[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much.
Thanks so much.
I think that, given last night's events,
I'm going to change the title of this talk
to Be a Kickass Citizen Without Losing Your Humanity.
The idea of radical candor is something
that will help you do the very best work of your life,
but more importantly, from my perspective,
it'll also help you build the very best relationships
of your career.
It's a simple idea, and to explain what I mean by it,
I'm just going to start with a quick story about a time
when my boss--
who is Sheryl Sandberg-- criticized me.
I just started at Google, and I had
to give a presentation to Google's founders and CEO
about how the business was doing.
And like any normal person in this situation,
I felt a little bit nervous.
And so I walked in wondering how I'm going to get these people's
attention, and all I had to do was say how many new customers
we had added in the last couple of months,
and Eric Schmidt, the CEO almost fell out of his chair.
So I felt like the meeting had gone pretty well.
In fact, I felt like a genius.
So as I'm leaving meeting, I walk
past my boss expecting a high five
or some form of congratulations.
And she says to me, why don't you
walk back to my office with me?
And I think, oh, shit, I've done something wrong.
I don't know what it is, but I'm about to hear about it.
And she says to me after we-- after a little bit of praise,
she says, you said um an awful lot.
Were you aware of it?
And I breathed a huge sigh of relief.
And I kind of made a brush off gesture,
and I said, yes, I know.
I do that.
It's kind of a verbal tick-- no big deal, really.
And she said, well, I know a great speech coach.
Google would pay for it.
Would you like an introduction?
And I make that brush off gesture with my hand again.
And I said, did you hear about all those customers?
I'm busy.
I don't have time for a speech coach.
And she stops, she looks right at me, and she says,
when you make that gesture with your hand,
I can see I'm going to have to be a lot more direct with you.
When you say um every third word,
it makes you sound stupid and insecure.
Now she has my full attention.
And some people would have said that it was mean of her to say
that, but in fact, it was the very kindest thing she could
have done for me at that moment in my career,
because when I did go to the speech coach--
and now that I knew I sounded stupid and insecure,
I did go see the speech coach--
I realized she really wasn't exaggerating.
I did say um every third word.
And the weird thing about this was
that I had been giving presentations
for my entire career.
I had given hundreds of presentations
over the course of 15 years, and nobody had told me
how often I said um.
It was as though I'd been walking around
for my whole career with my fly down,
and nobody had had the courtesy to tell me,
why don't you zip your fly up?
And this really got me to thinking two things--
one, what was it that made it so seemingly easy for Sheryl
to tell me, and two, why had nobody else told me?
And when I thought about it, it really
boiled down to two things.
I knew that Sheryl cared about me personally,
as she did about everyone who worked for her.
And I also knew that she was willing to challenge me
directly.
She wasn't so worried about hurting my feelings
that she was unwilling to tell me something I needed to know.
So that seems simple.
Who doesn't do that?
So I really got to analyzing this,
and I thought about it in terms of a two-by-two--
so care personally, challenge directly.
Let's take each axis in turn.
First, care personally-- this is what
I call the give a damn axis.
Now, nobody starts out their career thinking,
I don't give a damn about people,
so I'm going to be a great colleague.
Nobody starts out an election cycle thinking,
I don't give a damn about my fellow Americans,
and therefore, I'm going to be a great citizen.
That's not how it works.
What happens to us?
What moves us down on the care personally axis?
Really early in our careers, we're
often told to be professional.
Be more than just professional-- that's
my advice, because when you start out as only professional,
you move way down on the care personally
access, because somehow this advice to be professional
so often gets translated to mean leave your emotions,
leave your humanity, leave the very best part of yourself
at home.
You're never going to do the best work of your life
if you leave half of yourself-- especially the best
half of yourself-- at home.
So bring your whole self to work.
Bring your whole self to a political conversation,
the next time you have one.
Care personally about the person you're talking to.
You can't care about somebody else with only half
of yourself.
So that's the give a damn axis.
Next, the challenge directly axis--
this is what I call the willing to piss people off dimension.
Colin Powell said that leadership is often
about being willing to piss people off.
Let's not forget that.
It's actually important to be willing to piss people off.
But our reluctance to do this begins
not when we are 18 years old, but when we're 18 months old.
When we first learn to speak, how many of you
had a parent who said, if you don't
have something nice to say, don't say it at all?
Right?
Now it's your job to say it.
Now you've got to tell people what you really
think in order for either your thinking to be corrected
or for theirs to be corrected.
So radical candor happens when you
fulfill your moral obligation-- it's not just your job-- it's
your moral obligation to say what you really think,
and to allow yourself to challenge others,
but also to be challenged in return.
And when you can do both of those things at the same time--
when you can challenge people directly at the same time that
you care personally and humanly about them--
I call that radical candor.
That's why it's rare.
I just gave you two reasons why it's
rare-- this professional thing, and this
if you don't have anything nice to say,
don't say it at all thing.
What I've done to make it less rare,
to make it easier for you to be radically
candid is to name the quadrants where you fail
on one dimension or another, bury
with some emotionally charged language.
So when you challenge directly, but you don't care personally
I call that obnoxious aggression.
This is also known as the asshole quadrant.
Now, the reason why I don't just call it the asshole quadrant
is because it's not useful to write names
in these various quadrants.
One of the biggest problems that I've
seen over the course of this election
is what's called the fundamental attribution error,
or as I explain to my children, name calling.
Don't use these terms to call other people names.
Use them to guide you in your conversations with others.
So don't be obnoxiously aggressive.
Don't judge yourself, don't judge others
as obnoxiously aggressive, but judge a conversation
as obnoxiously aggressive, and move it in the right direction.
Now, when you fail on both dimensions,
I call it manipulative insincerity,
when you neither care nor challenge.
And then there's the quadrant where most mistakes actually
get made, because people usually do care about each other.
Despite all of the rhetoric of the last 48 hours,
I really do believe most people are fundamentally decent
and do care at a human level about each other.
And when you care so much about somebody
that you fail to challenge them, I call it ruinous empathy.
So those are the mistakes that you
can make in either political discourse
or giving feedback at work.
Now, in order to motivate each of these quadrants,
I'm just going to tell you a few quick stories.
First, radical candor-- a lot of people
make a mistake with radical candor,
thinking that they have to take a bunch of time
to be radically candid.
But the origin story for me with radical candor
happened in less than a minute on the streets of Manhattan.
I had just gotten a new puppy, and I
loved this dog-- had never said a harsh word to the dog,
and as a result, it was out of control,
and had no idea how to behave.
And it jumped in front of a cab.
I pulled it out of the way just in time.
And all of a sudden, my heart is thumping
in my throat, and this man--
perfect stranger standing next to me-- looks at me
and he says, I can see you really love that dog.
It's all he has to say to move up on the care personally axis.
Doesn't have to know my name, doesn't
have to have schmoozed with me-- just,
I can see you really love that dog.
And then he says to me, but you're
going to kill that dog if you don't teach it to sit.
Now he's got my full attention.
Then he says, sit.
The dog sat.
I had no idea the dog knew how to do that.
And I looked at him in amazement.
The light changes.
He looks back at me and he says, it's not mean.
It's clear.
And he crosses the street and leaves me
with words to live by--
didn't have to take him forever, and he changed my life
in just that brief amount of time.
So radical candor can be quick--
doesn't need to require a lot of schmoozing.
Next, obnoxious aggression-- I will tell you,
I will assert for the record, I'm not an asshole,
but I do occasionally behave like one.
And I bet all of you have just occasionally done
the same thing.
So this also comes from a time I--
shortly after I joined Google-- amazing
I lasted as long as I did.
I had a disagreement with Larry Page about an AdSense policy,
and I wrote an email to 30 people that said,
Larry claims he wants to organize all the world's
information, but if it'll make us $1,
he's willing to create clutter sites that muddle the world's
information--
not my most politically astute move--
worth taking a second to understand why I did it.
I did it because I believe there's
a special place in hell for people
who kiss up and kick down.
But it doesn't mean doing the exact opposite makes
a ton of sense either, right?
Carrying personally is something that you
owe to every human being you interact with,
either at work or in life.
So that was my foray into obnoxious aggression.
As with all things, the cover-up is worse than the crime.
Larry didn't actually mind that.
In fact, I learned later that he thought it was funny.
But what happened next was where I got into real trouble,
when, instead of moving up on the curb personally axis,
I moved over in the wrong direction
on the challenge directly axis.
I bumped into Larry a couple of days later.
A friend of mine was like, wow, that was pretty stupid, Kim.
And so instead of looking into it
and actually understanding the challenge that he had made,
and caring personally, I just went and said--
I lied-- I said, oh, Larry, I'm sorry about that email.
I realize you're right.
I'm wrong.
And Larry's got a pretty good bullshit meter,
and he kind of looks at me like I'm
a pigeon that pooped on his shoulder, and walks off.
A friend of mine patted me on the shoulder and said,
he likes it better when you disagree with him.
So don't move in the wrong direction
when you realize you've been a jerk.
Last, but not least, ruinous empathy,
the quadrant where most of us make most of our mistakes--
to explain what I mean by ruinous empathy,
I'm going to describe probably the most painful moment
in my career.
I had just hired this guy Bob.
I really liked Bob a lot.
He was funny.
He was quirky.
We were having one of those management off-sites
and playing a ridiculous management get to know you game
that nobody dared say, this is a waste of time.
Bob finally said, why don't we just go around the table
and confess what candy our parents used
when potty training us--
weird, but fast.
Then, weirder yet, we all remembered Hershey's Kisses.
And for the next 10 months, every time there
was a tense moment in a meeting, Bob
would whip out just the right piece of candy
for the right person at the right moment.
So he endeared himself to all of us.
There was just one problem with Bob--
his work was terrible, absolutely terrible.
I learned later.
The problem was he was smoking pot in the bathroom, which
maybe explained all that candy.
But anyway, I didn't know it at the time.
I kept trying to buck Bob up with false praise and say,
Bob, you are so smart.
This is not quite there yet, but I know you can do it.
And he had no idea how bad things
were until, 10 months later, it became clear to me
that, if I did not fire Bob, I was going to lose half my team.
And when I sat down and told Bob--
explained Bob the situation, when I finished,
he pushed his chair back from the table,
he looked right at me, and he said, why didn't you tell me?
And as that question is going around in my head
with no very good answer, he said,
why didn't anyone tell me?
I thought you all cared about me.
And I realize I'm having to fire Bob now because of mistakes
that I made-- six really important mistakes.
I didn't ask him to tell me what was going well,
and I never asked him for criticism.
Maybe I was doing something that was driving
him to toke up in the bathroom.
I don't know.
I didn't find out, and I should have.
I never gave him praise that was meaningful.
I basically just gave him praise that was a head fake.
I never told him when his work wasn't good enough.
And worst of all, I failed to create the kind of environment
in which everyone would tell Bob when-- what was truly good
and when he was going off the rails.
And all I could do in that moment
was to make a very solemn promise to myself
I would never make that mistake again,
and I would help everyone whom I worked with never
to make that mistake again.
And that is why I spent the time to come up
with this radical candor framework, which I hope
will help you all never to make that mistake.
Thank you all very much-- great talking to you.
[APPLAUSE]