Kim Scott: prediction

Transcript context

…Okay, they'll 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 skimmed the book, maybe even read the book a while ago, but don't truly remember or understand the concept. Could you just spend 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. And 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 you can think about it as a two by two framework. On the vertical axis is care personally, the horizontal axis is challenge directly. What happens when we remember to challenge directly, but we forget to show that we care personally. That is what I call obnoxious aggression, and it's really important to distinguish between radical candor and obnoxious aggression. I think one of the mistakes that people often make about, and I've gotten a lot, you write a book about feedback, you're going to get a lot of it, and I've heard a lot of feedback that sometimes teams will be rolling out the idea of Radical Candor and someone will charge into the room and say, "In the spirit of Radical Candor," and then they act like a garden variety jerk. And that is not the spirit of Radical Candor. That's the 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 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 insincerity. And it's kind of fun to tell stories about obnoxious aggression and manipulative insincerity. 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 insincerity. But I think the real rub comes and the fact that these, even though this is what we like to talk about, these two problems are 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 fail 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 thinkers and want to 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 care deeply about the person, you call that obnoxious aggression.…

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