[MUSIC]
Hello everybody, welcome to the Radical Candor podcast. I'm Kim Scott. I'm Jason Hoseoff. And I'm Amy Sandler. You know, most of us have encountered a person at work who always has a lot to say about those very important projects they're working on and how amazing they're going to be. This person is what Andre Spicer, an organizational behavior professor and Dean of Bayes Business School has called a loud laborer, which is hard to say multiple times quickly, loud laborer. Should we try it, Kim?
No, let's go. No. Quick laborer, while the term is new. The behavior is not. Attention seeking folks who labor loudly love to talk about the work they're doing, well, actually doing very little of it. They're also more likely to gravitate towards highly visible tasks that make it easy to show everyone how amazing they are. Spicer writes for the Guardian that quote, loud laborers have learned a crucial lesson from performance artists.
Performance artists take nearly any aspect of their life and calls it art. The loud laborer takes nearly anything they do and relabels at work. There's no experience, no matter how ephemeral that a loud laborer can't turn into weighty work. They show their unstinting work ethic by making their entire life into an endless assignment and quote, I think we would only see that in a British publication that lovely paragraph there.
Kim, I think you sometimes call this a bloviating BS or is this a form of manipulative insincerity? What's happening here? I think it's a form of macho suppression. I think the bloviating and I would love to get your all thoughts on the different types. I think there's maybe, I don't want to try to parse words too much, but I think for me the bloviating bullshitter is that is slightly different than the loud laborer.
The bloviating BS is the person who just makes stuff up and assumes they're right. They assume they know more than they do. Sometimes they're not pretending to know more than they do. They actually think they know things they don't even know. I think we've talked a couple of times about examples of me being a bloviating BS or a friend of mine called this sort of postulatory boldness. I think we get rewarded for it too often at work.
But I think that it's related but maybe slightly different from the loud laborer. I don't know. What do you all think? I think it is different. I think the point, although the end goal might be similar, which is sort of self-aggrandisement, I think at least as it's being described in the article on the Guardian and there was another article that Brandy shared, which we'll put in the show notes.
The way that I understood it is this is a person who is looking for others to give them credit for the work that they do. In order to get that credit, they are sort of constantly talking about all of the stuff that they are doing. Even if the things that they are doing are relatively trivial, they are aggrandizing. They're making it seem more grand and more important by drawing attention to it. But in theory, at least, they are...
It's not so much about what the person knows but about what the person is doing. Yeah. I think that's your head Amy. I was just going to say what was coming up as you were talking and Jason reflecting was around radical candor is measured not at the speaker's mouth but at the listener's ear. It's almost like bloating BS might be measured maybe more at the listener's ear and that I might be experiencing something.
The person might be saying things that might sound like BS or Jason, I think the word you use, was self-aggrandizing. How is it landing for me versus what your intention is? Kim, if I heard you correctly, you self-identified as someone who sometimes might be in the bloviating BS or camp because you tell me what's underneath that behavior for you. What is your intention? What is that experience?
I think before I answer, I promise I will answer your question, but I had a thought and I don't want to lose it. I think the loud laborer is trying to use sort of face time to show, I'm working, I'm working, I'm working. What's behind the loud laboring is a desire to show that the number of hours, it's the kind of person who says, I worked 12 hours on this as opposed to, I did this great work and I got it done in an hour. They're not worried about efficiency.
They're just worried about effort, only effort. They're not worried about results, they're just worried about activities and showing that they're busy creating activities. Whereas I think the bloviating BS is pretending to know things that they don't know in order to either make up for lack of preparation or to appear more confident than they maybe feel. Yeah, that was actually where I was trying to go, which was about intent and impact and the potential differences.
One thing that I'm curious about and I am not an expert in loud laborers apart from having read a few of these articles, but I would think it's not just people who are sitting at the office for 10 hours to show someone, hey, I was at the office for 10 hours, but also someone exaggerating what they're doing for self promotion. I might be at the art, I sent one email and like, oh my gosh, wasn't this a great email?
So it's actually less about the sort of non-efficiency, but really more about getting exponential credit for things that don't warrant it. Yeah, focused on getting credit. Yeah, I think that's right. Maybe taking credit for other people's part too.
I think that could be a side effect, but one of the things that struck me in the article in the Guardian piece was the quotation toward the end and I think we referenced it in the intro as well that they have a tendency toward work that is very visible. So like in a client services organization, they might have a tendency toward client communication, for example, right?
So that because everybody on the team would have a reason to see that work, even though the real work is like preparing all of the information to share with the client, like they would focus on, I want to be the one who sends the email to the client. That's the work that I want to do. And so the side effect is like they're sort of taking credit for it, but the goal is to like choose the task that allows you to be really visible.
And they might say, oh, you know, I spent eight hours crafting that email. It wasn't that email so great. I think a reaction to that might be, well, you know, we spent 30 days preparing all the material. Like he's spending eight hours on that email is a minor contribution to the overall effort. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. And I think people are loviating BSs or loud, loud laborers because it works. And I think the solution is for a leader and the whole team to not let it work.
Like if somebody comes in and says, ah, you know, I pulled an all-nighter instead of saying, instead of rewarding them either with praise or sympathy or whatever, like, gosh, why did you have to do that? How can we make sure that doesn't happen again? You know, having having that kind of reaction to the, there's like this mark, I think we've talked before about the work, martyr. And that seems to be part of the loud labor. Whereas the bloving, the, loviating BSs are often comes in.
They do the opposite. The bloviating BS will come in and say, ah, you know, I didn't have to spend any time at all studying for the test. They were that student. And I got, and I'm going to get an A, you know, or I didn't, I didn't do, I didn't prep for that sales meeting at all. And I just, you know, landed the biggest deal of the quarter. So, so there's like a little bit of the, the opposite with the bloviating BS. Or I don't have to do any work because I'm great.
Yeah. And when you were talking about, like for example, in a client services team and in sort of one group doing a huge amount of effort and then someone else sort of putting it across the, the finish line, I'm curious, do you have any examples from your own career, whether here or elsewhere, where you feel like there's certain roles that take more of that credit? Yeah, that's a great question. What was coming to mind is that I, I have sort of an allergy to people who are loud laborers.
There was a person who I'm thinking of was like very early in my career who, who had a habit of putting together these, these sort of like lengthy documents to describe an idea and talking about how their postgraduate degree, like informed it and all of a sudden, like would, like set up this whole thing and talk about how long they spent on it. And the problem was that it didn't deserve, like the idea didn't deserve that much work.
So like as the person looking at it, you're like, you're trying to take five dollars worth a credit for a two-cent idea. Like, it's great. Like, I'm, it's good to be proud of it, but it's very clear that they were doing this thing which is they were talking up the way that they approached the work in an effort, I think, to make the idea seem more valuable.
Yeah. The problem to Kim's point is like there were several situations in which it worked in which like you could tell people are like, oh wow, like, you know, this is so well thought out of this other stuff. And I'm kind of like, you know, they said we should add a refund button to the shopping cart. Like it didn't need a 10-pick, you know what I'm saying? It didn't need the, like, that it was that kind of a, it was that kind of a thing. And it led to a really tense relationship.
I was at a point in my, early enough, my career that I didn't quite have the skills to, like, productively deal with something like that. And so like I became, I developed like the, the sort of like, allergic reaction anytime he was going to present an idea, I had to like sort of prepare, steal myself.
And I think that when I read the article, I read a little bit of that as like the impact it can have on other people is that a person who continuously behaves in this way, it works for a period of time. And if it works for the boss, meaning like if the boss is, is sort of convinced by this behavior, it can work for a long time. And the problem is that person is, other people who are laboring quietly, start to become pissed off both at the person and at the boss for reinforcing the behavior.
And so like that's why I think that, that's my understanding of why it leads to it, it starts to tank morale on a team because it, anyway, came, I was thinking about it. Your suggestion of like, how do you fix it? You fix it by not rewarding it, but I think it's especially important for the boss not to reward that behavior. Like it's one thing for your teammates to call you on it.
It's quite another thing to make sure that the bot like as a manager, you're looking out for this behavior and calling it out.
And I think it's also, I mean, this is maybe an over stretch, but I have a, I have a definite preference for a functional organization as opposed to an organization that's, that is organized by business units because in a functional organization, the person who leads a team understands the expertise that is required to do the work and can call, can call BS on that kind of loud laboring.
Whereas sometimes when you have a general manager who doesn't understand the actual work that people are doing, it allows for more loud laboring. I mean, this was my big anxiety when I started a software company is that, you know, I had started, I had studied Slavic literature. I had no idea what the software engineers were doing really. And it made me very nervous, I think rightly so.
Yeah. So Kim, are you saying that what guidance would you give then for a manager who might feel like they don't have enough gravitas, perhaps in a functional area to draw the line on someone that might have loud labor tendencies? What would, what would you have needed to support you in laying that down? Well, I mean, the most important thing that I did in that situation was build a really good relationship with my co-founder and CTO who couldn't see through it, you know?
And make sure that he was managing the engineers, not me and not ever allow the engineers to go around him to me because I knew that they could be asked me because I didn't understand enough. I think the other thing, in another situation where loud labors might get away with their loud laboring was when I was leading at the AdTense team at Google and there were a bunch of people on the team who were providing customer support.
And because my manager, the by-director reports and I weren't in the queues answering these customer support questions, we often didn't understand what was involved in the work. And so actually sitting with them and doing the work with them on a regular basis was really important so that we got it, so that we weren't befuddled by either loud laboring or blvdating BS.
And I think I would only add to that, I mean, is to be sensitive to it, if someone tells you that someone on your, someone on the team is engaging in this behavior, I would take it seriously. Not, doesn't mean you have to like automatically assume they're correct, but it would be an opportunity, I feel like that's a call to pay closer attention to what I'd be going on. It's so interesting.
Like I'm flashing back a little to a team that I was on where there were a few of us that were at a certain level in the organization. And I think I had a belief system that sort of good work was rewarded of its own accord and that sort of internal promotion or PR for your own projects wasn't required. And so there was a peer in that group who was continually sending emails, saying all the things that they had done and sort of continually advocating for themself.
And I'm aware as I reflect back that I didn't engage in that what I would consider sort of self promoting or self aggrandizing behavior and probably to my detriment. And so I know on a recent podcast, I believe we had talked about managers advocating maybe more for their quiet labors. But Jason, for example, the situation that you talked about earlier in your career, you might not have seen that it was happening. What would you ask or think about someone who notices this?
How do you bring that to your manager in a way that doesn't feel like you're complaining in a way that feels like it's helpful to the manager? I will say that several people, including me, try to find ways to talk to this person directly. We try to, and again, skill not matching will, I feel like we could have been more direct. I could have used a lesson in core, to be really clear about the impact it was having.
But we would say things like, hey, you don't have to wrap everything in a presentation about how much work it took you to get to that particular answer. You can just present, we know you're working hard, just present the answer to us. But I don't think he understood what we were saying. I don't think he understood that it was frustrating and distracting, was actually making it less likely that people were going to listen to him.
Well, it's so funny as you say that, because actually what was coming up was Kim often talking about needing to show your work, right? Like to show how you got there. So how do you balance showing your work without being really annoying? I spent 23 hours on this email. There's a big difference between showing your work and nailing your diploma to the wall. Yeah. And I would say this is a silly example of this.
And I may be projecting a little bit, because this is how it felt to work with this person. But I feel like it was the kind of thing where I'd walk by his office and he'd always be like, big sight. He'd have a big sight. I've been working so, like I've been here since 6 a.m. It was one of those things where everything started with exasperation, followed by like I should get credit because kind of a thing.
So it's in my mind, it's not even so much like self promotion, like the sort of idea of confidently talking about the work that you're doing or the results. But Kim, you said this earlier in the episode, it's like an obsessive focus on effort and how much you are suffering to put forth that effort. It's a meta commentary as opposed to a specific commentary about the work. Yeah, and I think there's also like, there's a belief, which I think is that the more we suffer, the better our work.
And I would love to have that belief replaced with what I think is more accurate reflection of reality, which is when we're doing our best work, usually it's a joy, not a, you know, I mean, there's always an aspect of work that is unpleasant, but overall work should be a great expression of who we are as people. And when I have been doing my best work, I haven't felt martyred to it. I felt like I'm enjoying it. I'm lucky to be able to do this work.
And that's the kind of work environment that we're trying to create, not this, the martyrs are, you know, get paid the most. Yeah. And I think that point about almost like really unpacking the cultural context that we're in is so important. Brandy had bubbled up a, a rice crispy's commercial, I think from the late 1980s. I think rice crispies are still around so people know what it is.
But the commercial was really, you know, this mom, of course, it was mom, who had these rice crispies and didn't want the kids to know that she had not in fact sort of toiled all day making the rice crispies because they were so easy to make and so delicious and so had to like pretend and spray like flour on her face that in fact, these rice crispies took a really long time. But the reason why I think that's so interesting is like, what is the cultural message underneath it?
I mean, Kim, it's sort of what you're saying, which is that if I got like a great output, if I made rice crispies in 30 seconds, like that's not enough. What actually matters is that I sort of tortured myself for 24 hours to make these rice crispies. Is that still an accurate cultural, like are we still in that culture? Is that changed?
I definitely think like hustle culture is just a, the modern manifestation of that same phenomenon, which is like everybody talking about their side hustle and how they're like they're doing 10 things at the same time and isn't it like it's so, it's so tough and I'm so tired. I feel like there is, there's still that undercurrent still, from my perspective, it's still very present in, in our culture.
Yeah, one, one, one extreme or the other, either pretending it's easier than it is or pretending it's harder than it is. Why can't we just say, that's really going on in my, sometimes it's easy? One of the things that I did on one team that I worked with is I said, let's identify all the work that we are doing that we can stop doing, we can just quit doing it, you know, all the work that we can outsource, that we can get other people to do and all the work we can automate.
And that was really helpful in terms of sort of taking the wind out of the sales of the loud labors and the, and also the bloating BSers. Like if somebody was complaining about something, the question was, well, how can we, can we stop doing that work altogether? And often the answer was, yes, we don't even need to do that.
So in other words, when people are, like, there's a company called Joyous where when people, and there's some aspect of their work that is bothering them or irritating them, rather than sort of becoming a martyr to those irritants, they file a ticket that's almost like a software bug ticket. And, and the goal is to figure out what are the irritants that we can eliminate from your work so that you can work more joyfully, you know? And that's, I think, what you want to do.
You don't want to silence complaints, but you want to air them in a way that says the goal is if there are inefficient things or irritating things about your work, like, let's figure out how to get rid of those things. I feel like we're, we're touching up against, against something that we wanted to talk about, which is like, what if your job is actually BS?
Yeah. Well, and in fact, Jason, you know, Kim loves the word BS, I think, it's whether it's blow-viating or, but in fact, there was a book written that came out in, in 2019, I believe, by a professor at the London School of Economics, anthropologist David Graber, who passed away in 2020, and there was a Vox interview, we'll put it in the show notes where professor Graber, in this book that was called Bullshit Jobs, a theory, and he was a leader of the early Occupy Wall Street.
I believe this book came out of an essay that he had written earlier, quote, "bad jobs are bad because they're hard or they have terrible conditions or the pay sucks." But often these jobs are very useful. In fact, in our society, often the more useful the work is, the less they pay you. Whereas Bullshit Jobs are often highly respected and pay well, but are completely pointless, and the people doing them know this. Yeah. So what was an example of a Bullshit Jobs?
Well, one of them was corporate lawyer, I saw. But it was, it was, it was often a lot of folks that might be more white collar jobs and middle management jobs where people feel like they're not actually doing things where, if you stop doing your job, nobody would really notice. What I thought was really interesting because I was, I was really curious. I hadn't heard about this book. So I was trying to see, well, how, how did the thinking perhaps change post-COVID and now where we are with AI?
And that's where I learned that he, in fact, passed away in, in 2020 because he seemed quite prescient about, sort of, there are certain jobs that we must have. And I think we saw that, you know, in, in COVID and sort of who are sort of most important members of the workforce. And are we, in fact, reimbursing them accordingly to the value that's, that's being provided?
And there was actually something also quite poignant that people in some of these BS jobs, you know, felt the pain of feeling like you're actually not doing something that's really contributing very much to society perhaps. The superfluous man, very important notion flowing through all of Russian literature is that I'm not needed, you know, and my work is not needed. And that was a source of great anxiety for these, for these folks. I mean, I think, I think it is a source of great anxiety.
We were, we touched lightly on the motivations at the top of the show. But I think that this is a, a high, this is a, a motivation that we, we didn't include in that discussion, which is the fear of it being discovered that you at, like your work actually doesn't matter. So you talk about it all the time and you say all the time that you're putting into it because the fear that you have is that people realize that the work that you're doing is, is not meaningful.
Actually, I had a moment where I felt like I had a bullshit job. So let me describe it and you all can tell me if, if what I'm talking about is what David Graber was talking about. So I was working, I had a, it was just a summer internship, but I was working at McKenzie. And I was sort of spending the summer, like, making beautiful decks. They, they had some special program. It wasn't even a PowerPoint. I think it was called solo. And it was a really cool program.
Like these things would look really good. And, but it really felt to me like the work I was doing was sort of highly paid and meaningless and not gonna ever help any, but we were working really hard. We were working super long hours, but sort of changing, I mean, I'm exaggerating. And for those of our listeners who work at McKenzie, I apologize. Some of the work you do, I'm sure is really important. Well, I've already offended corporate lawyers. I was quoting, to be clear.
I'm speaking for myself. Some of my best friends are corporate lawyers. But I was, yes. But like, I joked. All my worst days, I felt like I was changing my charts to bar charts and back again. You know that is what I felt. And I was getting paid really, really well for doing it. It's the hero's journey. Yeah, and my chart to buy a chart. And back again.
And then my sister, meanwhile, was teaching at a middle school and there was a child who was suicidal and she talked to this child out of committing suicide. So like that to me was important work. That really, really profoundly mattered. And she was getting paid very, very little to do that work. And I was getting paid a whole lot to change by charts to bar charts and back again.
And that experience, that moment of talking to her that summer is kind of what prompted me to write a book called The Measurement Problem, which is about how capitalism is really good at rewarding what it can measure, but really bad at rewarding what is valuable. And I think, you know, maybe some of these BS jobs, maybe they aren't actually BS. Maybe they're important. But I do think there's a lot of jobs for which people get grossly overcompensated.
And a lot of, and increasing, I mean, I think like the one percent problem is getting worse and worse and worse. And increasingly, there's a lot of jobs for which that are really mattered for which people are not getting paid a living wage. And that is a big problem. I mean, that's like, turns capitalism into a snake eating its tail. So. It's happening in education, it's happening in healthcare. Yeah. Yeah. The snake is eating its own tail. Like it's already, it is manifesting itself.
So it's not even like a what if it is a thing that is happening in the world. And I think to your point of the measurement problem in healthcare, what they're measuring is the profitability of the healthcare company, not the health outcomes of the community that they serve. Yeah, we're not measuring what matters. Correct. And the people who are delivering those health outcomes, in most cases, they're not even doctors. They're nurse practitioners.
There are these people who are closer to the sort of metal. They're like frontline mental health professionals that are actually like delivering these health outcomes. But the pay is disproportionately distributed to the people who have business line responsibility who are responsible for the profit of the business unit as opposed to the health outcome. So I think like, I guess in a world where capitalism exists, it's not that that job doesn't matter. But the it's overcompensated.
It's overcompensated. It's overcompensated. Rosely, overcompensated. And maybe we're measuring the wrong thing. Correct. Well, that's why I'm wondering, you know, Kim and Jason, as you're talking and thinking about the measurement problem, if you were and you are co-founders of a start up, if you are creating a company now that you wanted to reward people whose work was valuable or that we weren't giving incentives for people to behave loudly, loudly, borrously.
Not sure if that's the right way to do it. How would you think about creating incentives in an imaginary new co that would reward the kinds of behaviors you want to see rewarded? Well, I think, I mean, Jason, we talked about this when we started the company.
I mean, one thing that we decided we didn't want to do was follow the venture capital growth at all costs model of-- We also, you know, I think we talked a lot about equity and kind of talked about how equity is the ultimate inequity in terms of how people get paid and making sure that we do something that is more fair to people. Yeah. I think like, from a compensation perspective, there's a bunch of things that you can do.
One of them is to ensure that in the world, like, and this has a chance to reinforce some of the things that are out there, but you don't want to make-- there's like multiple layers of mistakes that you can make when you think about incentives. One mistake that you can make is you can pay someone unfairly for the job that they do, even given the unfair way that money is distributed in the world. You don't want to do that.
So at the very least, you want to be like aware of what a job is worth and have some kind of process for making sure that the extrinsic rewards of a job match the value of the work that that person is doing as far as the world is concerned. And then you have a second thing to figure out, which is how do you want-- what extrinsic rewards or how do you want to structure the extrinsic rewards inside the company?
So it feels like you are able to reward people equitably for the value that they actually deliver. So not what their job is worth both for the value that they actually deliver. And I think we should not necessarily say what their job is worth, but the market value of their job. That is a better way to say it. Their job may be worth much more than the market value of their job. So that's somewhat of an inherent friction, right, of if the market is valuing certain jobs.
Are you beholden then to following those market valuations? No. I am not a slave for the market. I shouldn't say slave. I am not-- nobody is forcing me to obey what the market says. Yes. And I would say that there is a pressure that exists to be able to-- from a labor law perspective and things like that to be able to justify the choices that you've made. This is a place where the law reinforces the economic system.
Because, yeah, and I think there aren't many other great models other than a pure-- one way you could think about is everybody works on commission. You know what I'm saying? We do some calculation where you say your job brought in was responsible for X amount of the revenue and therefore your compensation is Y. A pure commission model is maybe one way to get away from this. So it's less about your title and it's more about your job, but there's still a judgment called to be made.
Often called to eat what you kill model, which is horrible. Going back to violent language. Yeah. But there's still a judgment called to be made because there are some activities that people are doing that are clearly adding to the bot, adding to the money that the company is making, but there's not a really clear way to assign a specific value to it. So it all-- There's a measurement problem. There's a measurement going back.
Well, and it goes back to Jason, your initial thing of like, you know, you've a operations team is working like days and days and months and months on building this relationship that someone swoops in and sends the email that, you know, seals the deal and now they're the hero. Yes. And I guess what I would say is like, I don't think there's a there's a perfect system for extrinsic. I want to talk about extrinsic rewards first.
I don't think there's a perfect system for getting extrinsic rewards to exactly match the value of an individual's labor or the contribution of an individual's labor, which is why you need some sort of semi flexible system like bonuses or profit sharing or whatever else.
You need some flexibility to be able to say, well, this year, we want to recognize that this person that's going to be a fuzzy calculation and that's the place where I feel like strict market valuing of jobs really falls on its face because there's there are years where some people are going to do something that far exceeds what the market value of their job is. But the intrinsic thing, I think, is what's more interesting to me. And that's what we were talking about before Kim.
That's what you're talking about when you're saying stopping these behaviors. So like the question is, what kinds of behaviors? What are you trying to intrinsically motivate in people? What kind of behavior do you do you celebrate? So for example, I think in our organization, something we value quite highly is people helping each other and helping each other is sort of in my mind is like the opposite of loud laboring, right?
You can turn it into loud laboring if you're always talking about how much you're helping everybody else. But by rewarding people for helping each other as opposed to just getting their own work done, I think that's the kind of thing that can start to create intrinsic motivation. And to move away from some of the things that would make a job BS, right? Because like theoretically, that BS job that was being described is one of which going away tomorrow would have no impact.
But if you are actually helping other people accomplish their work, even though you might not be doing a ton of the work yourself, you're still creating a lot of, you're adding a lot to the organization both culturally and from an output perspective. I think also it's interesting to think about sales in this respect because for example, at one point, I had started a company and one of the venture capitalists who had invested in the company, wanted me to hire this salesperson.
And this venture capitalist sent me an email that said, "This guy sold a $24,000 product for $500,000." And to me, that's a BS job. Like basically what you're telling me is that I should hire this person because they screwed the customer. And I said, "No, that's not the kind of salesperson that I want to hire and it's not the kind of company that I want to run. I want people to, I want a more consultative sales model."
And at Apple, in fact, for the stores, they don't pay on commission, which was a controversial decision. But they said, "People are going to, that is an unpleasant experience to be sold to in general." And so we're going to pay people to be helpful, actually. And we're going to pay people enough that we're going to take money off the table. They'll make about as much as salespeople in these jobs as they would if they were on commission somewhere else.
And there was this concern, "Oh, people are lazy." So they won't really try to sell stuff if you pay that way. But that's not what the data showed. They actually enjoyed the jobs more and the customers were being in the store more. In fact, here's another idea. Somebody just got an email from someone who is creating an AI technology that will help salespeople create pitches. And I'm like, "Okay, don't create that unless you also create an AI product that will talk to that person."
So my robot can talk to your robot and you can keep me out of the conversation. They're pitching to each other our robots. I wish that we could get the video on that with Kim's robot talking. Well, I think that is what is so interesting. One of the threads in the loud labor articles that we were seeing was that there were often folks who were either under-employed or what was called "fun employed" where you really didn't have anything to do or enough to do.
And so one of the ways to prove your existence was through this loudly, sort of extolling all the things that you're doing. And there was a quote from Vox. It said, "There are endless reasons why people at work wind up with little if anything to do. Maybe the project they were hired for is no longer a priority. The tasks they were in charge of by a large or now handled by technology." I guess they're AI is talking to Kim's AI.
Maybe they never should have been hired in the first place they were brought on board too soon. Maybe they're super fast at their jobs or they're really good at being secretly lazy hiding in plain sight." And quote, Kim just talked about, you know, not that laziness isn't as common as we assume. Yeah, what was your reaction, Kim, to that? I was trying to think of someone I've ever worked with who meets that description.
I can't, I can't, maybe I'm just naive, but I can't, I've never actually-- Brandy looks like she wants to jump in. No, this is happening. But Brandy, maybe you've worked with people who are in jobs like this. I've just never seen this. I've seen it often. These are the people that would take credit for the work that I did and get awards for it. In my experience, they had usually been white men.
They do a lot of glad handing, back padding, making people feel good, but there's no work actually being done. Unless the job is actually glad handing and back padding and managing up to saying I'm doing all these amazing things, but they're not doing the things. Their team's doing the things and they're just talking about it and they're having drinks with people. And they're not giving the team an ache credit.
No, other people are getting awards for work that they don't even know who's doing the work. Clearly. I mean, I had done a bunch of work and this person, somebody else, took credit for my work and was invited to the headquarters and given an award for work that I did. And nobody remember being on the phone with his boss, like, crying. I was new to the company. I said something to him about it like four years later. But nobody else, like nobody was terrified there. So, nobody said anything.
Yeah, I would say I have seen this kind of thing happen, but not in a way that the company just sort of ignored it. So, economy, one of the things about being donor funded is that sometimes a donor doesn't re-op. And so, there's like work that was going on that was being funded by a particular stream of income and that income doesn't dries up. And then the question is like, what is that person, like, what do we do now?
Like, there's a person or a team or a group of people who are working on a thing. And very soon, there, some combination of, they're not going to have anything left to do because we're wrapping that program up or we're going to not going to have any money to pay them to do the thing that they're doing. But I think the reason why we didn't run into it is like, one of the things that we were obsessed with was like using the money that we got as efficiently as possible, right?
Because we were always limited. We were donor funded. So, we were like, the resources were always limited and we were obsessed with being efficient. And so, it would never last. There might be a period of time where someone would be in a bit of limbo as we were trying to figure out like, do we keep this person on and change their job in order to make sure that they have something to do? Or do we let the person go because we're wrapping up the project?
Like, we do have to make decisions like that. But so, I could see it happening and in a company that's big enough where money is not as tight. I could easily imagine a situation in which you have people who are just sort of like in these ghost jobs that were relevant eight or nine months ago, but there hasn't really been anything going on in that area for a while. And it takes a lot. I mean, I could imagine it happening pretty easily.
So, Brandy, I think in the situation that you were describing, what I know what I would advise like the CEO to get rid of this layer of people who was just claiming credit for other people's work. But then I want to kind of brainstorm about what you could have done because that is much harder problem.
But I think like if a leader, if a CEO doesn't want these glad handers getting in between the people doing the work and the credit so that the people actually doing the work are demotivated, I think it's really important to define the role of the people who are role of manager very carefully and to expect managers to communicate to their bosses who's doing what and to like give credit. Your job as a manager is not to take credit but to give credit.
And if I see you taking credit, then I'm going to all the time and I'm going to say, oh, you don't need a team because you're doing all the work. And to almost come at it from that point of view. I think the people who get away with it are almost like cult leaders. They could be, not that they use people are cult leaders, but how people become cult leaders. They make you feel good. They look you in the eye. Everything feels exciting when you're around them.
So this is the kind of person that's managing the team and they're making everyone from the CEO to the bottom feel like, oh, I'm a part of this great experience, but they're not actually doing anything, but manipulating. Yeah, they're kissing up and then they're getting some of your favorite words like charisma, executive presence. Exactly. I mean, it's almost like slight of hand, you know what I'm saying?
It's almost like a trick, it's almost like a magic trick or an illusion that they're doing. Yeah, but like at least in a culture and a good culture, if you were to have said, actually, I did that. Like that person would have experienced some really immediate and severe consequences for taking credit for your work. I mean, it's one of the things. But you have to feel safe enough to say that. Well, you have to know that there will be consequences for taking credit for someone.
I mean, at Google, if that had happened, that person would have been taken down several notches. Yeah, so it actually happened to me twice when I first started and then actually right after I resigned, but I was still there for another month. And I did confront the second person and then actually, no, I told HR and then they told her or told my boss and then she skyped to me and was like yelling at me. And she's like, I thought we were one team.
Like one team does not mean that you take credit for my work. It means you say, look at the work that Brandy's team did. Yeah. Versus saying like, I did all this work. That's how that went down. But I have the blues side already resigned. Yeah, that is unbelievable. That is an interesting way to weaponize the one team thing. And I'm sure that happens all the family. Yeah, we're a family. So what serves is mine and what's mine is mine. This family works.
Well, before we get into our tips, I just wanted to bring something else into this conversation about folks that might land in this, whether it's under employed, fun employed, loud laboring one team. This was from the Vox article and this person that was being interviewed said, quote, I don't have a problem with being asked to do work. It's just, I'm not really being asked. He said, maybe he could take more initiative, but he gets good performance reviews and raises so figures why bother?
Plus, it's not like he can waltz up to his boss to announce there's no real business reason for his existence. I don't want you to initiate that conversation that's, quote, hey, I haven't been doing much of anything this whole time. I need more to do. You don't really want to draw attention to it.
And it was interesting because in this article, it said strongly suspecting that a certain person isn't doing much or not nearly enough to fill up what is ostensibly an eight hour day seems to be a near universal work experience. You know, sometimes we're the less than occupied worker and sometimes that's just how things have happened. You know, just this is not data, but just one anecdote.
I have a friend who is in an organization where there were a lot of layoffs and they actually don't have very much work because a lot of the people that they were doing the work for no longer there. And so I'm just curious like, what would again that advice be if someone comes to you and says, how can you make it safe for someone to say, hey, I don't really have much work without feeling like, well, why are we paying you?
Well, I think, I mean, if we go back to, so one of the things I want to take, I think you said a bunch of different interesting things there, Amy. So before I want to get on, I'm not answering your question right away because the, the, the, this thing happens in companies, the handshake problem. So the handshake problem, if there are two people, they shake hands once and then with every person you add, the number of handshakes that have to happen go up exponentially or geometrically or a lot.
And that's a technical. This is why it's the measurement problem. It's a lot. It's a correct mathematical term. But like by the time there's, there's a hundred Russian literature. Yeah, by the time there's a hundred people think of how many handshakes have to happen. So you can't even ever get to your work because you spend the whole day of day shaking hands. And that's a problem. That's sort of a coordination cost of a big team.
And so one of the jobs of a good managers to produce the, the, the number of handshakes that have to happen. And that's by, you know, breaking work down into its component parts. And so, so if, if you, you're in a situation where you've laid off a lot of people and it's, you know, a couple of things can happen. One, you can find out you are very inefficient too.
You may, it may, there may be in about six months, you'll realize you've killed the business, you know, you've cut the costs, but you've cut revenue more. And I don't know what's happening in, in that situation. So I think that's an important thing to consider. But like if you think about what helps an economy be healthy, you don't want to rely only on the growth of the population because then we will overpopulate the work. You also want total factor productivity.
And that is what managers are responsible for. So figuring out how to do things more efficiently. And when you do that very often when you're focused on that, then what you're doing, and this is part of the reason why I said, what, what can we stop doing? Mark, can we eliminate, what can we automate? I promised to the team was once we've gotten more efficient, I'm not going to reduce headcount.
What I'm going to do is help you all figure out what you're, you know, take a step in the direction of your dreams. Like, what are you interested in doing? What do you think would help us grow the business now that we've eliminated all this grunk work? And that was what they cared about. And there was a lot of excitement around it. They wanted to grow the business and we wanted them to grow the business.
And, you know, our incentives were aligned once we, once we made it exciting to say, I've got some extra time and I want to do this project, special projects. Yeah. I was going to say, if I was speaking to that individual, I think there's a way to approach your manager and say, look, I'm eager to grow. I'm eager for new opportunities. You know, I know there's a lot that's been changing in the business.
And I just want to, I'm putting you on notice that I'm open to opportunities to do other things inside the company. I don't think you have to talk about how little you're doing. I think you can talk about how open you are to doing new things. My guess is, interestingly, in that situation, I'm guessing managers are freaked out that people are going to quit. You know what I'm saying?
If you've been on the other side of a layoff, like the manager is probably petrified of losing anybody at this point because they had no idea how they're supposed to get the work done that they're going to get done. And so someone raising their hand and saying, hey, I'm here to help. If there are opportunities for me to do different things, like I'm excited about that, please point me in the direction of a thing that I can do that's going to help grow the company.
I feel like managers would probably take that pretty well. I think that's so, so helpful. Last point, which is actually an invitation for us to continue this conversation, what I'm really curious about is how this conversation is going to evolve, going back to people wanting to have work that has meaning, if not joy, going back to joyous. But now in a world with ever advancing AI, doing a lot more automation and other tools, how are we going to find meaning as our roles might be changing?
So I think that's going to be a topic that I suspect we will be continuing to explore. And I'm curious in six months or a year where we'll be on that. I think the important thing there is that everybody's got to find meaning in their own way. It's not the manager's job to tell the employees what gives their work meaning because then the manager becomes the bloviating BSR of all times. But Messianic Bloviating BSR, which is the worst of all possible, bloviating BSRs.
Well, on that note, let's get into some practical and tactical. Kim, over to you for tip one. All right, tip number one, remember the measurement problem. Too often we reward what we can measure and we do not reward what we actually value. So this all goes back to radical kind of like have those development conversations hook into the sort of two minute impromptu radical conversation hooks into a person's intrinsic desire to get better.
And I think that is the sort of atomic building block of a great team. It's more important than performance management. I'm not saying performance management is unimportant, but focus on that intrinsic motivation. Tip number two, stop rewarding loud laboring. This kind of behavior is rampant because it works. You should know as a manager what's going on with your team well enough to see through loud laboring, which isn't actually producing real results.
And you can only do this if you've taken the time to build relationships with the people on your team and get really curious about what's happening. Tip number three is going to be a throwback to a recent episode. You want to remind managers that it's part of their job to acknowledge and celebrate the work of the quiet laborers on their team. Make sure that you are sending up the chain.
There's no, there's no boss that I've ever had that regretted receiving an email from me talking about the great things that people who don't typically boast about their work had done on my team. So take the time to do that. It's going to help you and it's going to help them in their career. Can I add a tip number four in impromptu tip number four? Let's do it.
All right, so there's a interesting thing that happens where sometimes the loud labor or the bloviating BSR is pretending like you're doing all this work that they're not actually doing. But other times they're not talking about activities. They're talking about results. But sometimes those results just sort of happen. Not as a result of anything that anyone did. So I think that the conventional wisdom is focus on results, not on activities.
But sometimes you need to ask them questions about the results. I mean, I'll give you an example from my career. People, people when they're writing, they're publishing a book, they'll often come to me and they'll say, "How did you, why was radical candor? Why did it sell so well? What did you do?" And unfortunately, the answer is, "I have no idea." It just happened. It just took off. And it's not because of any brilliant marketing strategy on my part.
I mean, there's some, I did some stuff, but I also did that stuff for just work and just work just didn't sell that well. So I don't know sometimes. And I think creating, it's easy for me to be honest about that. It's harder for a person to be honest about that with their boss. But create space for people and say, "Well, this great thing happened, and I don't even know why it happened. Help me figure it out." I love that. That humility and curiosity.
And I will just say, there is so much good stuff in radical candor, of course. There's so much good stuff in just work too, but it didn't sell. That's true. It's fair. I don't know. I've created space to not know. I don't know either. But everybody could help us change that by buying a copy right now. Everybody who listens to this podcast by buying copies and just work. It'll be on the best seller list. So there you go. It's that easy. It is. Apparently it's that easy. That's how book sell.
Just have Kim talk about it. We'll go buy some books. Well, that is not a helpful tip on book sales, but for other tips related to feedback and culture. Go ahead, visit radicalcandered.com/resources. We've got free learning guides. Radical candor on masterclass, our lit video book, our workplace comedy series, the feedback loop, so much more show notes. Radicalcandered.com/podcast. Praise in public and private and criticize in private.
So if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Randy, is there a way for people to rate and review us on Spotify? I'm nodding. If you're listening to us in Spotify, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you. If you've got criticism for us, email it to [email protected]. Do we have a favorite thing for today? Yes. Today's favorite thing is my first show of school work. Oh, God, we have to do the video. That was so perfect. Today is favorite thing.
Today is for every day's, every day. But every day's for the day's, last week it was my deodorant without any plastic. This week it is, I'm going to sell my own thing, just work, buy a copy of just work. If you want to buy an environmentally sound copy of just work, you can buy it electronically. You can listen to it or you can buy it in paper. I really, it's not that many trees were killed in the printing of just work. That is our new tag line. A diminimus number of trees.
Just really a small bush. All right. And with that, it's a wrap. The Radical Candered Podcast is based on the book Radical Candered via Kickass Boss without losing your humanity by Kim Scott. Episodes are written and produced by Brandy Neal with script editing by me, Amy Sandler. The show features Radical Cander co-founders Kim Scott and Jason Roseoff and is hosted by me, still Amy Sandler. Nick Curisamy is our audio engineer.
The Radical Cander Podcast theme music was composed by Cliff Goldmacher. Follow us on LinkedIn, Radical Cander the Company and visit us at RadicalCander.com. (scary music)