Kim Scott: recommendation

Transcript context

…Because ruinous empathy creates this false harmony, which is really bad. So here's my ruinous empathy story. I had just hired this guy, we'll call him Bob, and I liked Bob a lot. He was smart, he was charming, he was funny. He would do stuff like we're at a manager offsite playing one of those endless get to know you games. And everybody was getting more and more and more stressed out. So start up, we've got a lot going on. And Bob was the guy who had the courage to raise his hand and to say, "I can tell everyone is getting stressed. I want to get to know all of you. I've got an idea. It'll help us do that and it'll be really fast." Whatever his idea was, if it was really fast, we were down with it. And Bob says, "Let's just go around the table and confess what candy our parents used when potty training us." Really weird but really fast. And then for the next 10 months, every time there was a tense moment in a meeting, Bob would whip out just the right piece of candy for the right person at the right moment. And we all remember that was the weirder thing. Like Hershey Kisses right here. That was what my parents used to potty train me. And so Bob was quirky, but he brought a little levity to the office. Everybody kind of loved working with Bob. There was one problem with Bob. He was doing terrible work. He would hand stuff into me and there was shame in his eyes. He kind of knew it wasn't good enough. He was very creative, but riddled with sloppy mistakes. And I would say something to Bob along the lines of, "Oh Bob, this is such a great start. You're so awesome. We all love working with you. Maybe you can make it just a little bit better." So let's pause for a moment. Why did I say such a banal thing to Bob? I think part of the problem was that I liked Bob and I really didn't want to hurt his feelings. So that was the ruinous empathy part of why I said that. But also part of the problem was something more insidious, a little bit of manipulative insincerity, because Bob was popular and Bob was also sensitive kind of. And there was part of me that was afraid if I told Bob in no uncertain terms that his work wasn't nearly good enough, he would get upset. He might even start to cry and then everybody would think I was a big, you know what? So the part of me that was worried about my reputation as a leader, that was the manipulative insincerity part, the part of me that was worried about Bob's feelings, that was the ruinous empathy part. And this went on for 10 months, 10 long months, and I was so puzzled the whole time I couldn't understand what was going on. I learned much later that one of the issues perhaps was that Bob was smoking pot in the bathroom three times a day, which maybe explained all that candy that he had at all times. But I didn't know any of that at the time. All I knew is that Bob was consistently doing bad work, but I wasn't really dealing with it. And eventually the inevitable happened. hat he had at all times. But I didn't know any of that at the time. All I knew is that Bob was consistently doing bad work, but I wasn't really dealing with it. And eventually the inevitable happened. I realized that if I didn't fire Bob, I was going to lose all my best performers because not only had it been unfair to Bob not to tell him, I also had been unfair to everyone on the team. And they were frustrated. Their deliverables were late because his deliverables were late. They weren't able to do their best work because they were having to spend so much time redoing his work. And the people who were best at their jobs were going to quit because they wanted to be able to do their best work. They were going to go to a different company where they could do their best work. And so I sat down to have a conversation with Bob that I should have begun frankly 10 months previously. And when I finished explaining to him where things stood, he kind of pushed his chair back from the table. He looked me right in the eye and he said, "Why didn't you tell me?" And as that question was going around in my head with no good answer, he looked at me again and he said, "Why didn't anyone tell me? I thought you all cared about me." And now I realized that by not telling Bob, thinking I was being so nice, I'm having to fire him as a result. Not so nice after all. But it was too late to say Bob because at this point even he agreed he should go because his reputation on the team was just shot. All I could do in the moment was make myself a very solemn promise that I would never make that mistake again, and that I would do everything in my power to help other people avoid making that mistake. It was so painful. It was painful for me. It was painful for Bob, much more painful for Bob actually, and it was bad for the whole team and it was bad for our investors. We weren't getting results because of my ruinous empathy and ruinous empathy slash manipulative insincerity. It's much harder to admit the manipulative insincerity part. And that is really why I'm here talking to you because I want all of your listeners to avoid making that mistake because it's the most painful and the most common mistake that I think leaders and not just leaders, I mean all of us make this mistake in all of our relationships. I love that this also gives an example of the impact of getting better at this point of you'll lose not just the people that are not necessarily great, but also other high performers on the team because they're seeing people slip through the cracks that aren't amazing. And if you're not practicing this early, your team basically becomes not high performing.…

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