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.