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

by Kim Malone Scott

The key insight behind Radical Candor is that command and control can hinder innovation and harm a team’s ability to improve the efficiency of routine work. Bosses and companies get better results when they voluntarily lay down unilateral power and encourage their teams and peers to hold them accountable, when they quit trying to control employees and focus instead on encouraging agency. The idea is that collaboration and innovation flourish when human relationships replace bullying and bureaucracy.

That is what happens in Ruinous Empathy—you’re so fixated on not hurting a person’s feelings in the moment that you don’t tell them something they’d be better off knowing in the long run.

picture yourself walking along a mountainous trail. You come across a person being crushed by a boulder on their chest. The empathetic response would be to feel the same sense of crushing suffocation, thus rendering you helpless. The compassionate response would be to recognize that that person is in pain and to do everything within your power to remove the boulder and alleviate their suffering. Put another way, compassion is empathy plus action.”

If you lead a big organization, you can’t have a relationship with everybody. But the relationships you have with your direct reports will impact the relationships they have with their direct reports. The ripple effect will go a long way toward creating—or destroying—a positive culture. Relationships may not scale, but culture does.

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.

Guidance, team, and results: these are the responsibilities of any boss.

The first dimension is about being more than “just professional.” It’s about giving a damn, sharing more than just your work self, and encouraging everyone who reports to you to do the same. 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.”

“Radical Candor” is what happens when you put “Care Personally” and “Challenge Directly” together.

A good rule of thumb for any relationship is to leave three unimportant things unsaid each day.

My friend’s suggestion to managers who worked at his company: when giving praise, investigate until you really understand who did what and why it was so great. Be as specific and thorough with praise as with criticism. Go deep into the details.

Bosses get Radically Candid guidance from their teams not merely by being open to criticism but by actively soliciting 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. Just as important as soliciting criticism is encouraging it between your team members. (You can find specific tools and techniques for soliciting and encouraging guidance from your employees in Part II, Chapter Six.)

When I am criticizing, I try to be less nervous, and focus on “just saying it.” If I think too much about how to say it I’m likely to wimp out and say nothing. And when I am praising, I try to be at least aware of how praise can go wrong, and put more energy into thinking about how to say it.

four common “lies” managers tell themselves to avoid firing somebody: It will get better. But of course it won’t get better all by itself. So stop and ask yourself: how, exactly, will it get better? What are you going to do differently? What will the person in question do differently? How might circumstances change? Even if things have gotten a little better, have they improved enough? If you

don’t have a pretty precise answer to those questions, it probably won’t get better. Somebody is better than nobody. Another common reason why bosses are reluctant to fire a poor performer is that they don’t want a “hole” on the team. If you fire “Jeffrey,” who will do the work he was doing? How long will it take you to find a replacement? 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.” A transfer is the answer. Because firing people is so very hard, it’s often tempting to instead pass them off to an unsuspecting colleague at your company, even if they don’t have skills your colleague needs or are a poor cultural fit. It feels “nicer” than firing them. This is obviously not so nice for the unsuspecting colleague and is generally a mistake for the person you’re trying to be “nice” to as well. It’s bad for morale. It’s also tempting to tell yourself that you’re not firing somebody because doing so would discourage the team. But keeping someone on who can’t do the job is far worse for morale—yours, the person who’s doing a crummy job, and everyone else who’s doing a great job. Again, this comes down to having built a good relationship with the person you’re firing, and the rest of...

To be in the right frame of mind, remember the following: 1. Recall a job you were terrible at and think how glad you feel that you’re no longer in it. One summer in high school I got a job as a bank teller. I don’t do math well in my head, and so I often counted out the wrong change. Since customers generally caught errors in the bank’s favor but weren’t always honest when they came out ahead, I gave away a lot of the bank’s money. My boss did not fire me. Instead, she said, “You can do this! If you just try, if you just focus, you can balance every day!” Now what had just been a math problem felt like a character flaw. But the harder I tried, the worse I became. Still my boss continued to cheer me on. I was miserable. I should have quit and gotten a job mowing grass. If my boss had simply fired me by saying, “You are clearly not interested in this work. Why don’t you find a different job this summer?” she’d have done me a big favor—and saved the bank a lot of money. Instead, I suffered and muddled through until the summer’s end. But what if it had been a permanent job and I had stayed on indefinitely? When you fire someone, you create the possibility for the person to excel and find happiness performing meaningful work elsewhere. Part of getting a good job is leaving a bad one, or one that’s bad for you. As my grandmother once said to me, “There’s a lid for every pot.” Just because the person is not good at the job they do for you doesn’t mean there isn’t another job out...

2. Retaining people who are doing bad work penalizes the people doing excellent work. Failing to deal with a performance issue is not fair to the rest of the team. Work undone generally winds up getting picked up by the top performers, overburdening them. In practice, morale has always improved once I’ve removed a poor performer, whereas I’ve sometimes lost the people I most wanted to keep by hanging on to a low performer for too long. Retaining a bad boss is especially damaging, because bad bosses have such a negative impact on the people who report to them. This is the opposite of managerial leverage. As I’m writing these words, a senior leader I know is putting off firing a bad manager who substitutes yelling for a knowledge of the facts. One person working under that manager is developing hives; another has not slept well in months. And still the process drags on. The manager in question suspects that it is only a matter of time until they get fired, so the whole situation is like a strange game of cat and mouse. Nothing about the situation is “nice” to anyone involved!

When run effectively, the GSD wheel will enable your team to achieve more collectively than anyone could ever dream of achieving individually—to burst the bounds of your brain. First, you have to listen to the ideas that people on your team have and create a culture in which they listen to each other. Next, you have to create space in which ideas can be sharpened and clarified, to make sure these ideas don’t get crushed before everyone fully understands their potential usefulness. But just because an idea is easy to understand doesn’t mean it’s a good one. Next, you have to debate ideas and test them more rigorously. Then you need to decide—quickly, but not too quickly. Since not everyone will have been involved in the listen-clarify-debate-decide part of the cycle for every idea, the next step is to bring the broader team along. You have to persuade those who weren’t involved in a decision that it was a good one, so that everyone can execute it effectively. Then, having executed, you have to learn from the results, whether or not you did the right thing, and start the whole process over again.

The keys are 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.

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.

The decider should get facts, not recommendations 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.

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.

Adding your guilt to other people’s difficult emotions doesn’t make them feel better.

Keep tissues a short walk away from your desk. I used to keep a box of tissues in my office in case of tears.

In order to build a culture of Radically Candid guidance you need to get, give, and encourage both praise and criticism.

“What could I do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?”

Listen with the intent to understand, not to respond.

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—

In some cases, of course, you may disagree with the criticism. It’s here that your Radical Candor skills become essential. It is never enough to simply acknowledge the other person’s feelings—that invariably feels passive-aggressive and insincere. Instead, first, find something in the criticism you can agree with, to signal that you’re open to criticism. Then, check for understanding—repeat what you heard back to the person to make sure you got it. Then, let them know you want to think about what they said, and schedule a time to talk about it again. It’s essential that you do get back to it. The key then is to explain exactly why you disagree.

it starts with you. If you don’t have the courage to give Radically Candid guidance, the people who report to you won’t believe you really want to get it from them, so you won’t hear about it when your team thinks you’re veering off course.

common concern that people raise about giving feedback is “What if I’m wrong?” My answer is that you may very well be wrong. And telling somebody what you think gives them the opportunity to tell you if you are. A huge part of what makes giving guidance so valuable is that misperceptions on both sides of the equation get corrected.

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.

Try a little preamble. For example, in your own words, say something like, “I’m going to describe a problem I see; I may be wrong, and if I am I hope you’ll tell me; if I’m not I hope my bringing it up will help you fix it.”

Giving guidance as quickly and as informally as possible is an essential part of Radical Candor, but it takes discipline—both because of our natural inclination to delay/avoid confrontation and because our days are busy enough as it is. But this is one of those cases where the difference in terms of time spent and impact is huge. Delay at your peril!

impromptu guidance really, truly is something you can squeeze in between meetings in three minutes or less. If you give it right away in between meetings, you will not only save yourself a subsequent meeting but also deliver the guidance in less time than it would take you to schedule the subsequent meeting.

If you ask somebody to do work to help you prepare for a meeting or a presentation where that person won’t be present, be sure to let them know the reaction to their work. If you don’t, the person who did the work feels as if their efforts have gone into a black hole. It is important to pass on both praise and criticism for the contributions they made.

What was it? He stopped saying, “You’re wrong,” and instead learned to say, “I think that’s wrong.” “I think” was humbler, and saying “that” instead of “you” didn’t personalize. People started to be more receptive to his criticism.

When you get the guidance, don’t offer a critique of the criticism, and don’t accept bland praise; focus on rewarding the candor if you get it and on embracing the discomfort if you don’t.

ask permission to give guidance. Say something like, “Would it be helpful if I told you what I thought of X?” If your boss says no, or that’s not your job, let it drop and polish up your résumé! If your boss says yes, start with something pretty small and benign and see how they react. If they react well and reward the candor, keep going. If they don’t, give up immediately or assume ill intent. Try again, carefully, but if you get the same reaction the next time, it may be time to move on. You deserve a better boss.

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.

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.

Criticism is a gift, and you need to give it in equal measure to your male and female direct reports.

No surprises. There should never be any surprises in a formal performance review, and if you’ve been diligent about offering regular impromptu guidance, you’ll lower the odds of this happening considerably.

Don’t rely on your unilateral judgment. Even if your company doesn’t require a 360 process so that you learn what other people think of your direct report’s performance, you can still do a sanity check. One manager I know does this by simply asking each person on the team to give their peers a √ −, √, √ +. Most people get a √, and if they do that’s the end of the conversation. If one person gives a peer a √ − or a √ +, he asks a couple more questions. This takes about five minutes out of everyone’s 1:1 time twice a year, right before performance reviews, and offers him a great sanity check to make sure he’s being fair and seeing a broader perspective.

Spend half the time looking back (diagnosis), half the time looking forward (plan).

“Whoops-a-Daisy.” Dan Woods, who was CTO at a start-up where I worked in the 1990s, developed the lowest-tech, cheapest, most effective system for encouraging praise and criticism on a team that I’ve seen. It involved two stuffed animals: a whale and a monkey. At every all-hands meeting, he invited people to nominate each other to win the “Killer Whale” for a week. The idea was to get people from the team to stand up and talk about some extraordinary work they’d seen somebody else do.

Whenever you feel yourself getting lost in the weeds, simply return to these two questions: “Am I showing my team that I care personally?” and “Am I challenging each person directly?” If the answer to both questions is yes, you’re doing just fine.

“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.

Here’s what to do: make a list of how the person’s role can change to help them learn the skills needed to achieve each dream; whom they can learn from; and classes they could take or books they could read. Then, next to each item, note who does what by when—and make sure you have some action items.

The first step is to identify your rock stars and superstars. Write their names in the correct boxes. Next, identify the people on your team who are doing good, but not exceptional, work. This will probably be the majority of people. Then, identify the people who are performing poorly but whom you believe should do much better, either because they are demonstrating signs that they can improve or because their skills and ambitions suggest improvement is possible. Finally—and this is usually the hardest part—identify the people who are not doing good work and not getting any better. Don’t obsess—spend twenty minutes, maximum, doing this exercise. Think fast.