1: “Google is famously viewed as a bottom-up company,” Kim Scott writes in her book Radical Candor, “one that empowers even very young employees to drive decision-making.”
Management at Google is often viewed as a necessary evil.
“The managers’ role is mostly to stay out of the way,” Kim notes, “sometimes to help, but never to interfere too much.”
After working at Google for six years in the early 2000s, Kim took a job just down the road at Apple. She was tasked with helping to create a class within Apple University called “Managing at Apple.” The overall goal was to “defy the gravitational pull of organizational mediocrity.”
Upon joining Apple, her initial expectations were quickly turned upside down.
She had “bought in to the narrative of the all-controlling Steve Jobs passing down his brilliant vision from on high, brooking no dissent, and driving his team to make it happen.”
But that wasn’t what she experienced.
Steve Jobs’s philosophy was better captured by his response to a new hire’s question: “How do you envision building the team? How big will the team be?”
Steve’s blunt response: “Well, if I knew the answer to all those questions, then I wouldn’t need you, would I?”
Which Kim describes as “borderline rude, but also empowering.”
Steve summarized his management philosophy more diplomatically in an interview with Terry Gross: “At Apple we hire people to tell us what to do, not the other way around.”
In fact, achieving results as a manager at both Apple and Google “had a lot more to do with listening and seeking to understand than it did with telling people what to do; more to do with debating than directing; more to do with pushing people to decide than with being the decider; more to do with persuading than with giving orders; more to do with learning than with knowing.”
2: What is a critical skill to becoming a successful boss at both organizations? Being good at delivering feedback to team members.
“In Managing at Apple, we often played a video of Steve explaining his approach to giving criticism,” Kim writes.
“He captured something very important: ‘You need to do that in a way that does not call into question your confidence in their abilities but leaves not too much room for interpretation … and that’s a hard thing to do.'”
Steve continued: “I don’t mind being wrong. And I’ll admit that I’m wrong a lot. It doesn’t really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing.”
Amen to that.
3: Both companies delight in candid feedback.
Kim recounts being in a meeting with Google cofounder Larry Page soon after joining the company. At the time, she worked for Matt Cutts, who led the webspam team.
“We were discussing a proposal that Matt and I had,” she writes. “Larry had a different, more subtle plan, which I didn’t understand. But it was clear that Matt did understand Larry’s plan and didn’t like it one bit.
“Matt—generally a very pleasant, easygoing guy—disagreed, heatedly. When Larry wouldn’t back down, Matt started yelling at Larry. He said Larry’s idea would flood him with ‘so much crap’ he’d never keep up.'”
Kim felt uncomfortable with Matt’s reaction: “I liked him, and I was afraid he’d get fired for criticizing Larry’s position so vehemently.
“Then I saw the big grin on Larry’s face. Not only did he permit Matt’s challenging him—he seemed to relish it. I could see from the open, happy way he responded to the argument that he wanted not just Matt but everyone at Google to feel comfortable criticizing authority—especially his.”
Looking back on their exchange, Kim surmises that “it didn’t make any sense to label this conversation ‘nice’ or ‘mean,’ ‘rude’ or ‘polite.'”
Instead: “It was productive and collaborative,” she notes. “It was free. It was driving to the best answer.”
Giving and receiving feedback is an essential capability of great leaders. But to create the conditions where this is possible, we must first focus our attention on a different area: Relationships.
Because as leaders, our ability “to build trusting, human connections with the people who report directly to us ,” Kim writes, “will determine the quality of everything that follows.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: How likely am I to give candid feedback? How well do I receive it? Are there opportunities to improve in one or both areas?
Action: Discuss with a colleague or with my team.