The Ledger, every show

“There's a lot of evidence coming out of University of Chicago and probably other places, but that's the article I've read it, that we, there's more noise than signal in facial expressions and body language, especially if somebody is just a little Square on a c…”

“There's this false dichotomy. In fact, the new biography of Elon Musk falls into this category. I like Walter Isaacson's work a lot, but he falls prey to this in his biography of Elon Musk, which is there's this notion that we have to choose between being a to…”

“This is the most common mistake, this is, I would say, 85% of mistakes in relationships at work get made when you do care personally, and you do actually show you care personally, but because you're so worried about the other person's feelings or whatnot, you …”

“One of them is that if you're a woman working for a male boss, it's highly likely that he's going to pull his punches when giving you feedback versus the men who work for him. Versus your male colleagues. And that's bad for you because feedback is good for you…”

“And basically the problem is that when you are a woman being radically candid with others, they're more likely to interpret your radical candor as obnoxious aggression than the same radical candor coming from a man.”

“And if you back off your challenge when you're giving feedback, when you're expressing your opinion, You wind up either in ruinous empathy or in manipulative insincerity, and both of those quadrants are going to be worse for your career than being seen as obno…”

“It's a disaster. Don't try to be more likable. There's a giant difference between caring personally and wanting to be liked. So it is really important to realize that a key aspect of radical candor is really focusing on the other person and their well-being an…”

“The sort of likability competence bias that a lot of women face pushed me, especially early in my career, in the wrong direction on challenge directly, and it made it much harder for me to, because often I would say something, and I would say it even more gent…”

“But if you don't, if it's not possible, and often it was not possible for me in my career to sort of schedule my time that way, I just decided that these moments of management were more important than being on time to my next meeting. And so I was just late so…”

“In fact, I did an analysis of Dalio's book, Principles, and there, it's like a, I don't know, three or 400 page book, and there were, I think, four or five pages about caring about people. It's, there's very low care, personally.”

“Radical candor gets measured not at, you know, not at the speaker's mouth, but at the listener's ear, and I think that Steve had built a team around him of people who didn't mind rather what other people would consider obnoxious aggression, but I think in the …”

“When you become a leader, you're much more prone to bullying, even if you don't think of yourself as a bully”

“Sometimes you're going to be working with somebody who's a little stubborn, maybe a little cocky, and you're going to have to use some extreme, extreme language to get through to them. And other times you're going to be working with somebody who's extremely se…”

“Occasionally, you'll have a boss who says, no, I don't want to hear about it. And then, of course, your job is to polish up your resume and find a better boss.”

“Basically the idea is to get very disciplined about, especially if you're a manager, not letting one employee Come and talk to you, complain about another, but rather say, have you talked to so-and-so directly? And if the answer is no, say, well, go talk to th…”

“It's so easy when a colleague comes to you complaining about another to feel like you're being empathetic to listen and maybe even stir them up a little bit, but it's not empathy. You're just stirring the political pot.”

“When I started the company, I felt that it was really just a matter of building a great software system that was going to give people the right reminder, the right nudge at the right moment, and it turns out that doesn't work in terms of getting people to have…”

“I would say 90% of us make 90% of our mistakes in that ruinous empathy bucket. It's by far and away the most common problem”

“No matter how talented you are, relationships don't scale. But she did do those things for her direct reports and the people who she worked most closely with, all, all of us. And when a leader treats their team, the people who they interact with on a day to da…”

“However, praise is even more important than criticism in terms of radical candor. Radical candor is not all about The boss giving the employee criticism. It should always start with soliciting feedback and it should include more praise and criticism.”

“I once coached someone who kept giving feedback over Slack and I finally just quit coaching him. I was like, I, if you keep making this mistake, I'm not, I can't be your coach.”

“If I didn't fire Bob, I was gonna lose all my best performers, because not only had it been unfair to Bob not to tell him, I also had been unfair to everyone on the team and they were frustrated. Their deliverables were late because his deliverables were late.…”

“One of the things that was helpful for me anyway, so you can tell me if it's helpful for you, what was realizing that my job was not to be liked. My job was to care about other people and to get out of my own head and to become others focused is what helped me…”

“Sometimes it's useful to show someone a pattern. All of the careless mistakes to, especially if someone is, is defense, is defensive, or if you think they're likely to be defensive. If you think they're likely to do to you what I did to my boss, I don't know. …”

“I think we do fear someone else getting upset more often than they actually get upset. We have kind of a negative, negativity bias when it comes to part of the reason why we're reluctant to give feedback.”

“There's really an order of operations to radical candor, and if you begin with soliciting criticism, then you take the first and most important step to improving your relationship with that person enough that, that it becomes easier for you to give it as well …”

“And if you want, if there are things that your boss Does that you appreciate and you want your boss to do more of those things? Praise is a better tool for that than criticism.”

“Very often the leaders who are low on the care personally dimension, they do care about their results and they do care about their own careers. And so when you sort of explain this to them in terms of enlightened self-interest, they tend to get better at it.”

“Part of the problem with obnoxious aggression is that you harm other people, but it's also inefficient because when you act like that, people can't hear what you're saying, so you're wasting your breath, you know.”

“I believe that the more novels people read, the better, that's the, if people often ask me, like, what can I do to move up on the care personally dimension of radical candor? And read more novels. This is the best way I know of to build compassion for other pe…”

“If you take just a second to establish a human connection, and if you don't let the concern, the worry about the other person's short-term feelings get in the way of telling them something that is really good for them to hear in the long run, then you wind up …”

“You know, I think that when you're giving feedback, whether it's up, down, or sideways, the sort of formula is the same, because it's hard to give feedback, and you want to do it in the right way, and I think the best thing to do is to start by soliciting feed…”

“And so the combination of those two factors of pretending at work that we don't have any emotions, that we're not fully human, and having been trained since we learned to speak, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it at all, makes radical candor …”

“I think what you can do is come in with a good deal more confidence than you feel. I think that is almost always a good idea because especially when you're early in your career, It's probably not such a good idea later in your career, but early in your career,…”

“I think one of the really important things that all managers can do for their direct reports to show that they care is to have real meaningful career conversations where you talk about sort of their life story, sort of their past, whatever part of it they're c…”