Radical Candor: Fully Revised & Updated Edition: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity - by Kim Scott
Date read: 2020-11-05How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
Heavily influenced from the author's time at Google & Apple, the title is a bit misleading as this book focuses more on management than on communication. Although I've already gathered most of these best practices from other books, I recommend sharing this with any new managers or leaders.
Contents:
- OBNOXIOUS AGGRESSION
- MANIPULATIVE INSINCERITY
- RUINOUS EMPATHY
- POSITIVE & CONSTRUCTIVE FEEDBACK
- SUPERSTARS VS. ROCKSTARS
- CREATING A CULTURE OF LISTENING
- CAREER DEVELOPMENT
My Notes
Ultimately, though, bosses are responsible for results. They achieve these results not by doing all the work themselves but by guiding the people on their teams. Bosses guide a team to achieve results.
Guidance, team, and results: these are the responsibilities of any boss.
Care Personally - The first dimension is about being more than “just professional.” It’s about giving a damn, sharing more than just your work self, and encouraging everyone who reports to you to do the same.
Challenge Directly The second dimension involves telling people when their work isn’t good enough—and when it is;
“Radical Candor” is what happens when you put “Care Personally” and “Challenge Directly” together.
Challenging others and encouraging them to challenge you helps build trusting relationships because it shows:
- you care enough to point out both the things that aren’t going well and those that are and that
- you are willing to admit when you’re wrong and that you are committed to fixing mistakes that you or others have made.
“If we have the data about what works, let’s look at the data, but if all we have are opinions, let’s use yours,” borrowing from Jim Barksdale of Netscape, but offering the opposite prescription.
A good rule of thumb for any relationship is to leave three unimportant things unsaid each day.
You don’t have to spend a lot of time getting to know a person or building trust before offering Radically Candid guidance. In fact, a great way to get to know somebody and to build trust is to offer Radically Candid praise and criticism.
Really specific praise is important.
When you criticize someone without taking even two seconds to show you care, your guidance feels obnoxiously aggressive to the recipient. When bosses belittle employees, embarrass them publicly, or freeze them out, their behavior falls into this quadrant.
The worst kind of Obnoxious Aggression happens when one person really understands another’s vulnerabilities and then targets them, either for sport or to assert dominance.
Manipulative insincerity guidance happens when you don’t care enough about a person to challenge directly.
When you are overly worried about how people will perceive you, you’re less willing to say what needs to be said. Like Jony Ives, you may feel it’s because you care about the team, but really, in those all-too-human moments you may care too much about how they feel about you—in other words, about yourself.
Praise that’s ruinously empathetic is not effective because its primary goal is to make the person feel better rather than to point out really great work and push for more of it.
When giving praise, investigate until you really understand who did what and why it was so great. Be as specific and thorough with praise as with criticism. Go deep into the details.
Start by asking for criticism, not by giving it Don’t dish it out before you show you can take it.
Bosses get Radically Candid guidance from their teams not merely by being open to criticism but by actively soliciting it. If a person is bold enough to criticize you, do not critique their criticism.
Your job is to listen with the intent to understand and then to reward the candor.
Balance praise and criticism Worry more about praise, less about criticism—but above all be sincere.
“How long do you spend making sure you have all the facts right before you criticize somebody? How long do you spend making sure you have all the facts right before you praise somebody?” Ideally you’d spend just as long getting the facts right for praise as for criticism.
It’s easier to find fault in that person than to look for the fault within the context of what that person is doing. It’s easier to say, “You’re sloppy” than to say, “You’ve been working nights and weekends, and it’s starting to take a toll on your ability to catch mistakes in your logic.” But it’s also far less helpful.
In my experience, people who are more concerned with getting to the right answer than with being right make the best bosses. That’s because they keep learning and improving, and they push the people who work for them to do the same. A boss’s Radically Candid guidance helps the people working for them do the best work of their lives.
Building a team is hard. A leader at Apple had a good way to think about different types of ambition that people on her team had so that she could be thoughtful about what roles to put people in. To keep a team cohesive, you need both rock stars and superstars:
Rock stars are solid as a rock. They don’t want the next job if it will take them away from their craft.
Superstars, on the other hand, need to be challenged and given new opportunities to grow constantly.
Scott proposed using the word “growth” instead of “potential,” to help managers think about what opportunities to give to which people on their teams.
“What growth trajectory does each person on my team want to be on right now?” or “Have I given everybody opportunities that are in line with what they really want?” or “What growth trajectory do my direct reports believe they are on? Do I agree? And if I don’t, why don’t I?”
Performance is not a permanent label. No person is always an “excellent performer.” They just performed excellently last quarter.
Most people shift between a steep growth trajectory and a gradual growth trajectory in different phases of their lives and careers, so it’s important not to put a permanent label on people.
Your job is not to provide purpose but instead to get to know each of your direct reports well enough to understand how each one derives meaning from their work.
For me, the most instructive part of Wren’s story is that he didn’t come up with a sense of purpose himself and pound it into everyone’s head. Each bricklayer cared about something different, even though all three were working on the same thing. Wren’s role was to listen, to recognize the significance of what he heard, and to create working conditions that allowed everybody to find meaning in their own way.
You don’t want to be an absentee manager any more than you want to be a micromanager. Instead, you want to be a partner—that is, you must take the time to help the people doing the best work overcome obstacles and make their good work even better.
Allowing transfers is important because it prevents bosses from blackballing employees who want to move on, and allows for the fact that sometimes two people just don’t work that well together.
Lack of interest in managing is not the same thing as being on a gradual growth trajectory, just as interest in managing is not the same thing as being on a steep growth trajectory. Management and growth should not be conflated.
It’s not only important to remember that nobody is always on a steep or growth trajectory; people’s performance changes over time, too. Be careful not to label people as “high performers.” Everybody has an off quarter occasionally. To combat permanent labels, Qualtrics cofounder (and my colleague from Juice and Google) Jared Smith came up with the performance ratings “off quarter,” “solid quarter,” and “exceptional quarter.”
If you’re not dying to hire somebody, don’t make an offer. And, even if you are dying to hire somebody, allow yourself to be overruled by the other interviewers who feel strongly the person should not be hired. In general, a bias toward no is useful when hiring.
“BIG DEBATE” MEETINGS are reserved for debate, but not decisions, on major issues facing the team.
At least part of the friction and frustration in a lot of meetings results from the fact that half the room thinks they are there to make a decision, the other half to debate.
I’ve found, again and again, that even if you work at a place that allows you to act in a more authoritarian way, you’ll get better results if you lay your power down and work more collaboratively.
You have to find a way to listen that fits your personal style, and then create a culture in which everyone listens to each other, so that all the burden of listening doesn’t fall on you.
He tried to make sure to spend at least ten minutes in every one-on-one meeting listening silently, without reacting in any way. He would keep his facial expression and body language totally neutral.
It's important to have “strong opinions, weakly held.” I tend to state my positions strongly, so I have had to learn to follow up with, “Please poke holes in this idea—I know it may be terrible. So tell me all the reasons we should not do that.”
- Have a simple system for employees to use to generate ideas and voice complaints.
- Make sure that at least some of the issues raised are quickly addressed.
- Regularly offer explanations as to why the other issues aren’t being addressed.
Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey explained why succinctly in an email he sent out to the whole company. “If you have to use someone else’s name or authority to get a point across, there is little merit to the point (you might not believe it yourself). If you believe something to be correct, focus on showing your work to prove it. Authority derives naturally from merit, not the other way around.”
“I’m going to describe a problem I see; I may be wrong, and if I am I hope you’ll tell me; if I’m not I hope my bringing it up will help you fix it.”
By explicitly describing what was good or what was bad, you are helping a person do more of what’s good and less of what’s bad—and to see the difference.
Praise in public, criticize in private.
“Not because I want to embarrass Jane, but to make sure all of you learn from what she did, I’m going to tell you what she just accomplished, and how she did it.”
He stopped saying, “You’re wrong,” and instead learned to say, “I think that’s wrong.”
Andy Grove had a mantra at Intel that we borrowed to describe leadership at Apple: Listen, Challenge, Commit. A strong leader has the humility to listen, the confidence to challenge, and the wisdom to know when to quit arguing and to get on board.
“I’m trying to be Radically Candid, and I want to check in with you to see how my feedback is landing for you.” Ask her to gauge your praise and criticism. (Even if you’re not worried about gender politics, it is a good idea to find out!).
I tried not to spend more than about half of the time talking about the past, because it was more important to start engaging people on the future. I didn’t come up with the plan—I asked them to. How would they parlay success into even more success, or how would they address an area of poor performance?
What if people won’t shut up? If one person is doing all the talking, read faces carefully. If somebody looks as though they agree or disagree strongly, ask what they think. If somebody looks bored, ask, “So, this issue doesn’t seem to resonate for you. Are there others on your mind?” If there seem to be more problems than you can cope with, focus the conversation on prioritizing them. Remind people that personality transplants are not available.
Whenever you feel yourself getting lost in the weeds, simply return to these two questions: “Am I showing my team that I care personally?” and “Am I challenging each person directly?” If the answer to both questions is yes, you’re doing just fine.
The first conversation is designed to learn what motivates each person who reports directly to you. Russ suggested a simple opening to these conversations. “Starting with kindergarten, tell me about your life.” Then, he advised each manager to focus on changes that people had made and to understand why they’d made those choices. Values often get revealed in moments of change.
Russ suggests encouraging people to come up with three to five different dreams for the future. This allows employees to include the dream they think you want to hear as well as those that are far closer to their hearts.
Last, Russ taught managers to get people to begin asking themselves the following questions: “What do I need to learn in order to move in the direction of my dreams? How should I prioritize the things I need to learn? Whom can I learn from?” How can I change my role to learn it?