If you’ve had a fair share of bosses, you’d probably come to see that they can make or break your working experience. Some bosses are caring and empathetic, some are exacting yet fair, and others might be dismissive, incompetent, or downright mean. Without knowing what it’s like to be in that position ourselves, however, it can be difficult to understand why they act the way that they do; i.e., what kind of pressures they are facing, what other considerations are on their minds, and so on. And so, we may not be in the best position to appraise their decisions.

Kim Scott, a Princeton and Harvard graduate who is also a former manager at Apple and Google, experienced this disjunct between what she expected from her superiors and what it was like to be a superior herself early in her career. She had a boss who motivated others by embarrassing them. And she found out that she was one of the targets of ridicule when someone accidently CC-ed her an email thread in which her boss had been mocking her to her colleagues. Because of this and other experiences, she left and started her own company, Juice Software, intending to stamp out all incivility so that people would love coming to work.

While Scott’s intentions were good, they did not produce the results she expected. In order to sustain what she thought would be an uplifting atmosphere, she avoided the difficult but necessary job, for any boss, of telling people when their work did not meet the required standard so that they could fix it and learn from the experience. She regales the example of one pseudonymous “Bob,” who had been hired because of his incredible resume and references. The problem, which surfaced rather quickly, however, was that Bob was doing terrible work. He had been working for a month on a document explaining how Juice’s software allowed people to produce Excel spreadsheets that would update by themselves. The result was, unfortunately, an incoherent jumble of words.

As Bob handed in his work sheepishly to Scott, who reviewed it on the spot, several thoughts ran through her head:         

Bob’s work wasn’t even close to good enough. We were a small company, struggling to get on our feet, and we had zero bandwidth to redo his work, or to pick up his slack. I knew this at the time. And yet, when I met with him, I couldn’t bring myself to address the problem.

She told Bob that the work was alright for a first run and she would help him finish. She chose not to be candid about the quality of his work, partly because he looked nervous, partly because she was afraid of the backlash, i.e., of possibly being seen as an ‘abusive bitch,’ because Bob is a genuinely nice guy, and partly because she knows it would be faster for her to fix the document rather than teach him how to do it.  

The problems that arose from Scott’s laissez faire style soon multiplied. Bob was lulled into a false sense of security since Scott only praised and never criticized his work. As a result, there was no incentive for him to improve. But, as the team’s performance continued to decline, with no one able to pick up the slack, she realized she had no choice but to fire Bob and replace him with someone else. So, over some coffee and muffins, she told Bob – who was expecting a pleasant conversation – that she had to let him go. His response brought her to the low point of her career. After a long awkward silence, Bob – who was clearly upset – looked her straight in the eye and asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t anyone tell me? I thought you all cared about me!’       

This encounter brought to her attention other related problems with the culture she had created at Juice. She never asked her subordinates to give her candid feedback, and she did not encourage peers to give candid feedback to each other. The positive atmosphere she tried to create had backfired. Her team was not bonded, and it continued to affect their performance even after Bob left. Juice failed soon after. This experience galvanized Scott to pursue a management strategy that she calls radical candour, which is also the title of her book. The book, which pools together her accumulated wisdom from all the leadership roles she has taken since then, at Apple, Google, YouTube, Dropbox, and other tech companies, struck a chord with the general readership since it became a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller.  

After Juice, Scott joined Google and witnessed a culture of uncompromisingly direct feedback. In one instance, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google was met with a heated disagreement about his plan by one Matt Cutts, who was involved in the fight against Webspam. When they started to yell, Scott got worried that Cutts, who is normally an easy-going person, would get fired for speaking to Page in that tone. But after Page saw that Cutts would not back down, he grinned. Scott realized that Page wanted people at Google to criticize authority, including his own if it was merited. This freedom to criticize upward, downward and sideways enabled true collaboration and productivity because it allowed for the best ideas to win.     

Some of the strategies Page adopted to produce such a culture included regularly asking subordinates for feedback. As Scott adopted these same strategies for her teams, she began to learn from her subordinates (about how to be a great boss) as much as they learned from her. This, in conjunction with the hiring of some ‘remarkable people,’ allowed the business she led to grow in revenue ten times over, reaching over several billion dollars. Following her stint at Google, she was offered a place to lecture at Apple University. At Apple, she discerned a difference in culture to Google. While Google prized “superstars” – people who strove to be on the steepest growth trajectories – above all others, Apple equally valued “rockstars” – folk who love their work and exhibit stellar performance, but who have no interest in being rapidly promoted or taking up new roles.     

In other words, you did not have to be obsessed with position or status to be fulfilled and well-remunerated at Apple. You just had to be good at what you did. Scott soon saw that stability and growth were both required for teams to function well and that she needed to value the incredible work of her rockstars – competent people who weren’t always gunning for the next promotion – as much as she did her superstars, which was sadly lacking in her time at Google, and for which she now realized had created dissatisfaction.  

One of the reasons for this phenomenon is that performance metrics are commonly designed to test for not only performance in the abstract but leadership potential as well. But not every top “performer” has leadership potential or wants to be in a leadership position. And what happens as a result in many traditional companies is that the careers of many talented and productive people are stymied simply because they don’t want to become managers.

Regardless, Scott does note that Google and Apple have some things – perhaps the most important things –in common:

My colleague asked Jobs several perfectly reasonable questions: “How do you envision building the team? How big will the team be?” Steve’s curt response: “Well, if I knew the answer to all those questions, then I wouldn’t need you, would I?” Borderline rude, but also empowering. Jobs articulated this approach more gently in an interview with Terry Gross: “At Apple we hire [the kind of] people [who can] tell us what to do, not the other way around.” And indeed, this was my experience at the company.

What is most impressive is that the candour that Scott witnessed at these Silicon Valley companies were authentic and conducive for growth. She points out that the technology companies in the Valley were growing at the time and hiring rapidly. So, if any competent employee felt undervalued or disrespected by her superiors, she needn’t have to pay the “asshole tax” to keep her job and her salary: she could quit, knowing full well that there’d be a dozen other start-ups eager to hire her.

In the rest of this article, I will summarize and comment on Scott’s advice on how bosses can create teams that are receptive to radical candour, through guidance and team-building, and who can, therefore, achieve their best.  

“Relationships, not power, drive you forward.”

The most challenging aspect of leadership is creating a trusting partnership with all those under you. Myriad niggles tend to obstruct that relationship from growing organically and flourishing, such as the obvious power disparity, differing communication styles, and temperaments, having to toe the line between professionalism and friendship, and the ever-present constraints on time. These relationships, however, are vital to the health of one’s teams, not to mention a primary feature of a bosses’ job. They allow leaders to understand what motivates each of their subordinates so that they can help them avoid burnout, boredom, or unhealthy team dynamics, and deploy them in such a synergistic manner that they perform their best. Getting people to do hard things that they aren’t good at because you haven’t built an authentic relationship with them dissolves trust, invites lacklustre effort, and even attempts at sabotage.  

So, radical candour in the above context means two things, i.e., “Care Personally” and “Challenge Directly.” Normal people feel some apprehension at challenging others directly, even if they are in a position of authority over those whom they intend to challenge. However, when people know that you really care about them, i.e., have their interests at heart, they are far more likely to accept being challenged with criticism. They are also more likely to accept your praises since they know that you aren’t being insincere and manipulative. Furthermore, they will be candid about your own leadership practices, on the accuracy of your feedback, and on the quality of each other’s work. These can only bode well for the collective performance of the team.     

Scott’s own experience with radical candour allayed her fears that people would get angry or harbour grudges. In fact, most were relieved to be able to converse candidly. Once people became more comfortable being candid with each other, with fewer resentments left festering in the dark, she noticed that people began to love their jobs again. And success followed as a result.

One of Scott’s earliest experiences working at a diamond company solidified the value of caring personally. Two years out of college with a degree in Russian Literature, Scott was tasked with convincing people to leave state-owned Russian factories in Moscow to come work for her company. But contrary to her expectations, money didn’t seem to motivate the diamond cutters, something else did:

And so we stood under the tarp, eating shashlyk—grilled chunks of meat—and small, tart apples, passing a bottle of vodka around while the diamond cutters peppered me with questions. […] “If everything went to hell in Russia, would you get us and our families out of here?” I understood this was the only question that really mattered. By the end of our picnic, I finally realized that the most important thing I could do that the state could not do was to simply give a damn, personally. The diamond cutters took the job. Suddenly all those late nights of reading long Russian novels became relevant to the business career I’d stumbled into. I had been deeply ambivalent about becoming a boss because I saw bosses as robotic dream-killers, Dilbert-like soul-crushers. Now I realized the question that led me to study Russian literature—why some people live productively and joyfully while others feel, as Marx put it, alienated from their labor—was central to a boss’s job. In fact, part of my job was to figure out how to create more joy and less misery. My humanity was an attribute, not a liability, to being effective. Two years after this picnic, I’d arranged for these men’s first travel outside their homeland; helped them to come to grips with the dissonance they felt between the world they saw and what their Soviet education had led them to expect; improved their English; and hung out with their families. They had cut diamonds for our company that sold in excess of $100 million per year.

Caring personally is the cornerstone of trust. And one way that this trust is eroded is when bosses adopt the belief, mistaken or not, that they are somehow “better” than those who report to them. In the words of Scott, ‘that attitude makes it impossible to be a kick-ass boss; it just makes people want to kick your ass. There are few things more damaging to human relationships than a sense of superiority.’

I once worked for a man who told me, “In every relationship there is a screwer and a screwee.” Needless to say, I didn’t work for him for long. Of course, if you are a boss, there is some hierarchy involved. There’s no use pretending otherwise. Just remember that being a boss is a job, not a value judgment.

To care personally is not to tick a checkbox of remembering dates, attending social events, etc., and it is not about asking people to share the skeletons in their closet or about sharing one’s own. It is about attending to the fact that people share the same humanity, i.e., they have interests, hopes, dreams, and desires for fulfilment that may or may not be related to work.

Once bosses care personally, they can then challenge directly. People will get angry, but if the challenge is handled well, they can be inspired to improve. Acknowledge and never deny the emotional experiences of others. Address outbursts and other emotional displays not with phrases like “let’s be professional,” but with statements like “I can see that you are upset….” Adopt the situation behaviour impact technique. Describe the situation, describe what the person did to produce that situation, and then describe the impact. Doing this allows for feedback to be about tangible, objective things, rather than sound like blanket judgments that can be arrogant.   

When somebody says, “You’re a genius,” it begs a question: “Who are you to judge my intelligence?” When somebody says, “I’m so proud of you!” it’s natural to think, “Who are you to be proud of me?” Better to say, “In your presentation at this morning’s meeting (situation), the way you talked about our decision to diversify (behavior) was persuasive because you showed everyone you’d heard the other point of view (impact).”

Do not begin the conversation with “don’t take it personally” or “let me be candid with you,” followed by garden variety insults like “you’re a moron.” That isn’t radical candour. You’re just an a-hole. Radical candour is not a license to nit-pick on inconsequential or tangential issues or your own pet peeves either. Focus instead on addressing the real problems. Sometimes bosses must challenge directly before they have established trust, or cared personally, because the latter takes time. In such cases, if she has already enforced a culture where her ideas can be challenged, her subordinates will be more willing to receive commensurate challenges from her, since asking for candid feedback is a trust building exercise.   

This takes some getting used to—particularly for more “authoritarian” leaders. But if you stick to it, you’ll find that you learn a great deal about yourself and how people perceive you. This knowledge will unfailingly allow you and your team to achieve better results.

When giving feedback, some think that sandwiching criticism between flattering comments is best practice. This approach, also known by the venture capitalist Ben Horowitz as the “shit” sandwich, lacks sincerity and comes across as manipulative, especially if the one giving feedback doesn’t think those flattering comments are true. Even the average child can see through your “shit” sandwich. So, it’s better just to be gentle but direct, to demonstrate that you only care about seeing them perform their best, and not to personalize, i.e., focus on the ideas and the processes, not the character of the person holding or performing them. Focus also on giving tangible action points and aid. If you are unable to consider the interests of others, you should not be a leader.     

So radical candour involves both caring personally and challenging directly. When we fail in either one dimension, we slip into ruinous empathy or obnoxious aggression. If we fail in both, we become manipulatively insincere and are more likely to give out “shit” sandwiches.

Scott recalls a time when a stranger was radically candid with her and her dog:   

This happened to me shortly after I adopted a golden retriever puppy named Belvedere. I adored Belvedere and spoiled her utterly. As a result, she was completely out of control. One evening we were out for a walk, and Belvy began to tug at her leash as we waited at a crosswalk, even though cars were speeding by only a few feet in front of us. “Come on sweetie, sit,” I implored. “The light will be green in a second.” Despite my reassurances, she yanked even harder on the leash and tried to lunge into the street. A stranger also waiting to cross looked over at me and said, “I can see you really love your dog.” In the two seconds it took him to say those words, he established that he cared, that he wasn’t judging me. Next, he gave me a really direct challenge. “But that dog will die if you don’t teach her to sit!” Direct, almost breathtakingly so. Then, without asking for permission, the man bent down to Belvy, pointed his finger at the sidewalk, and said with a loud, firm voice, “SIT!” She sat. I gaped in amazement. He smiled and explained, “It’s not mean. It’s clear!” The light changed and he strode off, leaving me with words to live by.  

Scott admits that she had been doing just the opposite at Google. Having only been at Google for a short time, she disagreed with one of Page’s policies and, having swerved away from ruinous empathy (because of her past experiences) to obnoxious aggression, she wrote a strongly worded email to him and thirty other colleagues voicing her disagreement and what she thought could be the possible unsavoury motives behind Page’s policy decision. After she got feedback from her colleagues that the email came across as incredibly rude, she feared for her job. And so, even though her opinion had not changed, she quickly apologized to Page in person and said that his decision was, in fact, right. But by so doing, she swung from obnoxious aggression into manipulative insincerity. Page, who apparently possesses a powerful BS detector, saw right through her and walked away with disdain. A colleague standing nearby smiled and said, ‘he likes it better when you disagree with him.’          

When you behave badly and get called out for it, an all-too-natural response is to become less genuine and more political—to move from Obnoxious Aggression to a worse place, Manipulative Insincerity. It would’ve been better to have said nothing than to move in the wrong direction on the “challenge directly” axis. Better yet to have moved up on the care personally axis—to have taken the trouble to understand Larry’s thinking and then come up with a solution that addressed his concerns and mine. In that context, admitting that I had behaved badly would probably have been better received.

But note that being candid does not mean airing our unfiltered subjective thoughts and expecting others to accommodate us. Part of what it means to be emotionally mature and self-aware is to be mindful of the fact that our subjective experiences aren’t necessarily shared by others. The black and blue, or white and gold dress, which became an internet sensation some years back, and the more recent “yanny or laurel” debacle, illustrate this.     

A comment made by one’s subjective experience would be like saying ‘tomatoes taste disgusting, and that is why I don’t like them,’ rather than saying ‘I find the taste of tomatoes off-putting, and that is why I avoid them.’ Tacitly recognising the disjunct between our subjective experience and objective reality enables us to challenge and be challenged by others without losing our minds.  

Finally, when it came to promotions, Scott also had valuable things to say about Google’s SOPs:  

Google’s distrust of unchecked managerial authority played out in virtually all of its procedures. Managers couldn’t just hire people—they had to put candidates through a rigorous interview process that then sent “interview packets” all the way up to Larry Page to approve or disapprove. Promotions were decided not by the managers but by a committee of peers. Performance ratings were influenced by 360-degree feedback on each employee, not just the manager’s subjective opinion, and then calibrated across teams to make sure standards were similarly upheld across teams. That made it pretty hard to play favourites or hold people back unfairly. And so on.

When a few managers get together to make sure their promotions are fair, the politics can get ugly very quickly. Disagreements can become overly personalized, silent disagreement can become toxic, and bizarre backroom bartering occurs—“I’ll support your undeserving person if you’ll support mine.” A grudge held from the last cycle may kill the promotion of an otherwise deserving person the next time around.

Google’s engineering team solved these problems with promotion committees, which were assembled off-site for one day twice a year. They debated the promotions of other people’s direct reports, not their own, based on a packet of relatively objective information about each person’s accomplishments. The debates were about the merits of a person’s promotion, not “my person” versus “your person.” But most importantly, the process was a solution to the age-old problem of manager favoritism. As a result, no engineer has ever been promoted at Google just by ass-kissing alone.

There you have it: some of Kim Scott’s insights on the value of radical candour to organizational effectiveness and personal fulfilment. If you liked this article, Scott’s entire book is worth your time. In an effort to keep this article manageably short, many more valuable nuggets of advice were left out.

Check out the video below to see Scott talking about radical candour herself.