Ask The Expert – Feedback and the skill of ‘radical candor’

Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction
00:02:03: What is Radical Candour?
00:03:34: The two-by-two matrix
00:04:53: Applying Radical Candour in the military
00:06:37: The problem of the power imbalance
00:09:26: Feedback shouldn't be just once a year
00:11:20: Let people know you want feedback
00:13:07: The biggest barriers to giving feedback
00:14:45: Dealing with stereotypes and discrimination
00:18:55: Kim's Google story
00:24:11: Building the right environment within organisations
00:25:00: "Just Work", by Kim Scott
00:26:48: Micro aggression
00:31:08: Kim's starting advice for organisations
00:32:04: Trier's starting advice for organisations
00:33:06: Trier's career advice - mentors
00:34:46: Kim's career advice - find your voice
00:35:48: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Sarah Ellis: Hi and welcome to the Squiggly Careers podcast.  My name is Sarah Ellis and this week, you're going to hear the next in our Ask the Expert series.  I'll be talking to two guests, Kim Scott and Trier Bryant, about feedback.  Kim has pioneered the idea of a feedback approach called Radical Candour which I'm sure lots of you have heard of, maybe even tried out.  This is the idea of how we can challenge directly and care personally at the same time; almost the Nirvana of feedback, I think, which we all recognise as probably easier said than done.

Trier and Kim worked together as Trier is the CEO of their company, Just Work, which is also the name of Kim's new book.  What I particularly enjoyed about our conversation together is that they don't shy away from tough topics; things like what is the impact of power dynamics on effective feedback and how our biases, conscious or unconscious, can affect how we deliver feedback, receive feedback and just our understanding of the work that we do and the world of work that we're part of.

I found the conversation with Kim and Trier really insightful and practically useful and I think that's because they are a great combination of well-thought through, really credible research, but also backed up by lots of practical experience based on the organisations that they've worked in as practitioners, and also the work that they now do with lots of different companies to apply their work and their thinking; and they don't over-promise, you know, they don't say, "There's a silver bullet that means you'll get this right all of the time", but they do offer ideas, tools and techniques that I think are helpful for all of us. So I hope you enjoy the conversation and I'll be back at the end to say bye!

So, Kim and Trier, thank you so much for joining us today on the Squiggly Careers podcast.  I'm really looking forward to our conversation.

Kim Scott: Thanks so much for having us.

Trier Bryant: Yeah, excited to be here, thank you.

Sarah Ellis: So Kim, let's get started and dive straight into Radical Candour; what is Radical Candour?

Kim Scott: Radical Candour is what happens when you care personally at the same time that you challenge directly, and I think one of the easiest ways to understand what it is is to understand what it's not.  So sometimes we challenge directly, but we fail to show that we care personally, and that I call "obnoxious aggression", and other times we fail on both dimensions, usually when we realise we have acted like a jerk; instead of going the right way on the care personally dimension of Radical Candour, we go the wrong way on challenge directly and then we wind up in the worst place of all, what I call manipulative insincerity; and that's where passive/aggressive behaviour, political behaviour, backstabbing behaviour, all of the things that make a workplace intolerable occur.

It is fun to tell stories about obnoxious aggression and manipulative insincerity.  So, when we talk about what goes wrong at work, we're usually talking about those two behaviours; but the fact of the matter is the vast majority of us make the vast majority of our mistakes when we do remember to show that we care personally.  It turns out, despite everything that we see in the media, most people are pretty good people and so we do remember to show that we care personally and we're so concerned about not hurting someone's feelings or not offending them, that we fail to challenge directly, and that's what I call "ruinous empathy".

Sarah Ellis: I watched a video where you were talking about this idea of everybody loves a two-by-two matrix, don't they, you know, and it helps us to have a framework and a mental model to understand something; but you were really clear, and it's something I think that's really important, this is not about labelling people or kind of putting people in boxes.  So I wondered if just wanted to talk a little bit more about that?

Kim Scott: Absolutely.  One of the dangers of even the term, Radical Candour, is that first of all, a lot of people use it as an excuse to act like a jerk.  The second big issue with this simple two-by-two, which is really helpful, I think, but it's dangerous, like most helpful things, because people will use it, they'll use this two-by-two to start writing names in boxes, especially in an earlier version of the two-by-two; instead of calling it obnoxious aggression, I labelled that quadrant "the asshole quadrant", and that was funny for a lot of people; it really encouraged them to start writing names in boxes.  I beg of you, if you take a moment to use this Radical Candour framework, don't use these terms like labels to hang around people's necks.  This is not another Myers-Briggs personality test.  This is, use the Radical Candour framework like a compass to guide conversations to a better place.

Sarah Ellis: And Trier, you have worked in a really wide range of fascinating organisations. So you've worked in the Air Force, you've worked in Goldman Sachs, you've worked in Silicon Valley, all sorts of kind of fascinating places; what's been your experiences in terms of how this has worked and actually, interestingly, not worked just in your day-to-day jobs that you've had?

Trier Bryant: Yeah, so I was familiar with Radical Candour and Kim before we had the opportunity to meet and the first time I was introduced to Radical Candour and got the book, I was like, "Yes, this is how we teach feedback and engaging with your teams in the military".  What Kim is really good at, her superpower, are taking these abstract concepts and ideas and giving you frameworks that are practical and easily digestible and so to add that to your toolkit is really powerful for leaders and individuals.

So, I think that there's instances where I have seen where maybe people need to do more work with the framework, is particularly really making sure that we're also considering how individuals on our team identify, what are their intersections and how your own intersections and identities may be the same or different. 

So if you are a woman and you are leading another woman, what does caring personally mean?  It might be easier for a woman with a woman direct report to do that versus when she's leading a male or someone that doesn't identify in the same way as they do.  So I think that just taking that a step further about how do we learn how to care personally, taking into consideration our intersections and what that means, really goes a long way.

Sarah Ellis: When we think about this idea of Radical Candour, how much is it impacted by the level that you are at in an organisation?  Can this be a universally applicable way of approaching feedback that everybody can use; or actually, does this feel like, oh okay, well as a leader, maybe that's easier to do because I'm sort of naturally in a bit more of a position of power?  Kim perhaps let's start with your experiences and then, Trier, maybe you can build on it from the roles that you have done and how you've even tried it for yourself.

Kim Scott: Power is a big problem and it's something I didn't talk enough about, I think, in Radical Candour, but hopefully, I corrected that in the next book, Just Work.  So the issue is, for Radical Candour to work, it's got to be something that happens up, down and sideways.  So there's a real order of operations to Radical Candour and it begins with soliciting feedback, especially if you have some authority in your organisation, if you have some power, you've got to start with soliciting feedback.  Don't dish it out before you prove you can take it.

Also, you want to lead by example, you want to show people that this feedback is a gift and it's a gift to you because it's going to help you do your job better, but then it's a gift to them because you'll stop frustrating them as much.

I think the other thing that is really important, I get emails from people all the time; it's important to realise there is fear on every side of the equation.  It's kind of obvious that it's hard to speak truth to power and that people are often reluctant to be radically candid with their boss.

One of the things that surprised me a little bit after I published a book was how many leaders wrote in, they were just as afraid of their employees as their employees were of them, and so I think that it's useful to remember that if you have power, you need to understand that you have power and you need to be very intentional about laying it down, because the whole Radical Candour works when we develop a relationship, a human relationship, and the relationship between a boss and an employee is different from other; it's not a friendship, it's usually not familial, it had better not be a romance, but you need to be on kind of a level playing field at a human level. 

There's very few things that are worse for a human relationship than a power imbalance and so if you have power, you've got to figure out how to lay it down and if you feel that you don't have power, you've got to figure out how to pick it up, how to pick some of it up, and that's tricky.  But the people I have seen who are most successful in their careers are the people who are not afraid of people who are more powerful than they are, who figure out how to get on a level playing field, but the real responsibility of course, is on the part of the people who have power to lay it down and to figure out how to hold themselves accountable.

Sarah Ellis: One of the things that I'm really interested in is, how do we move feedback away from this being this thing that sort of happens, you know, once a year or as part of a very formal process, which I just feel can never be the right way to help us to all improve as we go and kind of learn as we go? 

Trier, you've worked in quite a range of organisations, a range of roles, so some, I'm imagining, places like the Air Force, have a pretty clear hierarchy and power because they have to have to be able to work and to succeed and, you know, even somewhere like Goldman Sachs, I'm making some assumptions, but I'm guessing there's some pretty clear hierarchies there.  What has been your experience?  Have you worked with leaders where you've seen them do this really well and what can we learn from them?

Trier Bryant: There is a difference, right; organisations and leaders have to understand that there is a difference between a review process for documentation to leverage in people processes for promotion or compensation versus how are we really allowing our employees to get consistent feedback throughout the year. 

Sometimes organisations complete them and say, "No, we do a 360 review once a year", but having that review and documenting it is different, because a lot of times you'll get something in a 360 review and how long does it take the people or HR team to process it?  Usually 30 to 45 days, right, and some of that can be stale and also, some of the feedback you can action very quickly.  So then it's, "Well, what am I going to work on for the rest of the 11 months of the year?"  So, how do we build a workplace where you treat people with dignity and respect and you're fostering that culture of trust so that people want to give feedback?

But you also said something about not only giving the feedback, but leaders also have to then action the feedback and circle back, right?  So it is that full circle that you just continue to iterate on and you have to lead by example in doing that. 

A couple of things that I learned in the military; it was really interesting. One time I had a colonel who was a white male, sit me down, he gave me some really incredible feedback that I needed to hear but I was already four years into my military career as an officer, and I said, "Sir, I really appreciate this, but I don't know why no one's ever said this", and this like pretty obvious stuff, and he said, "Well, Trier, to be honest with you, you're kind of intimidating".  I said, "Okay", and he was like, "So you're going to have to tell people that you want feedback before they're ready to give it".

That really just changed my interactions with almost everybody, my team people that I collaborated with.  We would go into a meeting and as I was saying, we were meeting a new team that we working with, "Hey, I just want everyone to know, I really value feedback and I've also got feedback that I'm good at actioning feedback real time and that's also what you want me to continue to do well.  So, "Hey, Trier, that's a great job, that's how you send an email on the updates, continue to do that" or, "Hey, here's areas of improvement or development". 

I listen to the feedback and then I say, "Great, I'd love to circle back with you in a week, couple of days, two weeks and just to check in on how I'm doing" and so continuing to build that muscle so that we continue to do all those steps within that feedback process.

Sarah Ellis: The feedback is hard, right?  I don't work with many organisations who I think would say to me -- and I work with some brilliant organisations, but I don't think many of them would say, "Do you know what; the thing that we are brilliant at is feedback, is giving each other really open, caring personally, challenging directly feedback".  I think most companies would say, you know, "This is still a real challenge for us" there are probably other things that they're better at.  So what is still getting in the way?  What are the biggest barriers that you've learnt about and actually, you start to explore, I think these more specifically in just work?

Trier Bryant: Yeah, I think it is going back to that caring personally, but also on an individual level.  I think that some individuals, even though I know they have tried to implement Radical Candour, they're like, "Okay, caring means I'm going to ask you how you're doing at the beginning of a one-on-one".  And some people that may matter, and some people it may not.  Some, you know, say, "Hey, caring is, I'm going to celebrate everyone's birthday on the team and recognise that, right?" Some people really like that and other people are like, "I couldn't care less".

So I think where leaders can really start to build that rapport so that you have to cultivate that culture and that rapport first and then, you know, like challenge directly, but how do we do that individually for each person, and it may be different for each person?  There are some people that need to be -- you need to show that caring personally in a very public way and some of them it's more private or personal.  It could be leaving a Post-it Note on someone's desk, it could be shouting them out in a meeting, right?

I remember at Twitter, it was part of the culture to shout out and acknowledge your teams on Twitter in a very public way.  The employees and non-Twitter employees would retweet and likes and make comments, but I had an individual on my team that was very much an introvert, they didn't like the tweets, and so if I would have done that, it would have shown that I'm not carrying personally because I wasn't taking that feedback that she gave me into consideration.

Sarah Ellis: Kim, one of the things that really struck me actually from building on Radical Candour into the research and the work that you've done for Just Work, is that some groups definitely have a harder time with Radical Candour because of who they are.  Perhaps some of the judgments that people make about them, some of the stereotypes, some of the discrimination that does happen and actually, I really kind of appreciated you don't shy away from that in terms of working out what this might mean. 

Perhaps you could just talk a bit more about that in terms of how people may be caring personally and challenging directly, but that might be interpreted in a different way, and you talk about the difference between intent and kind of impact, which I found personally very useful.

Kim Scott: Yeah, usually people's intentions are really good, but if you're stepping on someone's toe, you probably don't mean to step on their toe, but if they tell you that you're stepping their toe, you don't stand there continuing to step on their toe and say, "But I didn't mean to!" like, you get off the damn toe.  So how can we do that?  That sounds very simple; of course, it's very much more complicated.

I think probably the book "Just Work" was born shortly after, well probably it was being born my whole life, but it crystallised shortly after I gave a Radical Candour presentation at a tech company in San Francisco, and the CEO of that company was one of too few black women CEOs in tech.  She pulled me aside after the workshop and she said, "I really like Radical Candour and I think it's going to help me build the kind of culture that I want, but I've got to tell you, Kim, it is much harder for me to put it into practice than it is for you, and it's probably harder for you than it is for your husband, who's a white engineer in Silicon Valley". 

I knew this was true, she said, "As soon as I offer someone, even the most compassionate, gentle criticism, I get slanged with the angry, black woman stereotype.  So I have to be extra careful".  I realised in a flash a bunch of different things when she told me this.  First of all, that I had known her for the better part of a decade and I had never seen her seem even a tiny bit irritated, and believe me, she had a lot to be pissed off about in that period of time.  The fact that I had never even noticed this made me realise that she had really paid a real toll and that I had not been the kind of upstander that I think of myself as, that I wanted to be, that I intended to be.  I failed in my intentions.

The second thing it made me realise, so in that sense, I was sort of a perpetrator of these racial and gender stereotypes, she's at the intersection of race and gender, and second of all, it made me realise that she was also right about me and my husband, it's not his fault, but that I was also a victim of gender injustice throughout my career and I never wanted to think of myself as a victim; even less did I want to think of myself as a perpetrator, right?  But I had been -- it's hard for the author of Radical Candour to admit this, but I had been in denial about the things, not only that were happening to her, but the things that were happening to me, myself.

Then it made me think, most alarmingly, it made me realise that as a leader, I had failed to create the kind of work environment that I intended to create very often, that I had often, for example -- and this is a scary thing to admit, but I think we can't do right if we can't admit what we've done wrong.  Like several times in the course of my career, I hired teams that were 100% white men and what is up with that?  It really caused me to re-evaluate my whole career and that's kind of where Just Work was born.

Sarah Ellis: I was wondering actually for, and I think with something like Radical Candour it would be really helpful and with what you've then continued with Just Work, is just maybe a story from both of you, or a couple of short stories you can pick, of just examples of where you have seen this work really well and what that looked like.  So almost, how did that show up just so that people can be inspired by, I think, the art of the possible.

Kim Scott: Sure. I'll tell you a Radical Candour story and then I'd love to jump into some Just Work stories as well because I think that it really gets into some of the nuances once we talk about Just Work. 

So, shortly after I joined Google, I had to give a presentation to the founders and the CEO about how the AdSense business was doing.  I walked into the room, and there was Sergey Brin, one of the cofounders, on an elliptical trainer wearing toe shoes and a bright blue spandex unitard; not what I was expecting to see in the executive suite.  There in the other corner of the room was Eric Schmidt, who was CEO at the time, doing his email, and he was so deeply focused on his emails, it was like his brain had been plugged into the machine, so I felt a little bit nervous.  How was I supposed to get these people's attention?

Luckily, for me, the AdSense business was on fire and when I said how many new customers we had added, Eric almost fell off his chair, "What did you say?  This is incredible.  Do you need more engineering resources?  Do you need more marketing dollars?" so I'm feeling like the meeting's going all right.  In fact, I now believe that I am a genius, and I walked out the door, I walked past my boss and I'm expecting a high-five, a pat on the back and instead, my boss says to me, "Why don't you walk back to my office with me?"  I thought, "Oh wow, I've screwed something up and I'm sure I'm about to hear about it".

She began the conversation not by telling me what I had done wrong, but by telling me about the things that had gone well in the meeting, not in the feedback sense, which I think there's a less polite term for that, a sense of the word, but really seeming to mean what she said, but of course, all I wanted to hear about was what I had done to screw up. 

Eventually, she said to me, "You said 'um' a lot in there, were you aware of it?" and with this I breathed a huge sigh of relief, because if that was all I had done wrong, who really cared?  I kind of made this brush off gesture with my hand I said, "Yeah, I know.  It's a verbal tic, it's no big deal really", and then she said, "I know this great speech coach, I bet Google would paid for it", and once again, I made this big brush off gesture with my hand and I said, "I am busy; I don't have time for a speech coach.  Didn't you hear about all those new customers?" and then she stopped and she looked at me right in the eye and she said, "I can see when you do that thing, I'm going to have to be a lot more direct with you.  When you say 'um' every third word, it makes you sound stupid".  Now she's got my full attention.

Some people might say it was mean of her to say that I sounded stupid, but in fact, it was the kindest thing she could have done for me at that moment in my career, and by the way, crucially, she would not have said to other people on her team, who were better listeners than I was, that they sounded stupid.  She wouldn't have used those words with other people, but if she hadn't used exactly those words with me, then I never would have gone to see the speech coach and I never would have realised that she was not exaggerating.  I literally said "um" every third word.  This was news to me because I had been giving presentations my whole career; I had raised millions of dollars for two different startups, giving presentations I thought I was pretty good at.

It really got me to thinking why had no one told me?  It was almost like I had been walking through my whole career with a giant hunk of spinach between my teeth and nobody had told me it was there.  So that was really kind of what got me thinking, what are the elements of Radical Candour?  Why was it so seemingly easy for my boss to tell me and why had no one else told me? 

It's one thing, if we're talking about saying "um" or spinach in your teeth, but what if the feedback I need to give somebody is that they've said something to me that's sexist; what if I need to be an upstander and say, "Hey, what you just said to Trier there was racist"?  That's harder feedback to give frankly, so when we get into these more difficult issues, I think the thing about Radical Candour, that I think people like, you can tell me, is that we all have this dread around feedback conversations and I think it gave people a sense that these conversations don't need to be something we dread; they can be something we embrace that we can learn from that will not only grow in our careers and build more successful businesses, but will build better relationships, we'll have more fun at work.

I think the same thing is true of creating a Just Workplace, why should we dread doing that?  We should be excited to do that.

Sarah Ellis: Trier, actually, just listening there to Kim, I was thinking the level of trust in relationships and in an organisation must have a bit impact on your ability to kind of create an environment of Radical Candour because I think I was thinking there a few times where I'm embarrassed to say that I think I should have been an upstander, and I didn't do anything. 

You know when you think back into your career you do think there are definitely examples of where things, not the most "um" type examples, but where you have observed things, that might not be directly to do with you, where you should have done something, I look back and think, "I should have done something" and I would have been too fearful and too scared and probably not known how to do it and that point again about speaking truth to power.

Do you think within the organisations that you've both been in and the ones that you now work with and advise and consult with, how do companies create this environment where you do feel supported to have those conversations?  Is it trust that comes from the top?  Is it really investing in your manager so that managers really understand feedback?  Where would you almost advise an organisation to start because, it's a big challenge? 

I think lots of people recognise the challenge but then are just not sure and are probably quite scared of the challenge, I suspect at the same time, and just think, "Where do I start? What would I practically start thinking about, maybe around a Board table?" for example.

Trier Bryant: We have to start with naming it.  To your point, "Oh, bystander", adding that to your vocabulary adding being an advocate to your vocabulary.  If we don't have the words to name it, then how can you solve it, right?  That is what makes Just Work, the framework and the book so powerful.

When we're talking about these workplace injustices and again, this is Kim's superpower, of taking these abstract things that we know are happening, we're observing them, we find ourselves in these situations and we default to silence because we don't know what to say, we don't know what to do.  We don't know exactly what we're experiencing; and so in the book, Kim talks about just detangling these different ideas and really giving you these simple concepts and that's where she starts talking about the bias prejudice and bullying with the simple definitions of not meaning it, meaning it and being mean.

The first time when I read that, I heard that, I was like, "That's exactly what it is, right?"  You can just very easily and quickly put your experiences in there and then from that, you know, what do you do in those moments?  Then she talks the "I statement", the "it statement" and the "you statement" and so you know in that moment where it might be bias, how can you, say, use an "I statement" to invite someone in because they don't mean it, but you want to invite them in and let them know how it makes you feel about it. 

So going back to just hearing some of our stories, Kim tells a really good bias story and a really powerful "I statement" of inviting someone in, and when you hear it and you hear the response that in that moment she didn't say it, but then later on she did, you're just like, "Of course that's what you should have said; of course that's how you could respond", but organisations have to give their employees the framework and the language to name it and then to cultivate a culture of trust to make sure that we are in an environment of not only trust but action to put those things into practice.

Kim Scott: I think that one of the things about that bias, prejudice, bullying, that simple framework, is that very often we're in denial about what's going on.  We want to pretend, at least I, for much of my career, wanted to pretend that the whole problem was unconscious bias and nobody really meant it, but the problem is sometimes, people do mean it.  Sometimes people really do have a prejudice and other times people are bullying you.  They don't have any belief at all, but they're just acting like jerks.

We lump one term as "micro aggression" but there can be three very different kinds of micro aggressions and the right response for each one is quite different.  So, like most under-represented people, I experienced bias on the very first day of my career.  So I'm an intern at a bank in Memphis, 1989, and I was sitting by the elevator, and an executive at the bank walked up to me and asked me what my role and I explained I was an intern.  He cocked his head and he kind of said, "Oh, I didn't know they let us hire pretty interns". 

I'm 18, I don't know what to say, but I also know that he didn't mean it, like he had started this internship programme to hire more women at the bank, he didn't have a belief that they shouldn't hire woman, he didn't fundamentally have the belief that -- and I also knew this man was not a jerk, he was not trying to be mean to me, he was not trying to drive me away.  In fact, he was trying to recruit me; he had no idea how his words impacted me. 

His words had a gigantic impact on me because I decided in that moment that I would not work at that bank and in fact, I would not work in my hometown because I needed to go to a place I thought had a better -- and then I landed in Silicon Valley which as its own set of problems.  Wherever you go there you are, but his words had the impact of exiling me from my home.  So that was one issue.

The second issue, of course, was that I didn't know what to say and who can blame me?  I was 18, picture me, I'm standing there, I've got my shoulder pads on, I've got my wings going on.  Fast-forward 30 years, now I'm the author of Radical Candour; I am supposed to know what to say in these situations and I still can't think of what I should have said.  So I put it out there on social media and I got a lot of funny responses from people, including my dad who said, "You should told him to eat shit and die", not probably the most effective response. 

But a man who I'm on the Board of Directors with pulled me aside after the Board meeting and he said, "Thank you for telling that story because I'm sure I've said things like that to women who I've worked with and you helped me understand how my words were landing and I'll never do it again.  So first of all, thank you".  Then he said, "I'll tell you what you could have said to me that would have stopped me in my tracks.  What you could have said to me was, 'I don't think I can work here when you refer to me as pretty girl, because it makes me think you'll never me seriously'".  Of course that's what I should have said.

Sarah Ellis: So easy after the facts, isn't it?

Kim Scott: Yeah, yeah, well 30 years, but the thing that I learned from that incident was severalfold.  One is that we have such dread about talking about this stuff, but when I talked about it, I learned something from a person who had done the same thing to me.  So I learned something, he learned something, our relationship got better, I liked him a little better.  It was not painful, it was a fun conversation, like we can have these conversations and they can be productive and actually not only productive, they can give meaning to our work and our relationships.

Sarah Ellis: I guess actually, I was wondering whether to finish, perhaps we do two bits of advice.  Maybe I ask you both for a bit of advice based on organisations and individuals who are listening who want to apply and adopt the approaches you talk about in Radical Candour and Just Work.  So I know one bit of advice is really hard on that, but within very much your world; and then we'll also do a bit of more general career advice that you would pass on to our listeners, because we do that with all of our guests, so it's nice to keep that tradition. 

But Kim, perhaps starting with you, and obviously, you must get asked this a lot, but when you're thinking about Radical Candour and then the work that you have done for Just Work, what is the kind of starting bit of advice for organisations?

Kim Scott: I think the most important thing, I'm going to say this to individuals and organisations should realise their individuals are doing this; locate the exit nearest you.  I think very often in my career I didn't challenge things that were broken because I felt trapped.  I felt, in fact, more trapped than I was.  So if I had looked around and understood what my options were, if I decided to quit, that I would have been bolder about challenging the things that were broken and ironically, I would have been less likely to quit. 

If you're leading the organisation, don't forget that people can quit.  People are looking for their nearest exit and they're going to leave.  Maybe you have a great company, but maybe you have some bad managers or you have some bad leaders.  Unless you create the kinds of checks and balances in your organisation that allow people to speak truth to power, they're just going to leave.

Sarah Ellis: Trier, how about yourself?

Trier Bryant: When it comes to doing this work, I truly believe that empathy is the catalyst for change and to lead with empathy and then ask questions from a place of learning instead of ego.  When you do cause harm, I think that the line that just goes so far, that someone actually said to me and it was so powerful was, I gave someone feedback that they had said that I thought was offensive and they said, "I'm listening, tell me more".  It was so inviting and it was very clear that whatever I was going to share with them in that learning moment, that they were willing to listen and willing to change their behaviour and they were opening that door.

Sarah Ellis: Then Kim and Trier, both of you, just to finish today's interview which has been brilliant and really appreciate your time, general career advice that you would give to our listeners.  It could be advice that you've been given that's really stuck with you, or just something that you say to yourself that has stood you in good stead throughout your Squiggly careers.  Trier, do you want to go first?

Trier Bryant: Yeah, so I think one of the best pieces of advice that I have got, the three types of mentors you should have, and I got this from a mentor who is like, "Trier, I can't be your mentor for everything" and so she said, "Trier, you need to have a technical mentor", and that is something that is a technical expert at whatever it is that you're doing so you can go to them and get advice on the actual technical part of you work. 

Two, you need to have a mentor that is where you want to be, right?  So what is your goal?  Where do you want to be in 5, 10, 15 years?  Success leaves clues, find someone who is already there, and it doesn't mean that their path has to be your path, but success leaves clues and so learn from that.

Then the third part that she said was, "You need to have mentors that identify in the ways that you identify".  So for me, I have mentors that are women, I have mentors that are black, but I also have mentors that are black women or that have been in the military or transitioned from finance into tech.  That's so that when you do have moments where you need guidance in a specific thing and you're interested to understand if it's due to your intersections, you can go to someone and ask them because I've had moments where I've needed to go to a woman and say, "Hey, I think this is happening because I'm a woman, right?"  

That woman was like, "Actually, Trier, no you were wrong in that situation and this is why". It had nothing to do with gender, but if a man had given me that feedback I would not have received it the same way.  So that has really served me well to have folks that identify in the way that I do and that I can lean on them for their perspective of unique situations to where I live at my intersections.

Sarah Ellis: Then Kim, just to finish today's episode, your best piece of career advice.

Kim Scott: Don't default to silence.  I think there are so many reasons why we do default to silence; it's that default to silence that gets in the way of both Radical Candour and Just Work.  So learn what your choices are to speak up.  I actually don't want to put too much pressure on people, especially if you're the victim of injustice, you get to choose your response, and sometimes you may choose silence but make that a proactive choice and make sure you're doing the work to understand what are the pros and cons on both sides. 

I think very often the risks of speaking up loom so much larger in our minds than the risks of remaining silent, which are equally real.  So make a conscious choice and don't default to silence.  In tech, we talk a lot about the power of the default and if you just default to silence, you wind up giving your agency away.

Sarah Ellis: Thank you for listening to today's episode.  I hope you found that helpful and you got some ideas that you can try out for yourself.  If you have any examples or ideas of how you're using feedback in your organisation that's working really well, I'd love to hear from you.  You can contact us at helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com or on Instagram where we're @amazingif. 

I think feedback is one of those areas where we all need to improve.  I know very few organisations that would say, "We get this right all of the time", so I'd love to be able to shine a light on examples and specific ideas that any of you have got that have just worked really well that you can see working really well and we'll work out the best way to share those if we get lots of those through.

That's it for this week, thank you so much for listening and we'll be back with you again soon.  Bye for now.