Summary ofRadical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean

by Kim Scott

Introduction

Kim Scott is an author who has experienced a great deal in her career. She has run startups, worked for Sheryl Sandberg at Google, and at Apple's renowned Apple University. She's learned from her mistakes and has picked up the traits that make leaders like those at Apple and Google so successful. This leadership style is called radical candor.

This post will explore what it is and how to use it in order to be a more effective leader.

What is the responsibility of managers?

Let's set the scene by looking at what managers and leaders are responsible for. Scott makes the point that bosses ultimately are responsible for the outcomes their teams produce. Because you have to get people to do the work to create the results, the boss' role is to guide the team towards achieving results.

Three separate things are required to get this done:

Guidance This usually comes in the form or feedback. After years of being given to us, or having it done by us, most people have grown to hate this.
Team Building : People are the ones who do the work, and how you create a team has a great deal to do with your results. You get great results if you build an amazing team.
Creating Results Scott says that these three responsibilities are dependent on strong relationships. This is where radical candor comes in.

What Is Radical Candor?

Radical candor equals care personally plus challenge directly.

Caring Personally

Care for others is about doing what you do well in your private life, and applying it at work. Acknowledging that people have aspirations and lives outside of the workplace. Making time for genuine conversations can help you to get to know each other on a personal level. Understanding what motivates the team members to get up in the morning is a great way to start the day.

Directly Challenging

Directly challenging someone is about telling them when they are not doing a good job. When necessary, give hard feedback. Making the tough decisions about who is responsible for what in your team. You know that you should do these things, but it is difficult for both you and your partner to face them.

Rarely is a person able to combine both of these things in one package. If you are a leader, you have to be able to accomplish this. You'll find on the other end a team who isn't angry or resentful, but one that is thankful for the opportunity to discuss the real issues.

What Radical Candor is Not

Before we get into the details, let's clarify what radical candor isn't and what will happen if the equation is wrong.

Caring personally It's not about making introverts more outgoing or schmoozing. Understanding your team members is key to getting the most out of them.
Challenging directly does not mean you are a jerk or that you want to pick on someone. Scott says that it requires a lot of effort from you and your team. So, only do it when it's really necessary.

You end up with obnoxious aggression when you don't care about people. If you are unable to pull off radical candor, then this is your second best option as a leader.

You will get ruinous sympathy if you do not meet the challenges. When you allow poor performance to slide, this is what happens. Usually, people are blindsided by the fact that they need to be fired.

When you fail both, it's called manipulative insincerity. It's when you don’t care about someone enough to confront them directly. Any praise or criticism that you give is fake, and is meant to gain some kind of political advantage.

Understanding what motivates your team

Understanding what motivates your team members is the first step.

Three Conversations

Scott shares three conversations that we can have to begin our journey of discovery with our team:

The Life story: This conversation is intended to discover what motivates team members. Let the conversation begin with this request, and then allow it to unfold.

"Starting with kindergarten, tell me about your life. "

Focus on the life changes that your team members have made and why they did them. Moments of change can reveal values.

Their Dreams: It is important to find out what their dreams are for the pinnacle in their career. The word "dream" is intentionally used. Avoid corporate jargon like five-year plans and long-term goals. Ask each of your direct report to fill in three to five columns with their dreams from the conversation. List the skills under each dream. Then review the spreadsheet with your direct reports during the next discussion.
The 18-month plan: In this conversation, we will answer the following questions.

What must I learn to achieve my goals?
What should I learn first?
From whom can I learn?
How can I learn to play it?

These conversations will help you gain a deeper understanding of what each member of your team is trying to achieve, how to motivate them, and where they want to go. This is a simple but powerful way to build a new level of intimacy between you and your team.

Building Trust With Your People

After you have begun to build a relationship of trust with your team it is time to do other things to strengthen the trust that you have already built.

First, Deal with Yourself

You'll be familiar with the fact that, if you've ever watched a safety video on an aircraft, you should always put on your mask first before helping others. This illustrates the fact that as a leader you must take care of your own needs before you can help others.

You need to bring your best self every single day to the office. Focus on finding your "recipe" for staying focused and follow it regardless of what happens. Put it on your calendar. Don't allow anyone to interfere with it.

Build Trust with Your Team

You can do several things daily or weekly to increase trust in your team. Here are a few of them:

Hang out in a Relaxed Environment: Spending quality time with your team, without the stress of deadlines and work, is a wonderful way to develop relationships. Consider inviting the families of team members.
Learn to Deal Well With Emotions: Building trust involves allowing others to express themselves in front of you. It's possible that anger, sadness or joy will come up at different times. This is important because emotions can be a good indicator of deeper issues. Find out how you can manage your reaction in these situations to make them feel comfortable.
Demonstrate openness As a leader demonstrating an openness to different ideas, ways of thinking and even worldviews that are radically different will encourage your team to talk to you about what they're thinking.
Check-In Regularly With One-on-Ones: This is your most effective tool for building trust within your team. You can use it to clarify and listen to any concerns you may have.

Here are some ways to get it right:

Treat the meeting as a casual coffee or lunch to get to better know someone.

You should not set the agenda. Instead, let each team member decide what issues you need to explore. Let them decide which issues you should explore.

Make them responsible for being prepared. You want to let them set the agenda but there should still be one.

Asking good follow-ups. "Why? How can I help you? Start by asking yourself "How can I help?" , "What can I stop doing or do to make it easier?" and "What am i going to do?" Start with ".

If you and your team are both actively engaged in identifying real problems and finding solutions, then these meetings will be going well. You should check to see what's going wrong if you notice that your team members cancel meetings frequently, or if you hear only good news and you always have a smile on your face.

Give and Receive Criticism and Praise

After we've done the fun stuff - building better relationships through caring personally - it's time to tackle the hard stuff - getting results by challenging yourself directly.

How to get others to criticize you in public

Invite your team to publicly criticize you as a first step in creating a culture that encourages direct criticism. This will let your team know that direct criticism is not just encouraged, but expected.

Use the same question that we discussed in the section about one-on-ones.

"Is there anything I could do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me? "

Let your team sit in uncomfortable silence for six seconds if you do not get an answer.

Giving Unexpected Advice

Advice should not only be given during formal performance evaluations. To be radically honest, you must regularly give advice and guidance. Here are some ways to do it right:

Give feedback immediately: The sooner you provide it, the more effective it will be.
Be Precise: Describe the following three things when giving feedback:

What you observe.
What was the behavior that you observed?
What impact did you observe?

State Your Intention to Be Helpful: If you are giving negative feedback, this will lower your defenses.
Do it in Person If You Can: Understanding how feedback is received is all about observing the face and body language of the person you are giving the feedback to.

Formal Performance Reviews

If you must do this, and many companies have stopped using the formal review process every year, make sure that there are no surprises. You should be practicing radical candor if you want to avoid surprises in the review.

Drive Results Through Your People

Finally, once you have a team built on candor and trust, you should make sure you work well together when solving problems and taking advantage of opportunities.

The GSD Wheel

Scott explains a tool that she uses, called the GSD Wheel (Getting Stuff Done), with seven distinct steps.

Listen: Make sure that everyone in your team has the opportunity to give their input and listen to each other.
Clarify: Make sure ideas are not thrown out before everyone understands them.
Debate: Discuss the pros, cons, and ugly sides of each idea.
Decide: Choose which idea you want to pursue.
Persuade: You may need to persuade others to implement an idea. You will need to use your persuasive skills to get them on board.
Execute the Plan.
Learn: Learn to close the loop and start over every time you do something.

This seven-step approach is only effective if your team follows it. You must also move quickly through each step to keep everyone engaged.