“You’ve never told me anything I wanted to hear.” Said one of my oldest and dearest friends. It was, I think, meant as a compliment. It was, I think, what he valued about our conversations – especially when it came to his work and career. Over the years, we have shared career secrets and fears and he has frequently asked me for advice. It is rarely taken but that’s not necessarily the point of going through the motions of canvassing opinion. I used to feel quite insulted that my pearls of you know what were ignored. Now, I am more sanguine. When people ask for advice, they are just asking for different perspectives so that they can make up their own mind what to do – or not do – based on a variety of inputs.
What did he mean? Someone who was once giving me both barrels (it was the end of a relationship if you must know) said to me that she didn’t believe in giving flaccid advice. That was a pretext for what is now euphemistically called ‘radical candour’. In other words, what we used to call in the old fashioned way before everything had to be given a business jargon label, straight talking. She was brutal in her assessment in what was wrong with me. Which, of course, made it all the more understandable that she wouldn’t want to be around me – as I pointed out. An argument which seemed to flaw her.
Being honest, saying what you believe, is rare. Most of us want to be polite. Especially to friends or clients. But we’re not paid to be nice. Or polite. We’re paid to tell our truth. To help our clients and our friends see the world through eyes wide open. The CIA has a brilliant unofficial motto:
Know what you need to know before you believe what you want to believe.
Central Intelligence Agency
It a good watch word for those of us who believe that the best service we can provide our clients and friends is to lift the scales from their eyes and help them see things as they are rather than as they wish them to be.
So far, so believable. The difficulty comes when people think that you can do this charmingly. Kindly. Diplomatically.
You can’t.
And that’s a problem.
The trouble with most of us is that we’d rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.
Norman Vincent Peale
You can’t because if you mince your words, you won’t be heard. The inventor of radical candour, Kim Scott, tells a story which illustrates this truth beautifully.
To illustrate radical candor in action, Scott shared story about a time her boss criticized her. “I had just joined Google and gave a presentation to the founders and the CEO about how the AdSense business was doing. I walked in feeling a little nervous, but happily the business was on fire. When we told Larry, Sergey and Eric how many publishers we had added over the previous months, Eric almost fell off his chair and asked what resources they could give us to help continue this amazing success. So… I sort of felt like the meeting went okay.”
But after the meeting, Scott’s boss, Sheryl Sandberg, suggested they take a walk together. She talked about the things she’d liked about the presentation and how impressed she was with the success the team was having — yet Scott could feel a “but” coming. “Finally she said, ‘But you said um a lot.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, no big deal. I know, I do that. But who cared if I said um when I had the tiger by the tail?’”
Sandberg pushed forward, asking whether Scott’s ums were the result of nervousness. She even suggested that Google could hire a speaking coach to help. Still, Scott brushed off the concern; it didn’t seem like an important issue. “Finally, Sheryl said, ‘You know, Kim, I can tell I’m not really getting through to you. I’m going to have to be clearer here. When you say um every third word, it makes you sound stupid.’”
“Now, that got my attention!” Scott says.
Kim Scott, First Round
We don’t remember that which is wrapped in kind words. Sorry. We just don’t. It’s what I call being a vicious friend. Someone who is on your side but tells you what you need to hear – regardless of consequence for themselves. (Wouldn’t it be nice if President Putin had a few vicious friends around him, right now?). Colleagues of mine have said it’s out of vogue now, out of kilter with the wellbeing zeitgeist in these post-pandemic days. That we have to be sensitive to other’s feelings. That it’s a bit 1980s. A bit brutal in an age of wokish snowflakism.
Well, the truth is often brutal. (Maybe that’s why we have that phrase. You know the one: the brutal truth.)
No one is who is serious about making better decisions or better life or career choices can afford to skirt around the brutal truth. It might be hard to hear, but without hearing it, we cannot make the decisions we need to make or move forward towards where we are trying to get to. There’s a scene in The Godfather when Tom Hagen, consiglieri to Vito Corleone, the Don, skulks downstairs drinking whisky to put off the inevitable duty to go upstairs, where his boss is recuperating from multiple gun shot wounds, to tell Don Corleone that Sonny, his eldest son, has been murdered. The Don comes downstairs because he can hear Tom drinking to summon the courage to tell him what he needs to know. He removes the whisky glass from Tom’s hands and says:
And now you have had the whisky, what is it you must tell your Don that he needs to know?
Vito Corleone
Only exceptional leaders, those committed individuals who wants to master their craft or genuinely improve their lives have the courage to hear the brutal truth. And only the very best advisors, the ones who those leaders can rely on through storm and sunshine, have the courage to tell that truth. It is not comfortable. It is hard. For both parties. But this is the territory where diamonds are made and mined. And this is the price you must pay for being a true trusted advisor.