A while ago, I was speaking with a friend of mine. She had been one of my best friends for years, one of those friends who you don’t feel uncomfortable to ask the really big favors of, or tell the embarrassing secret. She’s loyal, caring, and just a damn good person. Now around thirty years old, she was telling me about her frustrations trying to claim credit for her ideas and performance at work, and get promoted in her highly-competitive field.
「Everyone keeps telling me that I’m too nice, and that no one will take me seriously as a boss unless I behave more like an asshole,」 she said.
This was frustrating to me, because in fact, I viewed her friendliness, openness, and concern for others to be one of her core professional strengths. To see her sacrifice that in order to be perceived as a better manager would be disappointing to me, and in the long run, I believe it would be detrimental to her career as well.
What she expressed was a sentiment that I see quite often in the professional world: a false dichotomy, with 「nice and incompetent」 at one end of the spectrum, and 「effective asshole」 at the other. In reality, neither end of the spectrum is a true representation of reality. After all, if you’re 「niceness」 causes your team to fail, they won’t be very grateful for your compassion when you all lose your jobs. If you ruthlessly manage your way to the top, the bridges you burn will leave you stranded on an island, making it difficult to sustain your success over the long run. Failure to be tough can actually undermine your ability to help others, and failure to care about people can weaken your ability to get stuff done.
In fact, nearly every expert on managing people continuously emphasizes the same core principle: that effective management requires both niceness and toughness, and skillful management is determined by where the two sides of the spectrum are applied. In other words, it’s not about how nice or tough you are, but what you’re nice and tough about.
Tough on the task, soft on the people
One of the most useful management books ever written, in my opinion, is a 「children’s book.」 In the early 1980s, children’s book author Spencer Johnson met management consultant Ken Blanchard at a party, and they got to talking. Frustrated by the elitist, needlessly complicated jargon so often used by scholars of management, they decided to put their heads together, and write a 「children’s book for managers.」 The result was the 1982 best-seller The One-Minute Manager. It is cheesy, hokey, and at times condescending, but it boils managing people down to its most basic essence:
Set clear goals. Make sure that everyone involved agrees on the goals, and has an example of what good behavior looks like. Make the goals tangible. Write them down. Clarify what the consequences will be if the goals are met, or not met.
Praise people when they do something right. Watch them carefully whenever they begin a new task or responsibility. When they do something right, let them know, and show how their positive behavior impacts you and others on the team. Praise them immediately and be consistent, regardless of your mood. Once it is clear that they understand the task, you no longer have to praise them so often, but since each team member should have a development plan, there always should some area in which you are looking to praise them. Try to give three times as many praisings as reprimands.
When people do something wrong, let them know. Reprimand them immediately. Tell them what they did wrong, and how it impacts you and others on the team. Then, remind them that you value and support them as a person, just not their behavior in this instance. Be consistent in what you reprimand people for. Realize that when the reprimand its over, it is over. There is no need to remain upset or angry with the team member.
The gist of The One-Minute Manager can be boiled down to a simple philosophy: be clear and organized about the task that needs to be accomplished, and hold people accountable for meeting the task, but respect and value each individual’s inherent worth as a person, which exists regardless of their performance. Our ability and performance vary, but our worth as humans does not.
A similar concept has recently caught fire in many management circles, articulated in former tech entrepreneur and Googler Kim Scott’s 2017 book Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. In Scott’s model, she identifies two essential activities at the core of managing people: caring personally, and challenging directly. Depending on the degree that each is applied, they separate the behavior into four distinct styles: 「manipulative insincerity,」 「ruinous empathy,」 「obnoxious aggression,」 and the hallmark of great people-managers, 「radical candor.」
Manipulative insincerity is what happens when a person neither cares personally nor challenges directly, but simply avoids engagement altogether. Imagine your colleague who has given up trying to perform at work, and spends their time on Wechat or Taobao. Maybe they will still go through the motions of work, but you know they have stopped giving a shit. In one of my first jobs that I had in China, when I was in my mid-twenties, I once had a direct manager who used this approach to manage me. I was on a sales team in Beijing. Foreign headcount was required on the team, so that’s why I was there, but it was clear that the manager did not quite know how to properly integrate my role. He didn’t ever really criticize my performance, but also never really gave me goals or KPIs. Most of my job was spent attending client meetings as a 「white face」 to provide the image of internationalization, but with little substance.
I would actually find myself being a bit jealous of my Chinese colleagues who were often yelled at and reprimanded by our manager. Sure, he treated them poorly, but at least they were challenged, and given the opportunity to develop real skills. Every now and then the manager would give me general compliments in meetings, but it felt like he was patting the head of the family dog. Sure everyone likes the family dog, but it is neither valued nor respected to the same degree as the humans.
To be clear, despite the actions of my manager, I was able to find ways to grow on the job. This was mostly thanks to an excellent team of colleagues, most of whom I grew to rely on both personally and professionally. I still maintain meaningful relationships with many of them today.
Ruinous empathy is what occurs when someone cares personally, but fails to challenge directly. In this situation, the care someone has for an individual, coupled with an avoidance of confrontation, causes them to enable the individual’s poor performance or bad behavior. Paradoxically, the desire to care for the individual ends up hurting them in the long run. I can think of one experience when this happened in my group of friends. One friend was clearly starting to steer her life in a destructive direction. She began drinking heavily, doing hard drugs and having risky sexual encounters. These habits contributed to her inability to keep a job.
One of our friends who was fortunate enough to have a well-paying job began lending her money the (which she never paid back), and allowing her to live in her extra bedroom. She was compassionate, but could never confront our friend to receive help for her problems and turn her life around. Instead, the support that was provided simply enabled our friend’s bad behavior. With a source of money, but also no job, her destructed habits grew progressively words. While I moved away and lost contact with both of them, I recently received news over Facebook that our friend’s destructive lifestyle had led to her premature and unfortunate death.
Obnoxious aggression is what happens when someone is ok with challenging directly, but does not care personally about those around them. These are the abusive wrecking balls that rip through the company, leaving a mess in their wake. They hold others accountable for results, but cross lines in their behavior that limit success in the long-run. Often they are abusive, insult and demean others personally, and use their power in a way that fails to regard the humanity of those around them. This person creates culture of fear where team members fail to share information, try to cover up bad news, and focus more on competing with each other than achieving their team’s goals. Basically, it can be the workplace version of The Hunger Games.
An excellent example of this is Steve Jobs』 first tenure at Apple. Sure, he was laser-focused with a passion for making excellent products, but he caused self-destructive harm. He famously had trouble eliciting or accepting feedback from those around him, alienated himself from his co-founders and investors, and even refused to support, or even acknowledge his own daughter. This eventually led to a series of well-designed, but under-performing products, which led to his 1985 removal as CEO of the company he founded.
Radical candor is the result of both caring personally and challenging directly. It is the common thread that weaves between just about every great manager. Think about the teachers, family members, mentors, or bosses that have really been instrumental in helping you grow in life, both in your skills and as a person. There’s a good chance that those people were able to be effective due to their ability to care personally while also challenging directly.
An excellent example of the power of radical candor is, somewhat surprisingly, also Steve Jobs… but in his second stint at Apple, from 1997 to 2011. While still as relentlessly hard-driving as he was early in his career, his ouster undoubtedly humbled him, and cause him to re-examine how he dealt with those around him. In his personal life, he became a better father and friend. Professionally, he learned to curb the excessive petulance and cruelty that gave him his early-career infamy.
Long-time Silicon Valley reporter and Jobs biographer Brent Schlender described Jobs』 change this way: