a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Giving and Getting Feedback -- for Bosses and Employees

Episode Date: May 26, 2017

There's feedback and there's guidance; there's praise and there's criticism. All of it is important to do better work, but to develop a better and more productive workplace and relationships -- especially given how much time we spend at work! -- the way we give and receive feedback really matters. "One of the great things about having a great boss," observes Kim Scott, "is that a great boss will help you grow as a person. And for a lot of people, a big part of what gives work meaning is personal growth." That's another reason why feedback matters. But doesn't so much feedback take too much time when you're busy building things, especially in fast-growing startups where you're also focused on survival first? Or what if you're not so into the touchy-feely aspects of soliciting feedback? In fact, what is the best way to give feedback, so that you're not being obnoxiously aggressive or even worse, "ruinously empathetic"? You actually don't have to choose between those two things, argues Scott, because the answer lies somewhere in between, with "radical candor". Finally, how does this fit with other management wisdom around how much to develop someone -- or when to just "call it" and fire them? How does this affect women and under-represented minorities in the workplace? Or how about creatives, millennials, and remote workers? In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Sonal Chokshi explores these questions with Scott, who came out of Google, Apple University, and her own startups... and literally wrote the book on Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity.

Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. We're here today with Kim Malone Scott, the co-founder and CEO of Cander, Inc. Before that, she was a CEO coach for several companies. She also previously led AdSense YouTube and double-click online sales and operations at Google. And she was a member of the faculty at Apple University. But Kim's joining us today since she recently authored the new book, Radical Candor. And the subtitle is How to Be a Kickass Boss without losing your humanity. And in this episode, we're basically talking about how to give feedback, which is part of a much larger content. context around culture, hiring, firing, performance reviews, compensation, and so on. But we're focusing just on the topic of feedback today. First of all, I call it guidance, not feedback, because feedback makes us want to put our hands over our ears. And guidance is something we all long for. But no matter what word you use, it's basically praise and criticism. There's praise and criticism that you solicit. There's praise and criticism that you give. And there's praise and criticism that you encourage between people. So you kind of break it off into what's sort of encouraged and what's not.

You tell a funny story. It's actually not so funny, probably at the time, but it's about how you gave this killer presentation to Eric Schmidt when you were at Google. And everyone's, like, loving the results of what you guys were talking about, something in the ad program. And you were walking out of that meeting like, man, I did a great job. That was great. And your then boss at the time, Cheryl Sandberg took you on a walk and said,

how did you think that went and then gave some feedback? Yeah, it was such a funny moment. because I walked into the room and I felt really nervous and felt like a freaking genius by the end of the meeting. I thought it had gone great. And then Cheryl started off telling me the things that went well, not in, as you're fearlessly or calls it, the shit sandwich kind of feedback, but in a way that was really genuine. She told me some stuff I didn't know. But of course, all I wanted to hear was what I had screwed up. And eventually, she said to me, you said I'm a lot in there. Were you aware of it? And now I breathe a huge sigh of

And now I'm like, oh, that doesn't matter. And I kind of make this brush off gesture with my hand. And I said, I know it's a verbal tick. It's no big deal, really. And then Cheryl said, well, I know this great speech coach, and Google would pay for it. Would you like an introduction? And I make this brush off gesture with my hand again. And then Cheryl stops, and she looks me right in the eye.

And she said, I can see when you make that brush off gesture with your hand that I'm going to have to be a lot more direct with you. When you say every third word, it makes you sound stupid. A lot of people would say it was mean of Cheryl to say I sound stupid. But in fact, it was a kindest thing she could possibly have done for me in that moment. And if she had been talking to somebody else on her team, she wouldn't have had to say it that way. But in order to get through to my fixed skull, she had to put it in just those words. More direct terms. Right, exactly.

And when she did, I realized I better go see the speech coach. And when I did that, I learned that I really did say every third word. And the weird thing about that was that I had been giving talks my whole career. I thought I was pretty good at it. And so that really got me to thinking, what was it that Cheryl did, that made it so easy for her to tell me? But also, interestingly, why had nobody told me? Clearly there's an aspect to this that's as much about receiving feedback as it is about giving it. But I have to ask a tough question, which is what's the point?

first place. I mean, do people really change, even though they're actually more set in their ways, or is some part of giving feedback about a boss trying to impose their way of doing things or their preferred style on you? I mean, I guess why bother? One of the great things about having a great boss is that a great boss will help you grow as a person. And for a lot of people, a big part of what gives work meaning is personal growth. And so a boss who's unwilling to to talk to you about anything other than did you meet this particular objective is really doing a disservice. But what if it involves their style of doing things?

Like it's more about how the employee is versus what they did. One of the things that we really get confused about with feedback is the difference between you don't want to criticize personality, but you don't only want to criticize the work. you can also criticize somebody's behavior because somebody's behavior might be tripping them up for years. There was a person who worked with me and people tended to perceive him as very negative. Now, feedback saying you're negative would have just discouraged him. And in fact, the way I started out into giving him the feedback was exactly the wrong way. And this is important to remember, because you never know what's her right way and the wrong way, and at least if you

start, you can correct. So when I first told him about this problem, and he said, oh, my wife has been telling me this forever, and all her friends think I hate them, but I don't. At first, what I did with him was I started pointing out examples in meetings where he had been negative, and I realized I myself was becoming quite negative. If you're skiing, you don't want to look at the tree, you don't want to hit, you want to look at the path through the tree. When we started focusing on what he did right, it became clear to both of us that the reason why he often seemed negative to his colleagues was that he found a hard problem exciting, fun to challenge. And so what was for him exciting was discouraging for everybody else in the room. And once we were able to figure that out,

it made it much easier for him to change his behavior. And that's the purpose of feedback, is to help people know what to do more of, the praise. And the purpose of criticism is to help them know what to fix. So, okay, then on the flip side, how can people receive not just give feedback better? One of the pieces of advice that I often give people is just eliminate from your vocabulary, don't take it personally. Because we spend more time at work than we do in any other activity of our lives. We spend more time with our colleagues than we do with our spouses or our children. And so, of course, when you screw it up, it hits you in the gut. I mean, it is okay to have an emotional reaction.

And I think that that's the most important thing to remember is that we are human beings and we care about our work. And that's why we're having an emotional reaction. And that is okay. Now, when you're on the soliciting feedback or the receiving end, I like to focus on doing four different things. Which are? step number one is if you haven't gotten the feedback yet figure out how you're going to ask for it because the truth is just like you don't like to give feedback nobody likes to give you feedback either it is really hard and the second you ask for feedback you're putting the other person in an awkward

situation so you've got to come up with sort of a go-to question that falls trippingly off your tongue there's a question that fred Kaufman who is my coach at google like to ask and i adopted it as my own which is, is there anything I could do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me? Oh, that's a great question. I like how it's phrased because it's oriented to helping another person versus narcissistically sort of about make me better. It's making me better for you. Yeah, and it's also kind of hard to say no.

There's a friend of mine who said it feels too touchy-feely. The point is you don't have to ask any particular question, but you've got to come up with a question that you can ask, that feels comfortable for you to ask. And is there like a right time? Because isn't there this wisdom that you should try to solicit feedback when you're doing monthly check-ins, one-on-ones, meetings, or should you just do it kind of in the flow? Like, is there a best practice around this? Alan Eustace, who was the head of engineering at Google, said one of the best times to ask for feedback is when you know the other person is mad at you. Because they're more likely to tell you what they really think about.

So use those emotions. Andy Grove, who was the CEO of Intel. He's a big hero of ours. He let his employees get through all. their agenda items, and he said, what you need to do is wait until they've got everything off their mind, and then come up with your question, ask your question, and this brings us to step number two. Because I always thought, after you ask the question, your goal was to try to make the other person comfortable, that that's what would tell, get them to tell you the truth.

But Andy explained that it was exactly wrong. He said, actually what you need to do is the opposite. You need to embrace the discomfort. Okay, so that's the second step. What's the third step? Step number three is listen with the intent to understand, not to respond. It's so important when you do get criticism, not to criticize the criticism. Don't start saying, give me a specific example. Don't start cross-examine. When I get feedback, it's not because I'm insecure about it. I want a specific example just like I can understand the feedback better. Right. So one suggestion I have when you want that specific example is try to come up with one yourself. Challenge yourself to do it rather than challenging the other person to do it.

So say, okay, you're saying I interrupt too much. Do you mean that I should maybe let people have their turn to speak first and then weigh in with my opinion? Or just try to think of an instance. Say, oh, when I walked into that meeting five minutes late and launched into my story, not even knowing what was that an example? Oh, that's great. That's very empowering, I think, for employees too, because you're in charge of your own narrative. You're in charge of your own arc. So that's a third one.

And then the fourth one is you've got to reward the candor when you get it. And it's very easy to reward it if you agree with the feedback. You fix the problem and you tell the person you fix the problem. Or if it's going to take a while to fix the problem, you tell them the steps you're taking in the direction of fixing the problem. It's more difficult to know how to reward the candor when you disagree with the feedback. And you will sometimes disagree with the feedback. So what do you do then?

when you do disagree with that feedback. So a couple of suggestions for those cases. One is there's usually at least 5% of what was said that you could agree with. Focus on that 5% and say, so if you, for example, were to tell me, you can't wear blue jeans every day. I disagree. I can too wear blue jeans every day. But what I would try to say is something like, if I understand you right, you don't like it that I wear blue jeans every day and maybe it's because I don't seem to be very stylish or something like that, which is true. I can agree with that. And then say, well, let me think about that and I'll get back to you. Wait a day or two until you're sure you're not defensive. And then if you really disagree, sometimes the best way to reward the candor is just with a fuller explanation of why you're

going to wear those blue jeans every day, even though the person has you got to. Right, because you're reinforcing that you appreciate that someone took the time to tell you something. I think half the art of this is when you're having a conversation with someone. Again, I don't really believe that people change fundamentally who they are, but the mere act of having a conversation that lets you understand another person's way of being and vice versa, like my boss and I, we come from very different worlds. And when I understand that framework for where she's coming from, and she understands a framework from where I'm coming from, and we give each other feedback, but we also see where we're coming from, it's still better the relationship. I think it's really important to remember that

good feedback gets measured not at your mouth but at the other person's ear. So often you may think you've shown you cared and you may think you've been crystal clear. More often than not, you have showed that you cared and you have not been clear. That's what I call ruinous empathy. Let's do a quick terminology. So, you know, you define radical candor as being in this specific quadrant. Sure. So there's two dimensions of radical candor. I thought about what was it that made Cheryl able to do that and what was it that made it so difficult for everybody else. And there's two things that Cheryl did. One was she cared personally about me and everyone who worked for her.

But she also was willing to challenge me directly. She wasn't so worried that I'd be mad or that she'd get a bad reputation for being mean. I spent 10 weeks at McKinsey between my two years of business school and I learned that all of life's problems can be boiled down to a two-by-year-old. two axis. Vertical dimension is care personally. So at the very top is you care a ton, the very bottom is you carry very little. The very bottom is pseudo-speciation, where not only do you not care about the person you feel like you can, you can denigrate them without conscience. It's surprising how fast you move from caring personally to pseudo-speciation at work. And I think the culprit is the notion of being professional. Nobody starts out their career thinking, I don't care at all about

people, so I'm going to be a great boss. What does happen, you get your first job and you're told be professional. And for an awful lot of people, that gets translated to mean leave your emotions, leave your humanity, leave everything that's best about you at home and come to work as something less than fully human. And when you don't care personally about people, you often begin to trigger this friend or foe mechanism in your brain. And it's amazing how quickly one team begins to treat another team at work as the enemy. You're on a slippery slope to pseudospeciation when you're being just professional. So that's the care personally dimension. The vertical axis. And then on the horizontal axis is challenged directly. It's important to remember that this is not

in conflict with caring personally. There's a big difference between caring personally and needing to be liked. Needing to be liked will lead you to a bad place. So you've got to care about the other people, but you've got to be willing to challenge them. And when you can do both of those at the same time, that's radical candor. So radical candor is where you have high caring personally and high direct challenging. Yes. And that you're in that upper right quadrant, which is radical candor. Yes. And then ruinous empathy is to the left of that where you care a lot, but you're not actually being direct in your feedback. You're not challenging somebody directly. And that's the most common mistake people make is ruinous empathy. Remember, when you're trying to spare somebody's

feelings to be nice and then you're going to wind up having to fire them later, it's not so nice after all. That's why I call it ruinous empathy. Now, when you're giving feedback, the place that most of us are afraid of being is what I call obnoxious aggression. That's when you do challenge, but you fail to show that you care personally. Now, we're really, we love to tell stories about the asshole at work. I beg of you, though, don't use these terms to label yourself or other people. Use this framework to guide conversations you have, not to judge others. I have to say, if someone's direct but they're not caring for me personally, I'm also okay with that because, you know, in the case of startups, you're building companies. You've got to build

them fast. You have a lot of competition. I'm not trying to minimize the importance of having the caring and bringing the humanity, but sometimes you don't have time to really. It only takes 30 seconds. For me, the origin story of radical candor happened in the space of time it took a light to change. I'm walking the dog and she jumps in front of an oncoming cab. She's totally out of control because I've never said a crossword to her. And I pull her out of the way just in time. I'm standing there now with my heart in my throat.

And this man, a perfect stranger, looks at me and he says, I can see you really love that dog. It's all he has to do to move up on the care personally axis. It doesn't take long at all. And then he says, but you're going to kill that dog if you don't teach it to sit. That's a pretty direct challenge. And then he points to the ground and he says, sit. The dog sat. I didn't even know the dog knew what that meant.

And I kind of look up at this guy in amazement. And he says, it's not mean, it's clear. And the light changes and he walks off leaving me with words to live by. So I'm going to take my advice. I would agree with 5% of what you just said about the time. Yeah. I would agree that obnoxious aggression is actually better than ruinous sympathy. I'd rather have obnoxious aggression than ruin a sympathy, too.

But you don't have to choose between those two things. There's this other thing you can offer, which is radical candor. I have a question about how this affects underrepresented groups. And if there's a different cultural dynamic when it comes to, say, women in the workplace, if it's like a company that's dominated by men, if it comes to underrepresented minorities, Are there any differences in style that you think may make a difference here? I can talk most about being a woman because I am a woman. But as I've talked to other people, they have said that a similar dynamic applies.

It's hard to be radically candid with someone who looks like you. It's even harder to be radically candid with someone who doesn't look like you. Often male bosses have tended to pull their punches when giving me feedback. in a way they didn't pull their punches when giving my male peers feedback. And that disadvantaged me a lot because, as we've already seen, I'm a little bullheaded. So I needed to be punched pretty hard in order to hear it. This was not because these men were misogynists or terrible people. I think men are trained from the time they're little boys to pull their punches with women.

I have twins who are eight, one's a boy, one's a girl, and they're on the same baseball team. like I see this starting early, and I try to intervene. And so I think that if you are a woman or an underrepresented minority, you need to really drag it out of people because they're afraid, especially in today's political environment, the gender politics get really complicated really quickly. There's another side to the equation, which is if you are a woman giving radical candor, you're much more likely to get unjustly accused of obnoxious aggressions. You're going to be called abrasive.

You're going to be called bossy. You're not going to be called an asshole. You're going to be called a bitch. And I'd rather be called an asshole than a bitch any day. Same here. It's a personal attack. So I think that if you are a woman and you are being radically candid and you're unjustly accused of being obnoxiously aggressive,

You're more likely to be disliked for being competent, and that's painful. As I said, like it's normal to want to be. Don't back off your direct challenge. Because remember, obnoxious aggression is going to work better and going to get better results than either ruinous empathy or manipulative insincerity. So don't let that unjust accusation push you towards ruinous empathy or manipulative insincerity. But the problem is that all too often, more emotional. labor is demanded from women. Women are expected to bake cupcakes for people's birthdays. They're

expected to do the office housework. That is not a good way to show you care personally because you will burn yourself out and you'll be mad. So, and you won't get your work done. So move up on the care personally access, but don't get dragged into being the angel in the office. In the book, I said, put your thick skin suit on ladies, but my editor hated the phrase and took it out. So I get to put it back in in your podcast. What do you think of this popular opinion that, you know, you give praise in public and you criticize in private? I've often heard sometimes you actually want to criticize in public to affect change. So I'm a big believer that you praise, praise in public, criticize in private. But I will say there's a fine line because debate needs to happen publicly.

And there's a fine line between private criticism and public debate. So if you take a really simple example, there's a typo on page 13. Like, that's fine to say publicly or there's a factual error here. But if you always are making typos, and I'm starting to question whether you give a shit about your work because you're making sloppy mistakes, that's something I think you need to say in private. I was going to say that it's about types of people, too. Creative types, I think, respond to a very different set of feedback. And I think creatives in big companies are a very different dynamic than creatives and creative companies. And there's a whole art and science to how you manage creative. Someone could write a book just about that alone. Because that type of talent has a

different. And creatives can include writers, editors, coders, designers. Anybody who's sort of, their work is sort of their ego. The process you engage in is about your voice and there's different aspects of this. I wanted to do a little lightning round about if there are any nuances or differences in thinking about giving feedback to the following groups. And I'm going to start with creative types. Any reactions? So I think really quickly, I would be aware of generalizing. And some people, no matter what they do, or have really thick skin and other people have really thin skin. And so you just, I think the most important thing you can do no matter what the type of person is, is to give the feedback in person, judge the reaction.

And if the person is blowing you off, you got to move out on the challenge directly axis. If the person is getting upset, don't back off your challenge, but offer some compassion. Is there any difference managing millennials? I know it's a very cliche thing to say. people are always trashing on millennials one way or another. I think for all of human history, the job of the younger generation is to challenge the older generation. And the older generation always hates it. And millennials are good at challenging.

And so if you're open to feedback from your millennials, it's going to go better. So don't dish it out before you can take it. So a question, you mentioned in person, giving feedback in person. I mean, so many of us work remotely. There's all these different rules of thumb. What's your take on giving feedback, especially if you have a distributed workforce? I think there's a hierarchy of medium. If the person is remote, try to at least do a video call, phone next best, avoid email, text, whatever.

Because we said earlier that good feedback gets measured at the other person's ear, not at your mouth. But if you can't see the other person, you have no idea how they're reacting. And so you want it to be synchronous and as live as possible. I also find with remote employees that it's better to have more frequent shorter check-ins than one hour once a week if you can do... Why is that? Well, because you, when somebody's in the office, there's more opportunities for impromptu feedback. So you see something in a meeting and then you're walking with them.

And so you want to sort of recreate the feeling of almost impromptu. impromptu, in the moment, casual intimacy, right. I once worked for a man, I was in Moscow, and he had had remote teams all around the world. And he claimed that over a daily telex, if he did it every day, he could begin to get a flavor of the person's mood.

So I think more frequent contact is better if it's got to be long distance. Oh, is the last question. There's only so much feedback a person can take. And I wonder how we can avoid this cliche of being like only a feedback culture because sometimes there's too much. Yes. How do you not turn it into, you're just going through the act of the feedback and not actually doing something about it and sort of picking and choosing your battles?

And also, when do you call it? Like, when do you admit, like, you know what, I've given all the feedback I can give, this person's not going to change. I'd love to hear your thoughts. I think it makes a ton of sense to leave three unimportant things unsaid every day. Especially with criticism, you only want to focus on the important things. It's hard to give. It's hard to hear. You want to make sure you're prioritizing the same.

stuff that really matters. And you probably should have three or four months ago. If somebody is not good at what they're doing and not getting better, it's time to part ways. I'm glad you said that because it goes to that professional culture you're talking about. We're so professional. We're all trying to be professional that we don't actually always have the courage to say this isn't working. And you've got to call it sometime. It's a different relationship. It is not friendship, but it is a human relationship. So to me, the biggest takeaway is it's not also what you say, it's how you say it. And that's sort of the theme of this conversation. There's a right way to say it, that there's a right to be direct.

If you were to distill a one-line takeaway, what would you say as a parting message for people thinking about how to receive and give feedback? Make sure that person knows that you care about them, but also make sure that you've been crystal clear that you've challenged them really directly. Yeah, that's great.

Well, thank you for joining the A6NZ podcast. Thank you.