Ever feel like caring about a coworker is just…not in the cards? Same. Here’s the thing though – you don’t have to be besties to show respect and keep things productive. In this episode, Kim, Amy, and Jason tackle the tough question of how to Care Personally when someone’s driving you up the wall.
Listen to the episode:
Episode at a Glance: How to Care Personally
The key takeaway? Stop writing mental soap operas about your colleagues and start having real conversations. Awkward? Sure. Worth it? Absolutely.
Radical Candor Podcast Checklist: How to Care Personally
- Tip number one, we don’t have to like everyone we work with. And we don’t have to be okay with a particular action a person took. We can still insist that there be consequences for harmful actions and we can still hold people accountable. But we do have to respect them. And by respect, have sort of an unconditional regard for every person’s humanity if we want to be able to work together productively while also leaving space. Disagree and hold each other accountable for either sloppy work or for harming each other. You don’t want to fall below that kind of core respect on the care personally dimension.
- Tip number two: Caring personally isn’t about being BFFs with everyone you work with, but it is about showing genuine interest in the wellbeing and success of the people who work with you, and if you’re a leader, for you. Remember that your role as a manager is to support your team’s success, even when personal connections aren’t strong. But for all of us at work, whether we’re focusing on direct reports, peers, or our own bosses, the point is we’re working with other people. And so consider that you and that person you’re struggling to connect with might be optimizing for different things.
- Tip number three, sometimes our lack of connection might come from an unconscious bias. Ask yourself why you might be struggling to connect with someone. Have you made up a story in your head with them as the villain? Push yourself to see their strengths, their positive contributions. And to get to know them by asking questions and listening to their answers. By being willing to be vulnerable yourself and sharing your own perspective with them. Sometimes it feels especially risky when we don’t feel connected, but there’s no way out but through. Someone’s got to start and it could start with you.
- Tip number four: Own your own feelings of dislike. Don’t pretend to yourself or to other people that you feel differently than you do. And if you really can’t overcome that feeling of dislike, go to your boss and try to help this person find a better boss for them. If you really can’t, if you really hate their guts, don’t fake it.
Radical Candor Podcast Resources:
- What It Means to Care Personally About Your Team
- What’s the Ideal Manager-Employee Relationship?
- What does it mean to Care Personally?
- How to Develop Empathy for Someone Who Annoys You
- What Is Radical Respect? Learn Why It’s Crucial for a Healthy Workplace Culture
- Beware The Fundamental Attribution Error: Radical Candor Podcast 5 | 8
- How to Give Difficult Feedback While Still Caring Personally
- Adam Grant | Instagram
- How to Care Personally About Someone You Don’t Like
- How to Care Personally When You Don’t Like Someone
The TLDR Radical Candor Podcast Transcript
[00:00:00] Kim Scott: Hello everybody. Welcome to the Radical Candor podcast. I’m Kim Scott.
[00:00:07] Jason Rosoff: I’m Jason Rosoff.
[00:00:09] Amy Sandler: And I’m Amy Sandler. And today we’re talking about those times when we meet colleagues or team members or clients or other folks that we work with that we don’t immediately connect with. And this can make practicing Radical Candor a bit of a challenge. So today we’re answering a listener’s question about how do I care personally about someone I don’t necessarily like.
[00:00:35] This person writes, quote, thank you for the great information you share. I’m using your model to improve the feedback that managers give in our organization. One of the things that concerns me the most as a manager and as someone who trains managers to give feedback to their employees is what happens when we struggle to care personally for our employees. It’s hard to fake, and I fear it often hinders our ability to provide Radical Candor. There are employees we simply don’t like, or we simply don’t click, making practicing Radical Candor very difficult. Jason, thoughts?
[00:01:14] Jason Rosoff: Many.
[00:01:15] Amy Sandler: With or care personally, Jason?
[00:01:17] Jason Rosoff: I think my first one is just an acknowledgment, uh, that we’re not necessarily going to love every single person that we work with. So I just want to normalize a little bit that this is not, you’re not weird if you don’t love every person on your team.
[00:01:34] Kim Scott: I would say, not only are you not going to love them, there will be people who work for you who bug the living shit out of you. I think that’s what we’re talking about, what do we do with those people?
[00:01:46] Jason Rosoff: Well, there’s a range of things here, Kim, and I’m reading more than one of them into this. Is like some people it’s sort of like it borders close, it’s closer to indifference meaning like they’re not connecting. The words they use are like we’re not, we don’t connect with them. But I do think you’re going to work with and for people who bug you.
[00:02:07] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:02:07] Jason Rosoff: I think that is, that is absolutely true
[00:02:09] Amy Sandler: Kim just to build on the fact that we might actually, uh have a challenge liking someone. But in Radical Respect, you talk about, um, the definition of respect, which is really about seeing the other person’s humanity. So can you aim this conversation from your definition of respect and how that relates to caring personally?
[00:02:33] Kim Scott: Yeah, so if you think about the Radical Candor two by two framework. And you think about the care personally line, that vertical line, I would say in the middle of the line is basically respect. Respect meaning unconditional regard for the other person’s humanity, for your shared humanity with that person. And that’s the line beneath which you don’t want to fall. And so even if someone really bugs you, even if someone does something that really bothers you, um, it is important for you not to allow whatever that irritant is, uh, to push you below that line. You can still have a regard for their humanity, uh, I believe. And I’m not saying it’s easy, but you don’t need to allow whatever it is that this person does that bothers you, or maybe you just don’t connect, as Jason said. But I of course go immediately to the extreme, like, they really bother you. Uh, you can still have a regard for their humanity, you can still treat them with respect, even if they do something that really bugs you.
[00:03:48] Jason Rosoff: It’s interesting because the, we’ve had a couple of conversations over the last few weeks in which this particular topic has bubbled up. And one of the examples that was given as a way to start to think about the difference between, uh, above and below the line is whether you can imagine that you can still perceive the other person as a human being with thoughts, feelings that are of value, even when you feel annoyed with them. And so the illustration of this was the, you know, someone cuts you off on the highway.
[00:04:22] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:04:23] Jason Rosoff: And do you imagine that that person is a jerk and they’re speeding and they have no regard for you or other people, they’re sort of you falling below that line. You see them as their emotions and feelings and experience are not important, just their impact on you. That’s the only thing that matters.
[00:04:38] Or can you imagine, that person’s son is dying in the hospital and they’re rushing to see that per, to see their son before they pass away. And it, that, that’s sort of like mental trick to say like to reframe and say that this person is a human being and they have a story that I don’t know. That I don’t know I don’t fully understand. And at the, at a minimum I’m going to demonstrate respect for that man, for that experience, even if I am very upset by their behavior.
[00:05:05] Kim Scott: I’ll give you an example of a time when I worked for someone and I did something that bugged the living shit out of her. So I’m very disorganized. I’m extremely disorganized. I, you know, I leave my power cords everywhere, I don’t have chargers, I cannot remember to charge my phone. I, you know, I’m always on the verge of running out of gas. Like, that’s just kind of how I move through the world. And this really bothered my boss. She was like, she just couldn’t imagine living that way.
[00:05:37] And it always caught, it caused her a certain amount of stress. Like I don’t, it doesn’t cause me that much stress. It causes me more stress to get organized or whatever. I don’t know why I move through the world that way. But she, one time we were flying somewhere together. And she had forgotten her power cord and she was so stressed. She like went marching down the aisle of the airplane, asking people if they had the same computer and she could use their, um, their power cord like that. Like I would never have, I would have just said, okay, I’m going to, you know, whatever, read a book and watch a movie.
[00:06:17] Um, and at one point she turned to me and she said, gosh, this gives me so much sympathy for you. This, you must feel like, you must feel this stressed all the time. Like she asked a very, I mean, it could have been, I could have interpreted it as a rude question, but I felt like it was a very human question. She was like, this is really stressful for me. How can you stand to be this way all the time? And we actually had a good conversation around it. And, um, and I think it made her like me more and me like her more. So it allowed us to move up a little bit on the care personally dimension.
[00:06:57] So sometimes if there’s something someone does on a consistent basis that really bothers you, rather than remaining silent and then making up a story in your head, kind of like the, that’s what you were talking about somebody cut you off in traffic. Like there was one person who worked for me who smelled really bad. He didn’t use deodorant. And I found myself like really not wanting to walk into a room with him, not wanting to have a one on one with him, like, and then making up a story about what a horrible inconsiderate person he was. And I realized I was better off just talking about the fact with him. Uh, I, you know, I, and I thought about this, am I intruding? Is this incorrect? Is this like some kind of feedback that crosses a line?
[00:07:47] Uh, and I just decided it was going to be easier for him to use deodorant than for me to overcome my disgust at the way he smelled. And, uh, and so we had, and after we had a conversation, it was like, it was uncomfortable, but it wasn’t, he did start using deodorant actually. So I don’t know what you all think about that, those two examples, but those are some examples of like figuring out how to, uh, share what’s really bothering you about something someone else is doing.
[00:08:17] Amy Sandler: Well, Kim, what I heard in those stories, I mean, the first one with your boss was really about curiosity,
[00:08:25] Kim Scott: Yes.
[00:08:25] Amy Sandler: And connecting, like your boss was saying like, hey, this is really stressful for me and this happens to all the time and like it must be really stressful for you. And so for me that I would say curiosity is the biggest thing that I see here. And realizing that your emotional way of being in the world is very different from your bosses. And we tend to sort of ascribe our own psychological, mental, emotional framework to other people.
[00:08:52] Um, and so that was why curiosity was so helpful. And then the second one was actually having that conversation. So I think those were two different ones. Can I share something that I read in the last week that I found very helpful from Adam Grant that I wanted to bring in to the group?
[00:09:10] Kim Scott: Sure.
[00:09:10] Amy Sandler: Did either of you see, and I’m probably not going to pronounce this correctly, but it was a post about the word sonder, that really don’t think I’m going to pronounce correctly, K O E N I G, Koenig, in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Um, so if you will forgive me, I’m just going to read a little because I thought this was so beautiful from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
[00:09:32] You are the main character, the protagonist, the star at the center of your own unfolding story. You’re surrounded by your supporting cast. Friends and family hanging in your immediate orbit, scattered a little further out, a network of acquaintances who drift in and out of contact over the years. But there in the background, faint and out of focus are the extras, the random passers by, each living a life as vivid and complex as your own. They carry on invisibly around you, bearing the accumulated weight of their own ambitions, friends, routines, mistakes, worries, triumphs, and inherited craziness. When your life moves on to the next scene, there’s flickers in place, wrapped in a cloud of backstory and inside jokes and characters, strung together with countless other stories you’ll never be able to see, that you’ll never know exist, in which you might appear only once as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
[00:10:34] I thought that was so beautiful. And obviously when we’re working together, people are more than passing acquaintances, but I think it just gets to that sense that when we arrive at work with other people, we don’t know what they are bringing to us, to Jason’s point about the person cutting us off on the highway. We don’t know where they’re going and what got them there.
[00:10:57] Jason Rosoff: Yeah.
[00:10:57] Kim Scott: We often haven’t had time to learn their backstory and to get to know them.
[00:11:02] Amy Sandler: Yeah.
[00:11:02] Jason Rosoff: The thing I wanted to point out, Kim, about your two examples is that what was dangerous in both examples was the un, the, it wasn’t just that you had a neutral impression, or your boss had a neutral impression of your disorganization. Your boss had made up a story about what it was like to be you. And in the other case, you were making up a story about what it was like to be the person with the body odor, like, what they were thinking or imagining. And that is, like, that is fundamentally human. Like when there’s a blank in our experience, we try to fill the blank in.
[00:11:37] Kim Scott: Yes.
[00:11:38] Jason Rosoff: Uh, and I think that’s really, if we want to regard people’s humanity, we have to resist the temptation to fill that blank in, uh, with our own sort of like biased perception of what might be going on. Because the temptation is overwhelming basically to like to make up a story that answers the question of why this person is behaving in this way. And instead to be connected to them at least enough to talk to them about the thing that is bothering you.
[00:12:11] Kim Scott: Yes.
[00:12:11] Jason Rosoff: Like that I think is showing regard. Because one of the ways it can, we say this all the time. It’s like, uh, and something that I strongly believe is that relationships don’t become toxic because of disagreement. Relationships become toxic because of neglect, because we neglect to even try to be in connect, like being community or connection with that person.
[00:12:35] Kim Scott: Yeah, unspoken, unspoken disagreement.
[00:12:38] Amy Sandler: Yeah.
[00:12:38] Jason Rosoff: Yeah, unspoken disagreement. Exactly. Like the, your pocket veto or whatever you want to call it.
[00:12:43] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:12:43] Jason Rosoff: Like these things, that they over time, they corrode relationships. And I do think if you’re, if you live in that space for long enough, it can feel very difficult to imagine yourself getting back up to the line.
[00:12:57] Kim Scott: Yeah, yeah.
[00:12:59] Jason Rosoff: And it’s so, I guess like the thing that’s in my head is it’s so insidious the way that this works, like you don’t even realize it’s happening to you and you’re like, you’re disregard, like you’re disagreement with someone turns into disregard for that person or a feeling of animosity toward that person. And eventually it turns you, like you slide all the way down into like dehumanize, like you stop seeing that person as human and you start seeing them as the story of the villain that you’ve created in your head.
[00:13:29] Kim Scott: Yeah, as soon as you’re using words like worthless, uh, or always, or like these extreme words about people, you know you’ve slid too far down the line. I mean, one of the ways I try to think about it is, it’s human to make up like little short stories about people. And as soon as I realize I’m making up a short story, I stop. I don’t want to write a novel about this person. I want to get to know the real person instead of like going too deep into it. The danger, I had a friend of mine once would say, the danger of being friends with a novelist is that. And so I really try to make sure that I reserve my fiction for fiction and not for the real people who I’m actually encountering in the world.
[00:14:16] Amy Sandler: Yeah, well, I so appreciate that because I think just what I shared around, you know, we are all the protagonists of our own stories. And then because we’re the authors of our own stories, we are creating these other traits and characteristics of the other person. So I think just knowing that we are in our own stories and then we’re telling the other person’s story for them.
[00:14:39] So Jason, we’ve talked about curiosity and just that sense of how some of our own biases might get in the way of us caring personally. I’m curious, just from your own experience, what have you done in a practical way to move up on care personally when you have been working with someone that their behaviors or even their approach to work differed so wildly from yours?
[00:15:05] Jason Rosoff: There are a couple of things that come to mind. I was, uh, I had to work really closely with, uh, with a few people at Khan Academy who operated very differently than I did. And I feel like I fell prey to this pattern. Like, it was sort of like I had to reach rock bottom. It’s actually what had to happen for me to start to correct the problem. Which is, I got to the point where I was having this idea of like, I’ll work around this person. Like, I’ll do everything I can not to have to deal with them. Like, because I had slipped so far down the care personally axis, um, I literally saw them uh, as an antagonist. Like, as, like, someone who is against me.
[00:15:52] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:15:52] Amy Sandler: Like, not just a side character, but now they’ve turned into the villain in my story.
[00:15:57] Jason Rosoff: Correct. And I think this is what I was saying. This is the insidious thing. It’s like, when it’s a passing thing, it’s actually easier, I think, in some cases, to give the person cutting you off on the highway the benefit of the doubt than it is to give someone who pisses you off regularly the benefit of the doubt.
[00:16:12] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah. Totally.
[00:16:18] Amy Sandler: Jason, can I ask you a question on that? Because this came up recently in a workshop that I was leading where we had a couple of teams that were coming together, and there was a lot of, you know, Kim, what you call feedback debt. Where there was a lot of history, there were a bunch of cultures that were coming together, and it was clear in the group that there was a lot of both spoken and unspoken resentments about work that had happened to date. Things that hadn’t been said this, you know, this or that person cut me off in this meeting or didn’t set me up in that meeting. And so when people’s behavior has destroyed trush or trust or people don’t feel respected, Jason, I just, like, how do you, whether, you know, the experience from you having cast that person as a villain, but where do you go either when you’ve reached rock bottom or you feel like the relationship and your perception of that person has reached rock bottom because there has been some trust destroyed?
[00:17:20] Jason Rosoff: One thing that I’ve realized, uh, it, and I’m going to like, this is like very, like my journey here is like very selfish. I don’t, one thing I realized was that this person was much less stressed about our relationship than I was.
[00:17:36] Kim Scott: They really didn’t care and that gave them an advantage.
[00:17:42] Amy Sandler: They’re like, I’m the villain in your story and you are not even registering in mine, you are not even a character in my story.
[00:17:49] Jason Rosoff: It wasn’t quite that, but it was like kind of close to that actually. It wasn’t too far, it wasn’t too far off of that. And I realized also that like one of the things that I care a lot about is trying to, you know, have a positive impact on, you know, the people, especially the people who work for me. And I think that I’d started to see reflect, like, a reflection and I started to get criticism from my own team about, like, my attitude about the relationship that I had with this person.
[00:18:17] Amy Sandler: Jason, can I ask if you didn’t say this, um, and maybe you did, just to repeat the role, was it a peer of yours? This person?
[00:18:24] Jason Rosoff: Yes. This was a peer. Peer, yeah.
[00:18:25] Amy Sandler: Okay.
[00:18:25] Jason Rosoff: Yep. This was a peer. And so it sort of started to get me to take notice, and then I realized like, uh, the, like how bad I felt on a daily basis when I interacted with this person. Like it gave, it was like I was getting an ulcer from it. Like it was bothering me so much. And I think that was the, like the rock bottom moment. Like my team is criticizing me. I realized that this person doesn’t really, like, they don’t really even have a problem with me, necessarily. And I’m sitting there, you know, bile in my stomach every time I have to walk into a room with them.
[00:18:59] And I was like, what the hell is wrong with me? Like, why am I, you know what I’m saying? Like, why am I behaving this way toward this person? And I realized, like, I had allowed myself to write a novel about them. Like, in my head, there was all these reasons why they were doing these things. Um, and I had justified it by imagining that, you know, this, you know, I’ll give you like an example of a behavior that I noticed. So like this person tended to be, like, they liked to make declarative statements. Like, this is how this thing is going, this is how it works, this is how this thing is going to happen. And it left very little room for argument. And in my mind, I had become the sort of protector of the soft spoken person who didn’t feel comfortable standing up to them.
[00:19:48] But what I didn’t realize was like I wasn’t effectively doing that because I had zero effect on this person’s behavior. All of my, you know, imagining that I was somehow like, uh, defending other people, I was having no impact on this person’s behavior. Because I did not understand it. Like fundamentally I realized if I’m going to be effective in like improving the quality, the way that I work and the way my team works with this person, I need to understand it better. And like the really sad part about all of it is like, once we got over this, uh, you know, this maybe lasted, I don’t want to say a handful of months, three months, six months, something like that. Like once we got over it, we had like a quite a good relationship actually. Like we learned to work really well together.
[00:20:35] And not only that, but we started to see a little bit, perceive in our relationship a little bit of yin and yang. Like we both had ,not only like baseline human regard, but like respect for the fact that these two approaches could actually, might yield better results if we listened, like if one side listened to the other. Um, and so I think about when I read this letter, that’s kind of what I’m imagining. I’m imagining a bunch of people who are like, they have a pit in their stomach every time they go to talk to this person on their team. And not only could it potentially get better, but I think there’s actually, uh, you can transcend just good. Like you can transcend just respect. Like you can actually find a way,
[00:21:18] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:21:19] Jason Rosoff: To care about each other. And I hope that’s like, for the people who are struggling with this, I don’t, it’s not a challenge. I’m not challenging them, but I hope it’s like at least motivating. ‘Cause sometimes I think it feels like, and it wasn’t actually that much work. That’s the last thing I want to say about this. Like, all it took was me saying to this person, like really having a human conversation and saying, look, last couple of months, I’ve been extraordinarily frustrated in our relationship. I feel like these things have been going wrong. I also don’t feel like I’ve done anything to fix it. Um, like I’ve been, in my mind, I’ve been trying to address this and I haven’t done a good job of addressing it. But it’s important to me that we find a way to work well together. I’d like, I’d love to get your input on how I can approach things differently. And that changed the course of that relationship. But it was literally, like, I don’t know if I had an ulcer or not, but I was like, I was like literally taking medication. I was so, I found myself so upset by this.
[00:22:17] Kim Scott: Yeah. And I think that part of that story that really resonates for me, Jason is, especially when you feel like you’re defending other people, then it’s easy. I mean, I have done this. It’s easy to bring this like self righteous, I’m going to show you. And like, that’s, as soon as I feel self righteous, any hint of self righteousness, I try to really take a big step back, uh, because what I’m going to, whatever I’m going to do next is not going to be the right thing.
[00:22:50] Um, uh, the other thing that your story kind of brings up is like, he was optimizing for one thing and you were optimizing for another thing. And there are some times when I’ve had relationships with people, like I had a roommate once, like I very much optimize for efficiency. That’s what I’m always trying to do, is do the thing in the fastest, most efficient possible way so I can have more time to go read and write. Like that’s kind of like, that’s also why I was disorganized. It would take me longer to think about, to run through a checklist and sometimes like not have my power cord with me. And so I’m always optimizing for what’s the fastest thing to do.
[00:23:31] And I had a roommate who optimized for what’s the most beautiful thing I could do. So if she was cooking she would make a beautiful meal, she was getting beautiful, like, and it was driving me bonkers. And then I realized, you know what, I can just enjoy, like enjoy the beauty that she’s creating and she can enjoy the efficiency that I’m creating and we can live together peaceably. But I had to get to the point that I realized that I was, I had one algorithm and she had a different one and we were optimizing for different things. So what seemed to me totally irrational, then I’d make up a story like about her, was not irrational. It was just that she had, she was optimizing for something different.
[00:24:17] Amy Sandler: Yeah. I think building on that, Kim, going back to Jason, your story, really helpful, I think, especially for our listeners to hear what you specifically said and asked to, to this peer. And I’m curious, given the actual toll it was taking on you for a few months there, what was it, how did you go from sort of the internal and the ulcer, to actually getting ready to have that conversation? I think it might be helpful to get into that moment for folks who might feel a bit stuck to reach out to that other person.
[00:24:51] Jason Rosoff: I mean, I started to see it as somewhat existential for me. Like, I was like, I cannot continue to operate in this way. It’s just like unhealthy for me to have this level of agita about someone that I, like, there was no, um, there’s, we had to work together. You know what I’m saying?
[00:25:07] Like, it just had, we had to be able to work together. Um, so I think it was like necessity was probably the thing that drove me to have that conversation, and, or enlightened self interest maybe is another way to say it by my favorite motivation. Uh, and I do think it was, like I had a good enough relationship with my team. I think the second most important factor is my team’s critique of my relationship with this person. And their observation that like, they made it clear to me that I wasn’t helping. And I think that was really helpful also, because it shattered the, it put a crack, a big dent in the story that I was telling, right? Which is me, the self righteous protector of the innocent, and they were like, not helping dude. It’s not making anything better.
[00:25:59] And so I think it was those two things were like the immediate motivators. But I will say that in a, in less severe situation. So like, let’s say, uh, there was a direct report that I had, um, who is like, hyper logical, uh, that they, like everything needed a very clear explanation. And I believe that not everything has, like, you can’t always explain the rationale for everything before you do it. Because there are some times where you’re sort of taking a pretty big guess about what the right thing to do,
[00:26:34] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:26:34] Jason Rosoff: Is for the future. And so we butted heads a lot over that, because I would say, we need to trust Kim’s judgment here about that this is the right thing to do, even though, like, you know, she, we recognize there’s a lot we don’t know about what could happen in the future. And from my perspective, like, I started to envision the way that this person saw the world as sort of devoid of emotion. I took their, like, their desire to be logical as, like, a sort of disregard of emotion. And it wasn’t until I basically like accused this person of not having emotions that I realized like just how wrong I was. Like their logic for them, that the sort of like planning, planfulness and logic, uh, was a way to actually protect people’s emotions, is to protect people from disappointment.
[00:27:37] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:27:37] Jason Rosoff: Like they cared about getting a good outcome because they didn’t want people to feel sad that we hadn’t thought these things through and found a better solution ahead of time. Um, and that, in that case, like, I did the thing that Kim did, but not artfully. Like I was frustrated in the moment and I expressed what was actually in my head. And as a result of me saying the story out loud, it gave this person the opportunity to correct me, and say, that is not in fact what I am doing. I’m doing something quite different.
[00:28:08] Kim Scott: Yeah, you are taking a big risk to share the story inside your head.
[00:28:12] Jason Rosoff: Yeah.
[00:28:12] Kim Scott: Um, but sometimes that’s what you’ve got to do, to give the other person the opportunity to change the story you’re telling. If you hide your story, then you can keep going deeper and deeper and deeper in the story. And then you wind up with acid reflux or whatever.
[00:28:31] Jason Rosoff: Yeah. And that’s like where I think I would encourage people to start, is to think about, is there a way for me to take accountability for the story that is in my head?
[00:28:42] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:28:43] Jason Rosoff: Like,
[00:28:44] Kim Scott: But not to assert it as the truth.
[00:28:46] Jason Rosoff: Correct. Exactly. To, but to like to own up to the fact that, and I think that sometimes it’s as simple as, something as simple as saying, I’ve been feeling like, for example, one of, the way I found out that this person, that the first person I was mentioning didn’t feel that bad is when I said, I’ve been really frustrated the last few months of trying to work together, they’re like, oh, really? I had no idea.
[00:29:13] Amy Sandler: Everything’s going great.
[00:29:13] Jason Rosoff: Um, uh, but just admitting that opened the door.
[00:29:20] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:29:20] Jason Rosoff: Uh, to a conversation. And so you don’t even have to go into all the details of the story, but just , maybe even admitting, um, like I care about you and I want this relationship to work. Like that as a foundation to say, like, I want this relationship to be successful. And I’ve been feeling really frustrated by some things. And I wonder if we could talk about it. I feel like that is often a question that, it can yield surprising results. Because maybe the other person is like, thank god. I’m, you piss me off all the time.
[00:29:50] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:29:50] Jason Rosoff: Like maybe it’s mutual.
[00:29:51] Kim Scott: Yeah, or maybe it’s not, it’s enlightening if it’s not.
[00:29:55] Jason Rosoff: Yes, exactly. But in both cases like I wound up at a different place but started from someplace similar. Which was just sort of admitting, this is what’s going on for me.
[00:30:06] Amy Sandler: Yeah, I think first starting for yourself of being aware of what it is, sharing with the other, and just Jason, to your point, being really clear that you first said, I care about you and then you shifted a bit to, you know, I want this relationship to work. So naming that that might not feel authentic to the letter writer, to some of our listeners to say specifically, I care about you, that I am, and I care about this relationship. And I have found it’s very counterintuitive, but when I’m feeling frustrated by, uh, by someone else, I have found at least for me, the most helpful thing I can do is very counterintuitive, but to actually do something kind for that other person.
[00:30:42] And so when I might be feeling frustrated that someone is late. Or, you know, it seems like, uh, rather than going to that, going right to my frustration, acknowledge the frustration, but then I’ll say, hey, is everything okay? Or, and they might be late because actually something is not okay. And, or, you know, but it helps set them at ease. So there is something about being, a little bit of being the change that we want to see. Kim, the other thing I want to go back to is when you were, your story in college and that there was a part, and let me know if I’m getting this right, where in your own mind, efficiency is more valuable than beauty. Is that accurate?
[00:31:20] Kim Scott: No, no, no.
[00:31:20] Amy Sandler: Or is it more that you are, okay.
[00:31:22] Kim Scott: I didn’t think that it was, uh, objectively that it was more, but it was more important to me than beauty. Like it was more important to me to grab food and finish my homework so I could go read the book, you know, like whatever, do what I wanted to do. So what I was optimizing for was do everything as fast as possible. Like everything in my, like do the laundry as fast as possible, do the, eat as fast as possible. Like all the maintenance stuff for my, I was optimizing for time studying really. And that is not what she was optimizing for. She wanted to, uh, she was optimizing for enjoying, you know, the meal and making things beautiful.
[00:32:12] And I just, that was not, it was not that I thought it was unimportant at an objective level. But it was just, it was sort of this aha moment, like, oh, that’s why you’re doing what you’re doing, because you’re getting what you want and I’m getting what I want. And sometimes we want different things, but just sort of understanding what another person is optimizing for.
[00:32:35] Amy Sandler: I think that’s so important and that we might have a tendency to think that things that we’re optimizing for are the right ones to be optimizing for. I’m not saying in that situation, but going back to Jason’s story where Jason, you know, you might have thought, oh, somebody optimizing for logic is not taking into account the other team. So I think there’s also in that story that, um, for us to also be aware of, do we put our own optimization, um, priorities at the top of the list.
[00:33:03] Kim Scott: There’s an algorithm bias that we all have.
[00:33:06] Amy Sandler: Yes. Exactly.
[00:33:08] Jason Rosoff: I know we focused on this particular version of this topic on when we have strong emotions. Um, what was in my head was there’s a person from the community who wrote, something close, that they feel closer to indifference about the people that they work with.
[00:33:25] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:33:25] Jason Rosoff: Um, and I think that, like in their, the story they tell themselves, uh, in the story they tell themselves, they, they basically said, like I’m, when I’m at work, I’m like, I’m doing work things and I’m not there to like, make friends with people like that, that’s sort of the attitude that they have. It’s not that they have active dislike for people.
[00:33:48] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:33:48] Jason Rosoff: It’s not that people are pissing them off, it’s just sort of like they’re keeping people at work at arm’s length. Um, they’re,
[00:33:54] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:33:54] Jason Rosoff: They’re not like engaging with them at a human level. Uh, and I think the, what was in my mind is like, I actually think like, that you can operate that way, but you should recognize that there’s probably inefficiency. Like you’re creating an inefficiency by not like, connecting, but by not having like a human relationship with the people that you work with, you’re missing really important data.
[00:34:22] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:34:23] Jason Rosoff: About how and why they are doing the things that they are doing.
[00:34:27] Kim Scott: What they’re doing, yeah.
[00:34:29] Amy Sandler: So Kim, just to go back to what Jason shared about, if I’m feeling indifferent towards the people I work with, especially if they’re working for me and this idea that it’s not a friendship. Do you have an example or guidance of how do I build this real human relationship that connects to the humanity at the same time that it’s not a friendship?
[00:34:49] Kim Scott: Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the things that was really important to me at one point in my career, because I’ve been working at all these startups and there was this pressure, like every, you know, all your friends are at work and you’re spending all your time at work, and I felt that was very unhealthy. It was really important to me to have friends outside of the office. Uh, and not to have dinner with people in the office, not to have breakfast with like, I needed my personal time. I needed some divide between work and, um, uh, and my personal life in order to take care of myself. And at the same time, it was really important to me to have these personal relationships with people at work.
[00:35:31] So for example, I didn’t, I never had, I tried never to schedule off sites that would take people away from their personal life. Uh, I tried to do, to schedule off sites during working hours. I tried to keep work during working hours. Uh, and I remember I, when I first got to, uh, got to, to Google, there were a lot of teams that were having, you know, like somebody was complaining, oh, I’m told I have to go on this whale watching trip with my team, even though I get sea sick.
[00:36:07] And I, you know, that was ridiculous. Like one of the things I really liked about my team at Google is that my boss, everything always ended at five thirty, like nothing outside of working hours. And so create, making sure that there’s space for people to pursue their personal lives was really important. Um, when my team wanted to go to Six Flags, I was like I’ll get you all budget, but I’m not going to Six Flags. I hate Six Flags. If you all want to go, but don’t make people, other people on the team who want, who don’t want to go go. Like fun is for fun, fun is not forced. Um, and some of the people on the team were really upset about that.
[00:36:52] They’re like, oh, Kim, don’t you want to be our friend? And I said, yes, I do. But there’s seven hundred of you and there’s one of me. And I think you can have three or four friends in life. You can’t have, friendship doesn’t scale, humans don’t scale, relationships don’t scale. And sort of acknowledging that and saying what I owe to you is to listen to you when you come to me for feedback, uh, to, you know, stop and chat. But that is like, not, I don’t want to confuse me stopping by your desk and chatting with you occasionally as friendship. It means I care at a human level, but I’m, but I also have to acknowledge that I’m one and you’re seven hundred and I don’t scale.
[00:37:38] Amy Sandler: Now it’s time for our Radical Candor checklist. Tips you can use to start putting Radical Candor into practice.
[00:37:45] Kim Scott: Tip number one, we don’t have to like everyone we work with at a, uh, we don’t have to love them or like them. And we don’t have to be okay with a particular action a person took. We can still insist that there be consequences for harmful actions. We can still hold people accountable. But we do have to respect and by respect, I mean, I have sort of an unconditional regard for every person’s humanity. Uh, and we’ve got to have that kind of regard if we want to be able to work together productively while also leaving space to disagree and hold each other accountable for, uh, for either sloppy work or for harming each other, sloppy teamwork. Uh, so you don’t want to fall below that kind of core respect on the care personally dimension.
[00:38:36] Amy Sandler: Tip number two, caring personally isn’t about being BFFs with everyone you work with, but it is about showing genuine interest in the wellbeing and success of the people who work with you, and if you’re a leader for you, remember that your role as a manager, like the person writing into us, is to support your team’s success, even when personal connections aren’t strong. But for all of us at work, whether we’re focusing on direct reports, peers, our own bosses, the point is we’re working with other people. And so consider that you and that person you’re struggling to connect with might be optimizing for different things.
[00:39:18] Jason Rosoff: Tip number three, sometimes our lack of connection might come from an unconscious bias. Uh, ask yourself why you might be struggling to connect with someone. Have you made up a story in your head, uh, with them as the villain like I did? Push yourself to see their strengths, their positive contributions. And to get to know them by asking questions and listening to their answers. And I would say by being willing to be vulnerable yourself and sharing your own perspective with them. Um, sometimes it’s, uh, it feels especially risky when we don’t feel connected, but there’s no way out but through. Someone’s got to start and it could start with you.
[00:39:59] Kim Scott: Yes, totally agree. That’s a good one.
[00:40:02] Tip number four. Own your own feelings of dislike. Don’t pretend to yourself or to other people that you feel differently than you do. And if you really can’t overcome that feeling of dislike, go to your boss and try to help this person find a better boss for them, if you really can’t. If you really hate their guts, don’t fake it.
[00:40:24] Amy Sandler: For more tips, check out our YouTube channel where you can not only listen to this podcast, but also watch dozens of other Radical Candor videos. And show notes for this episode you can find at radicalcandor.com/podcast. Praise in public, criticize in private. So if you like what you hear and we hope you do, please do follow, rate and review us wherever you listen to podcasts. It really does help. Feel free to share an episode with your friends. And if you’ve got criticism for us, email it podcast@radicalcandor.com. Bye for now.
[00:40:58] Kim Scott: Take care everyone.
[00:40:59] Amy Sandler: The Radical Candor podcast is based on the book Radical Candor: Be a Kick Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott. Episodes are written and produced by Brandi Neal with script editing by me, Amy Sandler. The show features Radical Candor co founders Kim Scott and Jason Rosoff and is hosted by me, still Amy Sandler. Nick Carissimi is our audio engineer. The Radical Candor podcast theme music was composed by Cliff Goldmacher. Follow us on LinkedIn, Radical Candor, the company and visit us at RadicalCandor.com.
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Episodes are written and produced by Brandi Neal with script editing by Amy Sandler. The show features Radical Candor co-founders Kim Scott and Jason Rosoff and is hosted by Amy Sandler. Nick Carissimi is our audio engineer.
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