Radical Candor is a leadership book about optimal management. “Radical Candor” is defined as “the sweet spot between managers who are obnoxiously aggressive on one side and ruinously empathetic on the other.” The book helps managers know how to work between the two. The book also covers three simple principles “great bosses” use to build strong relationships with their employees.
I have worked as a manager and with process improvement teams for years. So I have had to “flex” to every personality style and preferences, often in one setting.
This book appealed to me because Kim Scott describes — with a simple four quadrant framework —how and how not to engage to help colleagues develop. This approach helped me find a comfortable spot of caring personally for employees and being honest in how I deliver both constructive criticism and praise – which Scott calls “radical candor” – without being disingenuous, manipulative, or obnoxious. For example, she describes one negative quadrant you don’t want to fall under as “Ruinous Empathy.” Kim Scott writes the quadrant is “responsible for the vast majority of management mistakes I’ve seen in my career” because “most people want to avoid creating tension or discomfort at work.” This is just one example of how this book improved my management skills.
I feel I am good at working with process improvement teams, but the team environment is always complicated. Radical Candor helped me approach teams in a new way. Before, I approached a team environment by trying to communicate everything more than once, varying it each time to each style preference. That way, everyone should gain from me what they need.
However, I have come to realize that approach can become challenging because I can “lose people” when I communicate in a style that is not their own. Connecting with different styles without losing other people is like a puzzle I am trying to put together rapidly. Kim Scott helped me improve my skills for these situations by providing an approach that is based on what all personality styles need from leaders when working with an idea. For example, all styles need time to clarify an idea. She explains that we should not skip time for a team to debate the idea. This sort of advice “uncomplicates” the team environment for me, so I am excited to know the teams I work with going forward will be that much more successful!
Kim Scott was a top manager with companies like Google and Apple. She also had her own businesses. She admits some of her ventures failed while others succeeded. Her honesty in what has worked and what hasn't worked is refreshing. She knows from experience!
The importance of caring personally for employees is emphasized throughout Radical Candor, as well as the damage or risks it poses to organizations and managers who don’t. I love that Kim Scott shares personal stories from her work to illustrate the need to understand and care personally. For example, she once worked for a diamond company in Russia after the end of the Cold War and was responsible for hiring diamond cutters. She initially thought the best way to motivate these diamond cutters was through compensation – by switching their pay from an “almost worthless” Russian Ruble currency to U.S. Dollars, which would have much higher value. However, she discovered pay didn’t motivate them to higher performance. Instead, they literally wanted a picnic – and the personal connection with a leader who would care about them and their families. I leave the rest of the details to those who join me in reading this book. What really hit home with me is how employees need to feel cared for as people. This is true across organizations, the globe, and cultures.
I was tempted at first to “skip” the parts of her book about Google because I thought they wouldn't relate to my experience in the Department of Corrections. But when I read deeper, I found much of Google’s journey and lessons learned to be valuable. One of the lessons was the potential downsides from traditional performance appraisals. We may not be able to build slides for people to use instead of stairs or allow employees to get around their workplaces on skateboards like Google does, but Google changed their approach to performance appraisals not because they don’t care about results, rather they did it because they care greatly about results. What perfect timing to read about this!
Radical Candor is relevant to the journey our Departments are now taking together as we strive to excel. In order to excel, we need to improve our results over time. Kim Scott’s basic premise is that managers are responsible for these results and that it is relationships — not power — that will drive results forward. This fits well with some of the new changes in how we work, such as ENGAGE and our other new approaches to professional development conversations. Radical Candor shows how the improved relationships we gain from such conversations can translate into improved results for our teams and citizens as well.
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