Stuck in a cycle of vague goals, half-hearted feedback, and meaningless career talks? Let’s call it what it is—bad leadership. In part one of this two part episode, Kim, Amy, and Russ Laraway rip into the mistakes that are killing your team’s engagement and results. Russ brings the heat with “The Big 3” leadership essentials—direction, coaching, and career—and doesn’t hold back on why so many managers fail to deliver.
Listen to the episode:
Episode at a Glance: Russ Laraway “The Big 3”
Radical Candor Podcast Resources: Russ Laraway “The Big 3”
- When They Win, You Win
- Russ Laraway On How To Be A Great Manager | Radical Candor Podcast 4 | 7
- How To Win At Managing – 3 Core Principles
- Stop Overcomplicating It: The Simple Guidebook To Upping Your Management Game
- “When They Win, You Win”: Russ Laraway Unpacks His New Guide For The Modern Manager
- Eagles’ Sirianni Is A Players’ Coach, No Matter What You Think Of Him | ESPN
Radical Candor Checklist: Russ Laraway “The Big 3”
- Tip number one. Set clear direction by aligning your team with long term purpose and vision; defining measurable goals for each quarter is usually the right cadence. And practice ruthless prioritization to focus on what truly matters each day and each week. Start holding a standup meeting, no more than a half hour, only focused on the things to get done that week in support of our quarterly goals.
- Tip number two. Coach effectively by giving specific and sincere praise; praise like your life depends on it. The goal of this is to let people know what good looks like. Solicit feedback from your team to make sure that you are building trust, that you know what’s really happening and what really is not happening that should happen. And last but not least, you want to give kind and clear criticism to help people improve.
- Tip number three. Career, this is the third of Russ’s big three. Imagine a gravity assist slingshot and hold that in your mind. So it’s really using a lot of gravity because Russ is going to be back to explain what that all means, and how it relates to your career development. We’ll get into all the deets on career conversations.
The TLDR Radical Candor Podcast Transcript: Russ Laraway “The Big 3”
[00:00:00] Amy Sandler: We need your help. Help us help you make this the best podcast possible. We want to hear your thoughts because you may have noticed lately, there’s been an increase in guests. And we want to know, do you enjoy hearing from our guests? Do you prefer episodes that feature just the Radical Candor team? Maybe you prefer a mix of both. Please let us know what’s working, what you’d like to see, so that we can create content that matters for you. Go ahead, email us podcast@RadicalCandor.com. Can’t wait to hear from you.
[00:00:40] Kim Scott: Hello, everybody. I’m Kim Scott. Welcome to the Radical Candor podcast, which you can now get early and ad free as part of the Radical Candor community.
[00:00:50] Amy Sandler: And I’m Amy Sandler. And Kim, you are so right. If you are not in the Radical Candor community, what are you even doing with your life? The instruction said ha ha, light and funny. Was that ha ha light and funny?
[00:01:02] Kim Scott: That was ha ha, light and funny for sure.
[00:01:05] Amy Sandler: Doing our best. So go to RadicalCandor.com/communitypodcast right now and sign up. That’s one word and this is a big day for us. We are so excited to welcome Russ Laraway You heard that right? The very same Russ Larraway back to the pod, a special two part episode about the big three leadership elements, and then we’ll have a follow up on career conversations. So I can’t imagine that you don’t know Russ if you’re listening to this podcast, but just in case you don’t, uh, Russ, you’ve got thirty years of leadership experience starting as a Marine Corps company commander before founding Pathfinders. And Russ has held management roles at Google and Twitter. I think that is where, uh, Russ and Kim teamed up. Am I correct?
[00:01:59] Kim Scott: Yep. At Google originally.
[00:02:01] Amy Sandler: Originally at Google and then, uh, Russ and Kim co founded Candor Inc. Which is the precursor to our current company, Radical Candor. So, Russ has also served as Chief People Officer at Qualtrics. Uh, he’s been an operating partner at Goodwater Capital. Russ is currently advising and serving on boards of a variety of tech companies. Continuing to tackle those pesky leadership and culture challenges that you are so good at, Russ, also seems to like the number seven. You’ve led seven hundred person teams, managed seven hundred million businesses, and is the author of, and if anyone’s watching, I’m going to hold up the book, such a great book, When They Win, You Win, Being a Great Manager is Simpler Than You Think. Available wherever books are sold. Welcome back, Russ.
[00:02:53] Russ Laraway: Thanks. I am so stoked to be back.
[00:02:56] Kim Scott: Been looking forward to this conversation for weeks!
[00:02:59] Russ Laraway: Right.
[00:03:00] Amy Sandler: Weeks. Alright. Yeah, we’re so excited. And Russ, we did have you back in 2022, which we were just talking about felt like about twenty years ago. Uh, your book When They Win, You Win was just coming out, we’re going to put that episode in the show notes. I also wanted to highlight one of the things people love so much from your content, that was also in Radical Candor, is career conversations. We’re going to, follow up with that episode next week. This episode, we’re going to talk with Russ about what you call the big three elements of leadership, direction, coaching, and career. And I think just like Kim, you’ve got this remarkable ability to really simplify and clarify complex ideas. And so these big three elements of leadership are a really coherent approach that can measurably and predictably help folks deliver more engaged employees and get better results. So let’s start there. Tell us more about direction coaching and career.
[00:04:03] Russ Laraway: Yeah, well, it’s, you know, that framework actually starts with you guys, believe it or not, with you all. Um, and, uh, the origin story of that thinking was when Kim and I were working together, um, I was on the phone with all of our prospects. Um, we couldn’t keep them away. Uh, and so I would just pace on top of the Flintstones building roof and I would take all these calls. And the very first question I would ask everyone was some discovery question about how we can be helpful? And I was looking for them to say some words that led me to believe that the stuff we were doing at the time, Radical Candor, could be helpful.
[00:04:42] And so they all, they, so when I would ask them, what’s the problem you’re trying to solve? Uh, I don’t know, hundreds of companies said some version of, uh, I’ve got it much tighter than maybe they all would have said it. Uh, they would say, we have an engagement problem related to low manager skill. And I would then out of mostly curiosity ask, what’s the nature of the skill gap? And the reality is that, uh, out of hundreds of calls, if you were to construct a word cloud around the skill gaps that they communicated, the three biggest words by a mile were direction, coaching, and career, helping people with their careers. And so, anyway, that’s interesting. That’s not enough. And when I got to Qualtrics, I was lucky to have a role and, um, and a team, uh, both that worked for me and that I worked for, that were really open to us studying whether those were real. Um, just because five hundred companies said it doesn’t mean it’s real.
[00:05:37] And so we were able to take that theory and we were able to test, now direction, coaching, career, not particularly testable, they’re abstraction. We were able to test more specific behaviors underneath each of those. And we’re actually able to measure by a statistical regression the extent to which each of those twelve or so behaviors changed employee engagement, which is crucially important. Thirty year old IO psychological measurement that many people are far too inclined to toss aside. And business outcomes, which is what we’re all really at work to drive. And so then we ended up writing a book that tells you in part one about how we got to that stuff, how we did that work. But parts two, three, and four are sort of the steps of the why, and parts two, three, and four are sort of the how. What does it mean, what is direct, how to do direction, how to coach, how to have career conversations. And so that that’s how we it’s how we got there with the big three.
[00:06:31] Kim Scott: We, but you really wrote the book. I mean you wrote the book
[00:06:35] Russ Laraway: I did.
[00:06:35] Kim Scott: But yeah, that was you. I, I. I’m gonna,
[00:06:40] Amy Sandler: It says it right here.
[00:06:40] Kim Scott: Usually we encourage people to say we, but I, Russ.
[00:06:44] Russ Laraway: Well. Yeah, so when I say we, um, first of all this audience we is really important on this podcast. But there’s also an audience that don’t, they don’t listen to my appearances anymore, but the people who did the real work. Like I don’t know, I can’t do this math that these people I mean, this is like complicated statistical analysis. Like Will and Alexis. They did the heavy lifting that gave us these answers. So,
[00:07:07] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:07:08] Russ Laraway: Yeah, so when I say we, I’ve got a couple groups there, you know.
[00:07:11] Kim Scott: Some people help you with the math.
[00:07:13] Russ Laraway: Yeah, and look if Chris Beckstead at Qualtrics didn’t say green light on writing about us in your book, it would never happen.
[00:07:19] Kim Scott: Yeah, yeah.
[00:07:19] Russ Laraway: You know, there’s just a lot, there’s a lot of we around, around the quality. I’m not just being falsely humble.
[00:07:24] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:07:24] Amy Sandler: Yeah. I want to we will dig into direction, coaching and career and in fact, we’ll also do the career conversations in our next episode. But I would be remiss if I did not backpedal a little bit and have a conversation about the Flintstones house.
[00:07:42] Kim Scott: This was my, I, this was my one of my favorite, um, things that I did at Candor Inc. So we had an office and they sold the office out from under us. So we had to look for a new office. And the engineers lived up in San Francisco and I lived down in Los Altos, and Russ kind of lived in the middle of those two. And so I looked on the, I stayed up very late one night looking on the map of the Bay area, what’s exactly equidistant. And I kind of expanded the map. And one of the things almost perfectly equidistant between San Francisco and Los Altos was what’s known as the Flintstone house and you can Google it. But it is this bulbous orange and purple building.
[00:08:33] Amy Sandler: It was orange and purple? Is that where the love affair started?
[00:08:36] Kim Scott: So many, there’s so many things to love about this house. That also on, in the kitchen in the house, um, there are villi. Like little, it’s like you’re inside a stomach. I mean, this house, like, somebody had a lot of fun with this house. I think they made it by blowing up balloons and pouring, um, some material over the balloons. Anyway, that’s, and that is what it looks like. It looks like something out of the Flintstones. Like it, um, and so I know, I’ve always driven by, you can see it from 280. So I’ve driven by it probably a million times. I was like, I wonder if it’s for rent. And I looked it up and it was for sale. And I thought, well, that means nobody’s living there. And so I called the person selling it and asked if we could rent it. And we did.
[00:09:20] Russ Laraway: Yeah.
[00:09:21] Kim Scott: It was really fun.
[00:09:23] Russ Laraway: You know, I can, I could connect Flintstones back to someone who you work with right now, Dan Green.
[00:09:28] Kim Scott: Oh. Do tell.
[00:09:29] Russ Laraway: It’s, expedient story, which is, I would do phone calls on the roof, but there was a sliding door, you could go up upstairs, walk out the sliding door and step on the roof. And I just, I got thousands of steps every day. And, uh, was randomly catching up with Dan one day. All of this was unplanned. He, uh, was driving up 280. And he said, dude, are you on the roof talking to me right now? He could see me facing the, I don’t know if smoke was coming off my shoes or what. But, uh, that one, that made, I just, I mean, I couldn’t stop laughing, I had to end the call. I was laughing so hard because he drove past me. I think he was driving a Tesla back then.
[00:10:15] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:10:15] Russ Laraway: In his Tesla, and, uh, and he saw me facing the road. So, Flintstones House, what a fun chapter.
[00:10:21] Kim Scott: That was not part of my, uh, I was not driving employee engagement. That doesn’t fall under direction, coaching, or a career, but it was a lot of fun.
[00:10:31] Amy Sandler: Well, I just want to acknowledge. So Dan is our Chief Revenue Officer. We will check the story as well as the current, uh, vehicle that’s being driven. You have so many good sound bites of how to actually put this stuff into practice. So let me, first of all, give a sentence summary of direction. Let you see if that’s actually accurate and then how we can put this into practice. So I have a definition of direction. Good managers ensure that every member of their team understands exactly what is expected and when it is expected.
[00:11:04] Russ Laraway: That’s very accurate. Um,
[00:11:06] Kim Scott: It’s a quote from your book.
[00:11:08] Russ Laraway: I think I wrote that. So, so I love that. That is so smart.
[00:11:13] Amy Sandler: That is amazing.
[00:11:15] Russ Laraway: Yeah, I’ve never I don’t know if I’ve ever heard it. But you know, you know whats funny about direction that I’ve learned is, so first of all, you said something that is, you couldn’t have paid me a bigger compliment, Amy, the word simple. A phrase I’ve stolen from Kim over the years simple, not easy. Um, I think a lot of people when they hear what our extremely rigorous research ultimately leads to, direction, coaching, career, I do think a lot of people have, never do this to my face. But I think a lot of people go, well, duh, is that all so obvious? Um, if we’re obvious, we wouldn’t have done the research. Um, you know, and so, um, but what’s fascinating about is the one that people are the most likely to give me a duh face on is direction. And the key word in that little sentence you gave is ensure, and then exactly what is expected, and when it’s expected by.
[00:12:08] What I’ve learned over the years is a very large percentage of managers believe that they have been clear about what is expected. And a very large number of their employees do not agree. And so, um, what I was hoping to do through framework is to sort of force folks, if you follow the four part, there’s a four part framework in the book. If you follow that, and just follow some of the basic rules around that, you have a very high percentage chance of making absolutely certain your team is crystal clear at exactly what is expected, when is expected by. And by the way, the most important thing you need to do comes back in coaching or no, the most important thing you need to do is the last part of the framework, which is subtract. Subtract, subtract, subtract until you get down to this tiny number of things that are expected and ideally what is expected has been collaboratively developed with your team.
[00:13:00] You think about just those two things. Subtract, like aggressively subtract. If the manager doesn’t help people subtract work, who will. And do, and create the expectations collaboratively with your team. Just those two things dramatically increase the chances that your employees will be clear on what is expected of them. And then you have to dot the I and make sure you’re clear about when it’s expected by.
[00:13:25] Kim Scott: Nothing’s, what’s so interesting about what you said, Russ, is that if you as the leader of the team, ask your team to set the goals. Then your job becomes telling them to do less rather than telling them to do more. And that does flip everything on its head, doesn’t it?
[00:13:44] Russ Laraway: It does.
[00:13:45] Kim Scott: Uh, so why don’t more leaders do that?
[00:13:50] Russ Laraway: Well, I think, um, I first of all, if you think about that, that’s, um, what does that require? That requires the leader to have some vulnerability, some humility, it requires the leader to believe their employees perspectives are worth something. You know, I think a lot of managers have some of these things. What’s probably mostly missing though isn’t those three things. What’s probably mostly missing is the consciousness that you should do it that way.
[00:14:13] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:14:14] Russ Laraway: Nobody tells you, you’re told you’re in charge. Like one of the worst phrases that,
[00:14:19] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:14:19] Russ Laraway: I’m in charge.
[00:14:20] Kim Scott: They’re not in charge. And nor are you the decider.
[00:14:23] Russ Laraway: And we’re, by the way, the phrase that I hear all the time that is now, I’m gonna say it in a way and it’s going to also forever grate on you, is when people say my team, my team, my team, my team.
[00:14:35] Kim Scott: Yes, yes.
[00:14:35] Russ Laraway: It’s their team too. Like that is,
[00:14:38] Kim Scott: Our team.
[00:14:39] Maybe
[00:14:39] Russ Laraway: the most important insight is,
[00:14:41] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:14:41] Russ Laraway: It’s not my team, my team, well my team. People can’t wait to say that phrase because it gets to, they get to communicate they’re a manager and that’s so cool. So I just think there’s not consciousness that, oh, if I actually ask my employees, you know, Peter Drucker said this, uh, in nineteen whatever. That people are far more likely to follow a course in action through enthusiastically if they’ve had a say in creating it. It’s obvious to you. It’s obvious to me It is decidedly not obvious to most managers because nobody ever told them they should do that.
[00:15:09] Kim Scott: Yeah, yeah.
[00:15:09] Russ Laraway: Probably the simplest.
[00:15:11] Kim Scott: And so I think what you’re talking about when you talk about direction, I mean I’m gonna boil it down and you tell me why I’m wrong. Um, is what is goal setting like, okay or what we used to call it Google OKRs. Is that wrong or right?
[00:15:27] Russ Laraway: No, that’s right. There’s four parts. That’s the third part
[00:15:29] Kim Scott: Okay. What’s the first?
[00:15:30] Russ Laraway: First two parts are long term, purpose and vision. The second two parts are short term, uh, quarterly ish goal setting. I’m fine with half a quarter, I’m fine with two quarters. Like, it doesn’t really matter, but quarterly goal setting.
[00:15:41] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:15:41] Russ Laraway: And then, actually, as important as goal setting is weekly prioritization. Deciding what work you will do and not do each week in support of those goals. Those goals should measurably be able to ladder up to your vision, which transpires over usually a three year period. And your vision is always a function of your purpose. And so they all, it’s a parent child relationship all the way down to what are we going to do each week? The stand up is a great example.
[00:16:04] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:16:04] Russ Laraway: But yes, the pivotal idea, Kim is the quarterly ish goal setting. But it can’t live relevantly, in my opinion, without a clear sense of what it ladders up to over time, vision.
[00:16:15] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:16:15] Russ Laraway: Um, and it’s not particularly useful if we don’t do the hard work every week of deciding what we’re going to work on in support of that goal.
[00:16:22] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:16:22] Russ Laraway: I think on either side of it, there’s a lot that matters.
[00:16:24] Kim Scott: So vision, what was number two?
[00:16:26] Russ Laraway: Purpose, longest in duration.
[00:16:28] Kim Scott: Okay, purpose.
[00:16:29] Russ Laraway: Vision is next, shortest in duration. Those expire more often than purpose does. Then extremely short duration is quarterly, is your goal setting. And then weekly, expressions of work, I call priorities, your priorities.
[00:16:41] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:16:42] Russ Laraway: Stolen the word priorities because I mean, are your quarterly goals of priority? Yeah, of course there but we have a word for that, quarterly goals.
[00:16:48] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:16:48] Russ Laraway: It’s your vision of priority. Yeah, it is but we have a word for that, it’s called vision. So I stole that word, the second most misused word in business, priority, to mean, definitionally, your daily or weekly, uh, chunks of work that support quarterly.
[00:17:02] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:17:02] Amy Sandler: Okay, so what is the first most misused?
[00:17:04] Russ Laraway: Strategic.
[00:17:06] Amy Sandler: Okay.
[00:17:07] Kim Scott: A strategery.
[00:17:08] Russ Laraway: Strategic, strategy. Um, the way that word gets abused, I can’t even count them all.
[00:17:13] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:17:13] Russ Laraway: But, uh, and then priority.
[00:17:24] Amy Sandler: Let me ask when we, you talked about you delineated between kind of longterm and short term. So we’re recording this kind of at the end of 2024, this will come out in 2025. So if I’m a manager listening to this podcast and I don’t really know, what is our teams, to use that frame, uh, purpose and vision, like, where do I get started with crafting that?
[00:17:47] Russ Laraway: Yeah, first of all, good question, first good question, uh, because, um, I am a big believer that purpose and vision are critical hygiene for every team. It’s not just something, you know, name the luminary that leaps to your mind first does. It’s not just something that the president should do. It’s not just something that Martin Luther King should do. It’s actually, in my opinion, critical hygiene for you and your team. So how do you get started? I can just tell you how I’ve done it. Um, and by the way, you will be pulling people along, silently kicking and screaming. They’ll be going, this is great, boss, I can’t wait. And nobody wants to do this work.
[00:18:19] Kim Scott: It’s a, yeah, everybody’s gonna think it’s a waste of time.
[00:18:21] Russ Laraway: And then when you’re done, you become, in a good way, a Catholic priest. Because everyone confesses to you their sins of skepticism. I thought this was gonna suck, but I’m so glad we did it. And what’s important, uh, what’s most important about purpose and vision together, and I’ll get to your answer, Amy, is they are the invisible leader that help guide people’s work and behaviors when there’s no direct in the moment guidance available. Which just happens. That, that’s their main purpose. And if they get used a couple times a year realistically for someone, along those lines, they’re worth it. So let me tell you how I’ve done it, uh, collaboratively with my team. So I’ll tell you when I was Chief People Officer at Qualtrics, I thought we needed a clear vision and I thought we needed a clear purpose.
[00:19:07] Um, I had some ideas about why we mattered, purpose. I had some ideas about what our vision might be. Um, so I took my team offsite, actually brought them to my home. And, uh, I did a number of things, but the, uh, I made sure they understood so we could skip all the semantics of purpose, vision, mission. I made sure they understand definitionally what each thing was by helping them understand what question we’re trying to answer. With purpose, we’re trying to answer the question of why do we exist. With vision, we are trying to answer, the question is tangibly, what hill are we trying to climb. Super important. If you think about where hills are, they are always around other hills, and so it’s not sufficient to talk about, we’re just gonna, common hill we’re trying to climb. You have to be really clear about which one. And so anyway, we all show up with a common definition, we have a little agenda. I break people down into groups of two, usually try to put people together who didn’t work together, who are maybe having a little conflict in the workplace. Um, and they get rid of that real quick. I send them away with those guardrails, and I have everyone come back to the table after, call it ninety minutes, I don’t remember. And say, what’s your purpose statement? As you would imagine, each one was a little biased toward the work that they’re part of the function, right?
[00:20:16] It’s okay. Really important. And everyone hears all the different views on, by the way, what everyone thought was so obvious, and now we’ve got, you know, twelve people, six different views. And then we talk it through, we try to rationalize it. Um, some ground rules for that. You’re not trying to win. We’re trying to get to the best answer, blah, blah, blah. And then I observe and I see who kind of seemed to get the exercise, the best slash who has the most energy. And then what I asked them to do is to take everyone’s input and craft an iterative prototype, uh, that I will ultimately sort of refine, approve and publish. Did that for both, uh, for both purpose and vision. And that’s how we arrived. I published them. I had an internal page, published them. Whenever a new hire came to the teams, first thing I went over with them. Here’s why we exist. Um, and here’s what we’re trying to get done over the next two, three years. Um, so that’s kind of how, how we did it in collaboration with the team. Um, and every single time with the team came up with, it’s pretty different than my sort of, you know, idea going in. And it was,
[00:21:11] Amy Sandler: So did you actually go into those ideas with your own kind of in the back of your mind, here’s, here’s what I think, what’s on my mind for purpose and vision and I’ll see how it maps up or did you kind of give that up after doing this a while?
[00:21:22] Russ Laraway: Yeah, it wasn’t, the first part. Yes. It’s just inevitable, right? If you think this is important, it’s on my mind. I’m trying to, when should I get the team together? When’s the right time to do this? Um, and I had my own kind of ideas which by the way would drive how I’d behave. Um, you know, I, right now, in my life, I say all the time, my purpose is just to be helpful. Um, that’s it, that’s all I’m doing. Um, and so, I’m just that way. But it wasn’t about matching up. I did go in very confident the team would come up with something better than what was banging around in my mind. Um, so I did have sort of an idea, but I went, I was really careful never to bias the team toward what I wanted or what I was thinking, because you know how that just frames everything toward your idea and who knows if we’ll get a better answer or not, if you frame everybody.
[00:22:06] Kim Scott: And so what was your purpose?
[00:22:08] Russ Laraway: Yeah, the purpose was a little wordy. Um, I think the vision was better, if we focus on one of the two. The purpose ended up being about really enabling an organization through, really through the manager. But the vision was much more interesting. We had, uh, Qualtrics itself had a two or three year vision, um, probably two. That was built around some pretty specific business goals. Um, and in fact was built around a pretty detailed operating plan that had a revenue expression and a cost expression. That cost was mostly headcount. So we had an implied revenue per head plan by, pretty much by year for two, three years.
[00:22:46] I thought, um, ultimately where we landed was that our team, uh, if we did a great job, we would improve Qualtrics revenue per head from what was planned to something different. Because, um, by affecting the employee experience that, remember your employees are the ones who deliver the results, nobody else. The managers create or destroy circumstances under which people can do their best work. Usually they destroy unintentionally. How do we teach them to create and senior management’s job in that leadership context is to create a system by which we could be reasonably short all the managers, the managers on average are behaving in a way that creates those circumstances. So if we did that well, and we made sure each employee experience was curated mostly through their point of contact into the organization manager, you would expect revenue per head,
[00:23:36] Kim Scott: Yeah, yeah.
[00:23:36] Russ Laraway: To be higher than what has been planned. And so our vision was actually ultimately a incremental revenue per head measurement on top of what had been planned in the company’s operating plan.
[00:23:47] Kim Scott: That’s amazing because not many HR department sign up for a revenue goal. Yeah.
[00:23:53] Russ Laraway: Nobody wants that smoke.
[00:23:53] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah. So question for you. Like if we go, let’s go back to our time at Google. Google’s, I guess, mission was to organize world information, make it universally accessible and useful, correct?
[00:24:07] Russ Laraway: Yeah.
[00:24:07] Kim Scott: And what would you have said the vision was when we were there?
[00:24:12] Russ Laraway: I don’t know that we had one, um, really, or maybe Larry and Sergey thought that mission statement served as both. Um, you know, that, that purpose drove, that mission purpose, those to me, by the way, are synonymous. Um, a lot of people think it’s important to differentiate but I don’t..
[00:24:26] Kim Scott: Yes.
[00:24:26] Russ Laraway: Um, but, um, I did, I did in the book, I, I actually grabbed some, what I thought were exemplary statements of each kind. And my lead candidate for purpose is organize the world’s information. I mean, it’s so incredible.
[00:24:39] Kim Scott: It’s so clear.
[00:24:39] Russ Laraway: If you think about the purchase of Keyhole, which became Google Earth, which became the satellite view of Google Maps, one of the most important consumer products in the world. If you think about Gmail, it made no sense. You’re a search company. No, we’re not. We organize the world’s, you know, and on and on, like during our time we were buying and building and it always was just so aligned.
[00:24:58] Kim Scott: It tied back to that. Yeah. It was incredible.
[00:25:00] Amy Sandler: And Kim, you said it pretty quick. So can you just repeat it again for folks who, the second half.
[00:25:05] Russ Laraway: We should do it together by the way.
[00:25:07] Amy Sandler: This is a little test.
[00:25:08] Kim Scott: It was almost like a prayer. Like everybody who worked there knew it. Uh,
[00:25:12] Russ Laraway: Want to try?
[00:25:12] Kim Scott: Yeah. Let’s do it.
[00:25:13] Amy Sandler: One, two, three.
[00:25:16] Kim Scott: Organize the world, all the world’s information and make it
[00:25:19] Russ Laraway: universally accessible and useful. We just had some messed up, um, prepositions.
[00:25:23] Kim Scott: But yes, exactly.
[00:25:25] Amy Sandler: Accessible and all the world’s information and it was accessible.
[00:25:28] Kim Scott: Universally accessible.
[00:25:30] Russ Laraway: Universally accessible.
[00:25:31] Kim Scott: Universally.
[00:25:31] Amy Sandler: Every word really mattered there.
[00:25:33] Kim Scott: Every word really mattered. I think it, Adsense. I mean, as it turned out, this was complete, um, this was completely aspirational. I was going to say complete bullshit, but it just, the reality didn’t line up with the purpose. But I used to say, I don’t know if you remember this, uh, that Adsense’s purpose was to fund creativity a nickel at a time.
[00:25:55] Russ Laraway: Yeah.
[00:25:55] Kim Scott: And that, and that was, you know, aspirational. I think we didn’t quite pull that off. Well, that was the ask, that was at least my aspiration.
[00:26:05] Russ Laraway: I guarantee we did pull that off. We just we had, there was a lot of, there was a lot of that and then there was a lot of junk and you know, so it was a business, but.
[00:26:12] Kim Scott: Yeah I mean in the end Adsense didn’t, if you were gonna write a novel, Adsense was not gonna help you make any money. If you were gonna publish a serious you know, analytical magazine, AdSense wasn’t going to help. So it funded certain kinds of. If you were going to create, ask the dentist, it was awesome or ask the builder, then it really did fund your creativity, uh, a nickel at a time, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. But anyway, so that was like the purpose. And then I think every year we had what I would call a vision, but I wonder if you would. Like one year was the year of operational efficiency. One year was the year of, um, there was the year of operational efficiency. There was the year of driving revenue proactive. You know, those were kind of visions.
[00:27:02] Russ Laraway: Yeah.
[00:27:03] Kim Scott: And then the team really wrote the at, once you and Scott pulled, uh told me, Kim, it’s not your job to write the OKRs. It’s the team’s job. It really does need to be more bottoms up. Then the team really did do the bottoms up goal.
[00:27:19] Russ Laraway: Yeah, those count. I think a good vision statement usually has two attributes, measurable outcome, actually, a lot of people, or binary, I’ll give you a couple of examples. And then a time horizon usually, especially in an operating environment like ours.
[00:27:32] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:27:32] Russ Laraway: And so we had for sure the time horizon, the year of. And I am confident we had some sort of view what operation efficiency meant by the end of the year.
[00:27:40] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:27:40] Russ Laraway: With Scott around, we would always.
[00:27:41] Kim Scott: Yeah, yeah.
[00:27:41] Russ Laraway: My two favorite vision statements, by the way, they break this rule a little bit, but not really. Um, it’s no longer Microsoft’s, but their mid eighties vision statement of, computer in every desktop and in every home.
[00:27:54] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:27:55] Russ Laraway: That was bonkers.
[00:27:56] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:27:56] Russ Laraway: And that is, if you think about it, that is pretty measurable. Um, and, uh, there was never a time hack. And so that vision served them for a very long time. The other one that I loved, it was Nike’s old one, which was Crush Adidas. And the reason I like it is because, um, I mean, it’s probably illegal in terms of like thinking about monopoly power, but that aside. Um, I like it because what I know for a fact is behind it, it was defined by market share chain.
[00:28:22] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:28:23] Russ Laraway: Um, but it’s a great, easily memorable phrase. And that’s, it does, a good purpose or vision statement doesn’t have to be easy and memorable. That’s handy if you can pull that off, it has to be precise first. But I love that because Crush Adidas and then they knew underneath they had very specific market share goals by year.
[00:28:39] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:28:40] Russ Laraway: Uh, so very, very satisfactory kind of visionary thinking by them.
[00:28:44] Kim Scott: Yeah, actually early on one of our visions was squash Yahoo Publisher Network like a bug, I think.
[00:28:52] Amy Sandler: Remember you were talking about violent language in the workplace.
[00:28:55] Kim Scott: I hadn’t heard about nonviolent language. Okay, so that’s really helpful. Um, and I want to confess, like, I’m so glad that you gathered some data. Because when I sat down to write Radical Candor, somebody gave me this book, The Ambiguities of Experience by James March. And, uh, and it unleashed something dangerous in me, because basically what James March said is, one way to get to the truth is to gather the data. But the other is just to make sense of your personal experience. I’m like, oh, making sense of my personal experience is way more fun. And as a result of that, I wound up, actually, I wrote a whole section on OKRs and goal setting. I wrote a whole section on mission statements and I wound up deleting those, which I think was a mistake. So I’m glad you got the data and, uh, and made sure to get that stuff in your book.
[00:29:54] Russ Laraway: I will say, um, the kinds of questions we asked. So, you know, the way we understood if our managers were doing these things, we asked their employees if they saw these behaviors.
[00:30:02] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:30:02] Russ Laraway: And the two kinds of questions we crafted around OKRs especially, we did, we, um, we didn’t ask about purpose and vision specifically, but we did ask about OKRs and priorities. And the OKR questions, one was, did your manager help you craft your quarterly OKRs? And the other was, did your manager allow you to help them craft the team’s OKRs? They’re a little different, right? One’s about manager being present, helping you craft your goals. And another’s about the manager giving you a say in your team’s goals, right?
[00:30:31] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:30:32] Russ Laraway: So we asked both those questions. And then we asked, um, a question that was, my manager helps me prioritize my work, including what not to, identify what not to do. And so,
[00:30:42] Kim Scott: Remember the proactive forbearance list?
[00:30:44] Russ Laraway: Yeah, I do. Exactly. And so, um, what’s really, really interesting is ultimately, ultimately, we substituted out those two OKR questions for just one that was a little more, a little broader about just, does my manager make sure that we’re clear about what is expected of me. I’m spacing on the exact language. And those, those first two questions, the OKR questions probably had the weakest relationship with both engagement and results, which I thought was really, really interesting. But luckily, with the presence of the question, the managers were still getting a score, and therefore, were still likely to change their behavior to do those things. I can’t explain. I mean, something had to be at the bottom of the list, but it always fascinated me that, fascinating to me that while I understand how critical this underpinning is of being clear about what’s expected, it wasn’t being, it wasn’t correlating as strongly with coaching, for example, with, um, your engagement.
[00:31:40] Kim Scott: With engagement. So coaching,
[00:31:41] Russ Laraway: It actually correlated with the results, but less with engagement.
[00:31:43] Kim Scott: Yeah, so coaching is really more important for engagement than, than direction. Is that correct?
[00:31:50] Russ Laraway: Coaching, uh, by our numbers. Um, I mean, the, the problem is what are you coaching on if you’re not talking about what you expect in terms of behaviors and work, work products, I don’t know what you’re really coaching people on. So, so I think that’s a little tricky, but yes, the, the two coaching, two primary mechanisms for coaching and then the requesting feedback, whereas, at three, besides career conversations, at three most powerful. relationship with employee engagement.
[00:32:16] Kim Scott: So by coaching behavior, number one is soliciting feedback. Is that right? Or what do you, so talk about coaching.
[00:32:22] Russ Laraway: Yeah. Three, three kinds of coaching that had powerful, extremely powerful relationship with engagement. Number one was what you would call praise. What I call continue coaching, distant number one. Number two, was asking for feedback about what’s to be better on this team, the whole, you know, for, for, uh, ask an open ended question, shut your mouth, that whole thing. We could get into that. And then third was improvement coaching, which I found super interesting because I, you hear a lot of people say they want improvement coaching and then when they get it, they hate it, right. It’s just, there’s no silver bullets here, right.
[00:32:55] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:32:56] Russ Laraway: But it actually ended up when managers did this well, which was usually about saying, I’m just trying to help you be more successful. That’s all we’re doing here. And maybe you can fix some stuff. Wasn’t that the most normal thing on earth? Then it really drove engagement and that’s how we taught it. That’s how we taught managers to do that, was make it always about helping people be more successful. That’s, that’s really it. It’s your job, deliver an aligned result and enable the success of the people on your team. Every manager in the world, exact same job description, end of story. So anyway, that had a super, all three of those, super strong relationship with both engagement and result.
[00:33:29] Kim Scott: And so talk about praise, like one of your, one story that you, one thing that you taught me that I talk about all the time is The Book when you were coaching. Little League. I love The Book.
[00:33:43] Russ Laraway: Yeah, I’m sure anyone who’s listened. I bet we’ve got that story on tape three times. So.
[00:33:48] Kim Scott: It’s okay It’s worth repeating. There’s some things that are worth repeating.
[00:33:52] Russ Laraway: I’m gonna let amy tell me whether we should repeat.
[00:33:54] Amy Sandler: Oh, I think it’s worth, I think it’s worth repeating and I, the reason why I think it’s really important, Russ, is because it really emphasizes the value of specific and sincere praise and also on small, noticeable, actionable things. So your example is in, if I’m not correct, mistaken, Little League baseball. So I want you to go into it, but something that we’ve observed, even in our, we had a recent challenge with the community, was the value of an exercise around praise and really noticing small acts of praise and building that into the culture. Please tell the story and to be clear, it was capital T, capital B, but it was a book that you carried and it was not When They Win, You Win.
[00:34:37] Russ Laraway: Right. The Book, it was a lab notebook. So I was impelled to go to a seminar by the Positive Coaching Alliance on a Saturday, which I didn’t want to do. I had no idea what they were. I thought it was going to be a clown show. Um, I’m an all star manager. What could they possibly teach me? And it was awesome. This woman, she was the best facilitator. Content was so good and my biggest takeaway was five one praise criticism. I’m gonna clear one idea before I go any further. A lot of times people hear this, they hear it’s Little League, they hear Positive Coaching Alliance. I’m gonna say two things about that. One is Positive Coaching Alliance works at pro, college, high school and youth sports levels, not just Little League. Number two is, five to one Positive Coach Alliance did not make up. They got it from John Gottman, uh, who wrote The Seven Principles for Successful Marriage.
[00:35:21] Five to one is one of the seven principles. So this is adult stuff. Anyway, lemme tell you the story. So I decide this is the kind of coach I want to be, my coaching partner I coach with a bunch, exact same. We had a philosophy which was winning mat, development first, but winning matters. Um, because the kids want to win and by the way, what standard are you using about whether you’re doing a good job with these kids developing them if, if we don’t at least look at on field performance. As we did. Um, and so I started to keep notes every practice, every game. I wrote a book what the kids did well. Literally show on time to, up on time to practice, you go in The Book as on time for practice. You were late. We didn’t say anything because when an eight year old or nine year old is late to practice, that
[00:35:59] Kim Scott: May not be their fault.
[00:36:00] Russ Laraway: That’s their parents fault, right? And so, um, funny how that drove behavior, uh, little kids in their parents shorts about getting to practice on time ’cause they wanted to be called out. And, you know, how you stretched, uh, all the way through to fielding a ground ball, right. Center the ball in your stance, get your glove in the dirt, uh, throwing hand over top of the ball, direct line. You’re throwing shoulder, back foot, front foot, fire to first. And so we would write this down. There’s a little lull in energy. You know, these are, I think, nine, ten, eleven year old kids. Uh, we’d stop the practice and I’d hold The Book up like Lion King and sing the Lion King song, you know, and everything. And we’d read from the book and kids, you know, they’re just like, and they knew we were watching.
[00:36:40] This is a really important thing that matters for adults as well as children. Um, when, it’s not that you use, we don’t like shit sandwiches and you don’t, I don’t like co locating praise and criticism in the same conversation. But if you have a habit of noticing what people are doing well relative to your standards, when it comes time for the improvement coaching they trust that you do see what’s happening in totality, it just becomes a tiny bit easier to absorb. Then the kids behavior was always pristine. They hustle, they move from station to station. They did the stuff right. And so, um, they loved it. I would write and then I do compilations on the website at night for the team.
[00:37:16] They couldn’t wait to read it. Their parents loved it. You know, it was all, it was all positive. Um, what I learned from this, by far the most important thing that happened, and this is the most transferable over to the workplace, is by adopting that practice and using specific and sincere as the standard, um, it forced Drew and I, to be, to know and to be able to articulate cleanly what our standards even were.
[00:37:45] Kim Scott: So it went back to direct.
[00:37:46] Russ Laraway: What is expected on this team, work products, you know, sort of the technicalities of baseball and behaviors, like hustle or being on time or. Um, and so that is, those two things. The idea that people know you’re seeing what they’re doing because you’re saying it out loud, makes it a little easier when the time comes for a little tougher conversation. And then forcing yourself as a leader to get very clear on what your team’s standards even are. We’ve all worked for the person who’s overly positive. There’s too many standards. They’re just, there may, seems like they’re making up one every flavor of the month or flavor of the week. Um, versus getting really clear about what is expected on this team.
[00:38:26] Usually the behavioral standards. I like to look for core values as a company and translate those to our behavioral standards. What is expected here? Um, and how can I articulate that and put your specific thing you did in the context of our expectation, context of our standards. That is massively, uh, effect, that is massively effective at nudging people toward behaving the way we want and the way they want, by the way, which is ostensibly behavior that leads to success and doing work that is also, also leads to success.
[00:38:59] Kim Scott: Love it. So that’s praise. What about soliciting feedback?
[00:39:04] Russ Laraway: And yeah, I, you know, I’ve been, um. I’ve been paying really close attention. I get it. I’m going to take this out of context. I want to go to the National Football League. I know, I know, I am pretty sure neither of you is a big fan.
[00:39:16] Kim Scott: You never know. Amy’s more of a sports person than I am.
[00:39:18] Amy Sandler: I used to be a big fan. I am aware, but I don’t know if, my football card stopped around the late seventies.
[00:39:24] Russ Laraway: So, I’m from Philadelphia. I’m a huge Philadelphia Eagles fan. They have a head coach named Nick Sirianni. He got hired a few years ago. I’ll tell you a story about this season that I think is fascinating with respect to soliciting feedback from your team. So the Eagles got out of the gate this year. They have, um, the head coach stayed. The context is the last seven games last year, they were ten and one, ten wins, one loss. And then the last seven games they went one and six. Absolute collapse, got destroyed and embarrassed in the first round of the playoffs. A lot of people thought Nick was gonna lose his job, head coach was gonna lose his job. He didn’t. Um, the owner is very inclined never to blame talent. Usually blames the manager, the coach. Gave Nick one last shot, most of us surmise it was, you gotta get back to the playoffs or else you’re done. So here come the Eagles, they get out to a slow start. They’re two and two after four games.
[00:40:13] And one of the two games they lost, they really should have won. And they go into their bye week. So every NFL team at different intervals, they get a week off where they don’t have to play a game. And the Eagles, by the way, just to get to the chase, they just, as of yesterday, have won their tenth game in a row after that bye week. They are now twelve and two. So they were two and two after the bye week. Reporter says, Nick, at some point, it’s a trend, right? It’s long before ten wins in a row. It’s six wins or, Nick, what happened in the bye week?
[00:40:41] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:40:42] Russ Laraway: He said, well, here’s what happened. Organizationally, we, we like to throw the ball more. The owner wants to, the offensive coordinator, the person who owns the offense wants to throw the ball more. He said, but um, are my, the offensive line, the least sexy, least famous people, the big giant guys who do, who just block and wrestle every play, went in, shut the door with the head coach, the five of them and said, we need to pass the ball less. We need to run the ball more. We’ve got this incredible guy who can run the ball and he’s been, he’s, by the way, might set the single season record for running yards, like he’s close. Um, and then the head coach, the head coach said, okay, and then he did the right diligence. Went to talk to that person, that person. Made a decision. We’re gonna shift our emphasis to running the ball more.
[00:41:35] Kim Scott: So he didn’t solicit feedback, but he got some.
[00:41:37] Russ Laraway: He um, He, he’s a solicitor. He did solicit it. Uh, I told it like he just got it. But even if that were the case, he listened to it. He absorbed it. He took action on it. And then he had to go sell this, by the way, to the quarterback who, guess what, wants to throw the ball, to the guy who owns the offense who, guess what, wants to throw the ball, to the wide receivers, who they have two of the best, want to catch the ball, therefore want it to be thrown. He has to go sell this. And they came out and they started running the ball, they run it better than anybody in the NFL. This is not even, this is not me just being a fan. It’s mathematically. And they’re on a ten game win streak.
[00:42:13] That ten game win streak required this head coach to go humbly and seek input from his team. He got it, uh, from the large, large, very large, scary men, uh, very directly. He did the right thing in digesting it. You know, you, doing what your team says isn’t the right answer. Um, but digesting it and following up is, and he did, it ended up being the right answer. And now this team’s on a ten game win streak. All this guy did was listen to his people.
[00:42:39] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:42:40] Russ Laraway: It’s their team too. They are closest to the facts. They are the ones on the ground who could see them winning every block that would lead to bigger ones. They are the, they’re, they are the ones that know the answers. His jobs to assimilate that into a coherent plan each week. All he did was go listen to his team. And I’m, like, I’m sorry if it’s good enough for the NFL, where, like where everything is measurable. You’re totally scrutinized every week by your fans, by your ownership, by your peers. You’re studying your game film, um, by the media, you know, this stuff has to cut the mustard in that context and I’m happy to report in this very masculine, tough testosterone environment that it turns out just listening to your friggin team really really moves the needle.
[00:43:24] Kim Scott: It really matters.
[00:43:25] Russ Laraway: Yeah. So I, I love is that, I love that example.
[00:43:27] Kim Scott: I love that. It’s great. It’s great.
[00:43:29] Russ Laraway: It’s a team too.
[00:43:30] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah. It’s, um.
[00:43:31] Russ Laraway: My team, my team. Oh, it’s my team.
[00:43:33] Kim Scott: Yeah. Or I lead the.
[00:43:35] Russ Laraway: I lead.
[00:43:36] Kim Scott: Yeah. I lead, I used, remember I was always proud of myself, but other people found it annoying. I would always say I work for the Edsons team. And when, that did not, that,
[00:43:47] Russ Laraway: We knew you meant it, we knew, a lot of people use those as cliches, right? And they’re annoying when, so you don’t always know, we the people,
[00:43:53] Kim Scott: It’s hard. Either way you sound annoying You sound annoying if you say, I lead the team. And you also sound annoying if you say, I work for the team. What are you supposed to say?
[00:44:04] Russ Laraway: Just do a lot of we and us stuff. Without any acknowledgement of the reporting relationship. Trust me, no one needs reminding of.
[00:44:13] Kim Scott: Yes, that’s the truth.
[00:44:15] Russ Laraway: That’s why you can, that’s why it’s so important. Totally different topic. That’s why it’s so important to relentlessly disempower yourself with your team. Because what never leaves is the actual power. And so to get them to tell you the truth requires you to constantly disempower yourself in their eyes.
[00:44:33] Kim Scott: To lay your power down.
[00:44:34] Russ Laraway: Lay it down and by the way, kick it aside, and then, and then kick it more and put it in the closet. And then throw in the trash because, because the power never actually leaves the relationship.
[00:44:44] Kim Scott: Yeah. You gotta, you gotta really work hard to lay it down. Totally true. Uh, which is why giving criticism as a boss is tricky. You want to make sure that you do it in the right way. Um, all right. So last but not least, uh, is career conversations. And we’ll talk about that in a whole other episode, right?
[00:45:02] Amy Sandler: Yes. Yes. So we had direction, we had coaching. We’re going to follow up on the next episode around career and, you know, Russ, one of the things that we love to do at the end of our episodes is to,
[00:45:16] Kim Scott: I think this is Russ’s original idea.
[00:45:18] Amy Sandler: Is this your original idea? The checklist?
[00:45:22] Russ Laraway: Probably Elise’s, probably Elise’s idea.
[00:45:24] Kim Scott: Probably Elise’s idea.
[00:45:25] Amy Sandler: But this is, this is something from the OG podcast. So we will give, uh, some public praise to you, Russ, and to Elise, uh, if you’re listening. Uh, Elise Lockhart. So, now it’s time for our Radical Candor checklist, tips to start putting Radical Candor into practice.
[00:45:43] Kim Scott: Tip number one, Russ, take it away.
[00:45:46] Russ Laraway: So, tip number one, I’m gonna do tip number one. Uh, set clear direction by aligning your team with long term purpose and vision, defining measurable goals for each quarter is usually the right, um, right cadence. And practicing ruthless prioritization, um, to focus on what truly matters each day and each week. If someone wanted to know one thing to do along these lines, what I would start doing next week, is holding a standup meeting. If you don’t know what a standup meeting is, Google search will get you that answer. Uh, no more than a half hour, only focused on what are the things we are going to get done this week in support of our quarterly goals.
[00:46:23] That’s tip number one.
[00:46:24] Kim Scott: All right. Tip number two, coach effectively by giving specific and sincere praise, praise like your life depends on it. Uh, and, and, so it’s the goal of this is to let people know what good looks like. Uh, you also need to solicit feedback from your team to make sure that you are building trust, that you know, what’s really happening, what really is not happening that should happen. And last but not least, you want to give kind and clear criticism to help people improve.
[00:46:59] Amy Sandler: Tip number three, career. This is the third of Russ’s big three. So imagine a gravity assist slingshot and hold that in your mind. So it’s really using a lot of gravity because Russ is going to be back to explain what that all means and how the heck it relates to your career development. We’ll get into all the deets on career conversations.
[00:47:23] Kim Scott: Take care and excited to be back with you all next week.
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