1: Growing up, how many times were we told: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”?
Turns out that’s really bad advice if we want to be good managers.
“Bob was one of those instantly likable people who make going to work a pleasure,” Kim Scott writes in Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity.
“He was a kind, funny, caring, and supportive colleague. “
The only problem with Bob?
His work was terrible.
“He lost my confidence shortly after we hired him. He’d been working for weeks on a document,” Kim recounts. “When I reviewed the document he’d been working on so diligently, I was shocked to discover that it was totally incoherent—a kind of word salad.”
She then recalled “the shame in his eye and the apology in his smile” when he had given it to her.
2: Kim was the CEO of a start-up called Juice. “We were a small company, struggling to get on our feet, and we had zero bandwidth to redo his work, or to pick up his slack.”
She knew Bob’s work wasn’t up to par.
And yet, “I couldn’t bring myself to address the problem,” she writes.
During their meeting to review the document, Bob was so nervous that Kim thought he might cry. “Because everyone liked him so much, I worried that if he did cry, everyone would think I was an abusive bitch.”
Plus, his resume and references were stellar. “Maybe he’d been distracted by something at home or was unused to our way of doing things,” Kim writes.
“Whatever the reason, I convinced myself that he’d surely return to the performance level that had gotten him the job.”
So she told Bob his work was a “good start” and that she’d “help him finish.”
At which point, Kim rewrote the document herself, reasoning it “would be faster than teaching him how to re-write it.”
3: What are the problems with Kim’s approach?
First, doing so creates more work for Kim and the other members of the team. “Following my lead, they too tried to cover for him,” she writes. “They would fix mistakes he’d made and do or redo his work.
“Usually when they should have been sleeping.”
Second, Kim’s false praise “allowed Bob to deceive himself into thinking he could continue along the same course.
“Which he did,” she writes. “By failing to confront the problem, I’d removed the incentive for him to try harder and lulled him into thinking he’d be fine.”
Third, others on the team “began to wonder if I knew the difference between great and mediocre,” Kim notes. “As is often the case when people are not sure if the quality of what they are doing is appreciated, the results began to suffer, and so did morale.”
Ten months later, Kim invited Bob for coffee and fired him.
“Now we were both huddled miserably over our muffins and lattes,” she remembers. “After an excruciating silence, Bob pushed his chair back, metal screeching on marble, and looked me straight in the eye. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
“As that question was rolling around in my mind with no good answer, he asked me a second question: ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me? I thought you all cared about me!'”
Kim remembers the conversation as “the low point of my career.”
Ouch.
“I had made a series of mistakes, and Bob was taking the fall. Not only was my earlier praise a head-fake—I’d never given Bob any criticism. I’d also never asked him to give me feedback, which might have allowed him to talk things through and perhaps find a solution.
“Worst of all, I’d failed to create a culture in which Bob’s peers would naturally warn him when he was going off the rails. The team’s cohesion was cracking, and it showed in our results. Lack of praise and criticism had absolutely disastrous effects on the team and on our outcomes.
“It wasn’t just too late for Bob. It was too late for the whole company,” she writes.
The start-up failed shortly thereafter.
There is a better way.
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: How effective am I in providing feedback to colleagues when their work is not up to par? How often do I put off giving necessary criticism? Or am I overly harsh?
Action: Journal about my answers to the questions above.
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