Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

by Kim Malone Scott

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.

There are two dimensions to good guidance: care personally and challenge directly. As discussed in chapter one, when you do both at the same time, it’s Radical Candor. It’s also useful to be clear about what happens when you fail in one dimension (Ruinous Empathy), the other (Obnoxious Aggression), or both (Manipulative Insincerity).

Only when you get to know your direct reports well enough to know why they care about their work, what they hope to get out of their careers, and where they are in the present moment in time can you put the right people in the right roles and assign the right projects to the right people.

Which brings us back to the main point of this chapter: your job is not to provide purpose but instead to get to know each of your direct reports well enough to understand how each one derives meaning from their work.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry school of management: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

Russ Laraway explained that I was doing this all wrong when I told my team at Google not to bring me problems; instead, I told them, bring me three solutions and a recommendation. “But then you’re not helping people innovate,” Russ explained. “You’re asking them to make decisions before they’ve had time to think things through. When do they get to just talk, brainstorm with you?” I realized Russ was right; I was abdicating an important part of my job by insisting on the “three solutions and a recommendation” approach.

When collecting information for a decision, we are often tempted to ask people for their recommendations—“What do you think we should do?”—but as one executive I worked with at Apple explained to me, people tend to put their egos into recommendations in a way that can lead to politics, and thus worse decisions. So she recommended seeking “facts, not recommendations.” Of course “facts” come inflected with each person’s particular perspective or point of view, but they are less likely to become a line in the sand than a recommendation is.

He resolved this by explaining that to be legitimately persuasive a speaker must address the audience’s emotions but also establish the credibility and share the logic of the argument.

To help you be more persuasive, and to teach the “deciders” on your team to be more persuasive, the rest of this section will cover, briefly, Aristotle’s elements of rhetoric—pathos, logos, and ethos, which I’ll translate loosely as emotion, logic, and credibility.7

We are often told that changing our position makes us a “flip-flopper” or “erratic” or “lacking principles.” I prefer John Maynard Keynes’s idea that “When the facts change, I change my mind.”

Take a look at the many colorful definitions of boss like this one in Urban Dictionary: “Bosses are like diapers: Full of shit and all over your ass.”

You are the exception to the “criticize in private” rule of thumb. Michelle Peluso, CEO of Gilt Groupe, explained the benefits of criticizing herself publicly. In an interview with The New York Times she said, “I’ve always taken a slightly different approach with 360 reviews. We’ll share them with each other on the executive team, and I’ll start with mine—‘Here

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. To help, I adopted a go-to question that Fred Kofman, author of Conscious Business and my coach at Google, suggested. “Is there anything I could do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?”

Listen with the intent to understand, not to respond. You’ve finally gotten the other person to offer some criticism. Once again, you have to manage your response. Whatever you do, don’t start criticizing the criticism. Don’t start telling the other person they weren’t Radically Candid! Instead, try to repeat what the person said to make sure you’ve understood it, rather than defending yourself against the criticism that you’ve just heard. Listen to and clarify the criticism—but don’t debate it. Try saying, “So what I hear you saying is…”

Situation, behavior, impact. The Center for Creative Leadership, an executive-education company, developed a technique called “situation behavior impact” to help leaders be more precise and therefore less arrogant when giving feedback. 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.

The good news is that being helpful doesn’t mean you have to be omniscient or do everybody else’s work for them. It just means you have to find a way to help them clarify the challenge they’re facing—that clarity is a gift that will enable them to move forward.

When offering guidance to your boss, use the same tips above: be helpful, humble, do it immediately and in person, praise in public (if it doesn’t look like kissing up), criticize in private, and don’t personalize.

Andy Grove had a mantra at Intel that we borrowed to describe leadership at Apple: Listen, Challenge, Commit. A strong leader has the humility to listen, the confidence to challenge, and the wisdom to know when to quit arguing and to get on board.

Spend half the time looking back (diagnosis), half the time looking forward (plan). When I wrote performance reviews, I focused on being extremely clear about how each person did over the past quarter/half/year. In the conversation, however, I tried not to spend more than about half of the time talking about the past, because it was more important to start engaging people on the future.

Sheryl decided to address this company-wide anxiety about so-called “career growth”. “You need a long-term vision and an eighteen-month plan,” she advised.

So what do you use in place of the standard questions? Russ recommends that you begin these conversations with, “What do you want the pinnacle of your career to look like?” Because most people don’t really know what they want to do when they “grow up,” Russ suggests encouraging people to come up with three to five different dreams for the future. This allows employees to include the dream they think you want to hear as well as those that are far closer to their hearts.

Job description: define team “fit” as rigorously as you define “skills” to minimize bias. The hiring person—not a recruiter!—should write the job description, basing it on the role, the skills required for the role, and the team “fit” criteria. Defining team fit can be hard, which makes it tempting to leave out. Try to describe your culture in three to four words. It could be “detail-oriented,” “quirky,” and “blunt.” Or maybe it’s “big picture,” “straightlaced,” and “polite.”

Google’s engineering team solved these problems with promotion committees, which were assembled off-site for one day twice a year. They debated the promotions of other people’s direct reports, not their own, based on a packet of relatively objective information about each person’s accomplishments. The debates were about the merits of a person’s promotion, not “my person” versus “your person.”

Announcing promotions breeds unhealthy competition for the wrong things: documentation of status rather than development of skill.

What about public praise? Yes, by all means, praise in public. But think carefully about what you are praising. Praise the things you want more of: high-quality work, mind-boggling innovation, amazing efficiency, selfless teamwork, and so on. Do you really want such a focus on promotions? If not, then don’t make such a big deal of them.

ABSENTEE MANAGEMENT PARTNERSHIP MICROMANAGEMENT Hands-off, ears off, mouth off. Hands-on, ears on, mouth off. Hands-on, ears off, mouth on. Lacks curiosity. Doesn’t want to know. Displays curiosity. Recognizes when they need to know more. Lacks curiosity. Pretends to know all.

Doesn’t listen. Says nothing. Listens. Asks why. Doesn’t listen. Tells how. Is afraid of any details. Asks about relevant details. Gets lost in the details. Has no idea what’s going on. Is informed because hands-on. Asks for make-work presentations, reports, and updates. Sets no goals. Leads collaborative goal-setting. Sets goals arbitrarily. Remains unaware of problems. Listens to problems. Predicts problems. Brainstorms solutions. Tells people how to solve problems without fully understanding them.

Causes collateral damage by tripping on grenades unawares. Removes obstacles and defuses explosive situations. Tells people how to remove obstacles/defuse situations, but watches from a safe distance. Is ignorant of both the questions and the answers. Shares what they know; asks questions when they don’t Pretends to know when they don’t. Is unaware of context. Shares relevant context. Hoards information.

Your role will to be to encourage that process of listening, clarifying, debating, deciding, persuading, and executing to the point that it’s almost as if your team shares one mind when it comes to completing projects, and then learning from their results.

If you have ten direct reports, I’d shift 1:1s to twenty-five minutes a week. Plenty of people I know have twenty direct reports, and there’s nothing they can do about it. It’s just the nature of the way their companies are managed. If you’re in that situation, I recommend twenty-five minutes every other week with each direct report.

Good news only. If you hear only good news, it’s a sign people don’t feel comfortable coming to you with their problems, or they think you won’t or can’t help. In these cases, you need to ask explicitly for the bad news. Don’t let the issue drop till you hear some. No criticism. If they never criticize you, you’re not good enough at getting guidance from your team. Remember that phrase: “What could I do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?” No agenda. If they consistently come with no topics to discuss, it might mean that they are overwhelmed, that they don’t understand the purpose of the meeting, or that they don’t consider it useful. Be direct but polite: “This is your time, but you don’t seem to come with much to talk about. Can you tell me why?”

An effective staff meeting has three goals: it reviews how things have gone the previous week, allows people to share important updates, and forces the team to clarify the most important decisions and debates for the coming week. That’s it. It shouldn’t be the place to have debates or make decisions. Your job is to establish a consistent agenda, insist that people stick to it, and corral people who go on for too long or who go off on tangents.

Here’s the agenda that I’ve found to be most effective: ■ Learn: review key metrics (twenty minutes) ■ Listen: put updates in a shared document (fifteen minutes) ■ Clarify: identify key decisions & debates (thirty minutes)

When you become the boss, you are under the microscope. People do listen to you in an intense way you never experienced before you became a manager. 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.

Now you’re ready to start having career conversations. Begin “career conversations” with your team. Start with people whom you’ve been working with for the longest.

Remember, people change, and you need to change with them! That’s why it’s a good idea to do one round of “career conversations” a year with each of your direct reports during your 1:1 time.

Next. After you have explained Radical Candor, asked for guidance, had career conversations, and improved your 1:1 conversations, you’ll notice that you are earning your team’s trust and building a better culture. Now you’re ready to start improving the way you give impromptu praise and criticism. Remember, impromptu guidance happens best in one- to two-minute conversations.

Take a deep breath. Assess. How’s it going? What’s working? What’s not working? Who can you talk to? Can your boss help? Your team? A mentor outside of work? A coach? Others from the Radical Candor community? Don’t try to do more new things until you feel 1) you’ve made good progress on the fundamental building block of management: getting and giving guidance, 2) you’ve gotten to know your direct reports better, and 3) you’re happy with your 1:1s.

Next step is to make sure your staff meetings are maximally productive. During the meeting, you are reviewing key metrics, sharing updates, and identifying your big decisions and debates. Don’t let them drag on too long. Don’t blow them off.

Return to guidance. Make sure you are encouraging guidance between people on your team. Establish a “no backstabbing” or require a “clean escalation” norm on your team. Explain that you’re not going to allow one person to come and talk to you about another; you can give your team “Prevent Backstabbing” in chapter six to read, but the important thing is not their reading but your enforcement.

Fight meeting proliferation. Make sure you’re not getting overscheduled. Think very consciously about what you are doing that you can stop doing. Put some think time in your calendar. (See “Think Time” in Chapter

Plan for the future of your team. Start doing a growth-management plan for each person on your team. (See “Growth Management Plans” in chapter seven.) Make sure that you are not creating a promotion-obsessed culture, and give some extra thought to how you’re rewarding your rock stars (see chapter seven).

Return to guidance. Ask your team to start gauging each other’s guidance. There are more of them than there are of you, so anything you can do to get them to give one another more Radically Candid praise and criticism will reinforce a Radically Candid culture and provide you with more leverage than any amount of guidance you can give or get personally.

Walk around. You’ve been at this for awhile now. Do things feel different on the team? What sorts of things do you want to know but are not hearing? Put aside some time each week to walk around and have informal spontaneous chats with people. (See “Walk Around,” chapter eight.) If you have a feeling that things are still not going well, and that there’s a lot of skepticism on the team, go back to step one.

Are you a manager of managers? If so, try “skip level meetings” for everyone on your team. You’ll need to do these only once a year, but it’s a good idea to cluster them in a two-week period so that nobody feels singled out.

Begin to take a more Radically Candid approach to the processes that your company may have in place. Be Radically Candid when hiring, firing, promoting (see chapter seven), as well as giving formal performance reviews (see chapter six).

That’s a lot of things to do, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. If you take every suggestion recommended in this book, the total time required is about ten hours a week, five of which are 1:1 meetings that you’re probably already holding anyway. Of course, some processes like growth-management conversations, skip-level meetings, and calibrations don’t get spread out each week but will come in bursts, so some weeks you may have eight hours of work associated with your core responsibilities as a boss, others twelve others five. But that still leaves fifteen hours a week to think and execute, and another fifteen hours to deal with the various unpredictable things that you’ll be asked to do.