A scene from “The Office.”
NBC-TV
When you’ve watched HBO’s “Silicon Valley” or NBC’s “The Office,” you have seen several examples of obnoxious aggression and manipulative insecurity exhibited by leaders.
It almost goes without saying that actual managers shouldn’t look to mimic Michael Scott, or the command-and-control culture dramatized on television. As a substitute, leaders should strive for what former Apple and Google executive Kim Scott calls the unconventional candor approach, showing that you simply care personally while difficult directly.
While the concept is straightforward, Scott told CNBC Senior Media & Tech Reporter Julia Boorstin on the recent Disruptor 50 Connect event in San Francisco that she views it as radical because it may possibly be difficult to show you care while difficult a peer at the identical time.
“It’s rare that we do each at the identical time, especially with feedback at work, but really feedback in any a part of your life,” Scott said. “It is a matter of existential dread.”
Avoiding the fear of providing honest feedback
That fear often keeps leaders from providing feedback that matches into the unconventional candor bucket, as a substitute moving towards three forms of negative feedback that Scott outlined in her “Radical Candor” book: Obnoxious aggression, or praise that does not feel sincere and feedback not delivered kindly; ruinous empathy, or feedback that tries to spare someone’s short-term feelings but doesn’t tell them what they need to know; or manipulative insincerity, actions like backstabbing or passive aggressiveness, which Scott said is the worst form of feedback failure.
Scott said that the challenge for CEOs and leaders is balancing the need to be “compassionately candid without being ruinously empathetic,” something that may be solved by soliciting feedback.
“On the core of radical candor is an excellent relationship between manager and worker, between peers, and up, down and sideways,” she said. “It’s about an excellent relationship, and there are few things which are more destructive to an excellent relationship than an influence imbalance, so if you will have power, I like to recommend learning how to lay it down, learning how to solicit feedback from people, and prove to them that it isn’t only secure for them to inform you what they really think, but that they will be rewarded.”
Being tough but fair
Amid recent leadership scandals in addition to the broader societal changes which have occurred, leaders will worry about upsetting workers when providing firmer feedback, but that is not any excuse for being a poor communicator, Scott said.
“What’s happening now could be we suddenly became aware of a bunch of things that we must always have been aware of before, but we weren’t, and other people have retreated to manipulative insincerity, where they’re neither caring nor difficult,” Scott said. “They’re so concerned about their popularity as leaders that they are saying nothing, and I get this query with some frequency from CEOs who tell me they are not going to give feedback to certain people on their team because ‘I’ll get in trouble with HR.'”
Scott said it requires leaders who’re willing to “challenge directly, even further than it’s possible you’ll be comfortable going,” while also being aware of how what you are saying is landing.
“Despite the whole lot you would possibly read on social media, most of us do actually care personally, but we’re so anxious about not upsetting someone or hurting their feelings or offending them, we fail to tell them something they’d be higher off knowing,” she said.