As Kim Scott tells it, the room was not what she expected. She had just joined Google, and she was there to tell the two founders and the CEO how the AdSense business was doing. In one corner, one of the founders was stepping away on an elliptical trainer, in bright blue toe shoes and a matching spandex unitard. In the other, the CEO was doing his email. She was nervous.
But the business was “on fire.” When she said how many new customers the team had added, the CEO almost fell off his chair and asked what she needed. More marketing dollars? More engineers? “In fact, I think I’m a genius,” she remembers thinking.
On her way out she passed her boss, Sheryl Sandberg, who said: “Why don’t you walk back to my office with me?” Scott assumed she had done something wrong.
Sandberg started with what had gone well, and seemed to mean it. Scott was only waiting for the bad part. Eventually it came. “You said ‘um’ a lot in there. Were you aware of it?”
Scott was relieved. That was all? She made a little brush-off gesture with her hand. A verbal tic, she said. No big deal.
Sandberg tried again. She knew a great speech coach, and Google would pay. Would Scott like an introduction? Another wave of the hand. “No, I’m busy. Didn’t you hear about all those new customers? Who cares if I say ‘um’ when I have a tiger by the tail?”
The details shift a little from one of Scott’s tellings to the next. In the version she gave at a First Round CEO Summit in 2015, Sandberg’s third try went like this: “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 went to the coach and found out Sandberg had not been exaggerating. She really did say “um” every third word. She had been giving presentations her whole career and had raised millions of dollars for startups with them. She wondered why nobody had ever told her. It was, she said, like going through your whole career with spinach in your teeth.
Scott gives two reasons it was so easy for Sandberg to say. One was that Scott already knew Sandberg cared about her. When Scott moved from New York to California for the job and was lonely, Sandberg introduced her to a book group; Scott says she is still friends with some of its members. The other was that Sandberg never let Scott’s feelings in the moment stop her from challenging her directly, and kept going when the first two tries bounced off. Those two ideas are the axes of the framework Scott calls Radical Candor, and when she explains it, this is the story she tells first.
She noticed what Sandberg had not said, too. “My boss didn’t say, ‘You’re stupid.’ She said, ‘You sounded stupid when you said um.’ There’s a big difference between the two.” Scott adds that Sandberg would not have used those words with others on her team, who were perhaps better listeners.
Years later, while writing her book, Scott sent the story to Sandberg. As Scott tells it, the reply was: “Gosh, did I really say you sounded stupid? I’m so sorry. That sounds so mean.”