Implementing Radical Candor to Drive Great Results
You’re a manager. Congratulations! You’ve been bestowed with the incredible opportunity of calling the shots, setting the strategy and leading the team towards success! You’ve also been loaded with responsibility and scrutiny from both those above and below you. You’ve now got to organize and care for a whole team of people. For all it’s glory, management can be tricky, even with the easiest of employees. The struggle is real.
You’re not alone if “overwhelming” is the word you use to describe your management job. A 2011 Brett-Koehler survey revealed that 90% of managers don’t feel they have the skills to manage. Up to 68% confess to hating being a manager.
The workplace is yearning for candid bosses and bosses yearn equally for a workplace that allows them to be candid. Fear of conflict and upsetting others stops this ideal from becoming commonplace. We’re instructed clearly from a young age: “don’t say anything at all if you can’t say anything nice” but this isn’t effective and is ruinous to managers whose job is to have these difficult conversations.
Luckily, there’s a new order in store for managers. Radical Candor is Kim Scott’s management philosophy about developing relationships to drive organizational success. Her book is inspired by her own experience as a top manager at Google and Apple, in supplement to management case studies from other geniuses such as Steve Jobs. At its core, radical candor is a set of simple principles designed to make employees and managers not just only love their work, but whom they work with too.
The formula is simple. It’s about creating teams that care deeply and challenge directly from all directions to drive incredible results. This description is but a taste of her compelling work; you can refer to our blog post from last week here to get a full meal’s worth of her philosophy.
Let’s put this new paradigm into practice and jump into the next phase of radical candor: implementation. But do catch yourself up on last week first; it’s crucial to wrestle with the concepts before you try to implement them.
Scott gives managers five tools to bring their teams to the radically candid sweet spot.
Establish Trust
Stay Centered
We’re all familiar with what to do on an airplane should the oxygen cut out.“Put on your mask before helping others” rings across every airplane before take-off. The oxygen mask rule holds true for management more than anyone else. You can’t give a damn about others if you don’t give a damn about yourself. You can’t manage, care for or guide other people properly if you don’t help yourself first. We’ve all felt stressed to the edge of insanity before. This place can’t be your norm; you have to step away from stress and into centered-living to manage candidly.
Work-life integration
We often think of work-life balance as a zero-sum game. Anything that you put into your work life robs your personal life and vice versa. The world is full of antiquated platitudes that perpetuate this myth such as “Working overtime means you’re an emotionally unavailable partner” or “having children makes it impossible to advance your career.” This simply isn’t true. Work-life balance isn’t a zero-sum game. Success in your personal life can benefit your work, as can professional success in your personal life. I challenge you instead to think of balance as work-life integration. Think of it as both coming together to create the story that is you.
Free at work
Everybody needs freedom at work. Nobody works effectively (see also: happily) when they’re micro-managed or treated as electronic paper-pushers! You can create an environment where employees thrive by relinquishing authoritarian control and giving employees ownership of some sort. It’s your choice as the manager to strategize the amount and type of freedom employees are given – but I urge you to trust them enough to let go of control. They may very well go above and beyond your expectations.
Socializing at work
The best way to get to know your employees is on the job. Make socializing with your employees a part of your everyday rhythm. It’ll humanize you and allow you to build genuine relationships with your employees. It doesn’t have to be lengthy to be profound.
Bear in mind that alcohol creates a sub-optimal condition for socializing. So don’t bank on relationship-building happening at the annual Christmas party.
Setting and respecting boundaries
“Setting boundaries” is deceitful; the reality is that they exist. Everybody has things that make them tick. Find out what those things are for your employees when giving feedback.
I’ll give you a personal example. I had an employee who would anger when told “not to take things personally.” I never understood why. From my standpoint, the problem wasn’t her; the problem was her work. I realized once I got to know her that her work was a part of her; she cared so deeply that she genuinely viewed it as an extension of her. Once I learned this, I stopped making this comment to her. This simple fix allowed us to hold onto an excellent employee that later became one of my most trusted advisors.
General Guidance
Criticize in private
Humans are complicated. They bring their whole selves to work, including their feelings. Sometimes the reason you’ve created tension between yourself and an employee has nothing to do with what or even how you said it; the problem was where it was said.Receiving constructive feedback is tough enough on its own. It can be humiliating to have your shortcomings made public in front of your superiors or team members. A simple way to build trust is to keep it in until you can find a private moment to share the feedback. And as a bonus, this will give you time to strategize how you will frame your feedback.
Embrace discomfort and welcome criticism
You are the exception of the “criticize in the private” rule. Why? Because you need to demonstrate to everyone that you (the boss) are receptive to feedback to change the culture. The more you open yourself up to feedback, the more your employees will as well. Plus it’ll be a learning opportunity to learn from your employees about how to give feedback, and how not to give feedback.
Impromptu Guidance
Guidance can’t always shouldn’t always come in a structured form during a meeting. It’s often more powerful to give feedback right away. Imagine working on something all week only to have had your efforts amount to nothing because your manager saved their feedback for your weekly meeting. You wouldn’t be pleased. You’ve got to strike the right balance between urgency and strategy when giving feedback. Timing is everything.
Formal Reviews
Most organizations have annual or semi-annual reviews to evaluate their employees’ performance formally. The general structure is to merge the manager’s feedback with those of their peers, be it in an anonymous way or not. Performance reviews are an opportunity to guide your employees down a constructive path. However, , your process needs needs revamping. Scott gives a few suggestions:
Ask for feedback first. Start by listening to your employees so you can understand how the shortcomings of your management influenced their performance. This will frame the rest of the conversation to be constructive, not critical.
No surprises. Your feedback should be frequent enough that your employees know what is coming. Performance improvement plans are scary for employees, whose livelihood depends on their job. Nobody’s performance will improve with the surprise of this added stress.
Write everything down before giving feedback. Commit yourself to give the whole picture, even if the conversation gets tough. This includes the bad.
Follow the 50/50 rule. Half of your conversation should be spent reviewing the past. The other half should be focused on the future.
Teams
Employees don’t work in isolation; isn’t it kind of funny we’ve decided to review them that way? Deliverables aren’t met by the results of one person alone either. They’re an amalgamation of the team’s coordinator efforts. I encourage you to reconsider the balance you’ve struck between evaluating the individuals versus the team.
Team Feedback
Consider reviewing your employees as teams, not individuals. Why not revitalize your feedback by making it a team affair? Striving to contribute to the team can be a powerful way to motivate struggling employees.
Career Conversations
Understand employees long-term visions and hopes for their career and life. Ask them their life story to find out what motivates them and why they’ve made the choices they have. Ask them their dreams and see if you can find alignment between these dreams and your organization’s evolution.
Create a 3-18 month plan.
Come up with clear ways to see how your organization can become a force to propel your employee along their life’s vision. Determine how you can equip them with the skills they need to become a powerful implementer of their dream.
Results
The final piece of wisdom Scott offers concerns results-driven feedback. Her philosophy of overt and ongoing feedback forms her recommendation for communicating results. She encourages leaders to consider four different types of meetings:
1-to-1 Conversation: Have a weekly or semi-weekly touchpoint with each employee, where possible.
Staff Meetings: Focus on orienting your team on the lessons learned from the previous week and mobilizing them around the three goals of the upcoming week.
Big Debate Meetings: Hold meetings to initiate discussion on critical internal and external challenges with your teams. Make it clear that the goal is not to reach consensus but rather to have a candid conversation.
Big Decision Meetings: Follow debate meetings with decision meetings where others reach consensus and find common ground.
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