Radical Candor - Chapter Notes

While Leaders are readers, I definitely have not read as much during quarantine đŸ˜©. I’ve been trying to get back into that as well as blogging more (đŸ€žđŸŸ). So with that in mind, I was dusting off some old blog entries from my drafts and stumbled upon my chapter notes for Radical Candor from 2019. While I do not agree with everything in this book, I do believe it has some insight to offer, particularly around “giving a damn” as a manager/leader and bringing your whole self to work. Please keep in mind that these notes are based on the first edition of the book (i.e. 2017) and I believe some things have changed in the newest version.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

  • You are told all of your life “if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all”, have a lifetime of training to undo
  • Management is hard
  • When people make mistakes over and over (and you do not give feedback or do anything to change it) you stop just thinking the work is bad, you start thinking the person is bad
  • As a boss, you sometimes just misread signals
  • Relationships are the core of your job
  • Relationships may not scale, but cultures do
  • At the heart of being a good boss, is a good relationship

Part 1

1: Building Radically Candid Relationships

  • leadership and management are like forehand and backhand, you need both to win
  • Bosses guide a team to achieve results
  • Three areas of responsibility: guidance (feedback/coaching, praise and criticism), team-building(hiring, firing, promoting, motivation), results (getting things done)
  • Relationships, not power, drive you forward

    “Your ability to build trusting, human connections with the people who report directly to you will determine the quality of everything that follows” (p8)

  • Two dimensions to move in a positive direction: give a damn, challenge directly
  • Be your whole self, show that you care personally

    “It’s not just business; it is personal, and deeply personal”

  • Telling people when work isn’t good enough, delivering hard feedback, holding a high bar for results
  • Radical Candor = Care Personally + Challenge Directly
  • Bring your whole self to work (how?)
  • Being a boss is a job, not a value judgment
  • Finding out what makes us get out of bed and what makes us wanna stay there
  • They may never repay you, but they are likely to pay it forward.

    “Challenging others and encouraging them to challenge you helps build trusting relationships”. You care enough to point out when things aren’t going well and admit you are wrong and committed to fixing mistakes (pg14)

  • Good rule of thumb: leave three unimportant things unsaid each day
  • Radical Candor is not front-stabbing, not an open invite to be a jerk, not schmoozing - remember you have to care about people
  • Radical Candor is sensitive to context. Not what is said, it’s what is heard. It’s measured at the listeners ear. Only works if person understand that you care personally
  • Communication and how to give feedback and share perspectives differs by company, country, and culture - be aware of this and still push for Radical Candor (e.g. from experiences in Tokyo at Google the author encouraged “polite persistence”)

2: Get, Give, and Encourage Guidance

  • “Um” note to self: check to see if you are saying “ummmm” a lot, if so stop! Work to improve. Maybe speech coach?
  • Give operational feedback (what can be done to help fix, in example the author’s boss offers to provide a speech coach)
  • Do not personalize feedback, the boss said “makes you sound stupid”, not “makes you stupid” or “you are stupid” âžĄïž “It’s not mean, it’s clear”
  • Contextualize comments, be personal and specific with your praise
    • “I admire that about you”
    • “To keep winning, criticize the wins”
  • Most people prefer a “challenging jerk” as a boss over the boss whose “niceness” gets in the way in Candor
  • Do not just criticize, show that you care
  • It’s about the behavior, not the person. Do not personalize feedback. About what you did, not who you are
  • Avoid belittling comments
  • Not everyone is a jerk all the time or nice all the time
  • Leadership is sometimes about being willing to piss people off
  • Do not be insecure, not about being liked or praised, about being honest, direct, and caring
  • When giving praise investigate until you really understand who did what and why it was so great. Be specific and thorough with praise as with criticism. Go deep into the details
  • On the path to creating a culture of radical Candor: start by getting feedback, not giving it
  • Worry more about praise, less about criticism - but above all be sincere
  • To criticize without discouraging, focus on the relationship
    • Ask for criticism before giving it
    • Be humble
    • Offer guidance in person (and immediately)
    • Praise in public, criticize in private
  • Don’t personalize; the problem is not due to some unfixable character flaw
  • Be more concerned with getting to the right answer than with being right
  • Use “your fly is down” or “you have spinach in your teeth” as examples on how to tell someone something that may be uncomfortable. Better to tell them then to let them walk around with it.
  • Simple advice about criticism: “just say it”
  • Give a damn!

3: Understand What Motivates Each Person on your Team

  • What motivates this person?
  • Rock stars and superstars
  • Rockstars are consistent, like rock of Gibraltar, superstars always looking for the next
    • Analyze when you have been each one? Self reflect first
    • Break down direct reports and see where they fall. Be honest. Avoid assumptions
    • Focus on growth
    • Job is not to provide purpose, but to know team well enough to understand how each drives meaning from their work
  • Ask how each person derived meaning from their work (since I cannot guess, just ask)
  • How do I determine rock stars and superstars?
  • Excellent performance
  • Be a partner, not an absentee manager or micromanager
  • Recreation is essential for creation
  • Great to find people that love their jobs for 5,10,30 years! Not wanting to climb the corporate ladder is not a negative. Treat these people with honor, they keep the team stable cohesive, and productive
  • Avoid Peter Principle (it’s hard to): people getting promoted beyond their level of competence
  • Sometimes you promote people who are skilled and can do it, but do not want to do it at this time. Avoid this
  • Excellent performance/steep growth trajectory
    • When you find super stars, keep them challenged (nts: develop a plan specifically for that person); make sure they are constantly learning
  • Steep trajectory is like a shooting star, lucky to have in orbit for a while, trying to hold on is futile
    • Don’t squash or block them, might be working for them one day!
  • Google has people nominate themselves for positions: can this work in a smaller team? Need a committee to review “promotion packet” - manager is not on the committee; avoids promotions based on loyalty
  • NTS: how can we crowdsource more ideas?
  • Do not conflate management and growth
    • Need a trajectory not just for managers or people who want to manage, but for individual contributors as well! (This is why the career ladder matters so much)
    • When management is the only path to higher compensation, everyone losses. People become bosses not because they want the role, but more about higher compensation. Can be miserable for all involved
  • Managing the middle
    • No such thing as B-player and mediocre human being. Everyone can be excellent at something
    • Set and uphold the quality bar
    • Do not get sucked into Ruinous Empathy when managing people who are doing OK, but not great.
    • Accepting mediocrity isn’t good for anyone.
    • Author had a policy of having people who had not been performing well for two years take the lead on a major initiative - if they shine here, great, if not, it’s not a fit. If after 2 years someone not doing well, let them go
  • Poor performance/ negative growth trajectory: part ways
    • When someone is not performing well, it is best for that person, you, and the team, to let them go
  • Consider: have you given radically candid guidance, do you understand the person’s performance on the team, have you sought advice from others?
  • Better to have a hole than an asshole
  • Retaining people who are doing poor work, penalizes people doing excellent work
  • Low performance/steep growth trajectory; manager, look at yourself in the mirror
    • If you put someone in the wrong role, it’s your fault
    • Reasons it may not work: wrong role, new to role; too much too fast; personal problems; poor fit
    • NTS: examine team and identify these (if they exist)
    • Avoid permanent markers and labels
  • Peoples performance changes over time

4: Drive Results Collaboratively

  • Better results if (when) you lay down your power and work more collaboratively
  • Get buy-in from the team in decisions
  • Help people understand the why
  • Insist that people tell you you’re wrong
  • Have people challenge you.
  • Get it right is more important than to be right
  • “Get stuff Done” (refer to graphic)
  • Listen

    “Give the quiet ones a voice” - managers job

    • Create a culture where the burden of listening doesn’t just fall on you.
    • Different ways to listen: quiet and loud
    • Quiet: allow for long pauses, do not respond, but let people know what you think sometimes
    • Loud listener: share opinions that you want to be challenged and get feedback on; state a point of view strongly and debate flaws
    • Create a culture of listening (check out hbr link)
    • NTS: create an idea box or a way for people to get their ideas out there. Once a week I (and maybe a committee) will review ideas submitted.
  • Clarify
    • As the boss, you are the editor, not the author
    • Help people think through ideas before they have to debate them
    • Ok to bring problems, as well as, solutions
    • NTS: schedule another hack-a-thon
  • Brainstorming sessions
    • The essence of making an idea clear requires a deep understanding not only of the idea, but also the person to whom one is explaining the idea (pg. 93)
  • Debate
    • Create a culture of debate on the team
    • Debate is the rock tumblr, it polishes the stones (I.e. the ideas)
    • Duty to dissent
    • Pause for exhaustion/emotion
    • Have separate debate and decide meetings
    • Have a deadline to decide
  • Decide
    • Do not make all the decisions as the boss, be sure to listen.
    • NTS: decide less, debate more
    • Challenge I see is that often people do not want to make the decision, they want to be told what to do? That is giving them the easy way out. They can be less vested and also complain and nitpick the decision. If you want buy in, help them facilitate making the decision
    • As a boss, do not decide for yourself, create a clear decision-making process to empower people closets to the facts to make as many decisions as possible
  • When appropriate, you can go low level(I.e. spelunking)
    • Get to the facts
    • Sometimes go directly to the source
  • Persuade
    • Emotion, credibility, logic
    • Must bring people on board to the decision making process
    • Decider must have credibility
    • Understand (and address) the emotion of the people who are listening to you
    • Credibility: know your subject matter, say “we”, instead of “I”; demonstrate expertise and humility
    • Logic: show your work;share how you got to it
  • Execute
    • Minimize collaboration tax
    • NTS: explicitly have people bring problems to you in your next 1-1, make announcement during engineering meeting
    • As a boss make sure you are clearing a path for your people
    • Continue to balance between leading and executing personally; integrate the two; don’t get too far away from the work your team is doing
    • Block time to execute
  • Learn
    • Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds (ouch! Lol)! - Ralph Waldo Emerson
    • Be willing to try things, admit they didn’t work, and try something new
    • Learn and admit to your personal mistakes
    • When the facts change, change your mind
  • As a manger, take care of yourself
    • (Return to listen, it’s a loop)

Part 2: Tools and Techniques

5: Relationships

  • Start with yourself, stay centered and take care of yourself
  • When everyone is able to bring the best of themselves to work, they are more fulfilled, they work better with one another, and the team gets better results
  • Lay down unilateral authority
  • Master the art of socializing at work
  • Sometime the greatest gift you can give your team is to let them go home!
  • Respect boundaries; Respect and openness
  • NTS: work to say “you all” instead of “you guys”
  • Recognize your emotions and master your reactions to others emotions
  • Acknowledge emotions: “I can see you’re mad/frustrated/elated/etc.”
  • When someone is upset ask questions until you understand what the real issue is
  • Do not add your guilt to people’s emotions, it may have nothing to do with you. Focus on them, not yourself
  • Telling people how to feel will backfire: do not say “don’t be mad, don’t be sad” or “no offense, but”
  • Some tips: keep tissue a short walk from your desk, excuse yourself to get the person water, keep water by your desk, go for a walk
  • Building relationships takes time and real energy, these relationships can give your work real meaning

6: Guidance: Ideas for getting, giving, encouraging praise and criticism

  • Guidance is the “atomic building block” of management
  • Important to build a culture where people feel comfortable providing criticism. As the boss, encourage and welcome it.
  • As the boss, the “feedback in private” rule does not apply to you (I do not completely agree with this, at least not in all cases)
  • Ask people to give you feedback in public, find someone who is comfortable challenging you and have them do it in a public setting
  • Have a go to question to get feedback: “is there anything I could do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?”
    • Tips: count to 6; ask the question again; watch body language
  • Your first job is to listen with intent to the criticism, not defend (or debate it!) - hard to do, learn how to master your response and emotions
  • Reward Criticism to get more of it (ie make a change as soon as possible, if change will take time do a small step towards it)
  • Hear the criticism and take action
  • Repeat what you heard back to ensure you understand it
  • Keep a tally each week: how much do people praise or criticize you
  • Make it not just safe, but natural to criticize you
  • Have management fix-it weeks, similar to engineering bug fix week. Get suggestions and that’s what you focus on
  • Giving impromptu feedback
  • Be humble
  • Technique: situation, behavior, impact. Describe what you saw, what the person did (good or bad), and the impact you observed
  • Left hand column: what you were thinking vs what was said?
  • Do not confuse objective reality with our subjective experience
  • Explicitly state what is good or bad: not “she is smart”, say “she just gave the clearest explanation I’ve ever heard of why users don’t like that feature”
  • Find help for people
  • Give feedback immediately; guidance has a short half-life
  • Don’t let scheduled meetings (performance reviews, 1-1s) be an excuse to not get impromptu in-person feedback
  • Praise in public, criticize in private
    • Group learning: most people will say they do not want to be praised in public, so say something like: “Not because I want to embarrass Jane, but to make sure everyone learns from what she accomplished and how she did it”
  • Don’t personalize, avoid saying “you are”
    • Say “that’s wrong” not “you’re wrong”
  • Track your guidance towards radical Candor
  • You can’t fix yourself once and for all, you have to manage yourself daily
  • Figure out how others experience your guidance
  • Listen challenge commit
  • Gender biases impact both men and women
    • Ask the women who report to you: do you see any gender biases in our organization? In my management? In leadership? In women in tech
what can we do to hire more? (NTS: I think the everyone in the organization should be focused on this)
    • Go back to page 158
    • Don’t use gendered language “abrasive”, “bossy”, “pushy”, “shrill”, “screechy”
    • Never just say “be more likable”
  • Performance reviews
    • Don’t rely on unilateral judgment
    • Things I’ve learned/noticed that she mentioned: don’t schedule back to back, give yourself enough time to conduct them, write it down, potentially separate review from compensation, schedule regular checkins to ensure feedback is being addressed
  • Peer guidance
    • Get people to solve problems together, not just talk to you as the boss
    • “whoops the monkey” is like celebrate the wins
  • Skip level meetings
    • Goals: to help each of them become better bosses, make sure people on their team feel comfortable giving feedback directly
    • Share everything with their boss, not not who said it
  • Goal to make things better, perfect is unrealistic

7: Team

  • Career conversations
    • Balance growth and stability
    • Three 45 minute conversations
    • Life story, dreams, 18 month plan
    • Build trust with the people who report to you: figure out best role for each person is suited for so team can achieve best results
    • Once a year, put together a growth management plan for each member of your team
    • Can email Russ directly
    • Growth plan: 3-5 bullets per person
  • Hiring
    • Define team “fit” as well as “skills” in job description
    • Define company culture in three words
    • Should we add pre-screen questions?
    • Give people the opportunity to show the work without looking at who the person is
    • Use the same interview committee for multiple candidates
    • Casual interviews reveal more about team fit: walk person to the car, schedule over lunch, etc (may not be feasible in all situations, but an interesting idea)
    • Write down interview notes after meeting/speaking with the person
    • Debrief with team in person
    • If not sky high on person, do not hire
  • Firing
    • Don’t want too long
    • Don’t make decisions unilaterally
    • Give a damn
    • Follow up
  • Promotions
    • Be fair
    • Refer back to page 194 for the details
    • Reward rock stars, not everything is about promotions
  • Avoid micromanagement and absentee management

8: Results

  • 1:1 meetings
    • Employees set the agenda, you listen and help them clarify
    • Purpose: to understand what direction each person working for you wants to head in and what is blocking them
    • NTS: Pretty clear on a lot of the points raised as I am familiar with 1:1s
    • Feedback: What could I do or stop doing to make it easier to work with me?
    • This is your time, but you don’t seem to come with much to talk about, can you tell me why
  • Staff meetings:
    • Learn, listen, clarify
    • Learn: review key metrics
    • Listen: put updates in a shared document
    • Clarify: what are the one or two most important decisions and the single most important debate the team needs to take in this week?
  • Think time
    • Block out time to think
    • Put time in your calendar and hold it sacred
  • Big debate meetings
    • When having a debate, clarify it’s a debate meeting, not a decision meeting
    • These meetings help encourage a culture of debate
    • Walk around: get a sense of how things are going by just walking around the office
    • How and what you communicate as a boss matters, it impacts culture. You are under the microscope as the boss
  • Culture: you know you’ve succeeded when it’s no longer about you
    • Culture is self-replicating

Getting started

  • Explain radical Candor
  • Share stories with the team, personal stories explain better than theory
  • Prove you can take it before you dish it out
  • Ask people to criticize you
  • Have career conversations, these are once a year (as defined here)
  • Take time to assess
  • After 1:1s, career conversations, and you’re getting guidance, assess and then (only then) start to add on to it
  • Staff meetings: reviewing key metrics, share updates, identify big decisions and debates
  • Encouraging guidance between members of your team
  • Fight meeting proliferation
  • Plan for the future of your team: do growth management plans
  • Walk around, do skip-level meetings

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