Radical Candor

Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
by Kim Scott

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Book Summary

Ch 1: Introduction

There are three areas of responsibility that managers do have:

Guidance (Feedback)
Team-building (Hiring, Firing, Promoting)
Results (Make decisions, Get things done)

“Radical Candor” is what happens when you put “Care Personally” and “Challenge Directly” together. Very few people focus first on the central difficulty of management: establishing a trusting relationship with each person who reports directly to you. These relationships determine whether you can fulfill your responsibilities.

When people trust you and believe you care about them, they are much more likely to:

accept and act on your praise and criticism;
tell you what they really think about what you are doing well and, more importantly, not doing so well;
engage in this same behavior with one another, meaning less pushing the rock up the hill again and again;
embrace their role on the team; and
focus on getting results.

Ch 2: Guidance

Ch 3: Team Building

There are two types of people with respect to growth ambition:

Rock stars love their work. They have found their groove. They don’t want the next job if it will take them away from their craft.
Superstars need to be challenged and given new opportunities to grow constantly.

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 opportunities of the team.

EXCELLENT PERFORMANCE/GRADUAL GROWTH TRAJECTORY
- Recognize, reward, but don’t promote
- Do Fair performance ratings
EXCELLENT PERFORMANCE/STEEP GROWTH TRAJECTORY
- Keep superstars challenged (and figure out who’ll replace them when they move on)
- Don’t squash them or block them if they decide to move on
- Not every superstar wants to manage
MANAGING THE MIDDLE
- Raise the bar—there’s no such thing as a B-player
POOR PERFORMANCE/NEGATIVE GROWTH TRAJECTORY
- Part ways
- How do you know when it’s time to fire somebody?
  1. Have you given Radically Candid guidance?
  2. How is this person’s poor performance affecting the rest of the team?
  3. Have you sought out a second opinion, spoken to someone whom you trust and with whom you can talk the problem through?
- Common lies managers tell themselves to avoid firing somebody who needs to be fired
  1. It will get better.
  2. Somebody is better than nobody.
  3. A transfer is the answer.
  4. It’s bad for morale.
LOW PERFORMANCE/STEEP GROWTH TRAJECTORY
- Check for following potential issues:
  1. Wrong role
  2. New to role; too much too fast
  3. Personal problems
  4. Poor cultural fit

Ch 4: Results

Ch 5: Relationships

Stay Centered

Be relentlessly insistent on bringing your fullest and best self to work—and taking it back home again. Figure out work-life integration.
Figure out your “recipe” to stay centered and stick to it.
Put the things you need to do for yourself on your calendar, just as you would an important meeting.

Make people feel free at work

When everyone on your team is able to bring the best of what they’ve got mentally, emotionally, and physically to their work, they are more fulfilled in their jobs, they work better with one another, and the team gets better results. You can’t get that out of people with power, authority, or control.

Master the art of socialising at work

Spending time with people from work in a more relaxed setting, without the pressure of work deadlines, can be a good way to build relationships.

Respect boundaries

Build trust
Share values
Demonstrate openness
Respect Physical space
Recognize your own emotions
Master your reactions to others’ emotions
- Acknowledge emotions.
- Ask questions. understand what the real issue is.
- Adding your guilt to other people’s difficult emotions doesn’t make them feel better.
- If you really can’t handle emotional outbursts, forgive yourself.

Ch 6: Guidance

As a leader, encourage feedback from the team

Embrace the discomfort in giving and receiving feedback.
Leaders are the exception to the “criticize in private” rule of thumb. When you encourage people to criticize you publicly, you get the chance to show your team that you really, genuinely want the criticism.
Have a go-to question. When you’re the boss, it’s awkward to ask your direct reports to tell you frankly what they think of your performance—even more awkward for them than it is for you.
Listen with the intent to understand, not to respond.
Reward criticism to get more of it.

Giving feedback to team member

Be humble. We’re all naturally defensive when first criticized, but if you deliver criticism humbly, it breaks down the natural resistance to what you’re saying.
- Situation, behavior, impact. 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. This helps you avoid making judgments about the person’s intelligence, common sense, innate goodness, or other personal attributes.
- Left-hand column.
Be Helpful
- Stating your intention to be helpful can lower defenses. When you tell somebody that you aren’t trying to bust their chops—that you really want to help—it can go a long way toward making them receptive to what you’re saying.
- Show, don’t tell. The more clearly you show exactly what is good or bad, the more helpful your guidance will be. Don’t explain just abstractions. 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.
- Finding help is better than offering it yourself.
- Guidance is a gift, not a whip or a carrot. Adopting the mindset that guidance is a gift will ensure that your guidance is helpful even when you can’t offer actual assistance, solutions, or an introduction to someone who can help. Don’t let the fact that you can’t offer a solution make you reluctant to offer guidance.
Give feedback immediately. 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.
- Say it in 2–3 minutes between meetings.
- Keep slack time in your calendar, or be willing to be late.
- Don’t “save up” guidance for a 1:1 or a performance review.
- Guidance has a short half-life. If you wait to tell somebody for a week or a quarter, the incident is so far in the past that they can’t fix the problem or build on the success.
- Unspoken criticism explodes like a dirty bomb.
- Avoid black holes. Be sure to let people know immediately how their work is being received.
Praise in public, criticize in private
- Corrections, factual observations, disagreements, and debates are different from criticism. It’s vital to be able to correct somebody’s work, to make a factual observation, or to have a debate in public. But criticizing a person should be done in private—“
Don’t personalize. Say “that’s wrong” not “you’re wrong.”

Formal Performance Reviews

No surprises
Don’t rely on your unilateral judgment. Use the 360 process.
Solicit feedback on yourself first. Asking each of my direct reports to give me a performance review before I gave them one was helpful.
Write it down. Writing is painstaking and time-consuming, and so a lot of companies don’t require written performance reviews. But it’s happened to me dozens of times that writing things down changes the review.
Make a conscious decision about when to give the written review.
Schedule at least fifty minutes in person, and don’t do reviews back-to-back.
Spend half the time looking back (diagnosis), half the time looking forward (plan).
Schedule regular check-ins to assess how the plan is working.
Deliver the rating/compensation news after the performance review.

Skip level meetings

Explain it. Show it. Explain it again. Explain to each of your direct reports that you have two goals: 1) to help each of them become better bosses and 2) to make sure people on their team feel comfortable giving them feedback directly.
Never have a skip level meeting without prior consent of your direct report.
Never have skip level meetings for some of the people who work for you but not others.
Ensure the meeting is “not for attribution.” Everything of import will be shared with their boss, but not who said it.
Take notes and project them.
Kick-start the conversation.
Prioritize issues.
Share notes right after the meeting.
Ensure that your directs make and communicate changes.
Have these meetings once a year for each of your direct reports.

Ch 7: Team

Career conversations with your team

Conversation one: life story. The first conversation is designed to learn what motivates each person who reports directly to you.
The second conversation: dreams. Understand the person’s dreams—what they want to achieve at the apex of their career, how they imagine life at its best to feel.
Conversation three: eighteen-month plan. Layout the plan: 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?

Growth management

Put names in boxes (temporarily!). The first step is to identify your rock stars and superstars. Write their names in the correct boxes.
Write growth plans. Come up with a three- to five-bullet-point growth plan for each person. Make sure that you have projects or opportunities that will stretch the superstars. Make sure that you’re giving the rock stars what they need to be productive.
Ensure fairness by level. Too often, the people who have the most senior roles are given the highest ratings when in fact they are surfing on the productivity of the people working for them. Don’t let that happen!

Rewarding Rock stars

Avoid promotion/status obsession. Announcing promotions breeds unhealthy competition for the wrong things: documentation of status rather than development of skill. When there are big public celebrations of promotions, the costs in terms of the organization’s focus on hierarchy often outweigh the benefits of publicly recognizing those being promoted.
Say “thank-you”. A thank-you goes beyond praise. Praise expresses admiration for great work. 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.
Gurus. Another great way to highlight how great people are at a job is to acknowledge them as gurus in their area of expertise.
Public presentations. Give people on your team who focus on tasks that are important but under-recognized or misunderstood an opportunity to explain their work to their colleagues.

Avoid micromanagement or absentee management

Ch 8: Results

One of your most important responsibilities to keep everything moving smoothly is to decide who needs to communicate with whom and how frequently.

1:1 Conversations
Staff Meetings
Think Time “Big Debate” Meetings
“Big Decision” Meetings
All-Hands Meetings
Meeting-Free Zones
Kanban Boards
Walk Around
Be Conscious of Culture

1:1 Conversations

1:1s are your must-do meetings, your single best opportunity to listen, really listen, to the people on your team to make sure you understand their perspective on what’s working and what’s not working. Few things to note:

Mindset: I found that when I quit thinking of them as meetings and began treating them as if I were having lunch or coffee with somebody I was eager to get to know better, they ended up yielding much better conversations.
Frequency & Duration: I like to meet with each person who works directly for me for fifty minutes a week. If you have ten direct reports, I’d shift 1:1s to twenty-five minutes a week. Finally, to avoid meeting proliferation, I recommend that managers use the 1:1 time to have “career conversations” and, if relevant, to do formal performance reviews.
Show up: No matter what fires erupt in your day, do not cancel your 1:1s.
Your direct report’s agenda, not yours. When your direct reports own and set the agenda for their 1:1s, they’re more productive, because they allow you to listen to what matters to them.
Ask some good follow-up questions to show not only that you are listening but that you care and want to help, and to identify the gaps between what people are doing, what they think they ought to be doing, and what they want to be doing:
Encourage new ideas in the 1:1. This meeting should be a safe place for people to nurture new ideas before they are submitted to the rough-and-tumble of debate.

Staff Meetings

An effective staff meeting has three goals:

it reviews how things have gone the previous week
allows people to share important updates
forces the team to clarify the most important decisions and debates for the coming week.

Here’s the agenda that I’ve found to be most effective:

Learn: review key metrics (twenty minutes). What went well that week, and why? What went badly, and why? This will go best if you come up with a dashboard of key metrics to review.
Listen: put updates in a shared document (fifteen minutes). Updates are different from key metrics. Updates include things that would never make it into the dashboard, like, “We need to change our goals for this project,” “I am thinking of doing a re-org,” “I’m starting to think I need to fire so-and-so,” or “I have to have surgery next month and will be out for three weeks.”
Clarify: identify key decisions & debates (thirty minutes). What are the one or two most important decisions and the single most important debate your team needs to take on that week?

All Hands Meeting

These can really help to get broad buy-in on the decisions being made—and also to learn about dissent. These meetings usually include two parts:

presentations to persuade people that the company is making good decisions and headed in the right direction, and
Q&As conducted so leaders can hear dissent and address it head-on. Q&A is usually handled by the CEO/founders and allows them to learn what people really think, and so it generally falls to them to answer these often unpleasant, challenging, or awkward questions.

Be Conscious of Culture

People are listening. Like it or not, you’re under the microscope. They attribute meaning—sometimes accurately, sometimes not—to what you say, to the clothes you wear, to the car you drive. In some ways, becoming a boss is like getting arrested. Everything you say or do can and will be used against you.
Clarify. Be vigilant about clarifying what you are communicating
Debate and decide explicitly. Don’t let things that pervert your culture “just happen”. There are a number of debates and decisions that you are going to be tempted to “delegate to HR.” Don’t.
Persuade. Pay attention to the small things. When you pay attention to seemingly small details, it can have a big impact on persuading people that your culture is worth understanding and adapting to.
Execute: Action should reflect your culture. It’s surprising how a small action from you can impact your team’s culture, even after you’re no longer around.
Learn. Shit happens. When you’re the boss and shit happens, it’s your responsibility to learn from it and make a change. If you don’t, you create a culture that doesn’t learn from its mistakes.
Listen. The most amazing thing about a culture is that once it’s strong, it’s self-replicating. Even though you’ve taken a number of conscious actions to impact it, you’ll know you’ve succeeded when it truly is no longer about you.

Bonus Chapter: Designing Annual Performance Review

Rating or no rating. Rating can force a hard conversation that ultimately helps the employee. Ratings also make calibrating managerial decisions much easier, which contributes to fairness.
Categories of ratings. Limit yourself to three or four categories. Here are four common categories:
- Results. Is the person achieving their goals, doing what they are supposed to do? Do they have the skills or domain expertise necessary to be effective in their role?
- Teamwork. How well does the person work with others to get the results? Do they help others succeed
- Innovation (Problem Solving). Does this person come up with new ideas that change the game, or help the team do old work in a new, better way?
- Efficiency. Does this person work productively and quickly and contribute to the team’s ability to do so? For example, the employee who can do the work asked of them a little more quickly than others, and who shows others how they do it.
Job ladders: They are necessary evil.
Number of ratings: I have settled on four ratings as generally the best ratio of simplicity to signal. Four ratings gives clear feedback to employees about where their performance stands, without pushing to false precision of more ratings. Separate ratings for each of the four categories you’ve chosen can help the performance review serve as a diagnostic for improvement (i.e., “your results are amazing, but your teamwork will hold you back”), not just a whip or a carrot in a way that a single overall rating does not.
Language of ratings: For the purposes of averaging, you will translate words to numbers. But when you deliver the rating, words are better than numbers. You could simply use numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4.
Consequence of ratings: Ratings guide variable compensation, promotions, and terminations. The ratings should make the reasoning behind these decisions more transparent to employees, lead managers to calibrate carefully, and generally make the whole process feel simple, transparent, and fair.
Distribution of ratings: Avoid having too rigid a distribution. Don’t let an expected distribution to blind you to reality.
Forced curve or no: Don’t force a curve but do put pressure on it. Require managers who fall outside the expected curve to provide a written explanation for why; ask a lot of questions and allow peers to ask a lot of questions.
Calibration of ratings. Calibration meetings are key for two reasons.
- The first is transparency fairness. They keep managers honest if they know they have to defend their ratings in front of peer managers and even higher management levels.
- The second is guidance for new managers. These meetings are a great way to learn about performance expectations and even cultural norms.
Frequency: My recommendation: do it twice a year. One can be lightweight, oral, and just between the manager and employee; the other should be written and include a light 360-degree component.
“360-degree” performance process or relying on a manager’s unilateral assessment: Requiring 360 reviews is one of the most effective things any organization can do to make sure that a manager’s subjective point of view does not create favoritism or allow unfair/suboptimal allocation of resources.
Transparent or confidential: For 360 feedback, you need to decide whether it will be transparent (what people write about their colleagues is visible to those colleagues) or confidential (what people write about their colleagues is visible only to the colleagues’ managers).
Lightweight or heavyweight: A heavyweight review process requires everyone who writes reviews for employees and 360 feedback “up,” “down,” and “sideways” to spend tremendous amounts of time doing so.