“In other words, I would tell the manager what everybody said but not who said it. Not because I wanted to foster secrecy, but because I wanted to help get the information out there,”
I think out company uses Reflektive which emulates this philosophy. Whether our employees know that or not is unknown.
But when you challenge directly without caring personally, you fall into the quadrant that Scott calls obnoxious aggression. Which is bad, but better than not challenging directly.
This seems like an area which can be difficult to delineate from "radical candor" since it is impossible to measure the value of caring personally. I can imagine a "cheating" behaviour where one challenges directly on points which are less relevant with the intention of appearing like a "radically candid" actor yet providing little value to the interaction. I would argue that the way something is said changes based on the severity of the transgression/advice. Since Kim's anecdote with her previous supervisor (Sandberg) seems to be refuting this thought, I will counter by saying that her supervisor escalated the criticism presumably because she could see Kim's recalcitrance to the initial "nice" formulation. Leading with the escalated formulation might have been OK since Kim presumably knew that Sandberg cared about her, but this information is not always known.
HHIPP: “Radical candor is humble, it’s helpful, it’s immediate, it’s in person — in private if it’s criticism and in public if it’s praise — and it doesn’t personalize.” That last P makes a key distinction: “My boss didn’t say, ‘You're stupid.’ She said, ‘You sounded stupid when you said um.’ There's a big difference between the two.”
This seems to be the takeaway
Guidance, which is fundamentally just praise and criticism, is usually called “feedback,” but feedback is screechy and makes us want to put our hands over our ears.
So we shift from the language of cybernetics to one with a more human connotation. Guidance evokes the mentor/master who leads the pupil.
Along the way, she managed a lot of teams in various states of euphoria and panic. And while she did a lot right, she’d be the first to admit everything she did wrong.The good news is that Scott, now an acclaimed advisor for companies like Twitter, Shyp, Rolltape, and Qualtrics, has spent years distilling her experiences into some simple ideas you can use to help the people who work for you love their jobs and do great work.
Establishing the ethos based authority of Kim: she has worked in the big tech firms of Google and Apple where she made mistakes and now she dispenses valuable advice to other tech companies.
Should we believe that these companies are icons of successful HR?
Certainly Google positioned itself as possessing paradigm challenging HR practices. Last I heard, Google wants to unlock the creativity of their employees by helping them balance their lives (life enriching programming) and giving them time to explore what they think is a best course of action (80/20). But the value of those practices are contingent on an individual's agreement with a company mission. Missions which can become complicated by various managerial interpretations. Thus, as workers, we are first asked whether we accept the interpretation of the mission by our manager(s) then we are asked to become the best we can in that shared understanding of the mission.
I'm reading this because our Chief Creative Officer likes this mentality and we will be discussing this in a quick meeting. From hearing about it second hand from him I am interested in these concepts so I will try to give it a reasonable response.
I am going to be using this with Firefox reader mode to prevent highlighting the embedded (internal) ads.