1: “Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off,” former Secretary of State Colin Powell once said.
That’s because to be an effective leader, we must be willing to “challenge directly” the people on our teams.
In her book Radical Candor, author Kim Scott tells us we must both care personally and challenge directly.
Challenging people directly “can be particularly difficult, especially at the outset,” Kim notes. We “may have to criticize somebody’s work or change their role while we are still in the process of establishing that trust.”
This means “sometimes people on our teams will be mad at us,” she writes.
“In fact, if nobody is ever mad at us, we probably aren’t challenging your team enough.”
2: As leaders, we must learn how to handle the anger directed at us.
Step one?
“Don’t pretend it doesn’t hurt or say it ‘shouldn’t’ hurt,” Kim suggests.
Instead, we can show we care. When we say something that challenges the other person to raise their performance, we can acknowledge the other person’s pain.
Step two: “Eliminate the phrase ‘don’t take it personally’ from our vocabulary,” she writes.
Because that’s insulting.
“Instead, offer to help fix the problem,” Kim recommends. “But don’t pretend it isn’t a problem just to try to make somebody feel better. In the end, caring personally about people even as we challenge them will build the best relationships of our careers.”
The movie Miracle tells the story of the 1980 U.S. men’s Olympic ice hockey team’s unbelievable upset of the heavily favored team from the Soviet Union. In the movie, U.S. head coach Herb Brooks “unifies his team by pushing them so hard that he becomes the common enemy,” Kim notes.
“It’s clear watching the movie how much he cares about each player, and it’s painful to watch how long it takes the players to see it.”
Her point? “Being the boss can feel like a lonely one-way street at times—especially at first.”
Because that’s what it means to be a leader. That’s what is required.
Challenging directly means embracing conflict rather than attempting to escape it. It means saying no. Being willing to disagree.
3: But that’s not what’s most difficult.
“The hardest part of building this trust is inviting people to challenge us, just as directly as we are challenging them,” Kim writes. We “have to encourage them to challenge us directly enough that we may be the one who feels upset or angry.
“This takes some getting used to—particularly for more ‘authoritarian’ leaders.
“But if we stick to it, we’ll find that we learn a great deal about ourselves and how people perceive us. This knowledge will unfailingly allow us and our teams to achieve better results.”
The reward is worth it in other ways as well.
“If we can absorb the blows,” Kim observes, “the members of our team are more likely to be good bosses to their employees when they have them.
“Once people know what it feels like to have a good boss, it’s more natural for them to want to be a good boss. They may never repay you, but they are likely to pay it forward. The rewards of watching people you care about flourish and then help others flourish are enormous.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: As a leader, how willing am I to challenge people directly?
Action: Experiment with challenging directly today.
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