Be the best boss you can: highlights from reading Radical Candor.
What’s it about?
At its heart, Radical Candor (Kim Scott) is a book about helping managers become leaders. It does this by helping you, the boss, create an environment where your team follows you rather than works for you.
So… what is Radical Candor?
Radical Candor is saying what you think while also giving a damn about the person you’re saying it to. It is based on the idea that when giving feedback, to be effective one must both care personally while challenging directly. But it goes well beyond just feedback: Radical Candor is a foundation which enables you to do better work, build stronger relationships and empower your team to do the same.
Throughout the book, Kim highlights the nuances of applying Radical Candor across a range of scenarios and provides some practical guidance on how all of us, bosses and employees alike, can become more radically candid. To keep the book engaging, Kim litters it with anecdotes from her own career, from poaching Russian diamond cutters to come work for her company to experiences as a manager and leader at Google and Apple.
Best bits?
Don’t have time to read the book, or just want to know what you’re in for? Here are my favourite bits.
The bosses duty
The role of a boss is to guide a team to achieve results. However, bosses also have a more fundamental duty: to provide honest feedback. Kim tells a story of firing an under-performing staff member after 8 months of substandard work. The reaction when the news was delivered was one of hurt and surprise: “why did nobody tell me?”
A bosses duty is to have the hard discussions early and often. You are doing your employees no favours if you only praise them, but never address areas of poor performance or substandard work. I believe this is the most uncomfortable part of being a boss, but among the most important. Often this is made harder by one critical element of the Radical Candor framework: caring personally.
Caring personally
To be genuine when providing feedback, good or bad, you need to honestly care for your team. Caring personally starts with understanding each team member: what motivates them, what they excel at and who they are as an individual. This foundation provides context for you to help them develop, keep them motivated and build strong and lasting relationships. It also means when you challenge directly, the other element of the Radical Candor framework, they understand its coming from a good place.
Challenge directly
For feedback to be meaningful, bosses must overcome the fear pissing people off or upsetting them. Ultimately, a boss who cannot provide constructive criticism is unable to get the most out of their team. This doesn’t mean you have free reign to be a dick, but it does mean you have an obligation to find a way to say the thing which might upset the other person, because they need to hear it.
Superstar or Rockstar
Everyone has different motivations, aspirations and goals — and these change over time. Kim contrasts Superstars, people on a high growth trajectory, with Rockstars, standout performers who embody stability. These classifications are not binary or permanent: a Rockstar at work might be a Superstar in some other aspect of their life, such as pursuit of a sporting talent. As they reach the end of their sporting career, they may transition to a Superstar at work, as the refocus their energy into their career.
Understanding each individual in your team, and their motivations, is important: some people may not want to be pushed to the next promotion because the stability of their current role works for them right now. A vital part of building cohesive teams is understanding these dynamics, and being able to interpret and react to changes over time.
No universal approach
Every organisation and person is different. As a boss you need to embody the culture you want to create, however this must be cognisant of the organisation you are a part of. It is very easy to get this wrong, and fail trying to do the right thing for an organisation because you approach it in the wrong way. Radical Candor isn’t a solution for this problem, and won’t stop you making mistakes. What it will do is provide an environment where people tell you about your mistake before you get too far, helping you adjust course early. Radical candor is a two way street.
Keep it HHIPP
When thinking about implementing Radical Candor, Kim uses the mnemonic HHIPP. “Radical Candor is humble, it’s helpful, it’s immediate, it’s in person — in private if it’s criticism and in public if it’s praise — and it doesn’t personalize.” If you remember nothing else away from the book, remember this.
What was missing?
I very much enjoyed Radical Candor, however the one annoyance while reading the book was the excessive name-dropping throughout. While the anecdotes were often interesting, it felt at times they were there to sell Kim’s experience through her association with some big names in Silicon Valley, rather than making a new or different point. However, this may reflect a different cultural perspective between Australia/the UK and the US, or might be a consequence of my innate cynicism.
In terms of content, I would have been interested to hear more about creating an environment of Radical Candor when you are not the boss, or operate in cross functional teams where everyone has a different boss.
My rating?
4/5 — a very useful book for bosses trying to get the most out of their teams.
Hungry for more about Radical Candor?
A more detailed description of the Radical Candor framework from Kim’s blog can be found here.
What should I read next?
If you enjoyed Radical Candor, you might also like Work Clean: the life-changing power of mise-en-place to organize your life, work, and mind. Work Clean shows how mise-en-place, the philosophy, methods and principles professional chefs use to churn out consistently excellent food in a high pressure kitchen environment, can be applied to careers outside the kitchen. It also provides a window into how professional chefs operate, which is super interesting if you’re a foodie like me.
