Kim Scott: recommendation

Transcript context

…I had a manager that was also very good at this. He was very good at just giving me very direct feedback, and I knew that he was only doing it because he cared about my future. To kind of follow this thread and get a little tactical, is there language or phrases or ways of communicating that you recommend people use to either challenge directly and avoid people getting defensive or make it clear you care deeply? People always want me to give them a script. And the problem with the script is that if I write it, you're going to sound like Kim Scott and not like yourself. And then people won't really think you mean what you're saying. But I do think there are some important things to consider when having these conversations. I think you want to go into the conversation, and by the way, everything I'm about to say applies to praise as much as it does to criticism. And I want to pause for a moment. That story is helpful because that's the kind of thing that has happened to so many of us, that's not unique to me. However, praise is even more important than criticism in terms of radical candor. Radical candor is not all about the boss giving the employee criticism. It should always start with soliciting feedback and it should include more praise and criticism, but anyway, way without offering up shit sandwiches. So anyway, I think that the important thing for these conversations, these sort of two-minute impromptu moments of management, is to go into the conversation being humble. To me, I call it candor and not truth because if I march into a room and I say, "Lenny, I'm going to tell you the truth." I'm kind of implying I've got a pipeline to God and you don't know anything. And that's not what this is all about. This is a dialogue, not a monologue. So to me, candor implies here's how I understand the situation. I'm also curious to know how you understand the conversation. So you want to go in being humble, you might be wrong, and that's totally fine. Omniscience is not a requirement for radical candor, thank heavens. So you want to be humble. You want to state your intention to be helpful. You want to remember in your own head and you want to make it explicit to the other person that you're telling them this to help them. You're not trying to be dominant or kick them in the shins or anything like that. You're telling them this because you care about them. So you want to state your intention to be helpful. You want to have these conversations right away, almost immediately. I mean, there's exceptions to everything I'm saying. None of this is absolute. But usually if I'm telling myself and Lenny, you can tell me if you have the same problem, but if I tell myself, Oh, I'm going to wait for a better moment to tell this person this thing, what I'm really saying is I'm never going to say. So if the purpose of praise is to tell people what to do more of, and the purpose of criticism is to tell them what to do less of, why wait. So you want to do it immediately unless you are so upset that you're going to say it in a terrible way or the other person is so upset that they can't hear you. But usually that's not the case. You also want, and in the before times I used to say have these conversations in person. Now I say have these conversations synchronously and I'm going to recommend phone over video. t's not the case. You also want, and in the before times I used to say have these conversations in person. Now I say have these conversations synchronously and I'm going to recommend phone over video. There's a lot of evidence coming out of University of Chicago and probably other places, but that's the article I've read that there's more noise than signal in facial expressions and body language, especially if somebody is just a little square on a computer screen. But it also may be true in real life, like the phone actually may be one of our best communication innovations of all time because when you're talking to someone on the phone, you're listening to the words that they are saying to you, and that is really what you want to do in this moment. So make sure that you're having these conversations synchronously, because what you want to do next is gauge how it's landing. So I'll talk about that in a minute. And you can't gauge how something is landing if you're sending an email or a text, and Slack is just a feedback train wreck waiting to happen. I once coached someone who kept giving feedback over Slack and I finally just quit coaching him. I was like, "If you keep making this mistake, I can't be your coach." So don't do that. Take a moment to pick up the phone and call the person. Go back to those old AT&T commercials when I was a kid. Reach out and touch someone. You want to show you care. So let's review. You want to be humble, you want to be helpful, you want to do it immediately. You want to do it in person or at least synchronously. If you can't do it in person. You also want to praise in public and criticize in private, and you don't want to give people either praise or criticism about their personality. So if you want to remember all that, it's HHIIPPP, two H's, two I's, kind of three P's depending on how you count. And so let's double-click though on this not about personality point. I think it's really important to remember that for both praise and criticism, you want to use sort of context, observation, result, next step. So context, in the meeting, observation, when you said um every third word, result, it made you sound stupid. Next step, go to the speech coach. Also is important for praise, in the meeting context, when you offered both sides of the argument, observation, result is it earned you credibility. Next step is do more of that. So you can call it CORE, you can think about that as CORE. I used to call it CORN, but I got some feedback that corn is like some shorthand for porn on TikTok. So I call it CORE instead, HIP CORE.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.