1: “I usually felt a little surge of pleasure,” Kim Scott writes in her book Radical Candor, “as I stepped off the elevator into the cavernous former warehouse in the East Village we’d rented as the office of Juice Software, the start-up I’d cofounded in 2000.”
But not this particular day. Instead, all she felt was stressed.
“The engineers had worked nights and weekends on an early ‘beta’ version of our product,” Kim writes, “which would be ready in a week.
“The sales team had gotten thirty big-name customers lined up for beta testing. If those customers were using our product, we’d be able to raise another round of funding. If not, we’d run out of money in six months.”
There was a problem, however. Her.
“The night before, one of our angel investors, Dave Roux, had told me he thought our pricing was all wrong,” she recalls.
“I knew in my gut Dave was right, but I couldn’t go to my sales team or my board and change everything just based on a gut feeling.”
The answer?
“I needed to sit down and do some analysis—fast,” Kim notes. “I’d cleared my calendar of meetings for the morning so I could do just that.”
As she exited the elevator, a colleague ran up to her.
“He needed to talk right away,” she writes. “He had just learned that he might need a kidney transplant, and he was completely freaked out.”
One hour and two cups of tea later, he seemed more at peace.
2: Kim walked toward her desk and passed an engineer whose child was in the ICU.
“How’d your son do last night?” she asked.
The news wasn’t good. “As he told me how the night had gone we both had tears in our eyes,” Kim writes, “I convinced him to leave the office and go and take care of himself for an hour before returning to the hospital.”
As she continued on, she walked by the quality assurance manager.
“His child had better news,” Kim recalls, “she’d just received the highest score in the entire state on a standardized math test. He wanted to talk about it.
“I felt emotional whiplash as I jumped from sympathy to celebration.”
When she finally reached her desk, she had “no time or emotional reserves to think about pricing,” she writes. “I cared about each of these people, but I also felt worn out—frustrated that I couldn’t get any ‘real’ work done.”
That afternoon, she called her CEO coach, Leslie Koch, to grumble.
“Is my job to build a great company,” she asked, “or am I really just some sort of emotional babysitter?”
Leslie, an intense former Microsoft executive, snapped back: “This is not babysitting. It’s called management, and it is your job!”
3: Leslie’s admonition that day had a lasting impact on Kim.
Kim’s “radical candor” framework has two dimensions: Care Personally and Challenge Directly.
Care Personally means being “professional” isn’t enough. We must do more than pay attention to someone’s ability to do their job. To develop strong relationships with our direct reports, we must bring our whole selves to work. And we need to “care about each of the people who work for us as human beings.”
It’s not just business. It’s personal. Deeply personal, Kim tells us.
“Every time I feel I have something more ‘important’ to do than listen to people, I remember Leslie’s words: ‘It is your job!’
“I’ve used Leslie’s line on dozens of new managers who’ve come to me after a few weeks in their new role, moaning that they feel like ‘babysitters’ or ‘shrinks.’ ”
Kim believes we undervalue the “emotional labor” of being a leader.
“That term is usually reserved for people who work in the service or health industry: psychiatrists, nurses, doctors, waiters, flight attendants,” she observes. But “this emotional labor is not just part of the job, it’s the key to being a good boss.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: As a leader, how well do I know the people on my team? What would they say I care personally about them?
Action: Journal about the questions above.
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I completed a 28 year career as medical imaging director. I designed the departments, researched and purchased the equipment and….the most important aspect of my position was…team building. While managing a 120 person team or a 10 person team, I found the challenge one that came relatively easy. First, sitting in your office and attending to “paperwork” is a definite no no. That was after hour work. Being on the floor was paramount. Second, know your equipment. I knew how to run or was at least very familiar with all the imaging modalities. Third, the most important, let your team run the daily operation. How does one do that? Upon arriving I would have frequent regular meetings. The “rules” of the meeting? You can bring up any subject, any complaint, any concern. That said, it had to be followed up with a solution. Solution based meetings. There were times when a problem was brought up and I cringed at the solution offered. They would work very hard to apply that solution because they owned it. The next meeting it was, if necessary, modified and adopted. The process was implemented by me, but they ran the show. It rarely failed me, but MOST IMPORTANT, it never failed them. The weekly meetings became monthly meetings over time. I floated from hospital to private practice and back to hospitals. I never applied for a position. The positions found me. The last few years consisted of converting the film system to digital. I thoroughly enjoyed my 28 years. And by the way….this included union shops. It can be done with a little tact and ingenuity. That tour in the US Marine Corps didn’t hurt me either. LOL.