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

If this sounds like a minefield, "Radical Candor" will help. It's a practical handbook packed with tips and tools for managers and leaders. It sets out a framework for frank, productive conversations that lead to healthy, high-performing teams and happy organizations.

"Radical Candor" is for anyone in a leadership role – in a company or a nonprofit, on the sports field, or at home. This book is for you if you want to learn how to get the best results from those around you, while making sure everyone feels valued and heard. It's especially helpful for managers who are struggling to feed back to someone whose performance is below par, or who deserves to be fired.

The book's author, Kim Scott, is a leading voice in her field, with decades of experience managing and being managed in the fast-paced environment of Silicon Valley. She's a former CEO coach at Dropbox, Twitter, and other tech companies, and she led several teams at Google.

She's also managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo and she started a diamond-cutting factory in Moscow. She now runs an executive education company based on the concepts in this book.

So, keep listening to hear how to walk the line between challenging and caring, how to know when it's time to fire someone, and how to achieve results collaboratively.

Scott bases the radical candor model on her experience of being led by heavy hitters like Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg and Google co-founder Larry Page, and of managing her own teams in the tech world. The book is a compilation of everything she's learned about building relationships based on trust. She draws on her and other leaders' success stories, as well as on her management failures and those she saw around her.

One of these failures is the opener for "Radical Candor." While running her own start-up, Juice Software, Scott shirked the painful step of telling one of her direct reports – whom she calls Bob – that his work wasn't good enough. For months, she accepted poor standards from Bob with an outward smile, while inwardly growing more resentful.

Her attitude toward Bob affected her whole team. Nobody understood why she was covering for him, but they followed her lead, making excuses for Bob too. As a knock-on effect, their work also got sloppy.

Scott finally faced the music. She told Bob his performance wasn't up to scratch and that he had to go. The man was devastated. He had no idea there was a problem with his work. Why had nobody told him?

Bob left the company and, not long after, Juice failed. Scott attributes its failure to her poor management of Bob and the impact it had on the wider organization. She'd been too nice to him, giving him false praise and failing to criticize his performance for fear of hurting his feelings. She'd also failed to build a culture in which Bob's peers could speak candidly to him.

You can almost hear Scott cringing as she narrates this personal story, which is a poignant and powerful illustration of how badly things can go wrong if managers don't create an environment in which people feel able to speak the truth to one another.

The good news is this experience helped Scott change her approach to leadership. It also gave her a mission: to create a framework to help other leaders have honest, caring conversations, leading to more productive and happier organizations.

So let's take a closer look at this framework.

Scott's model is best explained by imagining the diagram she uses in the book. Picture a cross, with a horizontal axis and a vertical axis and four separate quadrants. The vertical axis, y, is labeled "care personally" and the horizontal axis, x, is called "challenge directly."

These axes are designed to help managers gage the tone and content of their conversations. The goal is to strike the right balance between caring for people's feelings and challenging them. That means communicating from the top-right quadrant, which is "radical candor."

To understand this concept better, let's look at the alternatives to radical candor, or the three remaining quadrants. When bosses treat their employees as machines without feelings, or challenge them too directly, using bullying language or swearing, they fall into the bottom-right quadrant, which is called "obnoxious aggression."

Scott illustrates obnoxious aggression with an anecdote from her time at Google. She'd only been at the company a few months when she had a disagreement with Larry Page about his approach to a policy. She jumped to the conclusion that Page was chasing revenue, rather than doing the right thing for Google's users.

Acting out her frustration, she accused him of this in an email that she sent to Page and 30 other people. In short, she made an assumption without knowing all the facts, and attacked Page in public. She'd forgotten that he was a human being with feelings, and she hadn't taken the time to understand his thinking.

In this scenario, Scott challenged Page directly and forcefully, without caring for him. Such obnoxious aggression is also known as "frontstabbing," and it's more common that an employee is on the receiving end of it, rather than a boss.

What happens next in this story illustrates another of the four quadrants. Realizing that she'd been rude, Scott retreated to the other end of the spectrum and apologized unreservedly to Page when she saw him next, saying to him, "I know you're right."

This was a lie, or rather, what Scott calls "manipulative insincerity," which is the bottom-left quadrant of the grid. She regretted the tone of her email and backtracked to placate her boss. But she still didn't understand or agree with Page's new policy.

People resort to manipulative insincerity to save face, keep a job, get someone onside, or to play along with office politics. Passive aggression and backstabbing also fall into this quadrant.

Manipulative insincerity often backfires and loses us respect. In Scott's anecdote, Page noticed her about-turn, sensed she was being insincere, and looked at her with disdain.

The final quadrant on the grid, the top left, is called "ruinous empathy." This is when leaders are too nice or too kind. They want to avoid tension or confrontation, so they overlook poor performance or bad behavior. In the workplace, ruinous empathy allows low standards to slip even lower, impacting entire teams and often organizations, as we heard earlier with the case of Bob.

Scott's model is clear and easy to apply. Her approach to communication isn't especially new or groundbreaking. Other experts have written about the need to create an environment of psychological safety, where people feel free to be human, make mistakes, and speak their truth – especially to those in power. You'll find articles and tools on this and on managing difficult conversations on Mind Tools. But Scott's four-part grid is memorable, and helps leaders measure their tone and words, and correct course if necessary.

So, are there any downsides to this model? One issue is that the four quadrants are open to interpretation. One person's radical candor may be another person's obnoxious aggression. Scott stresses that radical candor is measured by the listener, rather than the speaker, and this is important to bear in mind. As a manager, you may think you've got the right balance between challenging and caring, but your employee may feel criticized or judged.

Scott accepts that her model has been open to misinterpretation. It was even parodied by the American TV comedy show "Silicon Valley," which featured tech executives being cruel to their employees under the guise of being radically candid. In response, Scott updated her framework, as she explains in the preface to the revised edition. Radical candor is definitely not a license to behave like a jerk, she says.

Scott's model may also need adaptation, depending on the size or culture of an organization. The author honed her management skills in American tech giants like Apple and Google, which pride themselves on their open cultures and limited hierarchy. More traditional companies or smaller organizations may need to figure out what radical candor means to them.

Finally, it's unrealistic to expect everyone to speak with radical candor, as they may feel their jobs and livelihoods depend on holding back to some degree. But radical candor is something to aspire to, and if leaders and managers can walk the walk, it will trickle down and everyone will benefit.

So what about Scott's guidance for managers who are trying to decide whether or not to fire someone? Well, let's imagine you have a team member called Peggy, whose work is getting worse.

Before firing her, Scott suggests you ask yourself some key questions. Have you been radically candid with Peggy, showing you care about her life as well as her work? Have you been crystal clear with her when you've challenged her to improve? Have you praised her for specific things that have gone well? And when criticizing her, have you offered to help her find solutions?

Next, ask yourself how Peggy's performance is affecting the rest of the team. And finally, get a second opinion from someone you trust. An outside perspective can reassure you that you're being fair.

Scott also lists some common lies managers might tell themselves to avoid firing Peggy. These include: she's bound to get better; somebody is better than nobody; her absence will leave a hole that will take too long to fill; she'd benefit from transferring to another department; and it's bad for morale to fire someone.

Scott suggests managers take a step back and see the big picture: that it's bad for everyone's morale, including Peggy's, to keep her on when it's time to let her go.

We like Scott's straight-talking approach to this difficult situation, especially the common lies, which will strike a chord with some managers.

There's another nugget in this book worth highlighting, and that's Scott's approach to getting things done without telling people what to do – something she learned from Steve Jobs at Apple. Scott says Jobs mastered the art of leading people to execute things flawlessly, without giving them direct orders.

Scott distills her learning into what she calls the Get Stuff Done wheel, which has seven steps. These are: listen, clarify, debate, decide, persuade, execute, and learn. Scott delves into each of these seven steps in detail, and explains how managers can cycle through them to foster good collaboration and build a culture where everyone's on board.

Let's look a bit closer at the first step: listening. This is an obvious starting point, but it's made more interesting by Scott's exploration of the difference between quiet listening and loud listening.

Quiet listening is when we allow others to speak. For example, a manager could set aside 10 minutes at the end of a meeting to listen silently, without responding and without any shift in body language. This encourages people to say what's on their minds, rather than what they think the manager wants to hear.

Loud listening is something Jobs used to do. It's about saying something that's intended to get a reaction out of others. Jobs would throw a strong opinion into the mix and insist people challenge him. Scott accepts this approach would only work in an organization where there's a good degree of trust.

There are many more useful insights for leaders in this book, from how to manage performance appraisals, to how to nurture and value different personalities on a team – both the high-flying, ambitious types Scott calls the superstars, and the steady workers she calls the rock stars.

There may, in fact, be too many insights. The book's revised edition is almost 300 pages long, densely packed with information, and with a fair amount of repetition, which dilutes what is a very helpful concept.

That proviso aside, Scott's radical candor model is powerful, memorable, and well worth exploring. We think managers who read this book and apply the concept will likely have better relationships and build happier teams.

"Radical Candor – Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity," by Kim Scott is published by Pan Macmillan.

That's the end of this episode of Mind Tools Book Insights from Emerald Works. Thanks for listening. Click here to buy the book from Amazon.