[Music] when i was 26 years old barely out of grad school i was asked to come teach a half-day class about motivation i was excited for it and then i found out my audience would be generals and colonels in the u.s air force i was way under qualified and i wanted to back out but it was too late so i walked in and i was staring at a room full of people twice my age wearing full military garb with all their medals on display they had nicknames like gunner striker and stealth by the end of
the first hour i felt like i was bombing and sure enough in the reviews they wrote after class they bombed me one wrote it was more quality information in the audience than on the podium another said i gained very little from the session but i trust the instructor did gain useful insight it felt like a punch in the stomach and i couldn't get it out of my head so i did what any self-respecting organizational psychologist would do i started studying why it's often soul crushing to receive criticism and whether we could actually learn to like
it i'm adam grant this is work life my ted podcast i study how to make work not suck organizations like google the nba and the gates foundation have invited me in to help make jobs more meaningful teams more creative and cultures more collaborative in this show i'm inviting myself in to some truly unusual places where they've mastered something i wish everyone else knew about work today the art and science of criticism thanks to bonobos for sponsoring this episode [Music] hey karen hello adam how are you doing well and you good this is kieran rao he
used to be a manager at a financial company like most managers he spent a ton of time in meetings and most of them were pretty run-of-the-mill but there's one meeting that kieran will never forget here's karen breaking down a recording of that meeting for us so we were in this large white tent 200 people sitting around the top 200 to 300 managers so the next two sections um are really going to be about practical application we've been talking about multiple strategic points and up comes a chart this is a list of force ranking the people
in this room by performance which was labeled the the worst managers so these are people we love some of the people in this room and these names probably shouldn't be here and i was number one on the list i look at this name i hired kieran you know apparently in his first couple years he's not doing that well now i'm working wow so you're totally caught by surprise you're staring in a room of 200 people and being told you're the single worst manager in that room that's right what was that like um it was intense
[Music] we'll hear more from kieran later but right now i want you to imagine you're kieran right in that moment think about what happens when you get criticized like physically your shoulders tighten your breath get shallower negative feedback sets off alarm bells it actually touches a nerve in your body and psychologically your mind races you start to put up shields and mount a counter-attack if you were a peacock you'd strut if you were an ape you'd beat your chest but humans have another kind of reaction there was a study a few decades ago that said
our ego can get so defensive in these situations that it becomes its own little totalitarian regime it starts to control the flow of information to our brains the way a dictator controls the media think about that your own ego is censoring what you hear but if we never hear criticism we'll never improve what would it be like in a place where people constantly criticize each other and crave that kind of feedback for themselves in order to make everyone better i've worked with hundreds of organizations and i found only one where that's truly the norm you
could say to me hey jerk you're being an then we'll say okay am i being an this is the guy in charge his name is rey one of the biggest tragedies of mankind is people holding in their opinions in their heads and it's such a tragedy because it could so easily be fixed if they put them out there and stress tested them in the right way they would so raise their probability of making a better decision everybody's giving high fives they're all smiling at each other but they're not dealing with the things they need to
deal with it's uh it's it's incredibly fun to think about like you can go around calling people and then their default response is supposed to be tell me more is that really how you want people to react to criticism well i want to put that on the table together and look at that because maybe i'm the one who's being a jerk or misunderstanding in the mid 1970s ray dalio started a financial firm called bridgewater associates at first he was working out of a barn with his friends he got really successful really quickly and then he
got cocky he placed a bad bet it tanked his firm he had to fire his friends and i was uh so broke that i had to borrow four thousand dollars from my dad to help pay for my family bills and that was extremely painful it turned out to be terrific i'm sorry you you just said it was terrific that it was so painful because well like normal human beings don't feel that way i mean like i was absolutely miserable but it gave me the humility that i needed to deal with my audacity it made me
want to find the smartest people i could find who disagreed with me ray realized that he crashed because there wasn't anyone around to check his ego when he was on top of the world he only listened to himself or people who constantly said yes now he was on his own so that experience was the one that really kind of drove it home for me and i say if you don't look at back on yourself and think that wow how stupid i was a year or two ago then you mustn't have learned much in the last
year or two ray decided that the next version of his company would have a different kind of culture where everyone would be brutally honest with each other and that's what bridgewater does today ray calls it radical transparency every criticism every opinion out in the open you're comfortable just putting out out there transparently why why shouldn't we be embarrassment pain uh you know ridicule cruelty right okay but it's not those kinds of things right we recognize that it could be a difficult moment before people come here we ask them do they want to do that isn't
this good to make them partners in that self-discovery of what is actually true bridgewater associates is now considered the most successful hedge fund in the world and ray believes the culture is the driving force behind their success they manage 160 billion dollars in assets and ray has become one of the richest people on earth if you can't tell by now bridgewater is also one of the strangest workplaces i've ever seen feedback is only one piece of what makes them different i'm not here to analyze all their practices dissect their performance or suggest you copy them
but i do believe that if we want to get better at something we should go and learn from the extreme you know the same way you might try and pick up a workout tip from an olympic athlete bridgewater goes to the extreme on criticism they think you can learn to dish it out and even crave it over the years they've had some high-profile senior leaders including james comey the recent fbi director he even talked about bridgewater at his senate confirmation hearing i went to bridgewater in part because of that culture of transparency it's something that's
just long been part of me today about 2 000 people work there and every single one of them is expected to put criticism out in the open even if the billionaire founder is the target here's an email rae got one day from a colleague named jim haskell ray you deserve a d-minus for your performance today you rambled for 50 minutes it was obvious to all of us that you did not prepare at all today was really bad we can't let this happen again when jim sent his scathing review ray decided to get a few more
opinions he asked his colleagues to rate his performance that day on a scale from a to f then he shared the feedback with everyone else and let me tell you rey did not get any a's for that meeting i sucked i think what a lot of people would have done in that situation is they would have just sorted the conversation out with jim and you replied and you said like hey everybody else in the meeting i'm looping you in the whole company that went to the whole company yeah a to f it's very important this
kind of thing is happening constantly at bridgewater what would you do if someone gave you a d minus there are actual studies showing that when coworkers criticize us we tend to drop them from our lives or at least avoid them at all costs instead we go straight to our cheerleaders to complain and get reassurance our friends our favorite like-minded colleagues mom that's our support network [Music] but there's another kind of network that we all need a challenge network a challenge network is the group of people that you trust to push you to get better they
tell you the stuff you don't want to hear but need to hear and bridgewater is one big challenge network i want jim's critiques because i might be inclined to ramble and because i might be inclined to not be prepared so ray made a promise to jim he'd do better the next time he said listen i can't trust you to do that and i say great i can't trust me to do that either and so as a regular protocol he'll call me up because he understands that it works well for both of us and works well
for the company a challenge network can only help you if you're ready to listen it's particularly important for me to be showing anybody what i'm doing including my failures my successes yes why would you not do that well because you're afraid of the answer what are you afraid of of the emperor being discovered to have no clothes if your objective is to be as good as you can possibly be then you're going to want that i think a lot of people would rather maintain a sort of at least the illusion of a decent image than
to actually improve but then they care more about their image than they care about results and you're not willing to tolerate that you know life's much better with good results than you know the idea of criticizing each other this openly might sound terrifying i get that in lots of workplaces it would be painful at best and abusive at worst there's there's a bunch of work by by economists showing that rankings generally demotivate people people even who are at the top are like well i expected to be further at the top and everybody at the bottom
doesn't enjoy the experience of comparing themselves negatively to everyone else around them in normal companies i suspect that they don't prepare people agree on it say is this a good thing what about your workplace what would happen if you just decided one day to be radically transparent it might not go so well i was working at esquire magazine at the time and i said to my editor in a meeting at one point i was like you know what i i really would rather be at the new yorker and if they offered me a job i
would take that and he he was stone-faced he did not like it that's aj jacobs a writer who thinks it's fun to live his life as an experiment for a story he was working on aj committed to being a hundred transparent for a few weeks if you hate your boss tell your boss i hate you aj did that with everyone he talked to his mother-in-law elderly neighbors his kids his wife's friends i was out with my wife at a restaurant and we saw some friends of hers that she hadn't seen since college and they were
all excited to see her and they said oh we should all get together and have a play date with our kids and i had to say what was on my mind which was you guys seem like nice people but i really don't want to see you again and they were you know they were offended rightly and my wife was furious so it was a disaster i mean we never did see them again so it is efficient it was effective [Laughter] so in my in my parlance saying something like that is not radical candor it's obnoxious
aggression kim scott is an executive coach in silicon valley she works with ceos and managers on being radically candid in their feedback be a kick-ass boss without losing your humanity i asked kim how we can all get better at providing criticism and guess what it's not about just blurting out whatever pops into your head like aj did the idea of radical candor is that you're caring personally about the other person at the same time that you're challenging them directly i guess then how do i get comfortable you know challenging directly when i do challenge how
do i make sure that i show care my biggest piece of advice is eliminate the phrase don't take it personally from your vocabulary it's okay if somebody's getting upset or having an emotional reaction it's normal it is inevitable what you want to do is you want to react with compassion to them but i wish if i had emotional novocaine i would give it to you i have seen so many people say all right i'm really uncomfortable challenging directly and so one of the ways i'll show that i care personally is i'm going to deliver a
feedback sandwich i'll you know open up with some praise and then criticism comes in the middle and then a slice of praise again so we start and end on a high note and the the research i've read on this is pretty clear in saying this is a bad idea for two reasons one when you lead with praise they're just waiting for the other shoe to drop and it seems insincere yes um and two is that people often tune out what's in the middle and so what what's your preferred alternative to the feedback sandwich yeah i
agree nobody really likes a sandwich and so it's important for both praise and criticism but especially for criticism is to go in being humble you may be wrong in what you're saying and that's okay one of the most important things you can do when offering criticism is to state your intention to be helpful there's evidence to back this up it's something i heard a lot at bridgewater too it's easier to take criticism when you know it's meant to help you from the outside it might sound harsh but they think it's good for them if you
know that it's healthy and you've experienced firsthand the benefit you're going to keep seeking it just like it still hurts sometimes to go running but i know how important that is to my well-being so i'll keep doing it even though it's always kind of an effort to get myself out the door i think the same with criticism [Music] more on that after the break this is going to be a different kind of ad in the spirit of exploring creative ideas at work we're going to take you inside bonobos our sponsor [Music] [Music] like everyone else
on earth i hate calling customer service it's hard to get a human on the line and if you do they're usually stuck reading from a script if you want to get anywhere you have to ask for the manager over and over and over but that's not how things work at bonobos they make great fitting men's clothes and if you call them with a problem you get a real person empowered to actually help bonobos calls them ninjas my actual title is creative customer engagement lead i'm on the uh the management team of the ninjas this is
kelsey nash he and all the other ninjas at bonobos have something pretty rare in the world of customer service freedom every ninja is empowered to take care of a customer in the moment in whatever way that they think is necessary there's no real uh sending it up the ladder and down the ladder to find a resolution like we'll call you back within 24 to 48 hours so every day we ask ninjas well how what would you want if you were the customer how would you feel which can lead to some surprising interactions like one kelsey
handled himself there was a guy named derek and he wrote in and he said i had a fire at my house and one of my favorite flannel shirts was damaged do you know of some way to like recuperate this or repair it i know i see you don't really have any on the website anymore kelsea bonobos wrote back right away well i mean we're happy to replace your shirt i'm so sorry about that is everybody all right and he wrote back and said actually everybody's fine except um our 15 year old dog was trapped in
the house and we lost our dog and that's been the only the only thing kelsey heard that and went into ninja mode i got online and i found his dog on his instagram account so i got a picture of the dog i commissioned this portrait and then i got a couple flannel shirts and i sent it to the guy and i'm not an emotional guy but with all that it happened it was still very fresh i i definitely cried when i saw the painting when i heard this story i had to get derek on the
phone you know you're kind of in a desperate situation and just any glimmer of something nice happening to you at that point goes a long long way what they did it wasn't necessary they didn't have to do it other than they thought it was the right thing to do what we pride ourselves on uh above everything is that we're human it's like we deal with every contact on a one-to-one basis as a human answering a phone call talking to another human and like let's work this out which is what you need sometimes it clearly meant
something to derek who recently started a new job the only picture i put up on the wall so far is that painting and it's right above my desk on the wall above the window so when i walk in the door every morning that's the first thing i see bonobos makes great clothes but my favorite part is that i don't have to leave my house to get them i hate going shopping almost as much as i normally hate calling customer service ordering on the bonobos website is super easy they ship fast and if it doesn't fit
you can always call kelsey you know just to talk try today at bonobos.com ted and you'll get 20 off your first order that's binobos.com ted for 20 off [Music] when i was in college i was a springboard diver i was learning a new dive two and a half flips with a twist when i tried it out in a meet i thought it went okay then i saw the judge's scores two two and a half and 0.5 i don't think i'd ever even seen that score before anyway when you're flipping and twisting in midair you can't
always gauge your own performance and i think big parts of our work lives are like that too we're so immersed in the situation that we can't see ourselves objectively at that diving meet there were multiple judges who all saw the same flaws when i watched the video afterward i saw them too i'd executed a near perfect belly flop if you've ever played sports you know the value of reviewing the game tape with coaches and colleagues who keep you honest why don't we do the same thing at work at bridgewater they do they're so obsessed with
radical transparency that they record the video or audio of almost every meeting if that sounds a bit like big brother is watching well he is but here's the difference everyone is watching they're constantly going back to the tapes to learn this is what radical transparency sounds like here's ray dalio the founder talking with a colleague no i'm not saying all your advice is bad well okay that sounds like it's it i just don't think it's bad some of it is bad but all he's saying to you you you need to display that you know that
you don't know in too many workplaces people keep those comments behind closed doors in general hierarchical structures you don't tell people what you actually think jen healy is a manager at bridgewater you're always managing other people's perceptions of you and what they think of you and trying to butter people up above trying to make sure that they don't think anything's going wrong that you have all the answers radical transparency is designed to solve for a deadly sin of work life office politics in too many places what happens in the meeting doesn't matter nearly as much
as secret alliances and conversations after the meeting and so you're able to just say what you think and also be held accountable if what you're thinking is bad but for it to work you need all of your colleagues to get past their knee-jerk reactions to criticism which isn't easy especially at first when i first became acquainted with bridgewater you know i wasn't enamored this is eileen murray when i first came up to bridgewater for a meeting i guess it was a management committee meeting and someone was being probed basically asking people questions until you get
to a logical answer as to what might be going on and i was like i can't wait to get out of here i think i'm gonna put my hair on fire these people are crazy but now eileen is one of the company's two ceos along the way she came to hear the criticism as tough love kind of like what you'd get from your family you know i have a younger sister who says things to me that i sometimes can't believe i tolerate but i tolerate it because she's trying to make me better and so once
i understood the intention was to understand what people are like for the purpose of them understanding what they're like so that you know you you basically are aware of what you do well you're aware of what you don't do well so you can do things better in life it's a little bit like navy seals take the navy seal put them in the cold water if that's a difficult moment let's practice that right every day at the firm is a new encounter with your challenge network you learn to seek out your trusted critics which means you've
opted in and little by little you get more comfortable hearing hard truths unless you don't about a third of bridgewater's new hires leave in the first year and a half it was right at that year and a half mark that kieran rau the guy you heard earlier found himself being told he was the company's worst manager in front of 200 of his colleagues kieran might have been prepared but it still hurt i was probably turning as red as my indian complexion allows me to and i was describing it as you know like basically dressing for
the beach one day in flip-flops and your uh swimwear and you swing your door open and you're in a full-force winter storm the thing you need to understand about kieran is that before bridgewater he'd already had a successful career actually several he was a doctor and worked with the world health organization he was a principal in a consulting firm and he worked at a successful investment firm he'd never failed like this before but what happened next was something i've never seen anywhere else are you embarrassed you know hide from everyone like how did how did
you move forward no i felt great um i'm sorry what i felt great do you realize how strange that sounds he does you can hear this in the tape of the meeting right after he found out his ranking i'm kiran rao by the way by now probably notorious slash famous number one on the list i think it's a great list and i agree that i'm in that spot this leaves me more energized versus not i get energy from it and i look forward to helping or leaving whichever is the right answer so are you just
a glutton for punishment it's just data it's just data objective data about what i'm like i would rather know how bad the bad is and how good the good is so i can do something with it i think a skeptic particularly one with my training might say well this is this is just cognitive dissonance reduction right so you're like well this this felt really bad but i decided to stay and so it must have taught me something i must have grown from the experience otherwise like how the hell do i justify this do you ever
wonder whether you're just kind of rationalizing the unpleasant experience no but bridgewater is not about those dramatic moments right the real challenge for for uh people to figure out if they're a fit for the culture or not is not the dramatic moments it's the daily experience of it right that drama is incidental to the real work of getting to know yourself i do believe i've experienced deep fundamental change at bridgewater it it is interesting because it almost sounds like you're trying to re rewire or override an instinct when i have somebody tell me i did
something badly my ego kicks in right and so my composure starts to become worse and worse and worse that is so wrong how can that possibly true i've done all these things in my life and how could i be that person that's what i call proving mode it's the primal emotional reaction the lower level you but your brain has another higher level setting it's improving mode that's your inner olympic diver who wants to know exactly how good you are and every single thing you can do to get better improving mode means you're always a work
in progress at bridgewater the thinking is that if you're exposed to feedback all the time you get better at hearing that improving voice there's a much softer voice right the logical person inside me who's saying yeah it's been a rough year it hasn't been such an impactful year kieran you aren't really accomplishing your goals that's not so surprising the difference though is that those two voices are very different in amplitude at that moment right the lower level means screaming the upper level me is whispering it's interesting so the two u's will always still be battling
at some level i think so and i think that's and and to me the beauty is i can see that now yeah it used to take me a month or two to recognize that and come back to an even keel and with ray it takes a microsecond yeah yes it's almost exactly that quick i go damn i wish i would have whatever that thing is and simultaneously where's the lesson and i think it's i think it's a habit okay that's weird ray is suggesting he doesn't just feel less pain than the rest of us when
he gets criticized he's trained himself so that the pain signal is actually followed by a pleasure signal over years of seeing that negative feedback leads to positive outcomes he sort of seems to enjoy hearing it now when you're getting criticism what what how do you feel about it so i think overall i've i don't think i enjoy it most of the time but i crave it you know i i started teaching and was terrified of public speaking i remember one of the feedback forms said that i was so nervous that i was causing the students
to physically shake in their seats at the time it was like oh i don't want to be that person but i need the feedback in order to not be that person and so but i think i think it was easier to take because i asked for it and i don't think i take criticism so well when somebody just springs it on me and i don't feel like i've i've opted into it first that's beautiful right and it's totally understandable that when it's sprung on you it takes you by surprise you know because it's an amygdala
response yeah and the amygdala is the fight or flight and it is a very short-term thing but but at some period of time that's going to fade and then if at that moment you reflect pain plus reflection equals progress because the pain is signaling you that something is wrong that the reflection helps to produce that learning and if you do that over a period of time you can't help but learn that's the goal but if you're like most people reflection gets hijacked by your inner dictator who immediately goes into denial and attack we need a
way to take a more honest look in the mirror in the moment that's hard to do so in psychology we have a fun way of making you a little more aware of how you appear to others imagine that you're sitting at a computer to take a timed multiple choice test the instructions say to answer question after question until a timer goes off but what we haven't told you is that we're recording your keyboard so if you submit an answer after the timer we know you're cheating it turns out you're significantly less likely to cheat if
there's a mirror in the room it reminds you to reflect on how your behavior will look to others at bridgewater rey is constantly trying to look in the mirror so he can see himself the way others see him psychologists often talk about a second score the idea being that you can't control your unprepared long-winded meeting performance the d minus is done that already happened the only thing you can do then is is say all right i can't control that first score i can control the second score which is how well did i take the first
score and so even if i got a d minus for my performance i can get an a plus for you know how i took the feedback on my performance that's right do you do you give yourself those kinds of explicit everybody use those everyone does yes if people know they're being evaluated on how well they learn and how well they take feedback then there's no stable image to protect anymore well put yeah it's a good point a second score every time i get feedback i rate myself now and how well i took the feedback that's
a habit we can all develop when someone gives you feedback they've already evaluated you so it helps to remind yourself that the main thing they're judging now is whether you're open or defensive you don't always realize when you're being defensive so call on your challenge network ask them to give you a second score too how did i come across when you gave me feedback and then really listen to what they say and respond by saying thank you the best way to prove yourself is to show that you're willing to improve yourself just ask kieran it's
funny i called my wife on my way home and said this happened they put up the list of the worst managers of bridgewater and i was number one and i had an amazing energizing day and and it felt great and she said that's wonderful kid and i'm proud of you she said she was proud of you yeah because for being the worst manager at bridgewater no for sucking in the mirror for not cringing from what i look like from being able to see reality for what it is and i probably reached home by then it's
a short commute [Music] work life is hosted by me adam grant the show is produced by ted with transmitter media and pineapple street media our team includes colin helms greta cone gabrielle lewis angela chang and janet lee this episode was produced by dan o'donnell with help from julia alsop our show is mixed by david herrmann with help from dan desula original music by hansdale sue special thanks to our sponsors bonobos accenture jpmorgan chase and warby parker next time on work life we're going inside the writer's room at the daily show to find out how they
do creative work under the gun the first draft is not meant to be the last draft yeah that's why they call it the first track yeah that was a big part of the naming process that's next time on work life in the meantime thanks for listening and if you like what you hear rate and review the show it helps other people find us see you next week [Music] well uh ray this this has been this has been fun and interesting and thought-provoking as always thanks for doing this so now what criticisms do i get though
oh i have to i have to criticize you yeah oh do we have time for this you stay at the level of abstract concepts and ideas as opposed to moving down into sort of the experiences that you've had the the stories that you can tell the emotions that are part of that that really bring your ideas to life if you brought more of the the concrete the emotional in along with the abstract conceptual i think your communication would be more effective [Music] well thank you [Music]
