Home > Work > Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
21 " feedback is personal for the person receiving it. Most of us pour more time and energy into our work than anything else in our lives. Work is a part of who we are, and so it is personal. "
― Kim Malone Scott , Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
22 " Georgia O’Keeffe said, “It is only by selection, by elimination, and by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.” Choosing what to select, what to eliminate, and what to emphasize depends not only on the idea but on the audience. "
23 " Remember, Obnoxious Aggression is a behavior, not a personality trait. Nobody is a bona fide asshole all the time. "
24 " There's several reasons why it make sense to begin building a culture of radical candor by asking people to criticize you. First, it's the best way to show that you are aware you are often wrong and that you want to hear about it when you are. You want to be challenged. Second, you'll learn a lot. Few people scrutinize you as closely as do those that report to you. [...] Third, the more first hand experience you have with how it feels to receive criticism, the better idea you'll have of how your own guidance lands for others. Fourth, asking for criticism is a great way to build trust and strengthen your relationships. "
25 " They get measured at the listener’s ear, not at the speaker’s mouth. "
26 " Richard Tedlow’s biography of Andy Grove, Intel’s legendary CEO, asserts that management and leadership are like forehand and backhand. You have to be good at both to win. "
27 " 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. "
28 " 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. 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. "
29 " If you find you cannot be Radically Candid with your boss, I recommend that you consider finding a new job with a new boss. "
30 " We learn more from our mistakes than our successes, more from criticism than from praise. Why, then, is it important to give more praise than criticism? Several reasons. First, it guides people in the right direction. It’s just as important to let people know what to do more of as what to do less of. Second, it encourages people to keep improving. In other words, the best praise does a lot more than just make people feel good. It can actually challenge them directly. "
31 " RELATIONSHIPS, NOT POWER, DRIVE YOU FORWARD "
32 " Saying “your work is shit” is way better than saying “you are shit,” but it’s still totally obnoxious. "
33 " The Art of Happiness. It’s about the teachings of the Dalai Lama … [who] explains it this way: 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. "
34 " SOME COMPANIES PUT a lot of effort into bringing employees together outside of the office. It might be a happy hour, or a holiday party, or an off-site event. While retreats and parties can be productive if people on your team really want them, it is best to remember that mostly you get to know the people you work with on the job, every day, as an integrated part of the work rhythm, not at the annual holiday party. "
35 " Some management bloviators will advise you simply to hire the right people and then leave them alone. Dick Costolo, Twitter’s CEO from 2010–2015, explained succinctly how crazy this advice is. “That’s like saying, to have a good marriage, marry the right person and then avoid spending any time with them. Ridiculous, right?” he exclaimed. “Imagine if I went home and told my wife, ‘I don’t want to micromanage you, so I’m not going to spend any time with you or the kids this year. "
36 " I do not believe there is any such thing as a “B-player” or a mediocre human being. Everyone can be excellent at something. "
37 " Radical Candor is so often misunderstood is that it’s confused with Ray Dalio’s Radical Transparency. While Dalio and I are very much aligned on the importance of challenging directly, there’s not much focus on care personally in his “manage as someone operating a machine to achieve a goal” philosophy.1 Furthermore, relationships require some privacy, so while I am all for transparency when it comes to business results, I don’t believe that Radical Transparency fosters good working relationships, contributes to psychological safety, or results in a productive, happy culture. "
38 " 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. "
39 " 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. "
40 " a boss’s ability to achieve results had a lot more to do with listening and seeking to understand than it did with telling people what to do; more to do with debating than directing; more to do with pushing people to decide than with being the decider; more to do with persuading than with giving orders; more to do with learning than with knowing. "