this. And I would've given him an opportunity to say, "Yeah, maybe I need to do it again." Let's imagine though that he said, "Oh no, it's awesome. It's ready." So then I get it and I look at it. I would have not been shy about pointing out very specifically every problem that I saw in that piece of work, every single one. Sometimes it can be tempting when you're giving someone feedback to say, "Oh, there's a number of careless mistakes here. Can you go back and look at it again," and the person will notice a few of them and then you got to go, sometimes it's useful to show someone a pattern. All of the careless mistakes, especially if someone is defensive or if you think they're likely to be defensive, if you think they're likely to do to you what I did to my boss, oh no, everything's fine. It's no big deal. You need to move out on the challenge directly dimension. You need to be prepared to keep going until you have communicated with a person. And that was really the problem with Bob. He probably would not have started to cry. I think my fear around his tears was probably more about my fear than what was actually likely to happen. But I think we do fear someone else getting upset more often than they actually get upset. We have kind of a negativity bias when it comes to part of the reason why we're reluctant to give feedback. And I think to your point, that we want to be liked, like you said, that you should get over that. I think that's obviously very hard just to be like, "Nah, I'm not going to worry about that." But I think your point is really important that you'll be liked later if you don't do the hard thing now. It'll only get worse if you just let it continue happening.…

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