Something You Should Know - The Amazing Science Behind Your Smile & How to Be Direct and Honest and Not Be a Jerk
Episode Date: November 21, 2019Do you leave your garage opener in the car? Do you know where your main water shutoff valve is? No matter where you live, there are a few questions you should ask yourself about your home. This episod...e begins with some of those questions – and the answers. https://www.familyhandyman.com/smart-homeowner/things-every-homeowner-must-know/ You smile at people all day long and most of your smiles are fake ones. That’s just one of the fascinating things I discuss with Marianne LaFrance, professor of psychology at Yale University and author of the book Why Smile? The Science Behind Facial Expressions (https://amzn.to/35ij7vp). Listen as she reveals why we smile, what smiling can do for you and how your smile communicates to other people. More people put up artificial Christmas trees than real ones. Artificial trees look a lot more realistic than they used to but are they a better choice? Actually there are pros and cons to both. Listen and decide which you should choose this year. http://www.rd.com/culture/real-vs-fake-christmas-tree/ “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” That wisdom is flawed according to Kim Scott, CEO of Candor Inc and author of the book Radical Candor (https://amzn.to/2rcq6XI). This is particularly true in the workplace where we need to be honest and direct. Listen as Kim reveals how important it is to say what needs to be said and how to do it without coming off like a jerk. This Week’s Sponsors -Fetch Rewards. Get 4000 points when you scan your first receipt. Download the app and use the promo code SYSK when you sign up to get your rewards. –Airbnb. To learn more about being an Airbnb host visit www.Airbnb.com/host -The Undercovers podcast. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-undercovers/id1479344440 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things
and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life.
I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about.
And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily.
Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks.
Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk
every weekday in less than 15 minutes.
Join host Elise Hu.
She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future.
Learn about things like sustainable fashion,
embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said,
if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like
TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be right back. enormous number of research reports that show that smiling is better than non-smiling for
generating trust, for relieving a tense situation, for conveying a sense of one's competence.
Plus, will you be getting a real or artificial Christmas tree this year? I'll discuss the
pros and cons of both. And how to say what needs to be said to someone and not sweep
it under the rug.
Since we learned to speak, we've been told some version of,
if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.
That is a disaster at work because we're so worried about not hurting someone's feelings that we fail to tell them something they need to know.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world,
looking to hear new ideas and perspectives.
So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives,
and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared.
It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more.
A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology.
That's pretty cool.
And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars.
Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today.
Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for.
Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts.
Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice
you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know, episode 344.
I moved not too long ago, so I've been reading a lot of things about home improvement and home ownership and all that.
And I came across an article on a website called thefamilyhandyman.com
that applies not only to people who are new homeowners, but really anybody that lives in a home.
It had some great tips that everybody should be aware of.
One of them is know where your main water shutoff valve is.
When an emergency happens, that's not the time to start looking for it.
So find out where it is now.
In warm climates, the main water shutoff is typically outside, attached to a wall,
and in colder climates, it's usually in the basement.
Synthetic soap makes less scum. Synthetic soaps make cleaning your shower or bath a lot easier
because they don't contain the ingredients that create that tough soap scum that's hard to get
off. Any liquid or gel soap is synthetic, but most bar soap is standard soap.
There are a few exceptions.
Zest and ivory soap are synthetic.
It's good to keep in mind that burglaries happen mostly during the day.
Most burglaries occur between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m., and in many cases, the crooks get in through unlocked doors or windows.
Don't automatically trust the labels on your electric breaker panels.
You could get zapped.
While those labels are a reasonably good guide,
they're not completely reliable
because you don't know who labeled them in the first place
and when they labeled them.
And in older homes especially,
they may have remodeled the house
and those labels may be obsolete.
You don't want to find out the hard way.
And don't leave your car remote in the car.
A thief who breaks into your car can grab the remote for easy access to your garage.
And it's easy to find your garage because the registration in your glove box gives the crook your address.
And that is something you should know.
Pretty much from the time you were born, you've been smiling.
Probably a day doesn't go by you don't smile.
Everyone smiles. It's a form of communication.
But what's so interesting is, it's so much more than that.
Most people believe a smile reflects an inner feeling of happiness.
But I bet you've smiled or faked a smile when you weren't happy at all. A smile not only reflects happiness, it can also create happiness. Smiles are fascinating and there's a whole science to it.
Marianne LaFrance is a professor of psychology at Yale University, and she's what
you would call a smile expert. She, in fact, was brought in as a consultant to Pepperidge Farm when
they were trying to get that smile just right on the goldfish cracker. And Marianne is the author
of the book, Why Smile? The Science Behind Facial Expressions. Hi, Marianne. Hello, Mike.
I think people are surprised to hear that there's a science to smiling.
Smiling seems to be pretty simple.
What could the science be?
So what could the science be?
For over 100 years, actually, now dating back to the 1870s when Darwin and others at the time decided that smiling was something actually fairly
complicated. And so science was brought in to bear on trying to decipher what a smile is,
what it means, what effects it has, and why it's so important in many people's lives that
others as well as themselves smile. Does everyone smile? It seems that, you know, even young babies smile.
It seems to be, it is a natural thing we do, yes?
It is definitely a natural thing we do.
In fact, research has shown that even in the womb,
most babies show smiles.
In short, smiles are natural.
They are human.
They may be actually necessary for human interaction.
Yeah, are they primarily a means of communication? Is that their purpose, or what is their purpose?
The answer is partly in the way you phrased the question, which is, is there a function or use or purpose in smiling?
And I think most psychologists would say absolutely. In fact, the core argument would be that smiles are functional,
purposeful in order to engage other people
and in order to send a variety of positive signals.
More often, though, researchers have been interested less on the purpose end
than on the meaning end.
That is, what do smiles, in fact, as Darwin suggested, reflect happy, joyful, positive feelings.
So it's less about the effect they have than about what is the nature of them,
what are the meanings associated with them.
Am I able to tell, even though I don't know how I'm able to tell, am I able to tell a genuine smile from a sarcastic smile, from an angry smile, from just some dishonest smile? I think I'm
good at that, but is that just something humans can naturally do?
Again, the question is a terrifically interesting one.
One, since you're male, or I'm assuming you're male,
you are less likely to interpret the difference,
to see the difference between a genuine and a non-genuine smile than women are.
Women are just better at deciphering facial expressions.
It is also the case that most of us know how to tell the difference but are usually not motivated to tell the difference.
That is, we tend to skim over lightly other people's expressions, other people's communications.
So if we are attentive and are paying really close view of another person's face. We can tell the difference, but often
we're preoccupied with other things. We are not paying that close attention, so we may
miss the distinction. But it's there to be seen if we're attentive.
There is a belief, I think, that, and perhaps this is more men than women, that, you know,
smiling, you don't want to smile because it shows you're not serious,
that smiling is being anti-serious,
and that if you want to be taken seriously, you don't smile.
Well, I think there's certainly the feeling that there are people who smile too much,
but there is just an enormous number of research reports that show that
smiling is better than non-smiling for generating positive impressions from other people who
see the smile, for generating trust, for relieving a tense situation, for conveying a sense of
one's competence. So the default would be better smile in a lot of circumstances than not,
but that doesn't necessarily mean that we take all smiles as genuine or legitimate
or signs that it is an authentic expression of what people are feeling.
Well, it's an interesting subject in the sense that people don't talk about smiling a lot.
We do it a lot, but we don't talk about it very much.
And one of the most interesting things, I think, about your story is how you were called
into Pepperidge Farm to help them figure out the smile to put on the goldfish cracker.
Absolutely. The initial movement was,
let's put a smile on the goldfish and see if we can increase purchases, basically. And the reason
why that impetus was that it turned out that a significant proportion of people buying the
goldfish crackers were moms of kids under the age of seven or five.
So kids are very drawn to smiling objects.
And so if we could figure out, if Pepperidge Farm could figure out how to put a smile on
a goldfish cracker, then it's more likely that kids would be attracted to them, which
means that moms would buy them, which means that sales would go up and so on.
The science of it was interesting, though, because when they first asked me to be involved in this project, the question was how to put a line, a small crease on a cracker that was already small, that would appear to be genuine,
as if fish or cheddar fish actually smiled.
So it was an engineering feat, not just a marketing interest.
It wasn't easy to come up with that smile.
No, because if it was too big, the crackers cracked, broke up.
That wasn't a good thing. If it was too small, then it wouldn, broke up, that wasn't a good thing.
If it was too small, then it wouldn't have been discerned as a smile.
If it was too straight, as opposed to having some curve in it, it might even suggest the opposite of the smiling goldfish.
So learning a lot about what real smiles actually look like went into trying to determine how,
in terms of the actual production, to produce something that looked right, looked good.
One of the reasons, I guess the big reason that people smile is when they're happy,
but isn't there also some research that would indicate that if you're not so happy, that smiling will help make you happy?
Right. The psychologists call the process a facial feedback.
And the core idea there is it used to be thought that all facial expressions were manifestations, were expressions of what was going inside people.
So an angry scowl actually conveyed a feeling of anger.
A smile indicated a feeling of feeling positive and good.
And the data seemed to show, with limits, more of that in a second, that smiling can
create good feeling as well as express good feeling.
The caveat is that if you're feeling really miserable and really angry and really upset,
then putting on a smile is not likely to override the negative feeling entirely. But there are a lot of studies that show that adopting a smile can actually reduce stress, can produce a more sanguine state of mind, can override some negative emotions.
But there are limits to how much that can happen. Marianne LaFrance is my guest. She's a professor of psychology at Yale
and author of the book Why Smile?
The Science Behind Facial Expressions.
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So, Marianne, I can imagine people listening to this thinking, well, come on. I mean, a smile's a smile. Let's not dig too deep here. Let's not research this to death. It's just a smile. I think I just came back from a trip out of the
country and I was telling someone about the work and her first response was, why have you taken
something so simple and straightforward and really nice and made it complicated? So I think some
reaction is, oh, please, you know, this is one of the nice things in the world.
Do we need to have layers and complexities and lots of caveats about it?
I think that's one thing that I've heard a number of times.
I think another that people are interested in is that a smile can both communicate and cover feelings.
So again, it would appear that smiling more often than not is taken as a positive gesture,
a positive expression.
But it turns out that most of the smiling we do is actually false.
False not in the sense that it's a complete lie,
but false in the sense that we do a lot of smiling as a social lubricant.
It's not because we feel good or happy or delighted or joyful.
It's that we want to keep our social environment cooking along nicely. And so we smile often quickly in meeting a neighbor on the street or at the store or something,
not because we're delighted to see them, but because it's better to keep the climate on a positive note than not.
So we do it almost automatically, and it goes under the notion of the benefit of weak ties.
That is, most of our social interactions on a day-to-day basis are, quote, weak in the sense that they're brief, they're non-consequential, they don't have huge reverberations, but they also are really important for maintaining positive connections. So when you meet your neighbor at the store and smile,
you're more or less acting delighted to see them.
You're not necessarily delighted to see them, but...
Exactly.
You're just continuing the momentum of the relationship by smiling and saying,
see, we're all just so happy to see each other.
Exactly.
So if you meet that neighbor at the store and you don't smile when you've caught the other person's eyes
so that there's some recognition that you know each other,
the lack of a smile is likely to be interpreted as something untoward, something undesirable.
Well, that's an interesting point.
It's like smiling has become
so expected that by not smiling, you're sending a message because the smile is conspicuous by its
absence when you don't smile. In fact, there's a phrase, if I could articulate it in this way,
called the resting bitch face. It's a description given about women. And why it takes that particular form is that women
not only smile more than men, girls smile more than boys, but it is the case that they are
expected to smile. And we don't think well of women who don't smile. So there is not a woman
that I've met who reaches a certain age who hasn't had some man, usually a stranger, say, oh, come on, smile.
Give me a smile.
Show me a smile.
I'd like to see your smile.
We expect it.
So if we don't see it, we think not good about that or her for not smiling.
What a bitch.
Precisely.
Look it up. Google that.
You'll find some interesting people to whom it's been attributed.
What about cross-culturally?
Is smiling different across cultures, or is it pretty universal?
It is one of the interesting things that smiling is universal in the sense that there is not a culture that has not been found to smile,
but it's also true that there's a lot of interpretation that varies cross-culturally.
So people in southern climes tend to smile more than in northern climates. People in, say, northern Europe, the Scandinavian countries, smile much less in general than people in the southern part of the U.S.
Some cultures regard the smiling American as suspicious because how could anyone smile
as much as Americans smile?
Germans feel that.
The French feel that way.
So there are huge differences regionally even within countries about is it a good thing to smile?
Is it appropriate always to smile?
Do you take a smile on face value or do you regard it as a put on, a phony gesture in some regard?
And so interpreting a smile cross-culturally can sometimes get you into some hot water, as it were, because smiling in some places is so rare and is so much associated with heterosexual connections that one may, a woman may, inadvertently signal her openness to interaction when she regards her action as simply being
friendly, not anything more than that. So often today we're called upon, we're asked to smile,
you know, everyone has a camera in their cell phone and so we're taking a lot of pictures and
smile, everybody smile. Is there a good way to fake a genuine smile, or will it always be a fake smile?
Often, I mean, good photographers will often create a context that is jokey or, you know,
prompt a smile by saying something funny or change the command to smile to look pretty,
and people will smile in response to it not being the usual thing that people say.
Some people smile naturally, genuinely, that if they know how to look genuine,
which sounds like a paradox, and it may in fact be a paradox.
And other people show too many teeth, show grimacing around the eyes, show clear indications that they're doing
it as a prompt, not as something that is felt. But it's interesting, quick aside, the reason why
people are told to smile when photographs are being taken is that we often want to remember,
by virtue of looking at the photographs after the fact,
that the occasion was a positive one.
So we want to see a smile because it suggests that that anniversary, that birthday, that
Thanksgiving was altogether a delight when it might have been anything but.
Well, it's interesting because that way, even if it was a lousy event, if you can make the
photograph of record show everybody smiling, then we'll all remember this as a happy occasion.
Well, this is such a great topic because everyone smiles.
We smile a lot and we don't really talk about it or necessarily understand the science of
it, but I think we understand the power of it
because anybody who has seen someone smile at them
when they really needed one
realizes the power of a smile.
And anytime you've smiled at someone
and you've seen the reaction
that that's exactly what they needed
understands the power of a smile.
Marianne LaFrance has been my guest.
She is a professor of psychology at Yale University,
and she's author of the book, Why Smile? The Science Behind Facial Expressions. And there
is a link to that book in the show notes for this episode. Thank you, Marianne.
You're welcome.
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In life, and particularly at work, we have a tendency to be less than candid. We don't want
to hurt people's feelings. We don't want to say what we really think.
So we don't.
It seems that niceness is more important than honesty because, well, why rock the boat?
On the other end of the scale are people who couldn't care less what other people think and just say whatever they want regardless of whether it accomplishes anything or hurts someone's feelings.
And we call that person a jerk.
There is a middle ground, something we're calling radical candor.
Kim Scott is the CEO of a firm called Candor Inc.,
and she is author of the book, Radical Candor.
Hi, Kim.
Thank you. It's great to be here.
So explain what's going on here,
and explain what radical candor is and why it's so effective.
So I think an awful lot of workplaces are frustrating because instead of caring personally
and challenging directly, which we all sort of know we should do in human communication,
we fail on one dimension or another.
So when you care and challenge at the same time, that's radical candor.
But sometimes you do challenge someone, you do express disagreement when you see a problem,
but you forget to show them that you care. And that's obnoxious aggression. And then very often,
unfortunately, when we realize we've been obnoxiously aggressive, rather than moving the right direction on the care personally dimension of radical candor,
we go the wrong way on challenge directly. And we say something we don't mean, or we utter a false
apology, and we wind up in the worst place of all, manipulative insincerity. And that's where
backstabbing behavior, political behavior, all the kinds of behaviors that sort of make work passive aggressive and unpleasant.
It's really fun to tell stories about obnoxious aggression and manipulative insincerity.
But the fact of the matter is the vast majority of mistakes happen when we do show that we care personally. And we're so worried about not
hurting someone's feelings that we fail to tell them something they need to know in the long run.
And that is what I call ruinous empathy. So if you sort of contrast radical candor and ruinous
empathy, and if you feel like radical candor sounds too radical, you can call it compassionate
candor. But if you can compare and contrast those two things,
you realize that work is a lot more fun when we care about one another
and push each other to do better work.
Well, it is interesting how we tend to see it as either or.
You're either a jerk or you're a pushover.
You're either too nice or too nasty,
and neither one of those is particularly helpful.
In many ways, this is a dichotomy we all have in our minds.
I certainly had it for a long time in my career, but I think it's really a false dichotomy.
And I became aware of this when I started this company and I got an article sent to
me by a bunch of different people who I worked with.
And it was an article about how people would rather work with someone who is sort of a total jerk than with someone who's really nice but totally incompetent.
And I thought, surely those are not our two choices. there's a lot of room, not just in the middle, but to go way up on care personally and way over
on challenge directly so that you are radically candid. So you're in the best of both worlds.
Well, there is a school of thought that work is work and that we don't need to concern ourselves
with everybody's feelings. We need to get the work done. Sure. So I think one of the things that we often fail to remember at work is that part of our job
is to remember that we're working with human beings, to care about the people who we work with,
not just as colleagues, but as real people who we enjoy and who we care about.
You don't have to like them.
I'm not talking about friendship necessarily.
I'm talking about sort of common human decency.
And when you're really lucky, actually, you do love your colleagues.
You do love the people who you work with,
not in the HR disaster, marriage-destroying sense of the word
that we read so much about today,
but in the real fundamental collegiality sense of the word that we read so much about today, but in the real fundamental
collegiality sense of the word. And this is for a lot of people what gives work meaning, actually,
are the relationships that we form at work. And in fact, there's a lot of research that shows that
people are happiest at work and do the best at work when they have some relationships that really
matter to them at work. So that's sort of the care personally dimension. And I'm not talking about
getting creepily personal or being unprofessional. But I think sort of one of the things that moves
a lot of us down on the care personally dimension of radical candor is when we sort of get our first job, let's say you're
18, 19, 20 years old, you're right at that moment in your life when your ego is maximally fragile
and somebody comes along to you, your persona is beginning to solidify to protect your fragile ego
and someone comes along
and says, be professional. And for an awful lot of people that gets translated to mean,
leave your emotions, leave your real identity, leave your humanity, leave everything that's
best about you at home, and show up at work like some kind of robot. And you can't possibly
care personally about others if you're showing up at work like some kind of robot.
At the same time, so what I'm talking about by caring personally is often just seeing a person in the moment, seeing what they're experiencing it, seeing what they're experiencing in that moment and responding to it.
Often I tell a story about a man on the street who said to me when my dog was
out of control, I can see you really love that dog. That was all he had to do to move up on the
care personally dimension. And then he proceeded to challenge me directly. So let's move on to
the challenge directly dimension. So challenge directly, I think many of us have been told
since we are, since we learned to speak, the real problem here starts not when we're 18 years old, but when we're 18 months old.
We've been told some version of, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.
And that is a disaster at work because a big part of what we do at work is help each other improve our work. And so in the case of the man on
the street who said, I can see you really love that dog. The next thing he said to me is, but
you're going to kill that dog if you don't teach her to sit. And then he pointed at the ground and
he said, sit. That was his direct challenge. And the dog sat. I had no idea the dog even knew what that meant. And as a result, I was I was able to sort of understand how to take better care of my dog. And I kind of looked at this guy in amazement. How did he get the dog to sit and he sort of laughed and he said, It's not mean it's clear. And then he, the light changed and he walked, leaving me with words to live by. And you can see how that translates to things that happen at work.
You know, I can see that you really care about this project and I want to help you succeed.
But there's a bunch of typos in your presentation.
So is it a tactic?
Is it a, here's something nice, now let me tell you the truth.
I can see you like this, but here's what you did wrong.
No, because if you think about caring personally as something that you have to do to earn the right to challenge directly, you're not really caring personally.
And it's not going to come off as very specific and very sincere. So the idea here is that when we pause in the moment
to see one another as human beings, who at the very least we owe common human decency to,
then when we say whatever it is that needs to be said, It tends to be said with kindness, as well as with clarity. So in the case
of criticism, you should really focus on being both kind and clear, right? Good criticism is
kind and clear. So kindness is sort of showing you care personally. And clarity can be how you think about, you need to be direct enough
until the person hears what you have to say. And it's not like one is in service of the other.
You want to be kind because you're a kind person. You want to show you care because you really do
care about the person or at the very least see them as another fellow human being.
And you want to challenge directly because you want to help fix a problem,
not because you want to show that you're bigger, better, stronger than the other person.
But is this always very transactional?
In other words, every time I'm going to criticize you, I must first show I care.
Or can it be more like we have a relationship where you know I care.
I don't have to tell you that every time.
I just need to tell you how to fix whatever you screwed up or make better whatever you did wrong.
You know, I think you always want to criticize in a way that shows you care.
It doesn't.
And again, I'm not talking about a five-hour monologue or even a 10 10 minute monologue. Often you can do that in two
seconds, I can see you really love that dog, I can see you really care about this project. You want
to keep that caring front of mind. Caring is not something you do yesterday, but not today. Caring
is not something you do when you've gotten enough sleep and had a good breakfast.
You need to constantly keep that top of mind.
But again, it's more of an emotional discipline thing than it is a tons and tons of time thing.
What I think people often have trouble with, though, is how do you word the criticism?
You don't want to come off as too harsh.
You don't want people to get angry with harsh. You don't want to, you know, you don't want
people to get angry with you, but you also want to be clear. You can't say, well, this really sucks.
I mean, clearly you didn't do a very good job here. This is subpar work. Well, that's going to
get you off on the wrong foot. I think that's where the fourth step in the order of operations
comes in, gauging what the other person says. Because
radical candor, there aren't any magic words. If I could just tell you how to say things in a way
that would never cause offense, believe me, I would give you those words. But there aren't any
such words in any language. The key thing about communication is that it's a give and a take. And
the key thing for radical candor is that you've got to make sure that you're paying attention to how the other person to start to cry or to yell at you. You don't want these kinds of extreme negative responses. But sometimes you will get them. Sometimes you're going to get those
extreme emotional responses. And you have to be prepared to deal with it when it happens. And I
think one of the things that for me has been the most helpful, I often coach people and they're
sort of preparing for a conversation
that they know is going to be difficult. And then they'll call me up afterwards and they'll say,
oh, I failed. The person got upset. And the fact that the other person got upset
is not necessarily your failure. And in fact, if you try to, if you believe you can control
someone else's emotional response, you're just, you're kidding
yourself. You can't. The fact that the other person got upset may be a reflection of the fact
that you said it badly or you said it too harshly, but it also just may be a reflection of the fact
that now they realize they've screwed up and we spend more time at work than in any other part
of our lives. And of course that feels like a gut punch when we realized that we've,
that we've screwed up.
So I think the key thing is not to try to avoid other people's emotions,
but try to have compassionate response to other people's emotions.
So, but I would imagine too, it makes a difference who you're talking to.
I mean, I, I know people that I can deal with.
I can be very blunt and say, and be very, you know, I don't have to beat around the bush.
And other people need, you know, a little more loving touch before you deliver the blow.
Yes, absolutely.
That's such an important point.
Radical candor gets measured not at your mouth, but at the other person's ear.
And that's why gauging the response is so important. And that's why I can't give you
a script for radical candor, because what would be radically candid for one person
is crushing for another and not clear enough for yet another person. So you need to make sure that
you're able to,
to gauge that response, to remember that radical candor doesn't get measured at your mouth,
that there's no objective measure for what is the radically candid way to say something,
but you need to adjust it. So for example, I, I had a boss, uh, when I worked at Google, I worked for Sheryl Sandberg. And she once told me after a big
presentation that she said, you said um a lot in there. Were you aware of it?
You said um? Oh, in your presentation, you said um.
And I sort of made this brush off gesture with my hand because I figured if that was all I had
done wrong in this big presentation, who really cared? And I sort of said something like, yeah, I know it's a
verbal tick. It's no big deal, really. And then she said, I know this great speech coach and I'm
sure Google would pay for it. Would you like an introduction? And once again, I made this brush
off gesture with my hand and I said, no, I'm busy. Didn't you hear about this business? It's growing so fast. I don't have time
for a speech coach. And so here, here she is. She's giving me these not so subtle hints. I'm
not taking the hints. So I am not hearing her. So she, she started in a neutral place. You said,
um, a lot in there. Were you aware of it? And then when I sort of brushed that off, she,
she went a little further out on challenge directly
I know a great speech coach hint hint google would pay for it hint hint once again I didn't
take the hint so now she has to go even further out on the challenge directly dimension then she
was comfortable going and she said to me I can see when you make that 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. Now, of course, if she had started there,
that could have been crushing. And she wouldn't have started there because most people
wouldn't have needed to hear that. But she could tell from my response, I was brushing her feedback off, that she needed to go further
out on the challenge directly dimension. And so that's what I mean by gauging your response.
Sometimes the person will get emotional, and they'll either get angry or they'll get sad.
And that's what we fear. But the more common case is that you'll say something and you'll say it so
gently that the other person hasn't heard you at all and and this was like
this was such a revelation for me as I was leading when I worked at Google a
700 person team and very often someone who worked for me would be having a
problem with one of their colleagues. And I would say,
well, did you talk to the colleague directly? And they would say, oh, yeah, I told them I was so
clear about it. And then I would bump into the colleague and I would ask about their issue,
the issue at hand, and they would have no idea what I was talking about. And it wasn't that
the other person hadn't told their colleague about the issue. They had, but the colleague
just hadn't heard them. And so they had to be more clear. They had to challenge even more directly.
And this is really hard, especially when we're focused on not hurting someone's feelings.
Sometimes in order to be clear, you have to say something in a way that feels uncomfortable.
And yeah, I guess you have to be okay with it. There is this tendency I think a lot of people have
where they don't want to feel that
and they don't want to make the other person feel that.
And so what gets lost and what loses in that whole transaction
is that the message never gets there.
That happens far more often than someone acting like a jerk intentionally.
I mean, it does.
Certainly we've all experienced jerks at work,
people who are obnoxious and intentionally obnoxious.
But that's actually less common than someone failing to communicate
in the name of being quote unquote nice.
And this happened to me, this came so clear to me pretty early in my career where I was working with this
guy who I really, really liked. And because I liked him so much, I was not clear with him about
the mistakes he was making. And he eventually got fired because he was making those mistakes.
Not so nice after all, right? And so I think
one of the things that is, I struggle with radical candor myself. That's why I wrote the book.
It's so, it's such a fundamental part of who I want to be as a human being to be kind.
And one of the things that really helped me was seeing that radical candor is kind. It's not actually so nice in the long run
not to tell someone about something that's going to hurt them in their career. That's not being a
great colleague at work. And so if you can, if you can realize, if you can harness that very good and
positive desire to be a kind person, and you can use it in the goal of helping someone
improve at work, then all of a sudden you get the best of all worlds.
Well, this is great, because there isn't anyone listening who hasn't been in the situation of
wanting to say something to someone that was somewhat critical and just said, well, you know,
I don't want to rock the boat. I don't want to you know, I don't want to rock the boat. I
don't want to cause trouble. I don't want to hurt their feelings. So it just gets swept under the
rug. And now there's, here's a blueprint on how to go ahead and say it without sweeping it under
the rug and not being a jerk, but saying what needs to be said. Kim Scott has been my guest.
She is the CEO of a company called Candor Inc.,
and she is author of the book Radical Candor. You'll find a link to that book at Amazon in
the show notes. Thanks for being here, Kim. All right. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed
the conversation. We're getting closer to the day where you have to decide about a Christmas tree,
and our family, for the first
time, is considering an artificial tree. We've never had one before, but like many people,
we're considering it because the cost of live trees is so high. And artificial trees look pretty
realistic. It may surprise you to know that about two-thirds of people who put up a tree put up an artificial tree,
and the reason most often given is that it's better for the environment. But that's not
necessarily true. Real trees you'd put in your home are grown specifically to be Christmas
decorations. They aren't really contributing to deforestation like you might think. Christmas
tree farms usually grow one to three new trees to replace each one they cut down,
keeping the number of trees balanced and generating more oxygen.
There are other considerations, like the mess of pine needles,
the constant need to water a live tree, and the fire danger of a real tree.
Plastic trees can also burn, but they're usually sprayed with a fire retardant.
Real trees can be recycled, whereas fake trees are made from plastic
that won't be accepted by a lot of recycling centers,
so the tree ends up in a landfill when it does come time to toss it out.
So, there are arguments for both sides.
And that is something you should know.
If you enjoy this podcast and would like to support us, well, that's easy.
Just share it with a friend and help us grow our audience.
I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller,
religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community.
Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth
Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent
V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible
criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing
secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very
own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth.
Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook
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Contained herein are the heresies of Rudolf Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned traveling
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and uncover the blasphemous truth
that ours is not a loving God
and we are not its favored children.
The Heresies of Randolph Burntwine,
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