Giving Effective Feedback

"You know, Matilda, I want to chat with you about the way you're interacting with your peers. So what I'm hearing from them is that you're missing deadlines on a regular basis and not letting them know you're missing the deadlines, and that also you're not fully keeping your team up to speed. And so they're kind of confused running around. Now, we both know that the most important way you can be successful here and also achieve your goals is to make sure that you are working with your peers in a way that's consistent and that they can count on you and you can count on them."

"Hope for the future is so important. I know this is going to be challenging for you to hear, not going to promote you, but I want you to know this. It's really important to me that you're able to succeed in your career here, and so I want to continue to help you find opportunities to build your skills and to advance."

"But at the end of the day, the hope is as a manager, the reason that you're giving someone this so-called constructive feedback is because you're helping them get better. You need them to change the behavior. They'll never get promoted if they keep doing that. They'll never be successful if they keep doing that."

"Look, you're a really good director of engineering because you do a great job at managing the team, get the products out, all that. But you're not really a CTO because to be a CTO, you have to be effective with other parts of the organization. You can't just be effective only with engineering."

"We don't understand that we are only privy to two out of the three, so I know what's going on for me and I know what I did. I have no idea what happened on your end."

"The thing that keeps us from repairing, which really is the idea of going back to a person after a moment we didn't feel proud of, taking responsibility for our part, maybe acknowledging the impact it had on them and talking about what you would do differently the next time, is actually this very false idea that there's a goal to be perfect."

"The idea of being good inside inherently requires us to separate behavior and identity. We infer a lot from people's behavior. Someone's late to work a lot, 'Oh, that person's lazy.' The quickest way to have an unproductive conversation is to lose sight of the fact that someone's good inside."

"Every management book that you read will tell you in public criticize in private. I fundamentally disagree with that notion. What you have to do is, is establish enough trust among the team so that you are comfortable critiquing and debating in public."

"If you give me feedback, I'll be like, 'Hey, thank you so much. This is super helpful,' because people are like, 'Oh, he actually likes the feedback.' Now, inside my heart might be melting. I'm like, 'Oh, I thought I got better at this.'"

"Radical Candor is just what happens when you care personally and challenge directly at the same time. And I think it's probably best understood by what it's not because we all fail on one of those two dimensions or both of them multiple times a day."

"The question that I like to ask is, "What could I do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?" Do not write down my question because if you sound like Kim Scott and not like yourself, then other people are not going to believe you want the answer."

"Strive for connection over perfection by daring to be dull. Just give the feedback. By doing that, you dial down the volume of self-evaluation, freeing up resources that can be used to really help you succeed."

"Fundamentally, the most selfish thing you can do is withhold feedback from someone. When you think a thought that would help someone improve and you avoid giving it to them because it would make you uncomfortable. Well, you're optimizing for your own comfort, and it's fundamentally selfish."

"Finally she said, 'I perceive you to be an anger.' So it's an I statement and it's simply what she's perceiving. There's no judgment. That was able to punch through my anger and then I woke up and went, oh, and then I stopped and just didn't act until I was able to shift out of anger."

"There's a misguided view that the goal is to convince the other person that what they're doing is wrong. Actually, the goal of any conflict is to create mutual understanding."