How Ruinous Empathy Ruins Praise 6 | 36

Radical Candor: Communication at Work

Radical Candor

Business, Management, Careers

4.7 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 18 September 2024

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How misguided praise can do more harm than good.

Praise can be powerful, but when it’s vague, generic, or something you can say to a dog like "good job," it can backfire and do more harm than good. Kim, Jason, and Amy explore the nuances of Ruinous Empathy and praise, sharing real-life examples, like the infamous FEMA response during Hurricane Katrina, to illustrate the pitfalls of Ruinously Empathetic feedback. They discuss the importance of making praise specific and sincere so people know what was good and why, allowing them to repeat their success.

Get all of the show notes at RadicalCandor.com/podcast.

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Chapters:

(00:00:00) Introduction
Kim, Jason, and Amy introduce the episode's focus on how praise can become ruinously empathetic.

(00:00:53) What Is Ruinous Empathy in Praise?
How praise can be ineffective when it's vague, insincere, or lacks specific feedback.

(00:02:19) Defining Praise vs. Criticism
What constitutes praise, how it differs from criticism and the dangers of insincere praise

(00:06:06) Effective Public Support and Praise
Guidance for leaders on how to support team members publicly after a mistake.

(00:11:51) Consequences of Praising Failure
Why offering praise after failure can be misleading and harmful.

(00:17:04) The Role of Specificity in Praise
The importance of specificity in making praise feel sincere and useful.

(00:22:11) Ruinous Empathy and Manipulative Insincerity
The nuances between ruinously empathetic praise and manipulatively insincere praise.

(00:33:07) Insincere Praise
Avoiding the common pitfalls of insincere praise in leadership and team management.

(00:36:53) Offering Effective Praise
Practical tips on how to offer specific and sincere praise that drives improvement.

(00:40:56) Radical Candor Tips
Tips for applying Radical Candor to praise, ensuring feedback is specific, sincere, and purposeful.

(00:42:18) Conclusion

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Radical Canter Podcast. I'm Kim Scott. I'm Jason Rosoff. I'm Amy Sandler. Today we are talking about something that a lot of you listeners have been going back to season one to explore. And that is ruinous empathy and praise. How can praise be ruinously empathetic?
0:26.0	Well, if you're new to Radical Kanderland, welcome, first of all. And second of all,
0:30.9	ruinous empathy is when you fail to tell someone something they need to know. So when it comes to
0:36.9	praise, this means you may just say something that you could say to your
0:41.1	dog, like, good job.
0:43.6	And Kim, you have said, even though we are all dog lovers on this podcast, if you can say
0:48.8	it to a dog, it's not really feedback.
0:51.8	Tell us more.
0:53.1	Well, you know, people, it turns out, they're, they understand
0:57.7	language better than dogs do. And they also, they benefit more from specific and sincere
1:06.4	details. And so when you're offering someone praise, you don't want it to be just a throwaway.
1:17.1	There was someone who I worked with at Apple, and she would ask a question of people when we
1:24.3	were teaching this class, managing at Apple, to ask participants in the class
1:29.1	to think about how much time they spent preparing to give criticism, and then to think about
1:35.7	how much time they spent preparing to give praise. And it turned out that people spent a lot of
1:43.0	time making sure they got the details right about criticism. And it turned out that people spent a lot of time making sure they got the details right about
1:46.2	criticism, but they didn't spend any time on praise. They just kind of gave a, you know,
1:53.4	oh, good job. And that wound up offering people praise either about the wrong thing or praise about something they
2:04.8	didn't really care about or praise about something they hadn't even worked on or even
2:10.0	offering them praise about something where, in fact, they had done a bad job, which really
2:16.1	can be very terrible. Kim, as you're talking about praise and criticism,
2:22.4	can you just give us a clear definition in your mind of what exactly praise is versus
	...

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