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

by Kim Malone Scott

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...