[MUSIC]
Hello everybody, welcome to the Radical Candle podcast.
I'm Kim Scott.
>> I'm Jason Rosa.
>> I'm Amy Sandler.
In the past, we've talked about how to know whether or not being a manager is right for you.
And we've also talked a lot about manager burnout.
Today we're exploring the question, what if nobody wants to be a manager at all?
Visier, a leader in people analytics, surveyed 1,000 individual contributors about whether they wanted to become people managers.
Almost 2/3, 64% said, thanks, but no thanks.
There was a TikTok video from a user named Kia Abdul.
And I hope I got that name right with over 2 million views.
And in that TikTok, they were equating management with an unpaid internship
due to all the responsibilities that managers aren't compensated for.
There was another TikTok where another user said that she stopped being a manager in tech
because there was no work, life, balance.
She had zero decision making power and felt that companies didn't care about their people
as much as they did about the bottom line.
So that is what we're going to be talking about today.
Just a little bit more data, this Visier survey,
they found that employee ambition was primarily outside the workplace, the top three priorities,
and just think about it for yourself, does this resonate?
The top three priorities, spending time with family and friends,
2/3 of folks put that as their top three priority,
being physically or mentally healthy, 64%, and traveling 58%.
Kim, Jason, any guess on where people manager came in on those numbers?
I bet it was number 11.
Oh, you're so good at reading the notes.
And being a sweet executive in this list of 12 came in dead last.
So the question we're talking about today is,
Kim and Jason, can we have a world without managers?
No, we cannot.
And I think like so many things were popping in my mind as you were describing these TikTok videos
in particular, and I think if you become a manager for money,
that is the wrong reason to become a manager.
I mean, I think a professor of mine at business school used to ask, Richard Tello used to ask,
do you want to do the things that managers do or do you want to be a manager?
And the right reason is to do the things that managers do.
I think also on that Visier survey,
like work is also like good work.
Work that you love is to me when I put that ahead of travel in my list of things.
I wouldn't always because often I hated my job, but like once now I would put, you know,
work as number three right behind time with loved ones and physical/mental health.
And the other thing about work, I don't know why I was spent all day, both days this weekend
weeding, which is work that I love to do.
And therefore I love my yard.
It does not compensate.
I don't get paid for that work.
But it, and there's a line in part of darkness about what's his name is working on his boat.
And there's a line in there where it says he did enough work on the boat that he loved the work.
I think work and love are actually connected.
And so anyway, that's not really a way of answering your question.
Well, it is, it's a really interesting way because I think even,
you know, what we may have heard from Professor Tedlow, you know, going back to this survey,
the question of, you know, why individual contributors don't want to become people managers,
91% were citing some kind of barrier.
And the top reasons that we're deterring I see is from wanting to be people managers.
Expectations for increased stress and pressure 40%.
The prospect of working longer more hours was 39%.
The third one was that people were happy with their current role.
And then the fourth one was a lack of interest in leadership responsibilities.
That was about 30%.
And so I think as I reflect on that and what you're talking about,
the work itself, you know, maybe if we ask them about weeding,
we might get a different response, but the actual work of being a manager does not seem,
seems like a lot of stress and pressure, the proverbial juice not being worth the squeeze,
at least from some of what we're seeing with these, I'd say, tick-tocks and data.
Yeah, I mean, I think if you don't, if you're not interested in doing the things that managers do,
if you do, if the idea of having a one-on-one with someone and asking them about their life,
if the idea of having career conversations and trying to understand what motivates people
and how you can help them take a step in the direction of their dreams,
if those things sound uninteresting to you, then you should not absolutely
should not become a manager.
I think I've told this story before, but, you know, play it again, Sam, I'm going to tell it again.
So, there was a moment when I was working at Apple, teaching, managing at Apple,
and we always tried to have these inspirational leaders come in and kick off the class.
And there were a lot of inspirational leaders at Apple, and one time, but I never knew who they were,
like, I don't know who found these folks and brought them in to kick off the class,
but I met them usually as I walked in the door. So, I'm about to teach this day and a half long seminar,
and this guy walks in and he stands in front of the class, I'm about to teach, and he said,
"Well, you all, I have made a deal with Apple. They do not ask me to manage people,
and I continue to work here." I was like, "That is not really the inspiring moment."
But it was very honest, actually, I was able to do something with that. I was like, "Look,
if you all don't want to manage people, you should not, you can have a successful career at this company,
as we just saw with whatever his name was, who was super successful. He made a ton of money at Apple,
but he did not manage people because he had no interest in managing people. So, that's
one of the things that was bringing to mind is, who are talking, Amy.
Emotional labor has always been part of being a manager because what you said,
Cam was talking to people about their lives and their goals and all of that stuff is true,
and it's a big part of what being a manager is. But there's also a signing work and making sure that
you're holding people accountable so the things that they've agreed to do, or rather that you're
inspiring them to follow through on the commitments that they've made is the positive way to say it.
But I think in the last five years in particular, the emotional labor has taken on a different tone.
There's so much collective trauma from the pandemic and the
you ask the refocus on the fight for social justice and equality. The emotional labor has
notched up in a significant way and it often has something to do with helping people continue to
enjoy their work. But I was talking to a friend of mine who is an incredibly talented
product manager and someone who was one of my favorite people to work with. And she basically said
that between the pandemic and having a kid, she has lost the ability to think critically about
any time, her eyes and beyond a year. Yeah. Yeah. She can't think about it anymore.
She's sort of like, it might be going to have a house in six months is that that's the level of
future planning that she's doing. And I think that's why a lot of people are elevating these other
things like travel and spending time with loved ones and all this other stuff because
we're still the nerve is still pretty raw. People are still living with the reality that
it's not the future is not guaranteed. And so some of that, I feel like some of the inspirational
like part of leadership and people management has been replaced by supporting people in their
trauma response to losing a sense of where they're going in their future. And I would guess
that that is very obvious to the people being managed. You know what I'm saying? They know what
they're saying in their one-on-ones. They know what those conversations are like. And so they're like,
do I want to deal with me on a regular basis? Like, no, that's someone else's job.
Yes, yes, yes, and I think, you know, a lot of great leadership training comes out of the military.
And in the military, obviously people, I mean, trauma is inherent in the job. If you're especially if you're
in a combat situation. And I think that the leadership training in the military has always been,
you know, you take care of your people and your people take care of the work. And I like your job
as a leader is first and foremost to take care not only of people but people and their families.
And so I don't think this is new, per se. I mean, trauma is not new. There's been trauma for, I mean,
I think maybe our willingness to talk about trauma is maybe a little bit new. But people had been
traumatized always forever. 100% agree. But I think people are, it's not new. You are correct.
Yeah. But I think there's a changed expectation as to who, as to our manager's responsibility in helping
an individual contributor manage that. Like manage their, their, their lives. Yes.
Yeah. I think there was a piece in a, a, a reddit thread in career guidance. I'm just going to read it
because I think it might flesh out Jason what you were sharing with your own reflections. It says,
quote, "being a manager is the most lonely role I've ever had." Like you get shit from both directions
and you don't really have peers to complain to. You just kind of have to deal with it all in your own.
And not sure if this is just my company, but a lot of this stuff I hate is what I have very little
control over. Strategy gets set by my manager, salary and policies by HR. I just get to communicate
this lovely stuff backwards and forwards. The bid I like is the stuff around building a great team
and coaching people. But the negatives outweigh the positives 90% of the time.
I think that's very well said for the problem of being a middle manager. I mean, when you're a
middle manager, you own decisions that you weren't necessarily involved in making and that you may
disagree with vehemently. And I think it's really important to think about how to deal with that
and to be very explicit about how to deal with it. And I think the most important thing you can do
when you're in that situation of having to communicate a decision that you disagree with to a team
of people who know you well enough, they're going to be able to tell that you disagree.
But it doesn't do any good to say, yeah, this is stupid, but we have to do it anyway. That's not
inspiring for anyone. Although it may be tempting. I think the thing you want to do is you want to
before communicating the decision, you want to go to your boss and ask some questions. You want to
try to understand the rationale behind this decision, even which still doesn't mean you have to
agree with it. But if you take the extra time to try to broaden your perspective, because very often
when a decision gets made, it gets made by people who have who are taking 12 things into account.
Whereas you're taking one thing, you know, your team's thing into account. And so it may not make
any sense from where you sit, but when you try to understand the broader picture, even though you
still disagree with it, you may be able to at least acknowledge these other points. And I think that
can be very helpful both in terms of communicating with your team, but also in terms of growing in
your career and trying to understand your boss's point of view and a different perspective.
That's great guidance. As you were talking, what it made me think is like, it's almost the same
guidance as like, what do you do when you get feedback you disagree with, which is like you have to
find the part that you do agree with and focus on that. Like that's the way to move forward.
We don't want to reject that of hand something just because we don't agree with part of it.
Yeah. And I think, you know, just Kim, you're calling out the piece about middle management is a
really important one. There was a piece in unfortunate and they were sharing some research around
how roughly two thirds of leaders reported having more responsibilities at work now than they did pre-pandemic,
which was shared by a third of individual contributors. And so this increase in responsibility
has led to an increase in anxiety and it shares how middle managers calling them, you know, in organizations,
shock absorbers are in a particularly difficult spot because they lack the senior leaderships,
you know, access to support and resources and they have to enforce these policies they may not
endorse. I just wanted to kind of reinforce this role of, you know, where middle managers sit,
but also going back to what you were saying about kind of where we were before the pandemic and now
that, you know, not only having the the actual emotional trauma and physical trauma that people
have navigated, but also there's people that have far more responsibilities than they may have had
three, four years ago. I was going to say I think the part of what happened is that companies were like,
we don't know what to do with this. We're not going to provide mental health benefits. We're not
going to provide you additional resources. We know people have these problems, manager deal with it.
Like that's what happened to the majority of managers in the pandemic. They're just basically
told like we know all these things happen. We're not going to spend any more money on resources or
help for you and you just have to deal with it. So I think like even though it might not be sort of
on paper and increase in responsibility, I think there might have been an increase in frequency of
having to sort of perform some of the responsibilities of being a manager without any additional support.
My theory, what I'm positing and it seems to be backed up by the data is that people are meeting
their meeting employees in some state of crisis. Forget trauma. Just like some state of crisis,
more frequently on a regular basis right now than they did 10 years ago.
It might actually be the case that we're meeting the same number of people in about the same
level of crisis, but people are more willing to reveal that they're in some state of crisis at work.
So it might be the case that this is always the case. People are just uncomfortable talking about it.
So you could say like societally, maybe net net, it's an improvement. From the perspective of a manager
who's like, how many times a day do I have to put on like my crisis management hat?
I think they're picking that hat up and putting it on a lot more frequently than they at least
they perceive they were in the past. And so and I think that there's a fixed number of hours
and energy is a sort of is a depletable resource. And so when you say, hey, it's your job.
And then you're also like, but it's also your job to do the goal set.
To make the pricing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like that's also your job. That's how you wind up with a stack of
plates that's like way bigger than you can possibly clean in your in a shift. Like every day you come in
and there's a stack of dirty plates on your desk, you know, like, okay, I'm going to try to get through
my stack of dirty plates, but there's no time at which you get to the bottom of the stack. I think
that's how a lot of managers feel. I think a lot of individual contributors feel the same way,
but at least in this data, it's at a slightly lower like, it's a lower percentage of the overall
population than managers. Yeah, that makes sense. You know, so I think as we try to give some guidance
to to the group, there was an entrepreneur.com piece where Vizier CEO Ryan Wong shared quote,
one important step is to redefine the meaning of manager. Partly, this is about reconceptualizing
the role the tech industry for instance has popularized player coaches. So these are employees who
continue to contribute as individuals while also leading small teams of trusted colleagues while
this balance can be challenging to strike. The upside is sustained engagement with your field and
growth of new management skills. And quote, some curious, you know, Kim, Jason, do you see is there a
need for companies to start to maybe separate out some of these parts of a manager's role? What do
you think is a path forward to make being a manager more attractive? I think explaining to people
what managers do and being very clear about it is important. Like managers should be soliciting
feedback before they give it. They should be giving praise. They should be giving a certain amount of
criticism in these impromptu conversations. They should be having career conversations. They should
like just spelling out what managers do. I think another metaphor is not going to solve the problem.
I think, I mean, I don't know that this is a metaphor. It sounds to me like they're they're actually
trying to maybe even separate out the coaching part with the responsibility part when I see player
coaches. That's how I interpret it. I don't know. Jason, do you read it differently? Here's the problem
with that sentence. It is the part that reads small teams of trusted colleagues. Yeah.
My experience with the tech industries embracing of player coaches is that they're like, you're
going to be a player coach and we're going to give you the same size team as we used to give people
who were only people managers. So you're still going to get a team of 10 or 12 or 15 people
that you're responsible for, but you're also going to have individual contributor responsibilities
and strategy responsibilities and communication responsibilities and HR responsibilities.
And now we're back into the TikTok where this is an unpaid internship.
Right. And you still won't be able to buy a house or afford to pay off your student loans.
We are interjecting. I don't have my microphone, but no, no, you're exactly right, Brandy. I think if middle
management is the step that people have to take and there are certain and like there are certain
unavoidable things about being a middle manager. I think the emotional labor is unavoidable. You
should embrace it. You should look forward to it. It should be part of what gets you excited is
like, I'm going to help this team be as sort of like happy and functional as they possibly can
to achieve our goals and maybe take a step into the direction of their dreams. Like the emotional
labor part, you have to be excited for. But like the unavoidable parts of like communicating decisions
that other people make, those that's just unavoidable. The unavoidable part of like having to
to assign work that you know that is not the thing that people are most excited about,
unavoidable part of work. I don't think it is unavoidable that people must be player coaches.
I think there's possibility at least in my mind that you could have a role that's primarily focused
on people management. It doesn't mean that you never touch a project again. But I do think this idea
that you know, you treat managers as half an individual contributor and half a coach or half a
player and half a coach. I feel like that idea is just like dead on arrival because one or the other
of those things is going to be significantly undermined by the company's inability to like properly
assess how much a single human being can possibly do in both of those roles. There might be a company
and Visier might be the one where they actually, you know, I could see a player coach if you have a team
of three or a team of four and like you've worked with them for a long time and you truly have an
individual contributor role could work. But that's not my experience. Like most companies don't actually,
that's not how they allocate resources in the player coach role. They do treat management like an
unpaid internship. Correct. It's like when you get done with your work, then you can manage.
Yeah, or you manage all day long and then you do your work at home all night long, you know.
That is not sustainable. I think also, I mean, the thing that I think they're trying to get at
with player coach that I do think has some merit is that when you become a manager, you shouldn't
expect people to do what you say. Right. And I think one of the things that sometimes causes new
managers real stress is they become a manager and they expect people to do what they say.
And they don't know that telling people what to do doesn't work. And then they feel like either
there's something wrong with them or there's something wrong that their their direct reports are
intransigent or not doing what they say. And then they start behaving really stupidly.
And being cruel to others, that's how the sort of brutal incompetence comes into management.
And I think that's true in general. And in life, I mean, the times when I have behaved
my worst are those times when I really expected someone to do what I said to listen to me.
And of course, they didn't. And then I felt my authority was challenged and like my ego kicked in.
And I I did something that I regret. Yeah. So I think like teaching people when they become managers,
don't expect that people will do what you say because you have this position. I mean,
so I think the quote from Bill Clinton is being the president is an awful lot like being the
overseer of a cemetery. There's a lot of people under you, but nobody's listening.
I don't think I ever heard that one. Oh, you haven't heard that one. No.
That's a good one. That struck me very. I was when I was managing. I think I was at juice when he
became, when I heard him say, I feel like that's how the revolution begins with the rising of
from the cemetery. Jason, we yeah, what's on your mind? The principle of player coach, like to me,
the reason why the concept is valuable is because we want managers to have good enough skills
that when the team needs it or an individual needs it, they can kind of roll out their sleeves and
help. I think the, it's really important not to lose the ability to actually do some of the work.
You don't need to be able to do absolutely everything on the team. The value of the team is
like you can hire specialists, you can do things that no one else can do and they make you better
and faster. But like if you really are, if you become allergic to the work, you're going to be
dead in the water because people will sense that you're unwilling and unable to help.
If you do all the work, you'll also be in trouble. This is the S and T manager versus
micro manager dichotomy. But you want to be able to be a thought partner, but sometimes being a
thought partner actually means like getting your hands dirty and doing some of the work, like in
order to be a good thought partner, you have to be like down in the muck with the person and sorting
through it to find the brass. Yeah, yeah. And they have to notice that when they come and talk to you,
you help them achieve something that they could otherwise not have achieved or do something faster
or they help. And you have to know what the work is in order to be able to give that kind of advice
as a general rule. Yeah, I would love to get your advice on what can people do? And especially
whether I am a middle manager or I am in an organization where we are having, we've seen our
survey results and they're reinforcing what we've just been talking about. So one of the things,
again, from this vizier study, it said, "Fortgly for employers, quote, only 12% of respondents say
that nothing would convince them to become people managers. Unsurprisingly, pay is the primary motivator
for respondents. 71% saying better compensation would incentivize them to become people managers.
45% say better benefits and 26% say more opportunities for a career advancement." So I know,
Kim, we started off with you saying, you know, sort of don't go into it just for the money. But to me,
I kind of interpret this more about if this is this unpaid internship and I'm having to do all these
other responsibilities that haven't necessarily been explicitly named, that that's what people
are asking for, that they want to be paid for being both this sort of player and the coach.
Is that how you read that? I read that when you were reading that, what I was thinking is people are
not explaining what the job is and therefore people don't want to do it. I mean, I think like if you
become a lawyer only because you want money, you're not going to be a happy lawyer. I just, I think
that you need to be able to under, and I think part of the problem with management is either it gets
treated like an unpaid internship or it gets treated as this thing you have to do in order to
advance in your career. And that is, those are both bad reasons to become managers. You become a
manager because you want to do the job and you find it exciting and to work with the team of people
and help them take a step in the direction of their dreams. So, is it a problem that we going back to
employee ambition that there's a large number of, you know, number 11 people manager and C-suite
executive number 12? Because that an alarm bell or is that, what is that signaling? I came as you
were, as you were saying that one of the things that that had brought up for me is I think there's
organizations and managers are in kind of a double bind that gets created by, you were talking,
Kim earlier about how at Apple there was these sort of parallel tracks, right? There's like a
technical track that you could use advance in your career and then there's this management track.
And in my experience, in order to advance in the technical track, it requires, there's like hard
skills. There's like, yeah, very, very, very, very sort of like specific things that you need to be able
to do, types of complexity, you need to be able to handle and all this other stuff. But before you get
to the sort of like the staff engineer is like a common title for the person at the top of that
that career ladder. But before you get there, there's all these other stages and it's sort of, in
some ways, it's, there's almost like an apprenticeship model as you move up, which is like, there's
slow expansion of responsibility. You sort of get bigger scope of projects and things like that.
In the management track, there's a step. There's like an individual to manager.
And already, you're sort of expected to be able to handle all these things. And so part of what I
hear you saying is if we're not explaining what the job is, if we're not teaching people how to do
the job, like to do the work of being a manager, we are creating a, this is the double bind of
the organizations have created them for themselves. There's no sort of like soft on ramp to
to management in most organizations, in part because they don't even know what they're asking people
to do. So just by defining it, being clear about it, that would take a step in the right direction.
But then like helping people, training people, finding some way to sort of create that apprenticeship
model that gets exists in the technical tracks for a manager might get people more excited.
You know what I'm saying? Because right now, it very much seems like I'm expected to make this
sort of step function zero to one change between my current role and a manager. And then I'm kind
of, and I know all the bad stuff that comes with it. But I don't have the opportunity to experience
the really good stuff that comes along with being a manager. And I don't even know what it,
what it is, what I have to do. Like you said, you have to learn hard skills to progress in your
technical, on the technical track. I would say you have to learn harder skills.
Yeah, yeah. It's a manager. Yeah, it means one was easy and one was hard.
No, no, no, no, no, I know you just, I mean, they're often called soft skills, but
but these are really difficult things to learn, much more difficult. I would argue,
than learning the learning a new technical skill. And and yet they often don't get defined or taught
or valued, especially. And that's why that's why nobody wants to become a manager. Because it's like,
what is the job? Yeah. So in some ways, if we were to go back to the Vizier CEO,
who is making the claim that we need to redefine the role, I think we're making the argument,
first you need to define the role. Yes. Yes. And player coach does not count as defining the role.
Right. So step one for organizations who are seeing this as a warning sign, because
Amy, to respond to your question specifically, I do think it's like a big blinking red light.
Yeah. If people are, if the majority of people who respond to that survey are saying, I have,
I do not see it as like a career objective for me to become a manager. That means that your pool
is very small. And if the majority of the people who are putting their hats in the ring are doing it
because of the additional money, you're going to be promoting a lot of people who don't,
who shouldn't be managers in the first place. Like there's just no, you don't want the job. Yeah.
Right. Who you don't want the job. So step one is defining the role. And I think step two is like,
giving people a way to experience the great parts of management, like the exciting part of,
you know, helping, so a concrete example, this might be a buddy or mentorship program.
A buddy or mentorship program is a great way to give people a taste of what it's like to be a manager,
right? The sort of like coaching and developing somebody else.
It's, they're proven to be really good for retention, meaning like they're,
they're great programs for, for retaining the talent that you hire. And it gives you a taste of like,
you know, if I was doing this for four or five or six people, would that be a great,
would I consider that to be a great way to spend, you know, a significant chunk of my time?
Yeah. Yeah. And in the military, that's called the non-commissioned officer, right?
This someone who has been in your job is no longer doing your job is like writing along with you
and teaching you how to do the job. Yeah. I think most, most companies can't afford to hire a manager
to teach a manager, but it would be great if they could. I think that's great. And I, I really appreciate
the tips, Jason. I think you just gave us our, our tips before we close, Kim, I want to go back to
when you were at Apple and the guy who said, you know, this is the work that I want to do and I want
to get paid for this work. I'm curious, was there an example that you had in your own career,
whether it Apple or somewhere else where you did, you saw what it was like to be a manager and
that inspired you? Like what would have been the inspirational, either mentor or conversation
that you were like, oh, okay, this is something that is actually really interesting for me.
When, when I was working in Moscow for this diamond company and I had no interest in diamonds,
like I wound up there in a random way, I had a boss who would call me first thing in the morning
and just asked me what was going on and I like really enjoyed talking to him and I realized that
his job was to like help me feel more comfortable and free to do my job and I was like, oh, that's
kind of fun. So that was like, that was one moment where I sort of, I remember feeling like, oh,
I could have an interesting career doing what he's doing. And then there was another, there was
another moment at business school when we were doing the case on the Tylenol poisoning and the credo
challenge and the new CEO of Tylenol in 1976. Yeah. Oh, Jay and Jay, yes, sorry. Spent a bunch of time
working with his team to rewrite the credo. Like he spent his first five months as CEO,
traveling around the world and and rewriting the credo. And I remember thinking, that's what CEOs do,
I could do that would be fun. So those are my two stories about the time he credited the company's
ability to respond so well to the poisoning with having spent those five months rewriting the credo
because people really knew what was important. There's something so powerful about
getting people, the feeling of like getting people aligned. It feels so expensive that the sort of
like process of painting a picture of like what the future could look like. And it can be really
frustrating because people disagree. Like they naturally disagree about what the future could or
should, should look like. And then I think it was very wise, you know, might have also been sort of
self-congratulatory but also very wise to like credit the team's ability to sort of follow the credo
that they had just themselves created as like giving that the credit for successfully navigating
that challenge because I do think like that is one of the moments where it actually feels good
to be in leadership. It feels good. There's like this powerful, almost like feeling, I'm trying to
think like how do I want to say this? You said earlier Kim that you can't tell people what to do. So you
can't tell people these are the things that are important and you must think that these things are
important. Follow the like. And so instead he drew out like this process, this process drew out
the things that were really important. And then when crisis came people were able to follow the
right thing. Yeah, to do the right thing. And that's a rarefied experience. You know, very,
very rarely do people get to experience something like that. And I do think that that is having
those examples is something that maybe the world needs more of. Maybe there's a book of inspiring
leadership stories, those moments of exaltation. Yeah. And sometimes it doesn't have to be even,
I remember there was one point where a woman on my team had gone, I think she was ill,
so she was out for several months and then she came back. And we were having a big debate about
something, a big discussion and there was a lot of disagreement, but it was a fun conversation.
And I remember at the end of the conversation she was like, oh, I missed this. I'm so glad to be back.
And that was like, that was fuel for a year. It's just that feeling of, oh, I like working with you
people and we're getting somewhere. That is, that is like, that's really joyful or when you work with
someone who, who all of a sudden is doing something that they always wanted to do, but thought they
never could do. Like that is, that is incredibly satisfying. For me, like, that's the most satisfying
thing that can happen in a career. And that's why I liked being a man at the.
Kim, that reminds me of a story in my career when I was, was managing someone and they were
new to the role and it had come from a more corporate background and so and they were responsible
for design. And I kept encouraging them to, you know, you can be more creative in showing them
different examples, but I'd keep getting back these more sort of corporate, stayed designs. And I
kept trying to paint a picture of what was possible and it sort of we're going back and forth.
And then kind of a few weeks in all of a sudden, all this creativity came out.
And it was, it was that sense of like that unlocking and yeah, and sometimes you don't know what's
that thing that's going to help unlock that other person and some of its patient and some of its
painting a picture and some of its just them all of a sudden realizing that something new was
possible. So I share with you, I hadn't thought of that in a while and I think just to Jason's point,
like it doesn't have to be these huge stories of like we overcame, you know, the Johnson and Johnson
crisis, like those can be really powerful, but even in some of our day to day moments that it does
give you some of that energy to keep, to keep moving forward. In fact, maybe our listeners can write us,
what's that moment of joy in being a manager and maybe we'll read some of these out. These can be
some of our favorite things. I would love to. Oh, I love that idea. Yeah, I think we want to give
being a manager a little better PR. Yes. And first is Jason said defining it. Yes. Exactly.
All right. So just to revisit quickly our radical candor checklist, these are tips to start putting
radical candor into practice. Tip number one, define the role. Teach people what the job of
management is. What do they do and provide the training and resources to help them learn how to do it
better? Tip number two, create a buddy or mentorship program so people interested in people
management can experience some of the positive aspects of building relationships, guiding teams to
achieve results and helping people take steps in the direction of their dreams. Tip number three,
if you want to explore this topic further, listen to season five episode 25 should I be a manager
and season six episode two managers are burned out to to find out more. And for other tips you can go
check out our YouTube channel where you can not only listen to this podcast, but also watch dozens of
other radical candor videos. Show notes for this episode are at radical candor.com/podcast praise
in public and private. And of course, you can go ahead and criticize in private. So if you like
what you hear, go ahead, rate and review us wherever you listen to your podcast. And if you have criticism
for us or your stories of manager joy, email it to podcast podcast@radicalcandor.com. Bye for now.
Bye everyone. Take care. The radical candor podcast is based on the book Radical Candor,
via kickass boss without losing your humanity by Kim Scott. Episodes are written and produced by
Brandy Neal with script editing by me, Amy Sandler. The show features radical candor co-founders
Kim Scott and Jason Roseoff and is hosted by me, still Amy Sandler. Nick Perissamy is our audio engineer.
The radical candor podcast theme music was composed by Cliff Goldmacher. Follow us on LinkedIn,
Radical Candor the Company and visit us at RadicalCandor.com.