On paper, Bob was the hire every startup hopes for. He joined Kim Scott’s team at a software company with glowing references, a career at two of the world’s best technology firms, and a quirky, charming personality. “I really liked Bob,” Scott has said.
The first warning came a few weeks in, when he showed her a presentation. By Scott’s account it was a “jargon salad.” Whole sections were cut and pasted, the slides were full of sloppy mistakes, and he hadn’t made the fonts consistent.
Scott said nothing. She was so angry that she was afraid anything she said would come out mean, so she put it off. When Bob worried aloud about how he was doing, she has said, she reassured him.
She put it off for ten months. By then Bob’s projects were months late, the team had lost faith in him, and several of her best people told her they would quit if she didn’t fire him.
So she scheduled the meeting and tried to be kind about it. She was so gentle, by her own description, that she was incoherent. Bob looked puzzled. He promised to buckle down and make fewer sloppy mistakes. He told her he loved the company. Even when she spelled out what his late projects had cost, he was busy sketching on a napkin an aggressive plan to catch up.
Finally she said it plainly: “Bob, today is your last day. I am firing you.”
He shoved his chair back from the table, loud enough that people nearby looked up from their mugs. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked. “Why didn’t anyone tell me what I was doing wrong?”
Scott had no good answer. Had she told him what she thought of that first presentation, even clumsily, he could have fixed the problem and kept his job, or moved on to work that suited him better. Instead he had spent ten months in a job where he was slowly failing, and Scott had been unfair to everyone on the team doing good work. She had thought her silence made her nice.
She later called the mistake Ruinous Empathy: caring about someone, and saying nothing. It became one of the four boxes in her 2017 book, Radical Candor.