Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean

by Kim Malone Scott

“Relationships are core to your job. If you think that you can [fulfill your responsibilities as a manager] without strong relationships, you are kidding yourself. I’m not saying that unchecked power, control, or authority can’t work. They work especially well in a baboon troop or a totalitarian regime. But if you’re reading this book, that’s not what you’re shooting for.”

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.

It’s not enough to care only about people’s ability to perform a job. To have a good relationship, you have to be your whole self and care about each of the people who work for you as a human being. It’s not just business; it is personal, and deeply personal. I call this dimension “Care Personally.”

Challenging people generally pisses them off, and at first that doesn’t seem like a good way to build a relationship or to show that you “care personally.” And yet challenging people is often the best way to show them that you care when you’re the boss. This dimension I call “Challenge Directly.”

When they become a boss, some people consciously or unconsciously begin to feel they’re better or smarter than the people who work for them. That attitude makes it impossible to be a kick-ass boss; it just makes people want to kick your ass.

You have to accept that sometimes people on your team will be mad at you. In fact, if nobody is ever mad at you, you probably aren’t challenging your team enough.

The hardest part of building this trust is inviting people to challenge you, just as directly as you are challenging them. You have to encourage them to challenge you directly enough that you may be the one who feels upset or angry.

Radical Candor works only if the other person understands that your efforts at caring personally and challenging directly are delivered in good faith.

Let go of vanity and care personally. But if you don’t care, don’t waste your time and everyone else’s by trying to fake it.

If a person is bold enough to criticize you, do not critique their criticism. If you see somebody criticizing a peer inappropriately, say something. But if somebody criticizes you inappropriately, your job is to listen with the intent to understand and then to reward the candor.

If I’m not firing you, it means you’re doing fine. That’s not good enough.

Rock stars are just as important to a team’s performance as superstars. Stability is just as important as growth. The right mix of each will change over time, but you’ll always need some of each.

Some roles may be better suited to a rock star because they require steadiness, accumulated knowledge, and an attention to detail that someone in a superstar phase might not have the focus or patience for.

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.

Every minute you spend with somebody who does great work pays off in the team’s results much more than time spent with somebody who’s failing. Ignore these people and you won’t, in short, be managing.

The careers of many great engineers and salespeople have floundered when they are promoted to manager. Why does this happen? Because there’s no other role to promote them to that acknowledges the kind of growth trajectory they want to be on.

When management is the only path to higher compensation, the quality of management suffers, and the lives of the people who work for these reluctant managers become miserable.

The fact is that poor performers often create as much extra work for others as they accomplish themselves, because they leave parts of their job undone or do other parts sloppily or behave unprofessionally in ways that others must compensate for. Steve Jobs put it succinctly, if harshly, when he said, “It’s better to have a hole than an asshole.”

if you put somebody in the wrong role, their poor performance is actually your fault. When this is the case, you want to put the person in a better role.

Make sure that you are seeing each person on your team with fresh eyes every day. People evolve, and so your relationships must evolve with them. Care personally; don’t put people in boxes and leave them there.

1) have a simple system for employees to use to generate ideas and voice complaints, 2) make sure that at least some of the issues raised are quickly addressed, and 3) regularly offer explanations as to why the other issues aren’t being addressed.

It’s so easy to lose “small” ideas in big organizations, and if you do you kill incremental innovation.

There’s a lot of research demonstrating that when companies help people develop new ideas by creating the space and time to clarify their thinking, innovation flourishes.

Your job as a boss is to turn on that “rock tumbler.” Too many bosses think their role is to turn it off—to avoid all the friction by simply making a decision and sparing the team the pain of debate. It’s not. Debate takes time and requires emotional energy. But lack of debate saps a team of more time and emotional energy in the long run.

On a broad level, this means intervening when you start to sense that people are thinking, “I’m going to win this argument,” or “my idea versus your idea,” or “my recommendation versus your recommendation,” or “my team feels . . .” Redirect them to focus on the facts; don’t allow people to attribute ownership to ideas, and don’t get hijacked by how others who aren’t in the room might (or might not) feel. Remind people what the goal is: to get to the best answer, as a team. You’re creating a collaboration of great minds,

Another way to help people search for the best answer instead of seeking ego validation is to make them switch roles.

In his book A Primer on Decision Making, James March explains why it’s a bad thing when the most “senior” people in a hierarchy are always the deciders. What he calls “garbage can decision-making” occurs when the people who happen to be around the table are the deciders rather than the people with the best information.

That is why kick-ass bosses often do not decide themselves, but rather create a clear decision-making process that empowers people closest to the facts to make as many decisions as possible. Not only does that result in better decisions, it results in better morale.

As the boss, you do have the right to delve into any details that seem interesting or important to you. You don’t have to stay “high level” all the time.

There were numerous stories about relatively new, young engineers who’d return from lunch to find Steve waiting in their cube, eager to ask them about a specific detail of their work.

Sometimes, the logic may seem self-evident to you, so you fail to share it with others. When you know something deeply, it’s hard to remember that others don’t.

You can’t fulfill your responsibilities without good relationships, but the way in which you fulfill your responsibilities is integral to those relationships. They’re built from the outside in and the inside out.

It’s natural to crave a little control. But power and control are illusory and won’t get you where you really want to go. Relationships are more effective, and more satisfying.

When you have too much unilateral authority, you’ll inevitably do things that will erode trust, ruin your relationships, and make your direct reports want to escape from their jobs the way they’d want to break out of jail. Sometimes even just a tiny bit of unilateral authority is enough to make people behave badly.

Building trust in any relationship takes time because trust is built on a consistent pattern of acting in good faith.

The important thing to do is to stay in touch with your personal values, and to demonstrate them in how you manage your team, not by writing down things like “hard work,” “honesty,” and “innovation” on a piece of paper. Live your values. Don’t try to list them like an HR exercise from the show The Office.

The fastest path to artificial relationships at work, and to the gravitational pull of organizational mediocrity, is to insist that everyone have the same worldview before building relationships with them. A radically candid relationship starts with the basic respect and common decency that every human being owes each other, regardless of worldview.

To build Radically Candid relationships, do not try to prevent, control, or manage other people’s emotions. Do acknowledge them and react compassionately when emotions run high. And do try to master your reactions to other people’s emotions.

Ask questions. When somebody is frustrated or angry or upset enough about a situation at work that they react emotionally, this is your cue to keep asking questions until you understand what the real issue is. Don’t over-direct the conversation; just keep listening and it will become clear.

When somebody is upset, it’s not necessarily your fault. Their upset may have nothing to do with you. Focus on them, not on yourself.

“What about ‘criticize in private’?” But when you are the boss, that rule doesn’t apply to you. When you encourage people to criticize you publicly, you get the chance to show your team that you really, genuinely want the criticism.

Manage your feelings rather than letting them manage you. Remind yourself going in that no matter how unfair the criticism, your first job is to listen with the intent to understand, not to defend yourself.

You have to reward the candor if you want to get more of it. If you agree with the criticism, make a change as soon as possible. If the necessary change will take time, do something visible to show you’re trying.

Employees won’t feel free if you don’t take specific actions to ensure that it’s not just safe but expected to make suggestions and complaints. You have to organize a system. But it needn’t be elaborate.

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.

Situation, behavior, and impact applies to praise as well as to criticism. Praise can feel just as arrogant as criticism.

Often you’ll be tempted not to describe the details because they are so painful. You want to spare the person the pain and yourself the awkwardness of uttering the words out loud. But retreating to abstractions is a prime example of Ruinous Empathy. Further, it can actually unintentionally signal that the behavior in question was so bad/shameful that you can’t even talk about it, thereby making it hard for the person to move on.

Adopting the mindset that guidance is a gift will ensure that your guidance is helpful even when you can’t offer actual assistance, solutions, or an introduction to someone who can help. Don’t let the fact that you can’t offer a solution make you reluctant to offer guidance.

Give feedback immediately

you are in a remote office, or if you are managing people in remote offices, it’s really important to have quick, frequent interactions. This will allow you to pick up on people’s most subtle emotional cues.