Radical Candor--Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott

Author:Kim Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Be helpful

It’s obvious that being helpful is a great way to show that you care personally, and that the whole point of challenging directly is to be helpful.

Still, it’s hard to do. You’re really busy, and besides, you don’t have all the answers—you’re humble, right? The good news is that being helpful doesn’t mean you have to be omniscient or do everybody else’s work for them. It just means you have to find a way to help them clarify the challenge they’re facing—that clarity is a gift that will enable them to move forward. Here are some tips and reminders:

Stating your intention to be helpful can lower defenses. When you tell somebody that you aren’t trying to bust their chops—that you really want to help—it can go a long way toward making them receptive to what you’re saying. Try a little preamble. For example, in your own words, say something like, “I’m going to describe a problem I see; I may be wrong, and if I am I hope you’ll tell me; if I’m not I hope my bringing it up will help you fix it.”

Show, don’t tell. It’s the best advice I’ve ever gotten for story-telling, but it also applies to guidance. The more clearly you show exactly what is good or bad, the more helpful your guidance will be. Often you’ll be tempted not to describe the details because they are so painful. You want to spare the person the pain and yourself the awkwardness of uttering the words out loud. But retreating to abstractions is a prime example of Ruinous Empathy. Further, it can actually unintentionally signal that the behavior in question was so bad/shameful that you can’t even talk about it, thereby making it hard for the person to move on. I once had to say, “When we were in that meeting and you passed a note to Catherine that said ‘Check out Elliot picking his nose—I think he just nicked his brain,’ Elliot wound up seeing it. It pissed him off unnecessarily, made it harder for you to work together, and was the single biggest contributing factor to our being late on this project.” The whole situation was so ridiculous that it was tempting just to say, “What you did in the meeting was juvenile.” But that wouldn’t have been as clear or as helpful.

And again, the same principle goes for praise. Don’t say, “She is really smart.” Say, “She just gave the clearest explanation I’ve ever heard of why users don’t like that feature.” By explicitly describing what was good or what was bad, you are helping a person do more of what’s good and less of what’s bad—and to see the difference.

Finding help is better than offering it yourself. When Sheryl Sandberg offered to get me a speaking coach, she did have to budget for it, but she didn’t have to sit there watching me practice presentations for hours. It took some of her time but not too much.

You won’t always be so lucky to have the budget for coaches that Sheryl had at Google.

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