Radical candor & transparency

The single most important thing a boss can do is focus on guidance: giving it, receiving it, and encouraging it.
- Kim Scott

I used to be arguably the most likable person. Even my wife tells me I'm too nice. When I was a noob manager, I wanted to be the best manager. I had excellent listening skills. And I could get along with anyone.

There was an engineer on my team who always did the bare minimum. He wouldn't volunteer to pick up more work even if he could. I wasn't happy about this. But my deep desire to be likable overcame my desire to tell him the truth. So, every time I met with him on our one-on-ones, I'd tell him, "You're doing great." We'd joke around when we bumped into each other at the office. Until one day, I was told the company wasn't doing well that year and we had to layoff some folks. He was on my list. When I broke the news to him, he said, "But you said I was doing great all this time. Why me?"

That was my first lesson on ruinous empathy even though I didn't know the phrase then. Kim Scott told a similar story about her version of ruinous empathy mistake. Apparently, this was the vast majority of management mistakes. Well, it didn't make me feel any better despite the sense of belonging. After all, not only did I fail at the single most important thing a boss can do, I denied the engineer the opportunity to improve.

Kim Scott identified four quadrants that describe our behavior as a manager.

Source: Radical Candor

The quadrants are so simple to understand you know there's only one choice to make because the other three are disastrous. But practicing radical candor is hard.

If you can't offer radical candor, the second best thing you can do is be an asshole.
- Kim Scott

I used to think assholes are just that. Like you I had my fair share of experience working with jerks. What I didn't realize until I saw the quadrants was the office jerk actually cared so much that he took the risk and challenged directly! I developed a newfound appreciation for the office jerk ever since. This is not to say you should hire jerks. That'd be a big mistake. Because it's very difficult to change someone who has no desire to change. Perennial jerks observe Newton's first law of motion.

Rather, when someone said something that came across as aggressive, pause for a moment. Suppress your gut reaction to get into a screaming match. Look at it with a different lens. Think about why he felt the need to speak up with such aggression. Why would he be so aggressive? Why did he use such strong words? What was he looking to achieve from doing this?

I bet he reached a point of frustration where he's not getting through to you and others. And this was the last resort he knew to try to get his message across. So, the next time you see someone being a jerk, listen intently.

Unfortunately, most people fall in the first quadrant: ruinous empathy. They care, but they don't want to challenge directly. For many reasons. They want to avoid confrontation. They're afraid of being wrong. They don't want to be embarrassed. They don't want to be the first to take the risk. They worry about retribution. But all these reasons are just various manifestations of one: They don't feel safe.

If you recall, psychological safety is the biggest factor in creating an elite team. To create a safe environment, you need to build trust. To build trust, you have to start by showing your own vulnerability. You have to lead by example. Walk the talk.

So, go all in. Lay it all out. Hold nothing back. Fuck it. Embrace the risk. Be authentic. Be your true self. Be a success. Be a failure. Be proud. Be ashamed. Turns out people are drawn to vulnerability. Because it takes courage. When you can do this, your team members will be encouraged to do the same. And that is when you have full trust. From here on, ideas flow freely. Tobi Lütke calls this a fully charged trust battery. This is also the point when each team member gains full autonomy.

One way to really show your vulnerability is to share your personal feedback publicly. If you received feedback from your team member, share it publicly with your team members without revealing who gave the feedback. This does several things:

• This shows your team members you're not afraid to share mistakes you have made publicly.
• It signals to your team members it's okay to make mistakes if you own up to them, learn from them, and take corrective actions.
• By sharing publicly, you're reaffirming to everyone you heard the feedback loud and clear. State your action in response to the feedback. Most importantly follow through.
• It creates a precedence and emboldens others to give you feedback.
• It sets the tone for the extent you're willing to go for transparency.

Radical candor isn't just for a boss. It needs to be practiced by everyone in the organization so the organization as a whole can improve continuously. Because no one is immune to making mistakes.

Your teammates aren’t idiots. They can smell bullshit from a mile away. So, don’t even try.

If you accept the fact that you’re indeed working with responsible adults, then there’s really no reason for you not to be radically transparent. To be radically transparent means to go beyond the norms. Ask why can’t you broadcast something rather than should you. Transparency provides the context behind the decisions you make. Your team members need context to buy into your idea. Because context illuminates the path you took to arrive at your decision.

Ultimately, if you want people to make smart decisions, they need context and all available information. And certainly if you want people to make the same decisions that you would make, but in a more scalable way, you have to give them the same information you have. Complete information also helps reduce the politics in an organization. One of the key drivers of politics in an organization is information asymmetry.
- Keith Rabois

Square made all information accessible, including the board deck, except for salary and options. Both Buffer and Stripe have a transparent email policy. Buffer even shares salary and revenues They stopped reporting their revenues through baremetrics recently because they realized they only sent Stripe reported revenues to baremetrics. They're working on a more accurate report.

Ugh, yeah, sorry about that! We took it down mainly because it wasn't too accurate (that was on our side, we were only pushing in Stripe revenue to baremetrics). We're working on rolling our own dashboard, but have a slight gap in the meantime.

— Joel Gascoigne (@joelgascoigne) November 21, 2019

But there are quite a few startups that chose to make their revenues public, e.g. ConvertKit which makes over $1.6M in MRR Netflix even holds a firing postmortem where a team comes together to discuss why a teammate was fired.

Sharing salaries and emails may not be your cup of tea. But it doesn't mean you can't do more.

Publish OKRs for everyone within the company to see. This allows every employee to see clear alignment across the board all the way up to the CEO. Not only that, each employee also gets to see the role her team plays in meeting the company objectives. When you have alignment from top to bottom, it empowers individual team members to ask the right questions. How does this project help meet this objective? Should we be focusing on this project at this time? Should we invest more effort into this project given its performance relative to meeting this objective? Public OKRs hold people accountable to their public commitments. Now, there’s no where to hide. As the quarter progresses, everyone sees how each team is doing on their respective OKRs. Peer pressure alone will push each team to do better. GitLab takes public OKRs one step further. They are publicly available for anyone to see

I find that, depressingly often, you’ll ask someone why they are working on something and they don’t know the answer. They’ve totally lost touch. Think about how disheartening this is on both sides.
- Justin Rosenstein

Another way to practice radical transparency is to build and design in public. I like to do this by writing Request for Comments (RFCs). So if I have an idea whether it’s a new process or an architectural design, I’d write an RFC and invite anyone interested to comment. This allows anyone interested to learn about the idea and participate in the decision making process if they want. By requesting input from everyone, you’re signaling that ideas can come from anywhere. And everyone‘s input is important. Needless to say, an idea that has survived the wisdom of the crowd is likely a pretty solid idea. Much better than an idea debated by the trusted few. Gone are the days when someone would claim, “How come no one told me about this.”

A trend I’ve seen lately is more SaaS companies are publishing postmortems publicly. These make for fascinating reading. They reveal some of the internals of the company. But more importantly, they are a testament to the company’s commitment to transparency. What could be better than sharing your most vulnerable moments as a company in public? If you handle it well, you'll build trust with your customers and garner respect from the tech community. In the process, you'll build a strong engineering brand that could draw future candidates to a radically transparent workplace, both internally and externally.

Autonomy & accountability

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people
to gather wood, divide the
work, and give orders.
Instead, teach them to yearn
for the vast and endless sea.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

This was the quote at the bottom of Netflix culture page. Netflix, of course, is known for its freedom and responsibility culture which, like it or not, kept the company competitive throughout its journey from a DVD mailer to a streaming giant. Freedom is taken so seriously that Netflix intentionally avoid setting rules. Their expense policy is 5 words long: "act in Netflix's best interest."

Rules are death by strangulation.

The biggest threat to most companies' survival is not making mistakes. It's a lack of innovation. Rules are created to dummy-proof the thing they are meant to protect. But the problem is companies are not things. Companies are their people. You take away the people, the company is nothing but a shell with an article of incorporation.

During the Vietnam war, between March 1965 and November 1968, the US ran an air campaign called Rolling Thunder. The objectives were to reduce the flow of men and material from North Vietnam to South Vietnam, send a clear message to the North Vietnamese leaders that continued action would exact a high price, and raise the morale of the South Vietnamese. The civilian leaders drew up an extensive set of rules of engagement (ROEs) so complicated, confusing, and restrictive that aircrews felt as if they could not accomplish their mission without either getting killed by the enemy or bought up on court-martial charges by their government. In fact, attacks on SAM sites and MiG airfields were prohibited until 1967. Despite superior numbers of aircraft and a more capable air force, American air suffered over 500 aircraft losses during 1966 and 1967. Rolling Thunder failed to achieve two of its three objectives.

It doesn't matter if you have the best team in the world if you don't trust the team to make their own decisions. Deny them autonomy, you end up with children. No amount of rules will make a team perform better. It is much better to provide a set of guiding principles. Teach your team to yearn for the vast and endless sea instead.

Autonomy and accountability are two sides of the same coin.

People need a sense of purpose in their lives. This is why even winning the lottery can only keep you happy for so long. Nothing is more rewarding than finding your purpose. Knowing what you own. Being accountable for something.

All employer-employee relationships suffer from the principal-agent problem. The employer or principal hires the employee or agent to do work. In most cases, the employee (agent) is paid a wage regardless of the impact the work has on the employer (principal). This creates misaligned interests between the employer and the employee. To reduce this misalignment, some roles have a portion of their renumeration paid in commission or stock options. But the problem with such arrangements is the employee doesn't bear the same risk as the employer because there isn't a downside. Regardless of how the company does, the employee is still paid his wages. Adding to the problem is the lack of direct correlation between the work the employee does and the impact the work has on the value of the employer. This nullifies the intent of the stock options, especially at a large, fast growing company where the impact of an employee is muted.

Therefore, accountability is the best antidote to the principal-agent problem. Assign an area of responsibility to each engineer. Tie performance pay to the area of responsibility. This creates a more direct correlation between pay and performance for the engineer. But the bigger intangible benefit is the sense of ownership that comes with such accountability. Now there's reason to take pride in your craft. If you're responsible for a service, how the service performs directly affects your pay for performance. Your decisions will be guided by how well your service serves its users. All of a sudden, you start thinking like an owner. A founder. If the service were to be spun off into a mini-startup, you'd be the CEO. You'd question your own sanity the next time you want to rewrite a service in the hottest language. When your service fails, you fail. But, you don't let the opportunity to learn from the failure go by because that is how you can reduce the chances of a recurrence.

Let’s take engineers working on incremental features: If they can see how this will directly affect the overall user experience, they can make decisions that are better connected to what everyone is doing.

The area of responsibility has to be owned by a single engineer. No more. No less. This is referred to as the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) at Apple. Coupled with a deadline, there's unquestionable clarity about what needs to be done when by whom.

If zero people are responsible for something, nothing happens. If two people are responsible, it probably still won't happen.
- Justin Rosenstein

When everyone on the team thinks like an owner, you can do without rules. There's minimal overhead throughout the company. Everyone is free to pursue the next best thing for the company instead of spending time devising more convoluted rules.

In this sense, clarity of responsibility fuels autonomy. When people are given ownership over a project, or even one piece of a project, they are empowered to do their best work.
- Justin Rosenstein

To do without rules, you must stand firm in accountability. That means you can't let any failure go unaccounted for. Keep in mind there are two types of failures: Failure in execution and failure in outcome. Failure in execution is what you can hold someone accountable for. Not the latter. Because if you do the latter, you will discourage everyone from taking risks, ever again.

When a team fails to deliver, hold the team accountable because it is the team’s growth opportunity. It’s the team’s right. Treat the team like adults!

Asana maintains a master list of Area of Responsibility (AOR) with a name assigned to each area. This allows everyone at the company to be autonomous and accountable for something. The master list usually stops at departmental heads. But it doesn't mean you can't do the same within an engineering team. Break down the area owned by a team further so each team member owns a smaller piece of the area.

Trust

Trust is a two way street. You get what you give. To build trust, you have to first show vulnerability because people are drawn to the courage to risk failure, rejection, and embarrassment. I touched on this earlier.

Vulnerability is basically uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.
- Dr. Brené Brown

The title of Dr Brené's book Daring Greatly came from Theodore Roosevelt's speech "The Man in the Arena".

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly... who at best knows the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.

But why is trust so important in an organization?

In 2004, General McChrystal was brought into Iraq to turn around the situation. The US military, the best in the world, was fighting Al Qaeda and wasn’t making any headway. The Al Qaeda was changing the conflict environment so rapidly the US couldn’t react and adapt fast enough. McChrystal found the chain of command was moving too slowly. The senior leaders were the ones making the decisions because they didn’t trust nor empowered the front lines to make decisions. Why the distrust? Because the senior leaders didn’t believe the front lines had enough information to make decisions when things changed.

The wisest decisions are made by those closest to the problem — regardless of their seniority
- General McChrystal

McChrystal’s solution was to develop shared consciousness. In other words, provide enough context, information and objectives so that everyone can make decisions on their own.

What matters is what you communicate. Communicate context, not control. The more context you provide, the better the decisions, the more you can trust your team members, the less control you need. When you level the information accessible to anyone, do you believe your team members will arrive at decisions aligned with your objectives? If so, why not give them the information. Otherwise, why not find someone who will?

In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.
- Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are

This takes me back to how Tobi Lütke used the metaphor of a trust battery to illustrate the level of trust we have for each other.

The more you’re willing to look stupid in front of your team members
The more you trust your team members
The more you’re willing to take a risk on a team member
The more responsibilities you’re willing to give a team member
The more transparent you are, the fuller your trust battery

If you want to remain competitive, trust your team members. You'll be able to communicate more efficiently. By empowering your team members to make their own decisions, everyone can do more. No one needs to come up with silly rules. Nothing needs to be dummy-proofed. Because you're now working with adults. Autonomous. Accountable. Trustworthy. Adults.

It takes time to build trust, but it only takes a moment to lose it.

One thing we tend to forget when we talk about trust is we need to nurture it. It’s not enough to remain transparent. We need to do what we say. The same way we build trust with customers, we need to do the same with teammates. Deliver on our promises. Don’t make promises we can’t or don’t intend to keep. Even if we succeed in delivering on our promises thus far, it doesn't mean we'll continue to have trust from our team members. Trust is earned daily. Because misinformation can come out of nowhere and cause distrust. Our best bet is to default to actions that increase trust in lieu of inaction.

Building a culture

What is your company culture like? Do you have free snacks and soda? Foosball table? Happy hour? Do people dress casual?

Sometimes I get this kinda question and I struggle to explain what a culture really is. Until I read Ben Horowitz's What You Do Is Who You Are.

Because your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking.
- Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are

So simple. A tautology. In fact, you only need to remember the last sentence: "It's how they [your employees] behave when no one is looking."

When you think about that, you start thinking about the values most companies have on their About page. Words like "integrity", "trust", "transparency", and "teamwork" come to mind. They are, in fact, great values to live by. The problem is how many of us actually put these values into practice? The discrepancy between stated values and actual values is so glaring and so common across organizations there's actually a term for it: values gulf.

In his paper, The Impact of Policies on Organizational Values and Culture, Lt Col William F Bell identified four ways to set values in the minds of members of an organization:

1. Publicize the written values widely. Values should be explained in detail.

I think most organizations publicize written values quite well. But, the part that's lacking is usually the detailed explanation that goes along with each written value. This is important because it provides clear guidance to team members what is acceptable and what is not. Ben Horowitz gave an example of the level of detail given to doing what's right in Bushido Shoshinshu which I'll paraphrase with a "modern touch" and summarize here while trying not to lose the point:

Your friend left $1,000 cash at your house for safekeeping while he goes on a trip. Unfortunately, his airplane crashed due to mechanical problems and he died. No one else knows about the money.

If you returned the money to his relatives out of sorrow, then you have done right.

If you're in need of the money and thought of keeping it, but then changed your mind and returned it out of shame, then you have done right out of a sense of shame.

If your spouse knows about the money, and you returned the money out of shame because your spouse knows or out of fear for legal consequences, then you have done right out of shame in relation to others.

The point is this: What matters is you do right. Why you do right doesn't matter.

The important thing to note here is the extent the Bushido would go to illustrate what really counts: Do the right thing.

Because enacted values > espoused values. How you behave is exactly how others will perceive what value really matters. If you kept the money, the value gulf becomes hypocrisy.

2. Senior leaders must live by the values and immerse their managers and employees in the ideology to an obsessive degree.

There's really only one way to live by the values of an organization: to be obsessed about the values.

At Shopify, Tobi Lütke is obsessed about quality – software that is significantly better than anything else out there. He wanted to create an environment that reflects the culture he wants. So, he went about setting the minimum quality everywhere. From coffee machines to microwaves, he'd make sure the user experience is effortless, just like Shopify software. These days, to make tea, you have to push three buttons on a touch screen just to get hot water. The whole user experience feels like an afterthought. It's insane! So, Tobi insisted on coffee machines with a single button for hot water. This is obsession. This is living by your value.

Like their products, Shopify offices also have to be clean and beautiful. To save employee time, Shopify serves catered lunch in their cafeteria. But there was always a mess after lunch because some people wouldn't clean up after themselves. They tried social proof by posting photos to shame people to do it to no avail. But values are derived from how you behave. So this cannot stand. If you can't even keep your cafeteria clean, how do you expect to build clean and beautiful products? They are conflicting behaviors. To live by a value, you cannot opt in only when it suits you. What finally worked for Shopify was a simple priming trick: they left a tray by the exit for people to deposit their dirty dishes.

There are other popular legends such as how Amazon obsesses over frugality such that they used wooden doors as desks and removed light bulbs from vending machines to save on electricity. Apple was, of course, obsessed about perfection. Back in 2007, Steve Jobs rehearsed every single day for the entire week leading up to the unveiling of the iPhone. But there was another thing Apple was obsessed about: secrecy. He was so paranoid he had 12 guards posted in front of rooms and doors throughout the building. For good reasons. It was to ensure the audience had nothing short of a spectacular experience at the launch. Because that is the hallmark of Apple products. The "Wow" moments.

3. New members learn the values through initial socialization with other members.

One of the most powerful ways to instill values into a new team member is to show her. This is because the values are learned indirectly rather than told explicitly. The action of reaching for the values is what internalizes them. But, it is also risky business because you can't control what values are actually learned.

The day your new hire starts is one of the most important days for her. Because this is when she learns how to behave in your organization. If her day starts with complete disorientation, she'll come to expect that's how things are around here. If her onboarding buddy is late, she'll come to expect tardiness is acceptable and other people's time is of no value, just like hers. If her team members are disengaged in a meeting, she'll come to accept that the work is boring.

So, it is hypercritical that we are always at our best behavior and prepared. Prepare? Prepare for what? Prepare for opportunities to make a value stick for the new hire.

In 1964, Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death outside her apartment building in Queens, NY. There were 38 witnesses who saw or heard the attack, but not a single one called the police or came to her aid. This phenomenon became known as the bystander effect or "Genovese syndrome".

Why did I tell this story? Because it teaches a deeper, but very important lesson that also applies to our daily lives: if a task needs done, assign an individual to it. Not two or more. Exactly one. Because when no one is assigned, everyone assumes someone else will do it. The accuracy of the number of witnesses notwithstanding, every witness assumed someone else would act, or some just decided to do what others were doing – exactly nothing. This is also known as diffusion of responsibility. That is, a person is less likely to take responsibility for action or inaction when others are present. The story teaches us the importance of having accountability.

Now you're going to remember this story. How it relates to accountability. And why it's important to have a Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) for everything.

According to Ben Horowitz, there are four rules for creating a culture rule that will last for years:

• It must be memorable.
• It must raise the question "Why?".
• Its cultural impact must be straightforward.
• People must encounter the rule daily.

The Kitty Genovese story was shocking, hence, memorable. Nay. Viral. It makes people want to repeat it. I did. It causes you to ask "Why?" Why are you telling me this story? What has a murder got to do with writing code? The cultural impact is one of accountability. Being responsible for things. And everyday, we run into tasks we must hold ourselves or others accountable.

When everyone wants to know “Why?” in an organization, the answer programs the culture, because it’s an answer everyone will remember. The explanation will be repeated to every new recruit and will embed itself into the cultural fabric.
- Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are

You may think, "Great. How am I going to come up with a story like that?" Fortunately, the story doesn't even have to be real. So long as it meets all four criteria above.

The building was burning and on the verge of collapsing. Jeremy barely escaped and was standing at a corner of a street. Across the street, a woman was frantically waving to him to cross over. In another corner across the street, a man was doing the same. Jeremy couldn't decide. He looked at the woman. She was with a group of neighbors from his building. He looked at the man. He was with another group. Bob, from 5C, was with the woman. Tim, from 6A, was with the man. He turned to look at the woman again. Bam! A bus hit Jeremy and dragged him underneath for 20 feet before it stopped.

Why? There's a bus stop outside the building near where Jeremy stood. While Jeremy was waiting, a woman on the 7th floor jumped out the window. The bus driver saw the whole thing. But didn't see Jeremy. What's the cultural impact? Don't be Jeremy. Don't wait for the bus. Have a sense of urgency. He could have survived running to either corner. We run into the need for dealing with tasks urgently everyday. Don't wait for the bus.

I just made the story up.

Stories and sayings define cultures.
- Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are

4. The most powerful method is demonstrated values through organization rules and policies.

How we behave is what is going to be learned as the actual values of our organization. From senior leaders at the top to the employees, people watch what we do. Not what we say.

When you hire, do you ask questions that clue you in on whether the candidate possesses any of your values? When you promoted Joe to a staff engineer, was it because he goes to lunch with you? Was it because he brought you a Christmas gift? Or maybe it was because he was brilliant even though he was an asshole. But he gets so much done. The team members can deal with him. No big deal. But if you promoted Joe, it wouldn't matter if your values included respect. What matters is Joe was rewarded for being a brilliant jerk. The true value you're signaling is be brilliant. You can be a jerk for all I care. As long as you get things done. Henceforth, your team members will all be jerks, and maybe even brilliant.

Behaviors need to be nurtured constantly, unforgivingly, without compromise – not even for a moment. Otherwise, you're not living by the values.

But, when you cede your core values to someone else, it’s time to quit.
- Daniel Meyer

Remember the salt shaker theory:

Your staff and your guests are always moving your saltshaker off center. That’s their job. It is the job of life. It’s the law of entropy! Until you understand that, you’re going to get pissed off every time someone moves the saltshaker off center. It is not your job to get upset.

Your job is just to move the shaker back each time and let them know exactly what you stand for. Let them know what excellence looks like to you. And if you’re ever willing to let them decide where the center is, then I want you to give them the keys to the store. Just give away the fuckin’ restaurant!

You cannot let things slide when it comes to your values. Because doing so changes the very definition of the values you and your team members worked so hard to upkeep.

There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard. This is also true of culture – if you see something off-culture and ignore it, you’ve created a new culture.
- Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are

Have the courage to stand for the values you espouse. Even at the risk of being disliked. Even at the risk of looking crazy. Because obsession is crazy. You do things that make no sense to everyone. But that is the length you need to go to get the point across. If you're successful, even if your company is not, you would have changed people's lives.

But they will never forget how it felt to work there, or the kind of the people they became as a result.
- Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are