Radical Candor has been embraced around the world by leaders of every stripe at companies of all sizes.
The idea is simple: You don’t have to choose between being a pushover and a jerk. Using Radical Candor—avoiding the perils of Obnoxious Aggression, Manipulative Insincerity, and Ruinous Empathy—you can be kind and clear at the same time.
Required reading for the most successful organizations, Radical Candor has raised the bar for management practices worldwide. Read an excerpt below.
IT’S CALLED MANAGEMENT, AND IT’S YOUR JOB
I usually felt a little surge of pleasure as I stepped off the elevator into the cavernous former warehouse in the East Village we’d rented as the office of Juice Software, the start-up I’d cofounded in 2000. That day, I just felt stressed.
The engineers had worked nights and weekends on an early “beta” version of our product, which would be ready in a week. The sales team had gotten thirty big-name customers lined up for beta testing. If those customers were using our product, we’d be able to raise another round of funding. If not, we’d run out of money in six months.
There was one blocker: me. The night before, one of our angel investors, Dave Roux, had told me he thought our pricing was all wrong. “Think about the last time you bought a used car—one that cost less than $10,000. Now, think about the guy who sold it to you. That’s who your salespeople will be. That’s who’ll represent you in the market.” I knew in my gut Dave was right, but I couldn’t go to my sales team or my board and change everything just based on a gut feeling. I needed to sit down and do some analysis—fast. I’d cleared my calendar of meetings for the morning so I could do just that.
I’d gotten only a few steps into the office when a colleague suddenly ran up. He needed to talk right away. He had just learned that he might need a kidney transplant, and he was completely freaked out. After an hour and two cups of tea, he seemed calmer.
I walked toward my desk, past an engineer whose child was in the ICU. Must check in. “How’d your son do last night?” I asked. He hadn’t improved—and as he told me how the night had gone we both had tears in our eyes. I convinced him to leave the office and go and take care of himself for an hour before returning to the hospital.
I left his desk drained, passing by our quality assurance manager. His child had better news: she’d just received the highest score in the entire state on a standardized math test. He wanted to talk about it. I felt emotional whiplash as I jumped from sympathy to celebration.
By the time I got back to my desk, I had no time or emotional reserves to think about pricing. I cared about each of these people, but I also felt worn out—frustrated that I couldn’t get any “real” work done. Later that day, I called my CEO coach, Leslie Koch, to complain.
“Is my job to build a great company,” I asked, “or am I really just some sort of emotional babysitter?”
Leslie, a fiercely opinionated ex-Microsoft executive, could barely contain herself. “This is not babysitting,” she said. “It’s called management, and it is your job!”
Every time I feel I have something more “important” to do than listen to people, I remember Leslie’s words: “It is your job!” I’ve used Leslie’s line on dozens of new managers who’ve come to me after a few weeks in their new role, moaning that they feel like “babysitters” or “shrinks.”
We undervalue the “emotional labor” of being the boss. That term is usually reserved for people who work in the service or health industry: psychiatrists, nurses, doctors, waiters, flight attendants. But as I will show in the pages to come, this emotional labor is not just part of the job; it’s the key to being a good boss.
HOW TO BE A GOOD BOSS
Given my line of work, I get asked by almost everyone I meet how to be a better boss/manager/leader. I get questions from the people who worked for me, the CEOs I coached, the people who attended a class I taught or a talk I gave. I get questions from people who have submitted their management dilemmas to our Web site (radicalcandor.com). But questions also come from the harried parent sitting next to me at the school play who doesn’t know how to tell the babysitter not to feed the kids so much sugar; the contractor who is frustrated when his crew doesn’t show up on time; the nurse who’s just been promoted to supervisor and is telling me how bewildering it is (as she takes my blood pressure, I feel I should be taking hers); the business executive who’s speaking with exaggerated patience into his cell phone as we board a plane, snaps it shut, and asks nobody in particular, “Why did I hire that goddamn moron?”; the friend still haunted by the expression on the face of an employee whom she laid off years ago. Regardless of who asks the questions, they tend to reveal an underlying anxiety: many people feel they aren’t as good at management as they are at the “real” part of the job. Often, they fear they are failing the people who report to them.
While I hate to see this kind of stress, I find these conversations productive because I know I can help. By the end of these talks, people feel much more confident that they can be a great boss.
There’s often a funny preamble to the questions I get, because most people don’t like the words for their role: “boss” evokes injustice, “manager” sounds bureaucratic, “leader” sounds self-aggrandizing. I prefer the word “boss” because the distinctions between leadership and management tend to define leaders as BSers who don’t actually do anything and managers as petty executors. Also, there’s a problematic hierarchical difference implied in the two words, as if leaders no longer have to manage when they achieve a certain level of success, and brand-new managers don’t have to lead. Richard Tedlow’s biography of Andy Grove, Intel’s lengendary CEO, asserts that management and leadership are like forehand and backhand. You have to be good at both to win. I hope by the end of this book you’ll have a more positive association with all three words: boss, manager, leader.
Having dispensed with semantics, the next question is often very basic: what do bosses/managers/leaders do? Go to meetings? Send emails? Tell people what to do? Dream up strategies and expect other people to execute them? It’s tempting to suspect them of doing a whole lot of nothing.
Ultimately, though, bosses are responsible for results. They achieve these results not by doing all the work themselves but by guiding the people on their teams. Bosses guide a team to achieve results.
The questions I get asked next are clustered around each of these three areas of responsibility that managers do have: guidance, team-building, and results.
First, guidance.
Guidance is often called “feedback.” People dread feedback. They dread getting it, both the praise, which can feel patronizing, and especially the criticism. They dread giving it. What if the person gets defensive? Starts to yell? Threatens to sue? Bursts into tears? What if the person refuses to understand the criticism, or can’t figure out what to do to fix the problem? What if there isn’t any simple way to fix the problem? What should a boss say then? But it’s no better when the problem is really simple and obvious. Why doesn’t the person already know it’s a problem? Do I actually have to say it? Am I too nice? Am I too mean? All these questions loom so large that people often forget they need to solicit guidance from others, and encourage it between them.
Second, team-building.
Building a cohesive team means figuring out the right people for the right roles: hiring, firing, promoting. But once you’ve got the right people in the right jobs, how do you keep them motivated? Particularly in Silicon Valley, the questions sound like this: why does everyone always want the next job when they haven’t even mastered the job they have yet? Why do millennials expect their career to come with instructions like a Lego set? Why do people leave the team as soon as they get up to speed? Why do the wheels keep coming off the bus? Why won’t everyone just do their job and let me do mine?
Third, results.
Many managers are perpetually frustrated that it seems harder than it should be to get things done. We just doubled the size of the team, but the results are not twice as good. In fact, they are worse. What happened? Sometimes things move too slowly: the people who work for me would debate forever if I let them. Why can’t they make a decision? But other times things move too fast: we missed our deadline because the team was totally unwilling to do a little planning—they insisted on just firing willy-nilly, no ready, no aim! Why can’t they think before they act? Or they seem to be on automatic pilot: they are doing exactly the same thing this quarter that they did last quarter, and they failed last quarter. Why do they expect the results to be different?
Guidance, team, and results: these are the responsibilities of any boss. This is equally true for anyone who manages people—CEOs, middle managers, and first-time leaders. CEOs may have broader problems to deal with, but they still have to work with other human beings, with all the quirks and skills and weaknesses just as apparent and relevant to their success in the C Suite as when they got their very first management role.
It’s natural that managers who wonder whether they are doing right by the people who report to them want to ask me about these three topics. I’ll address each fully over the course of this book.
Copyright © 2019 by Kim Scott
Kim Scott is the author of Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity and Radical Respect: How to Work Together Better. She co-founded an executive education company that helps people put the ideas in her books into practice. Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter and other tech companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University and before that led AdSense YouTube, and DoubleClick teams at Google. Earlier in her career she managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo and started a diamond-cutting factory in Moscow. She lives with her family in Silicon Valley.
Photo Credit: E Mackey
