Radical Candor, by Kim Scott

Build Radically Candid Relationships

We undervalue the emotional labor of being the boss. It's not just part of the job. It's key to being a good boss

Relationships, not power drive you forward.? They determine whether you can fulfill your three responsibilities:

• Guide – Provide guidance and develop a culture of guidance
• Team Building - Understand what motivates each person in your team well enough to avoid burnout or boredom and keep the team cohesive.
• Drive results

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Radical Candor

A concept that is key to developing powerful relationships. Two dimensions of Radical Candor:

?Care Personally - Go beyond ‘just professional’ and give a damn.

• You have to be your whole self and care about each of the people who work for you as human beings.
• Part of the reason why people fail to Care Personally is the injunction to keep it professional. There's also a less virtuous reason, people consciously or unconsciously begin to feel that they are better or smarter than the people who work for them when they become a boss. There is a sense of superiority. Just remember that being a boss is a job, not a value judgment.
• Only when you actually care about the whole person with your whole self can you build a relationship.
• It's about acknowledging that we are all people with lives and aspirations that extend beyond those related to our shared work. It's about finding time for real conversations about getting to know each other at a human level, about learning what's important to people about sharing with one another what makes us get out of bed in the morning and go to work and what has the opposite effect.

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Challenge Directly – Tell people when their work isn't good enough & when it is..

• Challenging others and encouraging them to challenge you helps with trusting relationships because it shows:
• You care enough to point out both the things that aren't going well and those that are
• You are willing to admit when you are wrong, and that you are committed to fixing mistakes that you or others have made.
• The hardest part of building this trust is inviting people to challenge you just as directly as you are challenging them.
• Radical candor is what happens when you put Care Personally and Challenge Directly together.
• Radical candor builds trust and opens the door for the kind of communication that helps you achieve the results you are aiming for. It turns out that when people trust you and believe you care about them, they are much more likely to:

1.?????? Accept an act on your praise and criticism

2.?????? Tell you what they really think about what you're doing well and more importantly, not doing well.

3.?????? Engage in the same behavior with one another, meaning less pushing the rock up the hill again and again.

4.?????? Embrace their role on the team.

5.?????? Focus on getting results.

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The most surprising thing about Radical Candor is that the results are often the opposite of what you fear. You fear people will become angry or vindictive. Instead, they are usually grateful for the chance to talk it through.

What Radical Candor is not:

• A license to be gratuitously harsh or to front stab. It's not radical candor. If you don't show that you care personally.
• An invitation to nitpick. ?A good rule of thumb for any relationship is to leave three unimportant things unsaid each day.
• A hierarchical thing.
• Radical Candor works only if the other person understands that your efforts at Caring Personally and Challenging Directly are delivered in good faith
• A license to be gratuitously harsh or to front stab. It's not radical candor. If you don't show that you care personally.
• An invitation to nitpick. ?A good rule of thumb for any relationship is to leave three unimportant things unsaid each day.
• A hierarchical thing.
• Radical Candor works only if the other person understands that your efforts at Caring Personally and Challenging Directly are delivered in good faith

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Get, Give and Encourage Guidance.

There are two dimensions to good guidance, Care Personally and Challenge Directly.? If you don’t do this you are left with the following:

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Obnoxious Aggressive Guidance:

• If you personalize or don’t take a second to show you care your guidance feels obnoxious and aggressive to the recipient leaving people defensive and unwilling to take his simple but essential advice
• Upside - people know you what you think and where you stand, so your team can achieve results. This explains the advantage that assholes seem to have in the world.
• It happens all too often that bosses view employees as lesser beings, you can degrade without conscious this results in:

·?????? Employees viewing their bosses as tyrants to be toppled,

·?????? Peers view one another as enemy combatants

• When there is a toxic culture of guidance criticism is a weapon rather than a tool for improvement.

1)????? It can give it can make the giver feel powerful and the receiver feel awful.

2)????? Even praise can feel more like a backhanded compliment than a celebration of work well done.

3)????? Remember, obnoxious aggression is a behavior, not a personality trait. Nobody nobody is a bona fide asshole all the time. All of us are obnoxious and aggressive some of the time.

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Manipulative Insincerity Guidance

This happens when you don't care enough about a person to challenge directly.

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Ruinous Empathy Guidance

• Most people want to avoid creating tension or discomfort
• Ruinous empathy can also prevent a boss from asking for criticism.
• They create the kind of environment where “being nice” is prioritized at the expense of critiquing and therefore improving actual performance.

Their direct reports never know where they stand and they aren't being given an opportunity to learn or grow.

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Radical Candor Guidance

Start by getting feedback. It will:

• Be the best way to show that you're aware that you are often wrong.
• Allow you to learn a lot - few people scrutinize you as closely as you do those who report to you
• Provide you firsthand experience on how it feels to receive criticism – giving you an idea of how your own guidance might land.
• Build trust and strengthen your relationship.

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Balance, praise and criticism. It will:

• Guide people in the right direction - The best praise does a lot more than just make people feel good. It can actually challenge them directly.
• The notion of a right ratio between praise and criticism is dangerous because it can lead you to say things that are unnatural, insincere, or just played ridiculous. How long you spend making sure you have all the facts right before you criticize someone. How long you spend making sure you have the facts right before you praise someone. Ideally, you would spend just as long get in facts right for praise as for criticism.
• Be straightforward in your guidance.
• It's tempting to think that radical candor can be reserved only for people you know, well like your friends and families. But the need for honest communication doesn't always wait until you've built a close personal relationship. And when confronted with somebody who's really upset really angry or shutting down, if you don’t speak up your invite awkwardness and mistrust
• As a boss it is not just your job, it is your moral obligation to just say it. You are also born with the capacity to connect to care personally. ?Somehow the training you got to “be professional” made you repress that. Stop repressing your innate ability to care personally, and start to give a damn.

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Team Building: Understand what motivates each person on your team.

To keep a team cohesive, you need both rock stars and superstars.

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Rock stars as solid as a rock. The rock stars love their work. They found their groove they don't want the next job as it will take them away from their craft. If you honor and reward the rockstars you'll become the people you most rely on. f you promote them into roles they don't want or aren't suited for however, you'll lose them. Or even worse wind up firing them. Some roles may be better suited to a rock star because they require steadiness/gradual growth.

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Superstars- ?need to be challenged and given the opportunity to grow constantly. They are on a steep growth trajectory characterized by rapid change, learning new skills or deepening existing ones quickly.

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Growth Management

?If I say a person is ambitious or stable, what is your reaction, positive or negative? In order to see the value of rockstars and superstars, you must let go of your judgments. Growth is ensuring that everyone on your team is moving in the direction of their dreams that you are helping people conduct their careers in the way they desire. Not in the way you think they want to. The most important thing you can do for your team collectively is to understand what growth trajectory each person wants to be on at a given time. And whether that matches the needs and the opportunities of the team. To that you're going to have to get to know each of your direct reports at a personal level

• Rockstars are just as important to a team's performance as superstars. Stability is just as important as growth.
• Plenty of individual contributors remain on a steep growth trajectory their entire careers and plenty of managers are on a gradual growth trajectory.
• teep growth should not be thought of as narrowly as promotion. It's about having increased impact over time.
• People in a superstar phase are bad at Rockstar roles. And people in a rock star phase will hate a superstar role.
• Many people shift from 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.

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Passion

The problem with insisting that people have passion for their job unnecessarily puts pressure on both boss and employee. There's nothing wrong with working hard to earn a paycheck that supports the life you want to lead. That has plenty of meaning. Your job is not to provide purpose, but instead your job is to get to know each one of your reports well enough to understand how each one derives meaning from their work and to create working conditions that allow everyone to find meaning in their own way.

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What to do with Excellent Performance

• Be a partner not an absent team manager or micromanager
• Common mistakes bosses make is to ignore the people who are doing the best work because ‘they don't need me’ or I don't want to micromanage. Ignoring somebody is a terrible way to build a relationship.
• Take the time to help the people do the best work, overcome obstacles and make their good work even better
• Managers often devote more time to those who are struggling than to those who are succeeding. But that's not fair to those who are succeeding.

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How to manage Rockstar’s

• Recognize that we all have period in our lives when our professional and personal growth, speeds up or slows down and not necessarily at the same time.
• Recognizing the whole person (personal and professional) when understanding where they are at.?
• We all need a bit of growth and stability in our lives and on our teams.
• Far too many bosses recognition via promotion, but in most cases, that's a big mistake. Promotion often puts these people in roles they're not well suited for or don't want. The key is to recognize their contributions in other ways; bonus, raise, tenure awards.
• If your organization gets performance ratings and or bonuses. Make sure they are fair to rock stars.
• A great way to recognize people in Rockstar phases to designate them as gurus or go to experts. Often this means putting them in charge of teaching your team members. Bosses can be reluctant to use a top performer this way, wanting them to do the job rather than to teach others. However, this attitude prevents an organization from getting as much leverage out of experts as they otherwise would. Generally people who are great at their job enjoy teaching it to others. There are some people who hate teaching and are terrible at it. This role should be an honor, not a requirement.
• Ensure that being in the same role for too long is does not become a badge of shame.
• Respect - gradual growth is actually often referred to as B players or as having as capped out.
• Kick Ass bosses never judge people doing great work as having capped out instead they treat them with honor they are due and retain the individual to keep their team stable, cohesive and productive.
• The dangers of promotion obsession results in people getting promoted beyond their level of competency
• Part of building a cohesive team is to create a culture that recognizes and rewards the rockstars

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How to manage Superstars

• Challenge them and make sure they are constantly learning.
• Give them new opportunities,
• Figure out what their next job is for them.
• Build an intellectual partnership find the mentors from outside your team organizations people have even more more to offer than you.
• Make sure you don't get too dependent on them. Ask them to teach others on the team to do their job because they won't stay in their existing role for long. I often thought of these people as shooting stars….my team and I were lucky to have them in our orbit for a little while, but trying to hold on to them is futile.

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Don’t Conflate Management and Growth

• If you do the unintended consequence is that armies of people are systematically capped because they don't want to become managers.
• When management is the only path to higher compensation, quality of management suffers and the lives of people who work for those reluctant managers become miserable.

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How to manage poor performance /negative growth trajectory.

• When somebody is performing poorly and having received clear communication about the nature of the problem is showing no signs of improvement you must fire that person.
• Why and how you do it goes a long way to defining your long term success as a boss because it sends a clear signal to everyone on your team whether or not you truly care about people far more than what they can do for you on the job.
• Common lies managers tell themselves to avoid firing someone who needs to be fired:

1)????? They will get better

2)????? Somebody is better than nobody

3)????? A transfer is the answer

4)????? It's bad for morale

• Getting fired is one of the most soul crushing things that can happen to a person, the way you fire people really matters.
• It's important not to distance yourself from the person you're about to fire. If you try to avoid feeling the pain that is inherent in the situation, especially for the person you're firing, you'll make a hash of it.
• Be in the right frame of mind and remember the following:

1)????? Recall the job you were terrible at and think how glad you felt that you were no longer doing it.

2)????? Retaining people who are doing bad work penalizes the people who are doing excellent work.

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Managing low performance / steep growth trajectory

• One of the most perplexing management dilemmas has been a person who ought to be taking on more and more and getting better every day, is instead screwing up or just doing a lousy job. This could happen for five different reasons.

1.?????? Wrong role

2.?????? New role too much too fast

3.?????? Personal problems

4.?????? Poor fit.

5.?????? People change and you have to change with them.

• This is a reason why you have to manage
• A great boss involves constantly adjusting to the new realities of the day or week or years it unfolds.
• But you can't adjust if you haven't been paying attention. Or if you don't know the person well enough to notice that something significant has shifted. Over the course of our careers. Most of us go through waves. Sometimes we are in learning mode or transition mode. Sometimes I priorities change.
• Don't put people in a box and leave them there

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Drive Results - Collaboratively

• Don't let your focus on the results get another way of caring about the people.
• The steps to getting stuff done without telling people what to do:

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Listen

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Quiet listening

• Upside - You hear things you don't want to hear. You don't tell people what you think and so they don't mirror what they think you want you to hear.
• Downside - People don't know what you think they waste a lot of time trying to guess.? Plenty of people are made very uncomfortable by silence. Some people feel a quiet listener is not listening at all, but instead setting a trap trap, waiting for others to say the wrong thing so they can pounce.
• If you're a quiet listener, then you need to take steps to reassure those made uncomfortable by your style. To get others to say what they think you need to say what you think sometimes too. If you want to be challenged, you need to be willing to challenge loud nothing.

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Loud listening

• Is about saying things intended to get a reaction out of them. Then you put a strong point of view out and you insist on a response.
• A challenge back approach only works when people feel confident enough to realize to rise to the challenge. You need to go to some length to build confidence of those whom you're making uncomfortable.
• Loud listening offers a quick way to expose opposing points of views or flaws in reasoning. It also prevents people from wasting a lot of time trying to figure out what the boss thinks.
• Most importantly, is to stick with the style that feels most natural to you.?
• Attempting to behave in ways that feel deeply unnatural can make your team feel less comfortable with you rather than more.
• Instead, try to strengthen your awareness of how your style makes your colleagues feel and work on improving that dynamic.
• Figure out how to give the quiet ones a voice. You want to get the best answers together

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Create a listening culture.

It's hard enough to get yourself to listen to your team members and let them know you are listening. Getting them to listen to one another is even harder. ?Some ideas:

• Create 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 explanation as to why the other issues aren't being addressed

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Clarify

• Trying to solve a problem that hasn't been clearly defined will likely result in a bad solution, debating a half-baked idea is likely to kill it.
• Ideas ultimately can be so powerful however they begin as fragile, barley formed thoughts so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily squashed. So it's important to help the people on your team to clarify their thinking and ideas so that you don't squash their best thinking or ignore problems that are bothering them.
• Create a safe space to nurture new ideas. Part of your job as the boss is to help people think through their ideas before submitting them to the rough and tumble of debate.
• Poking holes in new ideas doesn't necessarily kill them. They can push people to clarify their thinking. A good brainstorming session distinguishes between the two. ?
• A technique called ‘plussing’, rather than saying no that is a bad idea, people must offer a solution to the problem they are pointing out.
• 1:1’s can be a safe place for your direct reports to come and talk to you about new ideas. In this context, you shouldn't judge the ideas but rather help you to report clarify their thinking. This is a form of plussing, you can point out problems, but with the aim of figuring out a way around those problems, not killing ideas.
• It's only by selection by elimination and by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.

Debate

• Skip the debate phase you'll make worse decisions; you will be unable to persuade everyone who needs to execute and you're ultimately slow down or grind to a halt.
• Your job as a boss is to manage these debates.
• Debate takes time and requires emotional energy, but lack of debate saps a team of more time and emotional energy in the long run.
• Keep the conversation focused on ideas not egos remind people what the goal is to get the best answer.
• Another way to help people search the best answer instead of seeking ego validation is to make them switch roles. If a person has been arguing for A, ask them to start arguing for B. Warn people in advance that they're going to that you're going to ask them to switch roles. When people know they know that they'll be asked to argue another person's point of view. They will naturally listen more attentively.
• Create an obligation to dissent.
• Pause for emotion exhaustion. There are times when people are just tired burned out or emotionally charged up to engage in a productive debate. So it's crucial to be aware of these moments. Your job is to intervene a call a timeout.
• Use humor and have fun.
• Some people find the act of debate aggressive and are threatening. It's important to provide a clear explanation up front about the purpose of debate increasingly positive space in which it can occur.
• Be clear when the debate will end. One way to avoid this tension is to separate debate meetings and decision meetings. Have a decide by date.
• Don't grab a decision just because the debate got painful. Keep the debate going rather than to resolve it with the decision. It's the debate at work that helps individuals grow and help the teamwork better collectively to come up with the best answer.
• If people are having differences, try to wrap it up over a meal or a walk or they switch roles in all give each other's positions.

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Decide

• The boss should not be the decider.
• Garbage can decision making occurs when the people who happened to be around the table becomes the deciders rather than the people who have the best information.
• A good kick ass bosses creates a clear decision making process that empowers people closest to the facts to make as many decisions as possible. Not only does that result in better decisions that results in better morale.
• People tend to put their egos into recommendations in a way that can lead to politics and thus worse decisions. Seek ‘facts’ not ‘recommendations.
• Go spelunking - from time to time plunge in. It's a good way to find out what's really going on. It's also a good way to put bosses and other direct reports on a more equal footing.

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Persuade

• Time to get more people on board. This isn't easy, but it's vital to get it right.
• Many leaders I've worked with failed to be persuasive because they don't want to come across as manipulative and the line between persuasion and manipulation could be a fine one. Keys:

1)????? Consider you audience

2)????? Demonstrate expertise - knowing your subject and demonstrate a track record of sound decisions.

3)????? Humility - Be humble and evoke a ‘we’ not ‘I’ where possible. Bragging doesn't work, but neither does false humility,

4)????? Show the logic of your work.

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Execute

• As the boss part of your job is to take a lot of the collaboration tax on yourself so that your team can spend what some time executing
• One of the hardest things about being a boss is balancing these responsibilities with the work you need to do personally in your area of expertise. Here are three things I've learned about getting this balance right;
• Don't waste your team's time
• If debates gets tedious, identify a decider and ask that person to come back.
• Shield them from any time wasting mandates.
• Clear the deck so they can spend as much time executing.
• Keep the dirt under your fingernails?
• If you become a conductor you need to keep playing your instrument.
• Block time to execute
• Do you need to learn to toggle between leading and executing personally block time to execute?
• Often execution is the solitary task.

Learn

• Your team have put a ton of work, you've achieved something, and you want it to be great. It's human nature for us to become attached and its take a superhuman discipline to step back to see if our results could be a lot better or if they are simply no good and learn from the experience.
• Why is learning so rare? 1) Pressure to be consistent - changing our position makes us a flip flopper. You obviously can't change course lightly and if you do you need to be able to explain clearly and convincingly why you've changed 2) Burnout?