Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Malone Scott
Review
Great book stressing the importance and giving practical solutions to giving good guidance to direct reports. Very helpful
notes
- A Team needs both “rock stars” and “super stars”
- Guidance
- care personally
- challenge directly
- not speaking up is either
- manipulative insincirity
- ruinous empathy
- Teambuilding
- Results
Radical Candor
8. Results: Things you can do to get stuff done together—faster
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You have to accept that sometimes people on your team will be mad at you. In fact, if nobody is ever mad at you, you probably aren’t challenging your team enough
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They’d cancel all regularly scheduled activities (or most of them) and focus on fixing the management issues that were most annoying to the organiza
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Loud listening—stating a point of view strongly—offers a quick way to expose opposing points of view or flaws in reasoning
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Ruinously empathetic praise “Just trying to say something nice
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Be a partner, not an absentee manager or a micromanager
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Giving guidance as quickly and as informally as possible is an essential part of Radical Candor, but it takes discipline—both because of our natural inclination to delay/avoid confrontation and because our days are busy enough as it is.
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giving feedback. This simple technique reminds you to describe three things when giving feedback: 1) the situation you saw, 2) the behavior (i.e., what the person did, either good or bad), and 3) the impact you observed
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A huge part of what makes giving guidance so valuable is that misperceptions on both sides of the equation get corrected.
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Generally, people who are great at a job enjoy teaching it to others; giving them this role can not only improve the performance of the whole team but also give the rock stars a different sort of recognition.
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. A thank-you expresses personal gratitude. In the case of a thank-you, you are explaining not just why the work matters, but why it matters to you
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Almost nothing will erode trust more quickly than using one’s insights into what makes another person tick to hurt them.
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Don’t “save up” guidance for a 1:1 or a performance review.
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Why “radical”? I chose this word because so many of us are conditioned to avoid saying what we really think.
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. Be direct but polite: “This is your time, but you don’t seem to come with much to talk about. Can you tell me why?
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Schedule at least fifty minutes in person, and don’t do reviews back-to-back.
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Stating your intention to be helpful can lower defens
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Not every superstar wants to manage
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Part of your job as a boss (and as a human being) is to acknowledge and deal with emotional responses, not to dismiss or avoid them.
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If you want your team to achieve something bigger than you could achieve alone, if you want to “burst the bounds of your brain,” you have to care about the people you are working with.
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I recommend setting up a weekly “big debate” meeting. In my staff meeting we identified the most important debate each week, and who needed to be involved (
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They must go from Ruinous Empathy toward the very quadrant they fear most—Obnoxious Aggression—before they can achieve Radical Candor.
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The purpose of a 1:1 meeting is to listen and clarify—to understand what direction each person working for you wants to head in, and what is blocking them
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Thoreau said it best in Walden: “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary … If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under the
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You need to push them to communicate with such precision and clarity that it’s impossible not to grasp their argument.
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, “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
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When you have to fire people, do it with humility. Remember, the reason you have to fire them is not that they suck. It’s not even that they suck at this job. It’s that this job—the job you gave them—sucks for them
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effective staff meeting has three goals: it reviews how things have gone the previous week, allows people to share important updates, and forces the team to clarify the most important decisions and debates for the coming week. That’s it. It
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An enormously successful newspaper executive recounted walking into his CEO’s office and seeing him leaning back in his chair just staring out at the sky. When he asked the CEO what he was daydreaming about, it turned out to be the idea that pivoted the company for the next decade
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people usually loved presenting at these meetings. “Your team wants the stage? Show them the stage!
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Making progress visible to everyone gives more, not less, autonomy to the team.
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When you can see from a Kanban board what people are doing, respect tends to flow pretty naturally.
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WALK AROUND Learn about small problems to prevent big ones LISTENING TO THE people who report directly to you is relatively straightforward, even if it requires time and discipli