Home > Work > Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
81 " Another great time to solicit feedback is when people are really angry with you. It’s instinctive to avoid people when they are mad, but this is the moment when you’re most likely to hear the unvarnished truth. "
― Kim Malone Scott , Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
82 " At some point, a team at Google decided that it would be good hygiene to have regular management fix-it weeks. (Later, another team did a similar thing but called it “bureaucracy busters.”) Here’s how it worked: a system was created where people could log annoying management issues. If, for example, it took too long to get expense reports approved, you could file a management “bug.” And you could do the same if performance reviews always seemed to take place at the worst possible time of year, "
83 " You’ll be heard more accurately if you take the time to understand the people you are talking to. What do they know, what don’t they know? What details do you need to include to make it easy for them to understand—and, more importantly, what details can you leave out? "
84 " The management bug tracking system was public, so people could vote to set priorities. Somebody was assigned the job of reading through them all and grouping duplicates. Then, during management fix-it week, managers would have bugs assigned to them. They’d cancel all regularly scheduled activities (or most of them) and focus on fixing the management issues that were most annoying to the organization. "
85 " Google’s engineering teams solved this problem by creating an “individual contributor” career path that is more prestigious than the manager path and sidesteps management entirely. This has been great for the growth of these engineers; it’s also good for the people whom they would otherwise have been managing. "
86 " a 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 "
87 " 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. "
88 " Stating your intention to be helpful can lower defenses. When you tell somebody that you aren’t trying to bust their chops—that you really want to help—it can go a long way toward making them receptive to what you’re saying. 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. "
89 " I thought I’d been doing her a favor by leaving her alone, and yet it had really thrown her off and made the project start much more slowly than needed. I realized I had a problem: I didn’t know when to be hands-on vs. hands-off. It prompted me to start asking about exactly that: “In the last week, when would you have preferred that I be more or less involved in your work?” I learned that people not only had different default preferences, but different preferences based on the nature of the task. "
90 " For context, I circulated an article from Harvard Business Review (HBR) that explained how a culture that captures thousands of “small” innovations can create benefits for customers that are impossible for competitors to imitate. One big idea is pretty easy to copy, but thousands of tweaks are impossible to see from the outside, let alone imitate. "
91 " several workshop participants pointed out a flaw in the question Kim recommended in the first edition. The problem with asking “Is there anything I could do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?” is that you give people who fear conflict an easy out: they can just say “no.” These are the people for whom Radical Candor is hardest, and they need to be encouraged. Instead, ask, “What could I do or stop doing? "
92 " If you offer only three ratings, the vast majority of people will learn nothing from their rating because the vast majority (usually about 80 percent) will be in the middle. Four ratings requires managers to divide the vast middle between those who are above average and those who are below. Many managers resist this because it results in hard conversations. "
93 " 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. "
94 " Specific vs open-ended. Some people feel safe answering an open-ended question like “What could I do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?” But for those who don’t, a specific question might work better. For example, “I worry that sometimes I interrupt people before they’ve had a chance to express themselves adequately. When have you seen me do that? Will you flag it for me if you see me do it next week? "
95 " Any more than four ratings gives a false sense of precision. Too many ratings make managers feel they should be able to achieve a level of granularity in their assessment of people’s performance that isn’t actually possible. Also, when managers have too many ratings at their disposal they tend to try to show an uptick every review to make the person “feel” like they are improving "
96 " In order to build a great team, you need to understand how each person’s job fits into their life goals. You need to get to know each person who reports directly to you, to have real, human relationships—relationships that change as people change. When putting the right people in the right roles on your team, you’ll also have to challenge people even more directly than you did with guidance—and in a way that will impact not just their feelings but also their income, their career growth, and their ability to get what they want out of life. Building a team is hard. "
97 " Obviously, the performance of a recently hired college graduate should not be measured by the same standards as those of a CEO. So you need to describe what teamwork means for an entry-level employee versus a manager, a director, a VP, and so on. "
98 " If you wait too long to give guidance, everything about it gets harder. "
99 " Your ability to build trusting, human connections with the people who report directly to you will determine the quality of everything that follows. "
100 " Scott Forstall, who built the iOS team at Apple, experimented with a different approach, called Blue Sky. People came up with a project they wanted to work on and could apply to Blue Sky. If approved, they got two weeks off from their day job to further develop the idea. "