PDF Summary:Radical Candor, by Kim Scott

Become a great boss through the straightforward, deeply human lessons of Radical Candor. These techniques maintain high employee satisfaction and drive stellar results that you’d never be able to accomplish otherwise. With the two guiding principles of radical candor—caring personally and challenging directly—you’ll build stronger relationships within your team and create a culture of sincere and helpful guidance, inspiring your team members to bring their best and most motivated selves to their work and their collaborations, every day.

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1. Helpfulness: First, make your intentions clear—you’re giving criticism to help, not to be hurtful. Second, be as precise as possible—precision about what’s good or bad about someone’s behavior clearly tells them what to do more or less of. Third, look for ways to outsource help when appropriate and available—such as speech coaches or therapists.
2. Immediacy: Immediate feedback allows you to speak to the specifics of a situation that merit attention, and find ways to fix problems or build on success right away. Consistent, immediate guidance also helps your reports understand how their work is being received, which keeps them engaged.
3. In-person: Always give guidance in person if possible—you avoid misunderstandings if you see how your feedback is being received. Additionally, being present for negative emotions after criticism helps you demonstrate radical candor—if they’re upset, focus on caring personally to help them. If they’re not taking you seriously, focus on challenging directly to insist that your feedback is important.
4. Public praise, private criticism: Always default to giving praise in public and criticism in private. Public praise is meaningful for the recipient and demonstrates what your team should do more of. On the other hand, public criticism triggers defensiveness in the recipient and anxiety in your other team members who wonder if they’re next.
5. Don’t personalize: Make sure that your criticism targets the issue, rather than the person. Attributing a character trait to someone to explain their behavior, such as saying, “You’re careless,” doesn’t get to the root of the problem. However, saying, “There are too many typos in your reports” gives you a defined problem to find solutions to.

Maintaining a Radically Candid Culture

A radically candid culture is built on the continued use of caring personally and challenging directly. As the boss, you can maintain caring relationships with your team members by giving them consistent guidance and having regular check-in meetings with them.

Furthermore, you can ensure that your employees act with radical candor toward one another by insisting that they resolve conflicts together, instead of coming to you. You can also set up environments that encourage them to discuss their successes and failures openly. For example, in your weekly staff meeting, have employees nominate one another for an MVP award to recognize good work and highlight positive behaviors. Have them nominate themselves for a “whoops” award to take accountability for mistakes and provide everyone with a learning opportunity.

Managing Ambitions and Growth With Radical Candor

The third component of radically candid leadership is effectively managing the growth of your employees. In learning about your team members, you learn more about their goals, their motivations, and the growth trajectory they’re on—this helps you support them in ways that keep them engaged with their work and satisfied with their team. There are five performance and growth trajectory combinations you’ll come across:

High performance with gradual growth: These team members are your “rock stars,” the solid forces who keep things running smoothly. They aren’t looking for significant growth—perhaps because they’re happy with their current position, or other things in their lives are taking their time and energy. Support these team members by recognizing their efforts and thanking them, and by remembering that they deserve stellar performance reviews as much as those who are on rapid growth trajectories and gunning for a promotion.

High performance with rapid growth: These team members are your “superstars,” who want to move up in the ranks and are prepared to dedicate the necessary time and energy to doing so. They’re the results-driven people carrying your team to the next level. Support these team members by keeping them challenged with projects and new responsibilities, and by preparing them to continue moving up in their careers.

Low performance with expected rapid growth: These team members, based on their past track record of high performance, should be excelling and taking on new projects, but are instead falling behind. Support these team members by first considering your management. Perhaps you’ve put this person in a role that doesn’t align with their skills, such as a people person on a numbers-crunching project. Be sure that they’ve received adequate training and clear guidelines. Then, consider them. If they seem to be having problems outside work, give them space to recover. If they’re a poor cultural fit with your organization, it’s best to let them go, rather than keep them in an environment that they’ll always be at odds with.

Mediocre: These team members consistently do okay, but not great, work. It’s crucial to your entire team that you figure out what the path forward should be for a mediocre employee—otherwise, your high-performers will become resentful as they continually pick up her slack. Radically candid conversations will reveal the best way to support her—either let her go so that she can thrive elsewhere, or give her space to get back on track towards high performance on her terms.

Low performance with no growth: When someone is not performing well, and isn’t showing any signs of future improvement, it’s probably best to fire them—doing so allows them to find a different job they’ll thrive in, and your team won’t have the burden of picking up their slack.

Creating Meaningful Growth Plans

To build meaning into the work of your team members and figure out what growth trajectory they should be on, you need to discuss their goals—this should take place in three parts:

1. The life story conversation: This conversation is essential to getting to know your employee personally. Ask about her life story, focusing on changes she made and why these changes were made—it’s often here that you’ll discover her values.
2. The dreams conversation: This conversation should help you understand what your employee ultimately wants out of her career and life, and how you can help her get there. It’s important to frame this conversation around dreams because it usually pushes people to name non-work goals, such as, “I want to own a dude ranch in Colorado.” It’s possible that their dreams will be work-related, such as, “I want to retire at 50.” Task her with figuring out the skills she’ll need and rating her own competence in each skill.
3. The planning conversation: In this conversation, you should help your employee come up with a solid plan for achieving her dreams. Instead of focusing on telling her how to move up in your organization, focus on finding ways to make her current work clearly translate to preparation for her dreams. This makes her work more meaningful and rewarding. Think of projects that could develop necessary skills, or consider mentors or classes that would be helpful.

When you take time to fully understand who each of your team members are and what their growth looks like, you build a team where everyone feels valued, promotions feel fair, and work feels meaningful—naturally leading to higher motivation and better results.

Promoting Effective Collaboration With Radical Candor

The fourth goal of a radically candid workplace is building a highly collaborative atmosphere and a team that works together to accomplish much more than you could individually. There are seven steps to effective collaboration: listening, clarifying, debating, deciding, persuading, executing, and learning.

Listening

When listening to team members’ ideas, you’ll usually resort to one of two types of listening: quiet listening, which allows space in the conversation for the other person to speak their mind, and loud listening, which involves putting a strong challenge on the table for discussion. Neither listening style is better than the other, and you don’t need to change your style when you become a boss. However, you do need to stay attuned to how your employees receive your listening style—if they’re uncomfortable with a strong challenge, try giving them space to speak. If they find long silences unbearable, try putting forward a strong opinion for debate.

Teach your team members how to listen to each other—make sure everyone has a chance to speak in meetings, or have direct conversations with those you want to speak more or less. Idea-sharing among team members is important because they see small points for improvement that high-level managers often overlook, and can dedicate time to them. When small, innovative ideas are given the attention they deserve, they become big ideas. This inspires other team members to come forward with ideas, furthering the innovative cycle.

Clarifying

Schedule one-on-one meetings with team members to help refine their ideas for the next steps of collaboration. This is vital—unclear, half-baked ideas are likely to be dismissed or rejected when presented to others. Clarification has two main parts: letting your team member bounce ideas off you, and helping them know their audience. When your employee is bouncing an idea off you, don’t be afraid to point out logical flaws—this sparks brainstorming that reveals creative solutions that neither of you would have discovered on your own. Then, refine the idea until it’s impossible for any audience to misunderstand. Offer guidance about who they’ll be presenting to, and which details should be omitted or emphasized to best capture the audience.

Debating

Keep your debates focused on debate only, not a decision—this reduces the friction between those who want to make a decision ASAP and those who want to continue discussing an issue, and ensures that ideas are explored deeply enough.

Some ideas for building a respectful and healthy debate culture include: redirecting the conversation when it becomes clear that someone’s arguing to “win” instead of to make a good decision, stopping the meeting if it’s going on too long and wearing people out, or asking team members to argue the opposing side of the argument in the second half of the debate.

Deciding

Meetings dedicated solely to decisions are important because they signal that it’s time to stop discussing and start deciding. The decision-makers should be those who are close to the facts surrounding a situation, and thus have the best possible information to make a decision. Good bosses make sure that these people are given the clearance to make as many decisions as possible, instead of creating decision-making processes that favor senior positions or higher management.

The outcome of this meeting should be a meeting summary that’s sent out to relevant team members to explain the decision, and a decision that can’t be appealed or debated further.

Persuading

Once a decision has been reached, call an all-hands meeting to persuade everyone to the idea—this is important, because it makes sure that no one feels left in the dark. These meetings should have two parts: a presentation and a Q&A session.

• The presentation is usually done by those executing on the idea and should include one or two reasons the decision is important or exciting. The goal is to get everyone informed and on board.
• The Q&A is usually led by higher-ups (such as the CEO or team leaders) to learn about the audience’s thoughts and concerns, and to persuasively answer challenging questions.

Throughout these two parts, there should be a focus on listening and responding to the audience’s feelings about the decision; proving the credibility of those who will execute on the decision by talking about their past achievements and commitment to the team; and explaining the logic of the decision, from the very first idea all the way to the all-hands meeting.

Executing

As the boss, you probably won’t be doing much idea-executing yourself—your job is to clear the path for your team members to execute as efficiently as possible. There are a few ways to accomplish this:

• Keep it efficient: Always start meetings on time, and ask your employees to come to meetings with a prepared agenda and problems to address. Wrap up dragging debates by appointing a decision-maker and setting a decision deadline. Do your best to protect your team from time-wasting policies from higher management.
• Schedule execution time: Block off time in your and your team members’ calendars that’s dedicated to executing on ideas.
• Make workflows visible: Creating a place where everyone can visualize their own workflows within the context of the team’s workflow helps teams identify issues, delays, and other problems early. They can then fix them on their own, before the issues get so large that management needs to step in.

Learning

It’s crucial to examine your results and note the ways that the collaborative process could have gone more smoothly or been improved. Learning from errors or failure is how growth and improvement happens. In this process, people may accuse you of lacking integrity if you change your mind about a decision that was made. You can work against this by clearly communicating what new information caused you to change your mind.

What Radical Candor Creates

When you commit yourself to caring personally about your team members and challenging them directly, you become a great boss. You build strong relationships with your team members, create a culture of sincere and helpful guidance, and put together growth plans that make sense and have personal motivations built in. With this kind of support, your team members will consistently bring their best selves to their work and their collaboration, delivering results that you’d never be able to accomplish alone.