thank you so much so much I think that given last night's events I'm going to change the title of this talk to be a kick-ass citizen without losing your humanity the idea of radical candor is something that will help you do the very best work of your life but more importantly from my perspective it'll also help you build the very best relationships of your career it's a simple idea and to explain what I mean by it I'm just going to start with a quick story about a time when my boss who was Sheryl Sandberg criticized
me I just started at Google and I had to give a presentation to Google's founders and CEO about how the business was doing and like any normal person in this situation I felt a little bit nervous and so I walked in wondering how I'm going to get these people's attention and all I had to do was say how many new customers we had added in the last couple of months and Eric Schmidt the CEO almost fell out of his chair so I feel like the meeting had gone pretty well in fact I felt like a
genius so as I'm leaving as I'm leaving the meeting I walked past my boss kind of expecting a high-five or some form of congratulations and she says to me why don't you walk back to my office with me and I think oh I've done something wrong I don't know what it is but I'm about to hear about it and she says to me after we after a little bit of pray she says you said I'm an awful lot were you aware of it and I sort of breathed a huge sigh of relief and I kind
of made a brush-off just and I said yes I know I do that it's kind of a verbal tic no big deal really and she said well I know a great speech coach Google would pay for it would you like an introduction and I sort of make that brush-off gesture with my hand again and I said did you hear about all those customers I'm busy I don't have time for a speech coach and she stops she looks right at me and she says when you make that gesture with your hand I can see I'm going
to have to be a lot more direct with you when you say every third word it makes you sound stupid and insecure now she has my full attention and some people would have said that it was mean of her to say that but in fact it was the very kindest thing she could have done for me at that moment in my career because when I did go to the speech coach and now that I knew I sounded stupid and insecure I did go see the speech coach I realized she really wasn't exaggerating I did say
every third word and the weird thing about this was that I had been giving presentations for my entire career I had given hundreds of presentations over the course of 15 years and nobody had told me how often I said um it was as though I'd been walking around for my whole career with my fly down and nobody had had the courtesy to tell me why don't you zip your fly up and this really got me to thinking two things one what was it that made it's so seemingly easy for Sheryl to tell me and two
why had nobody else told me and when I thought about it it really boiled down to two things I knew that Sheryl cared about me personally as she did about everyone who worked for her and I also knew that she was willing to challenge me directly she wasn't so worried about hurting my feelings that she was unwilling to tell me something I needed to know so that seems simple who doesn't do that so so I really got to analyzing this and I thought about it and in terms of a two by two so care personally
challenged directly let's take each axis in turn first care personally this is what I call the given a.m. axis right now nobody starts out their career thinking I don't give a damn about people so I'm going to be a great colleague nobody starts out an election cycle thinking I don't give a damn about my fellow Americans and therefore I'm going to be a great citizen that's not how it works what happens to us what moves us down on the on the care personally acts really early in our careers we're often told to be professional right
be more than just professional that's my advice because when you start out as only professional you move way down on the care personally access because somehow this advice to be professional so often gets translated to mean leave your emotions leave your humanity leave the very best part of yourself at home you're never going to do the best work of your life if you leave half of yourself especially the best half of yourself at home so bring your whole self to work bring your whole self to a political conversation the next time you have one care
personally about the person you're talking to if you can't care about somebody else with only half of yourself so that's the give a damn axis next the challenge directly axis this is what I call the willing to piss people off dimension right : Powell said that leadership is often about being willing to piss people off let's not forget that it's actually important to be willing to piss people off but our reluctance to do this begins not when we are 18 years old but when we're 18 months old when we first learn to speak how many
of you had a parent who said if you don't have something nice to say don't say it at all right now it's your job to say it now you've got to tell people real at what you really think in order for either your thinking to be corrected or for theirs to be corrected so radical candor happens when you fulfill your moral obligation it's not just your job it's your moral obligation to say what you really think and to allow yourself to challenge others but also to be challenged in return and when you can do both
of those things at the same time when you can challenge people directly at the same time that you care personally and humanely about them I call that radical candor that's why it's rare I just gave you two reasons why it's rare this professional thing and this if you don't have anything nice to say don't say it at all thing what I've done to make it less rare to make it easier for you to be radically candid is to name the quadrants where where you fail on one dimension or another very with some emotionally charged language
so when you challenge directly but you don't care personally I call that obnoxious aggression this is also known as the quadrant right now the reason why I don't just call it the quadrant is because it's not useful to write names in these various quadrants right it's not one of the biggest problems that I've seen over the course of this election is what's called the fundamental attribution error or as I explained to my children name-calling don't use these terms to call other people names use them to guide you in your conversations with others right so don't
be obnoxiously aggressive don't judge yourself don't judge others as obnoxiously aggressive but judge a conversation as obnoxiously aggressive and move it in the right direction now when you fail on both dimensions I call it manipulative in sincerity right when you neither care nor challenge and then there's the the quadrant where most mistakes actually get made because people usually do care about each other despite all of the all of the rhetoric of the last of the last 48 hours I really do believe most people are fundamentally decent and do care at a human level about each
other and when you care so much about somebody that you fail to challenge them I call it ruinous empathy right so so those are the mistakes that you can make in either political discourse or giving feedback at work now in order to motivate each of these quadrants I'm just going to tell you a few quick stories first radical candor a lot of people make a mistake with radical candor thinking that they have to take a bunch of time to be radically candid but the origin story for me with radical candor happened in less than a
minute on the street of Manhattan I had just gotten a new puppy and I loved this dog had never said a harsh word to the dog and as a result it was out of control and had no idea how to behave and it jumped in front of a cab I pulled it out of the way just in time and all of a sudden my heart is thumping in my in my throat in this man perfect strangers standing next to me looks at me and he says I can see you really love bad dog it's all
he has to say to move up on the care personally axis doesn't have to know my name doesn't have to have smooth with me just I can see you really love that dog and then he says to me but you're going to kill that dog if you don't teach it to sit now he's got my full attention then he says suit the dog sack I had no idea the dog knew how to do that and I kind of looked at him in amazement the light changes he looks back at me and he says it's not
mean it's clear and he crosses the street and leaves me with words to live by right didn't have to take him forever and he changed my life and just that brief amount of time so radical candor can be quick doesn't need to require a lot of schmoozing next obnoxious aggression I will tell you I will assert for the record I'm not an but I do occasionally behave like one and I bet all of you have just occasionally done the same thing so this also comes from the time i shortly after I joined Google amazing I
left lasted there as long as I did I had a disagreement with Larry Page about an Adsense policy and I wrote an email to 30 people that said Larry claims he wants to organize all the world's information but I feel make us a buck he's willing to create clutter sites that muddle the world's information right not my most politically astute move worth taking a second to understand why I did it I did it because I believe there's a special place in hell for people who kiss up and kick down but it doesn't mean doing the
exact opposite makes a ton of sense either right caring personally is something that you owe to every human being you interact with either at work or in life so that was my foray into obnoxious aggression as with all things the cover-up is worse than the crime Larry didn't actually mind that in fact I learned later that he thought it was funny but happened next was where I got into real trouble when instead of moving up on the care personally axis I moved over in the wrong direction on the challenge directly axis I bumped into Larry
a couple of days later a friend of mine was like wow that was pretty stupid Kim and so instead of instead of looking into it and actually understanding the challenge that he had had had made and caring personally I just went and said I lied I said Oh Larry I'm sorry about that email I realized you're right I'm wrong and he's got a pretty good meter and he kind of looks at me like I'm a pigeon that pooped on his shoulder and walks off so a friend of mine patted me on the shoulder and said
he likes it better when you disagree with him so don't move in a wrong direction when you realize you've been a jerk last but not least ruinous empathy the quadrant where most of us make most of our mistakes to explain what I mean by ruinous empathy I'm going to describe probably the most painful moment in my career I just hired this guy Bob I really liked Bob a lot he was funny he was quirky we were having one of those management off sites and playing a ridiculous management get-to-know-you game that nobody dared say this is
a waste of time bob finally said why don't we just go around the table and confess what candy our parents used when potty training us weird but fast then weirder yet we all remembered Hershey's Kisses and 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 so he endeared himself to all of us there was just one problem with Bob his work was terrible absolutely terrible I learned later the problem was he was
smoking pot in the bathroom which may be explained all that candy but anyway I didn't know it at the time I kept trying to buck Bob up with false praise and say Bob you are so smart this is not quite there yet but I know you can do it and he had no idea how bad things were until 10 months later it became clear to me that if I did not fire Bob I was going to lose half my team and when I sat down and told Bob explain Bob the situation when I finished he
pushed his chair back from the table he looked right at me and he said why didn't you tell me and as that question is going around in my head with no very good answer he said why didn't anyone tell me I thought you all cared about me and I realized I'm having the fire Bob now because of mistakes that I made six really important mistakes I didn't ask him to tell me what was going well and I never asked him for criticism maybe I was doing something that was driving him to toke up in the
bathroom I don't know I I didn't find out and I should have I never gave him praise that was meaningful I basically just gave him praise it was a head-fake I never told him when his work wasn't good enough and worst of all I failed to create the kind of environment in which everyone would tell Bob when what was truly good and when he was going off the rails and all I could do in that moment was to make a very solemn promise to myself I would never make that mistake again and I would help
everyone whom I worked with never to make that mistake again and that is why I spent the time to come up with this radical candor framework which I hope will help you all never to make that mistake thank you all very much great talking to you you
