Telling People What to Do Doesn't Work | 6

[Music] Hello and welcome to Radical Candor, a podcast from Panoply and Gretchen Rubens Onward Project about how not to hate the boss you have or be the boss you hate. I'm Kim Scott, co-founder of Candor Inc. and author of Radical Candor, be a kick-ass boss without losing your humanity. And I'm Russ Larroway, also co-founder of Candor Inc. and career-long operational manager across the Marines, Google and Twitter. So in this episode we're going to talk about why telling people what to do just doesn't work. And we're going to tell some stories about times when both Russ and I have really screwed this one up because it's tempting. You become a boss and you think you're supposed to tell people what to do, right? We're also going to talk about how to achieve results collaboratively. And we're going to give you some practical tips, the Candor checklist, for achieving the results that everyone can be proud of. All right, Russ, let's jump into it. All right, let's do it. So Kim, I think one of the most common mistakes that new bosses make especially, but I think even old bosses make this mistake. Even old, cramuginly bosses like you and me, all of them, the young ones, the middle-aged ones, the super-old ones, probably even a couple dead ones. That the ancient Mariner made this mistake. There's zero doubt. The mistake that they make, that's a lot of prelude for a really simple mistake, is that they believe that their job is to tell people what to do. And as my seven-year-old twins told me last night when I told them to eat their broccoli, mom, telling people what to do doesn't work. Yeah, and actually, I don't blame them. I think broccoli is delicious. It's disgusting. It's yucky. Broccoli is yucky. It tastes yucky to you. I am with Battle and Margaret on this one. And I don't care what rationale they need to invent not to eat their broccoli, they're correct. They ate it. All right, so I think, Kim, so that's a good story. That's a quick story. In fact, that's probably more of a title than a story. Telling people what to do doesn't work. That's our title. So, but I think you have a good story about a time when you tried to sort of maybe tell some people what to do. And maybe like half your team quit in a week? More than half, three of five managers working for me quit. And one week, this one. That sounds like a really fun week. It was really one of the worst weeks of my life. It was painful. It was really painful. So here's what happened. My hope is that you can avoid making my mistakes if I tell you the story. So I had just gotten to Google and there were about 100 people on the team, on the AdSense, online sales and operations team. And everybody was doing a little bit of everything. And there was no real accountability. In fact, when somebody knew, joined the team, the way that that person was assigned to a manager was just. They got assigned to the manager who had the smallest number of direct reports. Another way they could have done that was they could have blindfolded somebody and thrown darts at a dart board. Yeah, that was basically. That would have been the same. Well, yeah. In the end, it would have worked out about the same. And there was no relationship between you and your boss and what. Results you were trying to achieve, right? And this, you know, this kind of makes Google look crazy. The fact of the matter was, this situation was a result of a runaway success. Yeah, it was a pretty new business that took off way through. That was growing like gangbusters. Nobody really thought it would take off that fast. And so people were just trying to keep up. But I think these were some relatively. Yeah, most of the people were. I hate the word, "genier," but they were people right out of college, right? They were super ambitious, super smart people just graduated from college. And they were scrambling to keep up with a business that was on fire, right? So I was brought in as the quote unquote old lady, you know, the adult supervision. And it was a stressful situation because like often there would be so many customers signing up that we couldn't keep up with the approvals or there'd be so many questions on some particular problem. And it was like the whole team, these 100 people, it was like a seven-year-old soccer game. Everybody was just scrambling to where the problem was. And so I looked at the situation and I was like, there's five things we do, right? We approve new customers, we give them some account management, and so on and so forth. And they said, why don't we break the team down 100 people into five teams of 20 and we'll assign a manager who's in charge of each of the activities and the people who are most interested in that activity will focus on that activity and we'll have some accountability, right? So you just described really common sense. Yeah, totally common sense. Yeah, almost another normal place operator. Right, right, I mean you can. You'd work in EyesBite, some coherence set of activities that together achieve some common, hopefully measurable thing. Yeah, when I wrote this story in the book, my editor was like, wait a minute, that's like, that would be like running the New Yorker where everybody's editing and writing and report like, no, you need to specialize, right? And so what I did was I just told everybody what to do. I was like, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to divide up into these five teams and you are going to lead this team and you're going to lead that team and I changed everybody's direct reports all around and seemed perfectly logical, right? And then. This still doesn't sound crazy. No, no, no. It wasn't crazy. It wasn't crazy. It was, in fact, the right thing to do. The problem was that I had spent zero time explaining why I had these ideas and I had also spent zero time listening to the team about their ideas. In fact, there were some nuances to what was going on that I didn't understand because I hadn't spent nearly enough time listening to them getting their ideas. I hadn't spent enough time allowing people to debate these ideas so that they felt like they were their own. And I just declared this is what we're going to do. And three of my five managers just quit. And Google, they didn't leave Google. They just joined other teams at Google. And one of the great things about. Poof. Poof. Yeah, it's like no team. And I thought, I'm going to get fired. I've just moved from New York to California to take this new job, to show that I can achieve these amazing results. And instead, I'm going to get fired. You can't lose three of five managers in one week and not get fired. Now, I was lucky. I had a great boss. And I went to her and I said to her, "What did I do wrong?" And she said, "Look, perfectly reasonable plan. That's why we hired you to put that into place. But you did it in the wrong way." She said, "Imagine that you're spinning a rope. Imagine that you've got a long rope and you're spinning it over your head, right?" Like you're about to lasso a little. Yeah, a little calf or something. And she said, "It doesn't feel like the rope is moving that fast to you because you're just kind of tweaking your wrist a little bit, right? Moving your arm just a little bit. But if you're at the end of that rope, it feels like you're going to get flung off the rope, right? It's scary. And for some reason, when she told me that, it reminded me of birthday parties. I used to go to as a kid skating parties. You know, when you'd make one of those long lines and you'd go around in a circle and the person at the end of the line always got flung off the circle. It was scary. And I realized that was sort of what I had done to my team. I had made them feel like they were being whipped around in ways they couldn't even understand. It's off putting. I mean, because I think a lot of us have kind of actually been on the other end of that before. Of course. And it's just hard. It's sort of hard to realize. It's sort of hard to put yourself in the shoes of the person who's actually creating that sort of whiplash at the other end of the rope, right? By the way, did you get fired? I did not get fired. Instead, Cheryl, let me hire people like you when you help me sort things out. We came in and we were like, hey, look how well everything's organized. So I have kind of a similar story. Going back to the Marines again, this is a story of a new lieutenant. And so one of the things that you were the new lieutenant was a new lieutenant rustler away. And a lot of people don't know that even though you're an officer, which a lot of people have some idea that they're saluting and respecting these kinds of things, when you shop to your unit, nobody gives a crap what you think. Sort of like being a new boss. Nobody really. You are actually a new boss. So you've been in school in this case for 10 months. You think you know a lot. Yeah, you learn a lot in 10 months. Yeah, but you don't actually really know anything about operating one of these teams. My grandfather would say, you don't know from Shanola. That was an amazing sound effect. I bet I bet our listeners can't. So for the listeners, sometimes we have to put an actual beep on Kim. I'm learning how to self-centred production. That one. I'm sure you can't tell, but that one she did herself. There was not that was not one one of the producers did. I know it's impossible, probably impossible for you to tell the difference. So I'd been to school for 10 months. I show up and you know in your first job, you're in charge of like a 40 person group. And I had sort of an extra dimension to my new job in that I showed up, say mid April. And we were actually the. playing to Okinawa in mid-May. So I really had no time to train with any of my Marines or anything. In fact, I showed up, and most people were sort of like on pre-deployment vacation, basically. So I had a hard enough time just even getting to know my Marines. - And how many Marines did you have? - It's 43 by Marine Corps standards. It's a little less than that. You almost never deploy with a full group, but it's supposed to be 43 Marines. So that is what it's supposed to be. - So we get on a big giant airplane. We fly over to Okinawa. The job of the Marines over there is really, it's strategic deterrent to prevent North Korea from rolling across the DMZ and Haiti's health threats. - That's important. - Yeah, that's an important job. - So as soon as you get over there, Okinawa is subtropical. And so you do a bunch of training in the jungles there. And there's Habu snakes and banana spiders. And it's really a new place. And so, really early on, we got the Marines out there. We got them acclimated to the heat and humidity and everything. We got them out there in the jungle and we were running a patrolling exercise, basically training exercise. And based on all the things I'd learned at school, I saw my Marines doing a lot of stuff wrong. - A lot of book knowledge you have. - Yeah, I had all that book knowledge. And I was fresh out of school, but they are legitimately doing a lot of stuff wrong. - So you're not wrong in your assessment? - I'm not wrong. But I do something really wrong. We come back from the exercise. I'm taking notes, I've got a notebook, of course. And I'm taking notes and all the things we're doing wrong. I'm not talking because you're not supposed to talk during the exercise. And I get back and I have this giant pile of feedback. - Yeah, you're gonna tell them what to do. - I'm gonna tell them what to do. - How it's done, what to do and how to do it. - And so I just, and I get, they're all sitting in front of me and I just started reading from my notebook. All the stuff they did wrong and that we're gonna improve. They sat there quietly and listened and I was like, oh, seems like these guys are really-- - Yeah, these guys are gonna do what I said. - They're really taking it in. And then it's time to head back. And we have to sort of all walk back. You don't really get a ride anywhere in the infantry in the Marines. You have to walk everywhere. And basically the three leaders, I kind of three leaders, they're called squad leaders, enlisted guys who lead about a 13 person each group. And the most senior of them, Sergeant Espino, he sort of grabs me by the elbow and he says, hey, sir, you might fall back here for a little bit and they let the rest of the Marines go and the squad leaders grab me and pull me behind me. - So is this squad leader work for you? Or I'm not so sure about the hierarchy? - Yeah, squad leader definitely works for me. Yeah, they're sort of my, they're like manager, I'm like a manager. - It's like your direct report. - Yeah, they're my direct reports. - Okay. - And so they grab me and they say, listen, you can never do that again. It's the first thing, first thing. Which sounds, I think a lot of people might be surprised by that. This is, I don't use the word superior, like you don't love the word junior, I don't love the words superior, and I'm a superior officer in this case. And this sergeant just said, you don't ever do that again. And they went on to explain, look, you have some good points. This was not our best effort. And they went on to explain a few other things. Your Marines have just been on vacation for a month. Your Marines have trained really hard leading up to that vacation. Your Marines just got acclimated. This is the first training exercise. - Right. - And you don't tell them all this stuff and embarrass them and embarrass us. You tell us. And we'll work out a plan together for how to get the Marines to do. And so I got, basically it was a polite, a very clear lecture about how to work with this team, this leadership team to help drive results collaboratively, not to stand up there and dictate to a group. - And say, here's what we're gonna do. - Say, here's what we're gonna do. So it's a really, again, like, really lucky, super important lesson, like really shaped me. - Yeah, thank goodness he was able to tell you. - Yeah. - So clearly. - Like you owe that guy one. You're back, you should send him an email today. - Sergeant Espino, I'm gonna try, I'm gonna figure out a way to make sure Sergeant Espino gets, gets, gets, gets, gets to listen to this podcast so he gets the shout out. But I'm probably a 22, 23 year old manager and I got one of the greatest lessons about driving results collaboratively. - So I think it's such a great story, Russ. I think what becomes clear from both of our stories is that when you're trying to get things done, when you're trying to achieve results, one person doesn't have all the answers, especially not the boss, right? You've gotta work collaboratively. You've gotta use everybody's experience and everybody's wisdom and everybody's thoughts in order to achieve the best results. (upbeat music) - And now it's time for a listener question. And a reminder, if you ever have a question or feedback for us, you can call us at 2626Cander or write us at [email protected], just like this listener did. - The letter reads, "I don't think of myself as a dictator. On my team, I left the people closest to the work, make the decisions and I have confidence that this particular decision-making process is good. But then there's the problem of announcing the decisions. I sometimes worry that I just sound like the suit giving marching orders. Is there a right way to announce new decisions so that the rest of the team feels included?" - This is a really good question. And I really, I actually applaud how sensitive this person is to this situation because it could be tempting to have gone through this process of getting the decisions out into the facts. And then when it's time to announce, to be aware that you might come off as a dictator after having followed a great, inclusive process, I really admire the sensitivity to how this might be perceived and spend a bunch of time thinking about this since reading the question. I have a few different piece of advice and I know you've got some ideas on this too. The first thing I'd say is, it's never gone wrong for me when I've been transparent with people about a process that I followed, right? So you just went through a process where you were pretty inclusive, you went through a process where you push the decisions out to the people closest to the facts, right? You know, it seems like you've done all the right things. I think it's probably not a bad idea as you're getting ready to say, quote unquote, announce the decision. And go ahead and give people some transparency into how exactly you arrived and how we made the decision. - In fact, maybe you didn't make the decision at all somebody else did. - Yeah, and it sounds like for this person, in many cases, that's the case. And so that's the first thing is talk to people about the process that you follow. That'll help dampen the feeling that you're this dictator up there. Here's the, you know, the suit announcing the decision. - Yeah, you want to kind of show your work, right? - Exactly, show your work, yeah. - I think another thing that is often really persuasive is to let the person who made the decision announce the decision. Dick Costello at Twitter used to say a great thing. He said, your team wants the stage, show them the stage. Like you don't have to be the one who's announcing it. You don't have to be the one who's persuading the team. Let the person who made the decision do the talking. - Yeah, yeah, exactly. You don't have to be the one who announced it. You can just make sure they have the venue to announce their decision. - I think one of the things you can do is let your team persuade the others. But when the skeptics come in, when the trolls step up, you've got to step in and help them. I think another way that you can help the people on your team be more persuasive when explaining a decision is to borrow an ancient, an ancient and wonderful technique proved by time. Aristotle said, in order to be persuasive, you have to share your logic, you have to establish your credibility, and you have to address the emotions in the room. And just helping people remember that they have to do all three of those things when persuading about a decision is one of the best services you can offer your team as a boss. - Yeah, I think this idea, so the first two are maybe pretty intuitive, but this idea of acknowledging and dealing with the emotions in the room, I think is often lost. And when we get a little too transactional about things, we got to announce the decision, we're going to share the logic, but we don't necessarily honor the emotions. - Yeah. - Yeah, so if you put it all together very briefly, it's okay to be transparent about the process that you followed to make it clear you followed an inclusive process and you have pushed the decisions out to the facts. Bring in other voices, let the person who made the decision announce the decision, but you stand there ready to back them up, things get a little weird, and then last is think about and honor the emotions in the room. - Thank you so much for the question, it's a great one. And thank you for your efforts not to tell people what to do, telling people what to do doesn't work. - And now it's time for this week's candor checklist. Concrete tips you can put into practice today or tomorrow in your own workplace. This week's checklist is of course all about not telling people what to do and what to do instead. - Tip number one, let direct reports choose the agenda for one-on-one meetings. Your one-on-one meetings with your direct reports are your time to listen and clarify. It's not the time when you should be telling them what to do or giving them feedback. - Yeah, and I think especially for one-on-one, when you turn over the decision making for the agenda to your direct report, my experience has been that dramatically increases sort of their feeling of ownership over their work. Just that one little change can really, because now it's on them to decide what's the important thing to come talk to you about. - And it's also on you to listen. Listening is work, it's not a passive activity, it is hard work and it is your job if you're the boss. So let your direct reports choose the agenda for your one-on-one meetings. Tip number two, in team meetings, make it clear whether the agenda is to debate or decide. So important. So often, tension arises on a team when half the room thinks that they're there to make a decision, and the other half of the room thinks they're there to debate. And the debaters wonder why the decision makers are rushing to a decision, and the decision makers wonder why the debaters want the meeting to go on forever and ever and ever, and they start to hate each other. This is when emotions really run high, so really important tip. And sometimes it's not the whole meeting. Sometimes it's specific agenda items can have different objectives. Sometimes the objective might be to make a decision. Sometimes it might be just to relate information. Sometimes it might be just to solve a problem or to debate. It doesn't have to be a whole meeting, but the idea is try to be really clear about what you're trying to achieve with a given agenda item or for a full meeting. And also who's in charge of that debate and that decision? And often you are not in charge, which brings us to tip number three, you are not the decider, at least most of the time you shouldn't be the decider. You're going to get the best decisions when you push them into the facts, when the people who are closest to what's really going on are making the decisions and telling you what the decisions are. Yeah, I think that's right a lot of times. I think in some cultures and some environments, dependent, you might be very close to the facts and you might be responsible for everything the team does or fails to do. And you might have to make the, it might be the expectation that you need to make the decision. But I'd say two things. One is, I think it's really worth experimenting with pushing decisions, closest to the facts. You will probably get better decisions. Number one, number two. You will definitely get better decisions. I would have to. You will almost certainly. And then I think, but I think the second point, and maybe the most important thing is do I identify explicitly who the decider is? Who has the facts? Yeah. Who has the facts and say out loud for everyone. So everyone knows who is the person who is supposed to make that decision. Exactly. For further tips on not telling people what to do, check out the show notes for this episode, episode six at RadicalCander.com/podcast. Now it's time to announce this week's Candor T-Shirt winner. As you know, we're doing a T-Shirt giveaway for listeners who leave us a review on iTunes. To enter, all you have to do is go to iTunes and leave us a review, a radically candid one. Each episode we're randomly selecting, not just selecting for praise, a listener from the reviews and giving them a really cool candor t-shirt. This week's winner is. Lish 1986, who left us a review on January 16th, 2017. I'm not a traditional boss or manager in the business world. I'm actually a middle school teacher. Still, the skills needed for managing groups of people are the same. This podcast looks like it'll be great to help refine my classroom management skills. The hosts are great and I already plan to make the "Carepersonally Challenge Directly Philosophy" a part of my classroom management plan. Thank you very much, Lish. That is great feedback. We really appreciate it. And agree that this can really be effective in the educational environment. Yes, Lish. In fact, shout out to my sister-in-law, Ellen Erskott, who taught RadicalCander at the Kip School. So glad you found this helpful. Such an important job you have as a middle school teacher. Thank you for doing it. So, Lish, to get your t-shirt, please email us at [email protected] to claim your t-shirt. Want to make sure you get that? It's awesome. Russ picked it out just for you. For the rest of our listeners, we'll be announcing another winner on the show next week. So make sure to leave us a review on iTunes and tune in next week. And that's it for this episode of RadicalCander. Our producer is Kristen Mindsert. Thanks also to Laura Mayer and Andy Bauer's at Panta Plei. Our theme song is by Cliff Goldmucker. RadicalCander is part of the Onward Project, a network of shows from Gretchen Rubin that also include her show Happier and Chris Gilleboe's show Side Hustle School. Every day, Side Hustle School profiles different people doing what they love. Recently, I heard an episode about a woman who started Airbnb for pets. No way. Yeah, as a dog lover, I think that's an awesome idea. Yeah, that sounds like a good one. When I go out of town, I always feel so guilty what am I going to do with Elsa? Please let us know what you think of the show. You'll find us on Twitter at candor. Our email address is [email protected]. Our website isradicalcander.com and the RadicalCander book is available for pre-order at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, book passage and your local bookseller. And if you like this show, please be sure to tell a friend or subscribe to us in iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app. I'm Kim Scott. And I'm Russ Laraway. We'll talk to you next time. Thanks for listening. [Music]