Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean

by Kim Malone Scott

When I was thirty years old, I came across a book called The Art of Happiness. It’s about the teachings of the Dalai Lama . . . [who] explains it this way: picture yourself walking along a mountainous trail. You come across a person being crushed by a boulder on their chest. The empathetic response would be to feel the same sense of crushing suffocation, thus rendering you helpless. The compassionate response would be to recognize that that person is in pain and to do everything within your power to remove the boulder and alleviate their suffering. Put another way, compassion is empathy plus action.”*

Compassion = empathy + action.

A conversation I had with one of Apple’s leaders helped me see a critical flaw in my approach to building teams earlier in my career. I’d always focused on the people most likely to be promoted. I assumed that was how it had to be at a growth company. Then a leader at Apple pointed out to me that all teams need stability as well as growth to function properly; nothing works well if everyone is gunning for the next promotion. She called the people on her team who got exceptional results but who were on a more gradual growth trajectory “rock stars” because they were like the Rock of Gibraltar on her team. These people loved their work and were world-class at it, but they didn’t want her job or to be Steve Jobs. They were happy where they were. The people who were on a steeper growth trajectory—the ones who’d go crazy if they were still doing the same job in a year—she called “superstars.” They were the source of growth on any team. She was explicit about needing a balance of both. This was a revelation. Apple was growing fast, and bigger than Google. And yet Apple made room for people with all sorts of different ambitions. You had to be great at what you did and you had to love your work, but you did not have to be promotion-obsessed to have a fulfilling career at Apple. At Google, I’d systematically undervalued the so-called rock stars. This mistake had caused a lot of unhappiness for people who contributed significantly. Google’s bias for people on a steep growth trajector...

How having super ambitious people and people who were happy in their current role brings stability.

“At Apple we hire people to tell us what to do, not the other way around.” And indeed, this was my experience at the company. At Apple, as at Google, a boss’s ability to achieve results had a lot more to do with listening and seeking to understand than it did with telling people what to do; more to do with debating than directing; more to do with pushing people to decide than with being the decider; more to do with persuading than with giving orders; more to do with learning than with knowing.

A gentle approach on how leaders should be.