To Zip or Not To Zip?

Jul 2, 2019

Is radical candor at work always a good thing? When to zip and when not to zip! 

t happened to me. One of the most dreaded moments a public speaker can face – the realization that I’d been speaking for the last hour or so with my zipper down. And, truth be told, not just down, no sirree  – the hangar doors were wide open.

I discovered it when a gentlemen from the back of the room raced up to see me on stage after I had asked the audience to undertake a table exercise. When I resumed my presentation (properly zipped up), I asked the audience how many of them had noticed my zipper was down. Easily 60% of the hands flew up.

Then I asked, “How many of you passed a note to your table mates about it?” 30% of the hands went up, leading, naturally, to uproarious laughter in the room.

And here’s the crazy part – I was speaking about open and honest communication, about the need to speaking candidly, to speak truth to power and to say what needs to be said, even when it’s uncomfortable! And yet no one, in the span of an hour, said a word to me!

I was reminded of this story after reading the brilliant book, “Radical Candor: How to Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity,” by Kim Scott. Scott, a former manager with both Google and Apple, shares great insights on how to build a culture of candor and how to lead with a mindset of radical candor.  To illustrate her concept about how to speak with radical candor in a way that demonstrates you care personally about a person while still challenging them directly, she uses the  example of dealing with some at work whose, yup, zipper is down.

To Zip or Not to Zip: A Guide to Radical Candor

Here’s a summary of Kim Scott’s four quadrants for how one can handle this potentially embarrassing situation:

1. Say nothing because you’re worried about the person’s feeling. This is what Scott describes as “ruinous empathy” because what needs to be said goes unsaid in our effort to be empathetic or nice.
2. Say nothing because you’re overly worried about your own feelings. Scott labels this “manipulative insincerity” because what needs to be said goes unsaid because we don’t care enough about the person to speak up, we are overly-concerned about being liked, or we can gain some sort of political advantage through what we say…or in this case…don’t say.
3. Yell out,”Hey look, Mike’s fly is down!” Scott labels this approach as “obnoxious aggression” where we blurt something out or “tell it like it is” without giving a nanosecond of consideration to the person’s feelings.
4. Take the person aside, or lean in and gently whisper, “Sorry to tell you this, but you probably want to know that your fly is down.” This is the sweetspot of what Scott defines as radical candor: saying what needs to be said in a direct enough way that there’s no room for interpretation, while still demonstrating your care about the person.

Radical candor is about recognizing that it’s not about being direct vs. caring. It’s about communicating with humanity and demonstrating you care enough about the people around you, your workplace, and yourself to say what needs to be said, but without being a jerk!

So the next time you see a speaker, or anyone, unzipped, do them and everyone around you a favor – don’t zip it up!

2020 Michael Kerr.