Twenty one pilots self titled dropbox

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Kim Scott is the cofounder and CEO of Candor, Inc. Kim has been an adviser at Dropbox, Kurbo, Qualtrics, Shyp, Twitter, and several other tech companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University and before that led AdSense, YouTube, and Doubleclick Online Sales and Operations at Google. Previously, Kim was the cofounder and CEO of Juice Software, a collaboration start-up, and led business development at Delta Three and Capital Thinking. Earlier in her career, Kim worked as a senior policy adviser at the FCC, managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo, started a diamond-cutting factory in Moscow, and was an analyst on the Soviet Companies Fund. She is the author of three novels, Virtual Love, The Househusband, and The Measurement Problem. She and her husband Andy Scott are parents of twins and live in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can sign up for email updates here.

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6.

GUIDANCE

Ideas for getting/giving/ encouraging praise & criticism

IN CHAPTER TWO, I DESCRIBED how Radically Candid relationships create the trust that enables you to give better guidance and how giving better guidance in turn further develops those Radically Candid relationships. Guidance is the “atomic building block” of management, but it is profoundly uncomfortable for most people. What follows are specific tools and techniques that will make it easier for you to create a culture of guidance on your team.

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In order to build a culture of Radically Candid guidance you need to get, give, and encourage both praise and criticism. The graphic I developed to help keep the balance right is shown on the previous page.

SOLICITING IMPROMPTU GUIDANCE

Embrace the discomfort

ONE OF THE key insights I received about creating a culture of guidance came from watching the argument between Larry Page and Matt Cutts that I described in the Introduction. Before Larry criticized Matt’s proposal, he encouraged Matt to challenge with gusto by grinning encouragingly when Matt started to get passionate. Larry never said, “Don’t get emotional.” The more intense Matt’s criticism got, the wider Larry’s grin got. How can you foster an environment in which this becomes unremarkable? What are the things you can do to get criticism from your team?

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It’s not so easy, because when you are the boss people really do not want to criticize you or to tell you what they really think. Along with the position, you inherit a bunch of assumptions that have nothing to do with who you really are. The role often changes people’s impression of you in ways that can be bewildering. For example, I am five feet tall, have blonde hair, and speak with a Southern accent. All my life I’d fought the “dumb blonde” stereotype. So when I became a manager and somebody told me I was intimidating, I thought she was joking. Then, I overheard somebody else describe me as tall. Even though one guy on the team was seventeen inches taller than I am.

Don’t think for a minute that because you’re a nice person, or because you used to eat lunch every day with the people you now manage, that people won’t see you differently now that you’re the boss, or that they will automatically trust you. Take a look at the many colorful definitions of boss like this one in Urban Dictionary: “Bosses are like diapers: Full of shit and all over your ass.” “Boss: Disingenuous form of address used by insolent little twats, which although ostensibly deferential, actually implies that they don’t actually have any respect for you at all.” To some degree, the minute you assume the role of boss you’ll be fighting preconceptions. And the authority that comes with the role is, in fact, likely to bring out some of your worst instincts—so it may not just be a matter of unfair perception!

That’s why when you become the boss it’s important to work so hard to earn your team’s trust. You may be worried about earning their respect, and that’s natural. Unfortunately, though, being overly focused on respect can backfire because it’ll make you feel extra defensive when criticized. If, on the other hand, you can listen to the criticism and react well to it, both trust and respect will follow.

Here are some tips/techniques I’ve seen work to get the conversation flowing:

You are the exception to the “criticize in private” rule of thumb. Michelle Peluso, CEO of Gilt Groupe, explained the benefits of criticizing herself publicly. In an interview with The New York Times she said, “I’ve always taken a slightly different approach with 360 reviews. We’ll share them with each other on the executive team, and I’ll start with mine—‘Here is where I’m good, and here is where I’m not doing so well.’ I’ll even tell the whole company and say, ‘Here is where I want your help.’ That makes it a bit safer for other people to do the same, and you can build trust.”

Once I figured out who on my team was most comfortable criticizing me, I would ask that person to do it in front of others at a staff meeting or an all-hands meeting. They were always reluctant at first—“What about ‘criticize in private’?” But when you are the boss, that rule doesn’t apply to you. When you encourage people to criticize you publicly, you get the chance to show your team that you really, genuinely want the criticism. You also set an ideal for the team as a whole: everyone should embrace criticism that helps us do our jobs better. The bigger the team, the more leverage you get out of reacting well to criticism in public.

Also, the bigger your team, the harder it is for people to get on your calendar. If you have more than sixty or so people working for you and you make them wait till they can get a private moment with you to share some criticism, you’ll probably never hear it. Airing it in public has another benefit as well: it saves you from having to hear the same thing over and over.

Too many managers fear that public challenge will undermine their authority. It’s natural to want to repress dissent, but a good reaction to public criticism can be the very thing that establishes your credibility as a strong leader, and will help you build a culture of guidance.

Have a go-to question. When you’re the boss, it’s awkward to ask your direct reports to tell you frankly what they think of your performance—even more awkward for them than it is for you. To help, I adopted a go-to question that Fred Kofman, author of Conscious Business and my coach at Google, suggested. “Is there anything I could do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?” If those words don’t fall easily off your tongue, find words that do. Of course, you’re not really just looking for one thing; that opening question is just designed to get things moving.

Embrace the discomfort. Most people will initially respond to your question with something along the lines of “Oh, everything is fine, thank you for asking,” and hope that’s the end of the conversation. They probably didn’t see your question coming, and so they feel immediately wary. Their discomfort will make you feel uncomfortable, and you may find yourself reassuring them by nodding and offering an “I’m glad to hear that.” Don’t do this. It’s essential that you prepare yourself for these scenarios in advance and commit to sticking with the conversation until you have a genuine response.

One technique is to count to six before saying anything else, forcing them to endure the silence. The goal is not to be a bully but to insist on a candid discussion—to make it harder for the person to say nothing than to tell you what they’re thinking. If they can’t come up with anything on the spot, you can always arrange a time to meet again. If counting to six doesn’t do the trick, ask the question again. And again if necessary. One of the bankers who led Facebook’s IPO told me about a time that Sheryl asked him for feedback after a meeting with potential investors. “What could I have done better?” she asked him. He couldn’t think of anything. The presentation had been a home run. Sheryl wouldn’t let him off the hook, though. “I know there was something I could have done better in there.” He still couldn’t think of anything. Now, he was getting nervous. “You have a reputation for being great at giving feedback,” Sheryl encouraged him. “I bet if you think about it you can come up with something.” Now, he was sweating. But still she didn’t let him off the hook. She smiled expectantly, and stayed silent. That was when he finally thought of something, and told her. “Thank you!” She said. “I’ll do better next time!”

Another way to embrace the discomfort is to point out when people’s body language is at odds with what they’re saying. Imagine you’re at a meeting with a colleague with whom you’ve just shared a big, possibly impractical idea. He responds, “Oh! Great idea,” but you notice that he hunches over and crosses his arms defensively. Ignoring that sort of nonverbal cue is a lost opportunity. Without being obnoxious, try saying something like, “Then why are you folding your arms and hunching down in your seat? Come on, tell me what you’re really thinking!”

Listen with the intent to understand, not to respond. You’ve finally gotten the other person to offer some criticism. Once again, you have to manage your response. Whatever you do, don’t start criticizing the criticism. Don’t start telling the other person they weren’t Radically Candid! Instead, try to repeat what the person said to make sure you’ve understood it, rather than defending yourself against the criticism that you’ve just heard. Listen to and clarify the criticism—but don’t debate it. Try saying, “So what I hear you saying is…” If you find my language too programmatic, find another way to say it.

If you’re not one of those people who instinctively welcomes criticism as an opportunity to improve, you’ll of course feel a strong urge to act defensively—or at the least to explain yourself. This is a natural response, but it pretty much kills any chance that you’ll get the person to offer you the gift of candor again. So don’t feel bad that you are having this very normal human reaction. Manage your feelings rather than letting them manage you. Remind yourself going in that no matter how unfair the criticism, your first job is to listen with the intent to understand, not to defend yourself.

Reward criticism to get more of it. Once you’ve asked your question and embraced the discomfort and understood the criticism, you have to follow up by showing that you really did welcome it. You have to reward the candor if you want to get more of it. If you agree with the criticism, make a change as soon as possible. If the necessary change will take time, do something visible to show you’re trying. For example, my cofounder Russ once complained that I interrupted him. It was true; I am an inveterate interrupter. I tried not to do it, but I knew I wouldn’t succeed in eradicating this bad habit just because he’d mentioned it. Telling Russ that I couldn’t help myself was hardly a good way to reward his candor. So I said, “I know, it’s a problem. Can I ask you to help me stop interrupting?” I pulled a fat, blue rubber band out of my drawer and put it around my wrist. I asked him to snap the rubber band every time I interrupted him. Russ thought this was funny, and agreed. I wore the rubber band, which I now think of as my “radical bander,” to my staff meeting. I asked everyone present to help me by snapping it. Sure enough, others started snapping the rubber band. Then, I mentioned it at an all-hands meeting. Additional snapping did help me interrupt less. But equally important was that it sent a strong signal that I had heard the criticism and was taking action, and that I wanted to hear more criticism.

In some cases, of course, you may disagree with the criticism. It’s here that your Radical Candor skills become essential. It is never enough to simply acknowledge the other person’s feelings—that invariably feels passive-aggressive and insincere. Instead, first, find something in the criticism you can agree with, to signal that you’re open to criticism. Then, check for understanding—repeat what you heard back to the person to make sure you got it. Then, let them know you want to think about what they said, and schedule a time to talk about it again. It’s essential that you do get back to it. The key then is to explain exactly why you disagree. If you can’t make a change, giving the employee a thoughtful, respectful explanation of why not, is the best reward you can offer for their Radical Candor. Sometimes they’ll come around, sometimes not. Sometimes they may even spot flaws in your reasoning that causes you to reconsider. Or the reward for their candor might have to be a full explanation of why you disagree, an openness which invites them to poke some more at your logic, and a clear idea of when it’s time to stop arguing and commit.

Gauge the guidance you get. Try keeping a tally. How many times each week do the people reporting to you criticize you? How often do they praise you? If it’s all praise and no criticism, beware! You’re having smoke blown up your rear end. You need to work harder to get them to criticize you. Try teaching the people on your team about the idea of Radical Candor. Explain why you don’t want them to be ruinously empathetic or manipulatively insincere with you. Tell them you’d welcome Radical Candor, but you’d prefer Obnoxious Aggression to silence. Print out the Radical Candor framework, and when you’re having a conversation and you feel like somebody is pulling their punches, point to Radical Candor and ask them to go there. If keeping a tally or printing out frameworks seems tedious to you, try the Candor Gauge we built to help with this. (www.radicalcandor.com/).

ORANGE BOX

Make it not just safe but natural to criticize you

JOHNSON & JOHNSON’S ORIGINAL credo had an interesting line: “Employees should have an organized system for suggestions and complaints.” When it got rewritten, this intention got watered down into a much vaguer and less useful statement: “Employees must feel free to make suggestions and complaints.” If you’re the boss, you have to do much better than announce how employees “must” feel. Employees won’t feel free if you don’t take specific actions to ensure that it’s not just safe but expected to make suggestions and complaints. You have to organize a system. But it needn’t be elaborate.

Michael Dearing, who defined product marketing at eBay in 2002 and is now the CEO of the successful seed-stage fund Harrison Metal, used a simple but effective technique for getting people to criticize him. He put an orange box with a slit on the top in a high-traffic area so that people could drop questions or feedback into it. At his all-hands meeting he’d reach into the box and answer off the cuff. A good friend of mine, Ann Poletti, who used to work on Michael’s team, said that no matter how banal the question, he was “always amazingly respectful and took on each question thoughtfully.”

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Here’s how Ann described it: “Taking Q&A with a team of 200-plus when the business was very turbulent and eBay was in the midst of switching CEOs … must have worn him out—he’s an introvert. I know he hated doing it, but he never seemed annoyed or impatient, in fact he made it look like he enjoyed the questions.” By proving to the team that he would fix problems when people pointed them out rather than shoot the messenger, Michael eventually built a culture where people would challenge him directly. Over time the orange box emptied out. When people had an issue, they would stand up and ask direct questions, or simply drop by his cube.

MANAGEMENT “FIX-IT” WEEKS

ENGINEERING ORGANIZATIONS OFTEN do the equivalent of spring cleaning. Everyone will stop working on new features for a week and fix bugs in the current product. Engineering teams are constantly tracking and evaluating bugs, so that they have a prioritized list to tackle when the so-called “fix-it” week comes around. A bug fix-it week is sort of the opposite of a Hack Week; instead of a chance to work on new and exciting ideas people usually don’t have time to get to, it’s a chance to fix old and annoying problems that have been bothering people for months. It’s like cleaning out the utensil drawer into which you spilled a little honey three months ago but somehow never found the moment to take all the knives and forks out to scrub the bottom of the drawer properly. Fix-it weeks can be deeply satisfying in a totally different way from hack weeks.

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At some point, a team at Google decided that it would be good hygiene to have regular management fix-it weeks. (Later, another team did a similar thing but called it “bureaucracy busters.”) Here’s how it worked: a system was created where people could log annoying management issues. If, for example, it took too long to get expense reports approved, you could file a management “bug.” And you could do the same if performance reviews always seemed to take place at the worst possible time of year, or if the last employee survey took too long to fill out, or if the promotion system seemed unfair, and so on.

The management bug tracking system was public, so people could vote to set priorities. Somebody was assigned the job of reading through them all and grouping duplicates. Then, during management fix-it week, managers would have bugs assigned to them. They’d cancel all regularly scheduled activities (or most of them) and focus on fixing the management issues that were most annoying to the organization.

GIVING IMPROMPTU GUIDANCE

SO FAR WE’VE dealt with getting your team to give you feedback. I put that first because I wanted to emphasize that it has to be a two-way street. But in fact, it starts with you. If you don’t have the courage to give Radically Candid guidance, the people who report to you won’t believe you really want to get it from them, so you won’t hear about it when your team thinks you’re veering off course. And if you don’t lead by example, the people on your team are unlikely to guide each other.

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Be humble

I start with being humble because it’s absolutely essential when delivering both praise and criticism. We’re all naturally defensive when first criticized, but if you deliver criticism humbly, it breaks down the natural resistance to what you’re saying. Being humble is just as important when delivering praise. Otherwise, you sound patronizing or dishonest. Furthermore, a common concern that people raise about giving feedback is “What if I’m wrong?” My answer is that you may very well be wrong. And telling somebody what you think gives them the opportunity to tell you if you are. A huge part of what makes giving guidance so valuable is that misperceptions on both sides of the equation get corrected.

Here are some techniques I’ve found helpful to make sure I’m being humble when giving praise and criticism:

Situation, behavior, impact. The Center for Creative Leadership, an executive-education company, developed a technique called “situation behavior impact” to help leaders be more precise and therefore less arrogant when giving feedback. This simple technique reminds you to describe three things when giving feedback: 1) the situation you saw, 2) the behavior (i.e., what the person did, either good or bad), and 3) the impact you observed. This helps you avoid making judgments about the person’s intelligence, common sense, innate goodness, or other personal attributes. When you pass blanket judgments, your guidance sounds arrogant.

A simple example from everyday life: instead of yelling, “You asshole!” when somebody grabs your parking space, try saying, “I’ve been waiting for that spot here for five minutes, and you just zipped in front of me and took it. Now I’m going to be late.” If you say this, you give the person a chance to say, “Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t realize, let me move.” Of course, the person might also just flip you off and say, “Tough shit.” Then you can yell with more justification, “You asshole!” :)

Situation, behavior, and impact applies to praise as well as to criticism. Praise can feel just as arrogant as criticism. When somebody says, “You’re a genius,” it begs a question: “Who are you to judge my intelligence?” When somebody says, “I’m so proud of you!” it’s natural to think, “Who are you to be proud of me?” Better to say, “In your presentation at this morning’s meeting (situation), the way you talked about our decision to diversify (behavior) was persuasive because you showed everyone you’d heard the other point of view (impact).”

It’s the fear of sounding arrogant or patronizing that sometimes makes me hesitate to give praise to people properly. Using these three touchstones helps.

Left-hand column. Chris Argyris, a professor at Harvard Business School, and Donald Schön, a professor of philosophy and urban planning, developed an exercise called the “left-hand column.” This method also helps leaders avoid letting arrogant snap judgments seep out into their guidance.

Here’s how it works. Think of a conversation you had that was frustrating. Take out a clean sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. Write down what you actually said in the right-hand column. Write down what you thought in the left-hand column. Now think about when the conversation went sideways. Did what you think spill out into what you said? The point is not just to say whatever is in your left-hand column; it’s to have the humility to question what you’re thinking—“Is Sally really hoarding information, or did she just forget to tell me?” “Is Sam really unreliable, or did I just not define the requirements clearly enough?”

“Ontological Humility.” Fred Kofman argues for the importance of reflecting your core values in the way you work. His book Conscious Business includes a chapter titled “Ontological Humility,” which reminds us not to confuse objective reality with our subjective experience. He explains by quoting his daughter: “Broccoli is yucky. That’s why I don’t like it.” This is funny in a three-year-old, but when adults confuse subjective tastes with objective reality, it’s arrogant. “He is an idiot. That’s why he’s wrong.” The idea is that when you are mindful that your subjective experience is not objective truth, it can help you challenge others in a way that invites a reciprocal challenge.

Be helpful

It’s obvious that being helpful is a great way to show that you care personally, and that the whole point of challenging directly is to be helpful.

Still, it’s hard to do. You’re really busy, and besides, you don’t have all the answers—you’re humble, right? The good news is that being helpful doesn’t mean you have to be omniscient or do everybody else’s work for them. It just means you have to find a way to help them clarify the challenge they’re facing—that clarity is a gift that will enable them to move forward. Here are some tips and reminders:

Stating your intention to be helpful can lower defenses. When you tell somebody that you aren’t trying to bust their chops—that you really want to help—it can go a long way toward making them receptive to what you’re saying. Try a little preamble. For example, in your own words, say something like, “I’m going to describe a problem I see; I may be wrong, and if I am I hope you’ll tell me; if I’m not I hope my bringing it up will help you fix it.”

Show, don’t tell. It’s the best advice I’ve ever gotten for story-telling, but it also applies to guidance. The more clearly you show exactly what is good or bad, the more helpful your guidance will be. Often you’ll be tempted not to describe the details because they are so painful. You want to spare the person the pain and yourself the awkwardness of uttering the words out loud. But retreating to abstractions is a prime example of Ruinous Empathy. Further, it can actually unintentionally signal that the behavior in question was so bad/shameful that you can’t even talk about it, thereby making it hard for the person to move on. I once had to say, “When we were in that meeting and you passed a note to Catherine that said ‘Check out Elliot picking his nose—I think he just nicked his brain,’ Elliot wound up seeing it. It pissed him off unnecessarily, made it harder for you to work together, and was the single biggest contributing factor to our being late on this project.” The whole situation was so ridiculous that it was tempting just to say, “What you did in the meeting was juvenile.” But that wouldn’t have been as clear or as helpful.

And again, the same principle goes for praise. Don’t say, “She is really smart.” Say, “She just gave the clearest explanation I’ve ever heard of why users don’t like that feature.” By explicitly describing what was good or what was bad, you are helping a person do more of what’s good and less of what’s bad—and to see the difference.

Finding help is better than offering it yourself. When Sheryl Sandberg offered to get me a speaking coach, she did have to budget for it, but she didn’t have to sit there watching me practice presentations for hours. It took some of her time but not too much.

You won’t always be so lucky to have the budget for coaches that Sheryl had at Google. But more often than not you will have a colleague or acquaintance who can help. All you have to do is to make the introduction and help your direct report structure the conversation.

Guidance is a gift, not a whip or a carrot. It took me a long time to learn that sometimes the only help I had to offer was the conversation itself. Adopting the mindset that guidance is a gift will ensure that your guidance is helpful even when you can’t offer actual assistance, solutions, or an introduction to someone who can help. Don’t let the fact that you can’t offer a solution make you reluctant to offer guidance. Think about times that guidance has been most helpful to you, and offer it in that spirit.

Give feedback immediately

Giving guidance as quickly and as informally as possible is an essential part of Radical Candor, but it takes discipline—both because of our natural inclination to delay/avoid confrontation and because our days are busy enough as it is. But this is one of those cases where the difference in terms of time spent and impact is huge. Delay at your peril!

If you wait too long to give guidance, everything about it gets harder. You know how it is when you kick things down the road—you notice a problem and note that you need to deal with it, but you don’t take the time to write it down. Then it occurs to you, and you need to sit and remember what precisely the problem was. Then you need to remember to schedule the meeting. You’re beginning to need a list of the things you’ve intended to say but haven’t. And then before the meeting, you need to find time to remember what’s on the list of random things you’ve been intending to say but failing to jot down. The list of things won’t really hang together—you will no longer be able to remember clear examples of the problem—so you won’t be able to use the “situation behavior impact” model, and you’ll end up with a confused, frustrated colleague. What, exactly, are you criticizing? Putting criticism off is simply daunting and exhausting. It’s much more effective and less burdensome to just say it right away!

Of course, there are times when you should wait to praise or criticize somebody. Generally, if either you or the other person is hungry, angry, or tired, or for some other reason not in a good frame of mind, it’s better to wait. However, this is the exception not the rule, and too often we use the exception as an excuse not to do what we know we should do. Finally, there is a difference between saying it right away and nitpicking. If it’s not important, don’t say it right away or at all.

Say it in 2–3 minutes between meetings. Just saying it right away in a minute or two, three at most, will take less time than scheduling a meeting for later, let alone having it—and it won’t stick around in your mind, worrying you at odd moments. When I teach classes on Radical Candor, the single most common question people ask is, “How do I find the time?” At first, I took this as a sign that they hadn’t bought my argument about how important guidance was. But after more conversations, I realized that people actually don’t believe it can be quick. They think it’s an hour-long conversation they need to schedule. They think giving good guidance is going to add hours of meetings to each week. They think of it like a root canal. Try thinking of it as brushing your teeth instead. Don’t write it in your calendar; just do it consistently, and maybe you won’t ever have to get a root canal.

So let me reiterate: impromptu guidance really, truly is something you can squeeze in between meetings in three minutes or less. If you give it right away in between meetings, you will not only save yourself a subsequent meeting but also deliver the guidance in less time than it would take you to schedule the subsequent meeting. And the quality of your guidance will be much better. The best guidance I’ve gotten in my life generally happened in super-quick conversations on the fly, like my exchange with Sheryl. If you have five direct reports and you want to offer each praise three times a week and criticism once a week, this is far more impromptu feedback than most managers offer. And it will just take you a maximum of sixty minutes per week—all those minutes grabbed from the time you’d otherwise spend just walking between meetings. But doing it does require energy and consciousness.

Keep slack time in your calendar, or be willing to be late. Prioritizing something generally means making time in your calendar for it. But how do you make time in your calendar for something that is “impromptu”? You can’t. Better to talk to the person right away. But in order for that to happen, you must do one of two things. One, keep slack time in your calendar, either by not scheduling back-to-back meetings or by having twenty-five- and fifty-minute meetings with hard stops, not thirty- and sixty-minute meetings. Or, simply be willing to be late to your next meeting.

Don’t “save up” guidance for a 1:1 or a performance review. One of the funniest things about becoming a boss is that it causes an awful lot of people to forget everything they know about how to relate to other people. If you have a beef with somebody in your personal life, it would never occur to you to wait for a formally scheduled meeting to tell them. Yet, management has been bureaucratized to the point that we throw away effective strategies of everyday communication. Don’t let the formal processes—the 1:1 meetings, annual or biannual performance reviews, or employee happiness surveys—take over. They are meant to reinforce, not substitute, what we do every day. You’d never let the fact that you go to the dentist for a cleaning a couple times a year prevent you from brushing your teeth every day. Don’t use performance reviews as an excuse not to give impromptu in-person feedback.

Guidance has a short half-life. If you wait to tell somebody for a week or a quarter, the incident is so far in the past that they can’t fix the problem or build on the success.

Unspoken criticism explodes like a dirty bomb. Just as in your personal life, remaining silent at work for too long about something that angers or frustrates you makes it more likely that you will eventually blow up in a way that makes you look irrational, harms your relationship, or both. Don’t let this happen to you. Unless you feel you’re in a rage, just say what you’re thinking right away!

Avoid black holes. Be sure to let people know immediately how their work is being received. If you ask somebody to do work to help you prepare for a meeting or a presentation where that person won’t be present, be sure to let them know the reaction to their work. If you don’t, the person who did the work feels as if their efforts have gone into a black hole. It is important to pass on both praise and criticism for the contributions they made. Better, of course, is to let people present their own work whenever possible so they can get guidance first-hand. Even at nonhierarchical Google, praise from my boss always meant more to the people working for me than guidance from me.

In person (if possible)

Remember, the clarity of your guidance gets measured at the other person’s ear, not at your mouth. That’s why it’s best to deliver guidance in person. You won’t really know if the other person understood what you were saying if you can’t see the reaction. If you don’t know whether what you said was clear to the other person, you may as well not have said it. And most communication is nonverbal. When you see a person’s body language and facial expression, you can adjust how you are delivering the message so they can best hear it. It is far easier to tell if the other person understood you clearly when you can look into their eyes, notice if they are fidgeting, folding their arms, etc.

Often the reason why you’ll be tempted not to deliver guidance in person is that you are trying to avoid seeing the other person’s emotional reaction. This is natural. But the quality of your guidance will improve if you’re present for these feelings. If somebody is upset, this gives you an opportunity to show compassion—to go up on the “care personally” dimension of the Radical Candor framework. The emotional response of the other person will help you better understand how your message landed, and to adjust. When somebody is blowing you off (as I did Sheryl when she first told me I said “um” a lot), you know you have to go further on the “challenge directly” dimension of the Radical Candor framework. But when someone is upset or angry, focus on showing that you care personally, don’t let the emotions knock you off your good intention to challenge directly.

Unfortunately, giving guidance in person is not always possible. When that is the case, here are some things to keep in mind:

Immediate vs. in person. If the person is in another city and giving guidance in person means waiting more than a few days, then optimize for immediacy unless what you’re talking about is a big deal. (Don’t fire somebody via text.) If the person is down the hall, and doing it in person means just taking a little walk, then get off your butt!

Hierarchy of modes. A video call, if you have high-speed internet access, is second best. If the connection is spotty, use phone for voice and video as a bonus, muting your computer. Phone is third best. Email and text should be avoided if at all possible. It always feels faster to fire off an email or text, but when I think about all the times I had to spend hours clearing up a misunderstanding that arose from an email that was misunderstood, I realize that it’s actually faster to walk down the hall or if the person is remote pick up the phone.

Multiple modes. I found that praising people at a public all-hands meeting was a great way to share significant accomplishments. However, I often found that following up in person at a 1:1 carried more emotional weight, and following up with an email to the whole team carried more lasting weight.

Reply All do’s and don’ts. If you must criticize or correct somebody over email, do not Reply All. Never. Even if there’s a small factual error that went out to a lot of people, reply just to the person who made the factual error and ask that person to Reply All. For praise on small things, I found that a quick Reply All email worked pretty well. This kind of praise takes only a moment, and it shows that you are noticing and appreciating what’s going on around you. If you can remember to mention it in person when you pass the person in the hallway or walk by their desk, so much the better. But don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good.

Being in a remote office is hard. If you are in a remote office, or if you are managing people in remote offices, it’s really important to have quick, frequent interactions. This will allow you to pick up on people’s most subtle emotional cues. I learned this from Maurice Tempelsman, my boss when I lived in Russia. He made a point of calling me every day from New York, if only for a three-minute check-in call. He had operations in Africa in the 1970s and had learned the importance of frequent communication to pick up on emotional cues from people in far-flung locations. In fact, he claimed he could sense a person’s mood even when phone calls were impossible and he had to rely on telex—but only if he got in the habit of telexing daily. (Telex was the technology used in between the telegraph and the fax machine.)

Praise in public, criticize in private

A good rule of thumb for guidance is praise in public, criticize in private. Public criticism tends to trigger a defensive reaction and make it much harder for a person to accept they’ve made a mistake and to learn from it. Public praise tends to lend more weight to the praise, and it encourages others to emulate whatever was great. However, this is a rule of thumb, not a hard and fast rule. Here are some things to think about.

Corrections, factual observations, disagreements, and debates are different from criticism. It’s vital to be able to correct somebody’s work, to make a factual observation, or to have a debate in public. But criticizing a person should be done in private—“There’s a typo on slide six,” or “There are a lot of typos in this presentation, and given the nature of our work we need to be 100 percent accurate,” or “There are a bunch of typos here but they don’t matter too much at this stage,” or “You missed your number by 5 percent,” or “I disagree with what you just said.” Those kinds of corrections could go out over email or be said in a public meeting. Here is an example of criticizing the person: “When you give several important presentations that are all riddled with typos that a simple spell-checker would catch, I start to wonder what’s going on. Can you explain?” That sort of thing needs to be a private conversation.

Adapt to an individual’s preferences. While the majority of people do like to be praised in public, for some any kind of public mention is cruel and unusual punishment. When you’re praising people, your goal is to let them know what they did well as clearly as possible and in the way that will make them feel best—not the way you’d like to hear it. When you care personally about each individual working for you, when you’ve taken the time to get to know each person, being aware of these preferences is natural.

Group learning. I’ve rarely encountered anyone who will admit that they like to be praised publicly. So whenever I praised in public I would explain that I wasn’t doing so because the person wanted public praise, but so that everybody could learn from what had happened. Something like, “Not because I want to embarrass Jane, but to make sure all of you learn from what she did, I’m going to tell you what she just accomplished, and how she did it.” When I wanted to encourage public criticism so that everyone learns from one another’s mistakes, I’d let it be self-reported. (See “Whoops the Monkey” later in this chapter.)

Don’t personalize

There is a big difference between caring personally and personalizing when giving praise and criticism. Caring personally is good. Personalizing is bad. Here are some tips that can help you avoid personalizing but accept it when people take what you say personally:

The “fundamental attribution error” will harm the effectiveness of your guidance. This phrase was coined by Lee Ross, a social psychologist from Stanford. We’ve touched on this already, but it’s useful to repeat because it is so central to healthy human relationships, whether with spouses, children, friends, or the people who report to you. Making a fundamental attribution error is using perceived personality attributes—“You’re stupid, lazy, greedy, hypocritical, an asshole,” etc.—to explain someone else’s behavior rather than considering one’s own behavior and/or the situational factors that were probably the real cause of the other person’s behavior. It’s a problem because 1) it’s generally inaccurate and 2) it renders an otherwise solvable problem really hard to fix since changing core personality attributes is so very difficult and time-consuming. In the story I told in chapter two the problem with the AdSense policy was not that Larry was greedy; it was that I didn’t understand his proposal. But it was so much easier and more satisfying in the moment to just accuse Larry of being greedy. Try to catch yourself when you think or say, “You are ____.” Use situation, behavior, impact, or the left-hand column techniques to be humble and to avoid personalizing.

Say “that’s wrong” not “you’re wrong.” I once worked with a Radically Candid guy who had an unfair reputation for being an a-hole. Once people got to know him well, they realized he wasn’t a jerk, he was just super intense; in fact, he cared as deeply about his colleagues as he did about the quality of the work they did together. His work was so good that the short-term impression he made didn’t stop him from being successful. But the fact that he rubbed people the wrong way often created a lot of unnecessary stress for both him and his team. I moved from New York to California, and I lost touch with him for a few years. Then I happened to meet somebody who’d just joined his team. I braced myself for a request for advice about how to work with him, but all I heard was, “Oh, he’s such a great guy! I love working with him. He has a reputation for being one of the most supportive people at our company.” I called up my friend to pass along the compliment, and to ask how he’d pulled this off. He told me that a simple suggestion had helped him turn things around. What was it? He stopped saying, “You’re wrong,” and instead learned to say, “I think that’s wrong.” “I think” was humbler, and saying “that” instead of “you” didn’t personalize. People started to be more receptive to his criticism.

All too often, an argument over something simple—“Should we go left or go right? Should we put the button at the top or at the bottom?”—becomes a contest of egos: “You are a moron! You are an arrogant jerk!” When an argument is about an issue, keep it about the issue. Personalizing unnecessarily will only make the issue harder to resolve.

The phrase “don’t take it personally” is worse than useless. I’ve warned against personalizing, but even when you take the steps outlined above—even when you don’t personalize—feedback is personal for the person receiving it. Most of us pour more time and energy into our work than anything else in our lives. Work is a part of who we are, and so it is personal. Thus when you try to soften the blow by saying, “Don’t take it personally,” you are in effect negating those feelings. It’s like saying, “Don’t be sad,” or “Don’t be mad.” Part of your job as a boss (and as a human being) is to acknowledge and deal with emotional responses, not to dismiss or avoid them.

How not to personalize even when it really is personal. It’s easier to understand how to avoid personalizing guidance when you’re talking about a person’s work. But when you’re talking about something that is more personal, it’s even harder. One woman I worked with had body odor to the point that it undermined her effectiveness. But how to raise the issue? I tried hard to make the conversation about her colleagues’ noses, not her armpits. She wasn’t American, but we were working in the U.S., so I laughed a little bit about American culture. I tried not to be prescriptive about the solution—maybe she had an allergic reaction to deodorant, or a health concern—but I did make clear that the status quo was undermining her otherwise strong performance. She looked embarrassed, but she fixed the problem. Five years later, she wrote me a note thanking me. A manager now, facing a similar situation, she finally understood how hard raising the issue must have been for me. But she had also noticed a remarkable increase in people’s willingness to work with her once she addressed the body odor problem. So she knew how important it was to overcome her own reluctance, and find a way to explain the problem to the person reporting to her.