Stop Being Nice: The C.L.E.A.R. Method for Earning Respect

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Codie Sanchez** (0:30)
If you want to be a terrible leader and have nobody listen to you, the biggest mistake you can make isn't saying the wrong thing. It's refusing to tell people the truth. Every time you soften the feedback and let someone walk out believing, this looks good when it doesn't, you're just avoiding the hard conversation that you eventually need to have. I'm going to give you a four-step framework that makes hard conversations easier, and I'll show you the one conversation almost every leader avoids, even though it's the one their team or the people in their lives need the most. I'm Codie Sanchez, this is the BigDeal Podcast. Let's get into it.
If this show has ever saved you from a bad deal, a bad day, do me one favor, hit subscribe. It's free, it takes two seconds, and it's the single biggest thing that helps us book better guests and make this better for you. All right, I want to start talking about this. Call it the vanity test. There's one test you need to run before giving anyone feedback, and there's no one who ran this vanity test better than Steve Jobs. There's an incredible story basically. So Steve had this designer named Johnny Ive, and they were very close, but Steve was kind of a maniac.

**Johnny Ive** (1:37)
Remember having a conversation with him and was asking why he was a little harsh, and he said, no, you just want people to like you. I thought you held the workup as the most important, and I was terribly cross because I knew he was right.

**Codie Sanchez** (1:52)
I think great leaders, they build up people by saying the hard thing.
Bad leaders, they're so obsessed with their image and what people think about them, that they don't realize why vanity is so dangerous. It looks like kindness, and it's not. The second thing I've realized is soft feedback is the cool option, actually. So every time you soften the truth, I want you to think that you buy yourself a few seconds of comfort, but you cost someone else weeks or months of improvement. Like who are you to make that decision? Don't you want to be the type of leader who people leave their time with them and say, God, I learned so much, that person made me better? As opposed to like, yeah, that's pretty good boss, kind of like them, he's fine. So I was reading about Bill Gates the other day, and he famously loved conflict. He believed in doing these really aggressive one-on-ones with people that would make other employees cringe, and it was how he communicated. But he believed that it was never good enough in anything you could almost do. You could always do more. And so he actually used to push employees so hard in their one-on-ones that they would leave feeling like they got a workout, they famously said. He even used to drive around the parking lot and check and see if employees were in on the weekend by memorizing their license plates and then following up and having a one-on-one with them on Monday about why they weren't there. Now, I'm not saying that works in every job or company, but it tells you what the crazy ones do. There's this chick, Kim Scott, and she leads teams at Google and Apple. She actually wrote this book called Radical Candor, really big book. She calls this ruinous empathy. It's when you care so much about avoiding an uncomfortable conversation that you never say what needs to be said. You know what's crazy though, is most people actually do this. Like, imagine for a second, someone makes the same mistake three meetings in a row with you. It's not the first time you never told them. They walk into a performance review later thinking, they're doing great, only to find out you've been mad at them for months. You've been unhappy for months. You haven't thought they were performing for months. So every conversation you avoid is like you stealing from their future. It gets more expensive for them and for you. The most respectful thing you can do for a competent adult is treat them like one. They can handle the truth or you guys shouldn't be working together. What isn't helpful is them finding out you knew and said nothing. Steve Jobs was effective because he was tough. Plenty of tough bosses build terrible companies, but he was effective because everyone knew the work came first. That's what you're copying. You're not throwing a temper tantrum. You're not being mean to people. To be mean to people, you're holding the standard or what we call holding the line. If you're not going to be a standard bearer, you shouldn't be in charge.