Today's Reading
INTRODUCTION
WE CAN FIX PROBLEMS ONLY WHEN WE ARE WILLING TO NOTICE THEM
When you write a book about feedback, or guidance as I prefer to call it, you're bound to get a lot of it. In 2017, I published a book called Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. It advocated for caring personally and challenging directly at the same time, a combination of real compassion for the other person and a commitment to helping them succeed.
Hands down, the best feedback I got on the book came from Michelle who'd been a colleague for the better part of a decade. I liked and admired Michelle enormously and was thrilled when she invited me to give a talk about Radical Candor at the tech start-up where she was CEO.
When I finished giving the presentation, Michelle pulled me aside and said, "I'm excited to roll out Radical Candor here, Kim. I think it's going to help me build the kind of innovative culture we need to succeed. But I gotta tell you. As soon as I give anyone even the gentlest, most compassionate criticism, I get accused of being an angry Black woman."
I'd been in innumerable meetings with Michelle. I'd never once heard her raise her voice or even seem annoyed, let alone angry. She's one of the most even-keeled, cheerful people I've met. Calling her "angry" and following that up with "Black" and "woman" was no small indication that something other than an objective assessment was going on with the people who called her that.
Michelle's story made me realize I had not done much to dig into how bias, prejudice, and bullying get in the way of Radical Candor. These attitudes and behaviors destroy the trust that is foundational to the healthy exchange of different perspectives, they mar the quality of feedback, and therefore hurt our ability to do great work and build strong professional relationships. Michelle's feedback also made me realize I'd treated bias, prejudice, and bullying as though they were all the same thing, making it difficult to respond effectively. Different problems demand different solutions, after all.
My failure to consider all this had put Michelle in a jam when she implemented Radical Candor. Come to think of it, it had put me in a jam, too, though in different ways. Why had I not paused to think about this when writing my book?
I was certainly aware of the problems of bias, prejudice, and bullying and how they can give way to discrimination, harassment, and violence. I grew up in an upper-middle-class household in Memphis, Tennessee. Since I was a teenager, I'd been wrestling with being White and Southern. Then I moved to New York and Silicon Valley and learned racism was unfortunately not just in the South. A tech CEO I coached was active in the BLM movement after the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. But he didn't need to fly to Missouri to fight racism. There was plenty of that in California.
Bias, prejudice, bullying, discrimination, harassment, and physical assault weren't things that happened to "other people." I'd personally experienced all of these throughout my career. Given these experiences, how was it possible that I had written a book about management that barely touched on what causes the worst management train wrecks? Freud calls this kind of knowledge "knowing without knowing." Linsey McGoey and others call this strategic ignorance. Charles Mills has written about "epistemologies of ignorance."
Michelle's Radical Candor on Radical Candor helped me break through that kind of hazy knowing / not knowing so that I could analyze problems clearly enough to begin to develop a framework that might help me (and hopefully you, too) figure out what to do when we notice them. Too often in my career, I have not said or done anything about these problems either because I refused to notice them or because I didn't know what to say or do.
It wasn't Michelle's job to educate me, so I'm grateful to her for doing so. This book is my effort to pay it forward. It will offer a framework that helps us all recognize the different ways that bias, prejudice, and bullying interfere with our ability to work together and what to do to get back on track. It will also examine the ways they enter our management systems, creating even more intractable problems. It will also offer some design principles that will allow us to create better management systems.
The goal is not simply to describe the problems but to figure out what to do about fixing them. Awareness is the first step to change. But awareness without action quickly breeds despair. Unless we figure out the next step to take, we'll retreat into denial. Oedipus gouged his eyes out after he realized he'd committed crimes he was ashamed of. This violent depiction of the denial that comes before coming to grips with our own misdeeds, be they intentional or not, is a kind of denial complex. If we are willing to notice problems rather than retreating to denial we can fix them—a much better response than gouging our own eyes out.
This book doesn't promise to fix everything. What it offers are some practical, tactical suggestions that will help us start putting more wins on the board so that we can keep moving forward, so that we don't retreat back into denial.
...
