Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. We're here today with Kim Malone Scott, the co-founder and CEO of Cander, Inc. Before that, she was a CEO coach for several companies. She also previously led AdSense YouTube and double-click online sales and operations at Google. And she was a member of the faculty at Apple University. But Kim's joining us today since she recently authored the new book

Radical Cander. And the subtitle is How to Be a Kickass Boss without losing your humanity.

And in this episode, we're basically talking about how to give feedback, which is part of a much

larger context around culture, hiring, firing, performance reviews, compensation, and so on. But we're

focusing just on the topic of feedback today. First of all,

I call it guidance, not feedback, because feedback makes us want to put our hands over our ears.

And guidance is something we all long for. But no matter what word you use, it's basically

praise and criticism. There's praise and criticism that you solicit. There's praise and criticism that you give. And there's praise and criticism that you solicit. There's praise and criticism that you give,

and there's praise and criticism that you encourage between people. So you kind of break it off

into what's sort of encouraged and what's not. You tell a funny story. It's actually not so funny

probably at the time, but it's about how you gave this killer presentation to Eric Schmidt

when you were at Google, and everyone's like loving the results of what you guys were talking about, something in the ad program. And you were walking out of that meeting like, man, I did a great job. That was great. And your then boss at the time, Cheryl Sandberg took you on a walk and said, how did you think that went and then gave some feedback? Yeah, it was such a funny moment because I walked into the room

and I felt really nervous and felt like a freaking genius by the end of the meeting. I thought it

had gone great. And then Cheryl started off telling me the things that went well, not in, as you're

fearlessly or calls it the shit sandwich kind of feedback, but in a way that was really genuine. She told me some

stuff I didn't know, but of course all I wanted to hear was what I had screwed up. And eventually,

she said to me, you said, I'm a lot in there. Were you aware of it? And now I breathe a huge sigh

of relief. And now I'm like, ah, that doesn't matter. And I kind of make this brush off gesture with my hand.

And I said, I know it's a verbal tick.

It's no big deal, really.

And then Cheryl said, well, I know this great speech coach, and Google would pay for it.

Would you like an introduction?

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