Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
Bibliography
- Author: Kim Malone Scott
- Full_Title: Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
- Category: books
- Last Highlighted Date: 2025-03-07 07:51:58.598672+00:00
Highlights
- leader at Apple pointed out to me that all teams need stability as well as growth to function properly; nothing works well if everyone is gunning for the next promotion.
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- My point is not that you need to cuss or shout or be rude to be a great boss. In fact, I wouldn’t recommend it, because even if your relationship evolves to the point where you think mutual respect is understood, as boss you sometimes just misread signals. The point is, rather, that if you are someone who is most comfortable communicating in that way, you have to build relationships of trust that can support it, and you have to hire people who can adapt to your style.
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- Even in Silicon Valley, relationships don’t scale. Larry Page can’t have a real relationship with more than a handful of people any more than you can. But the relationships you have with the handful of people who report directly to you will have an enormous impact on the results your team achieves. If you lead a big organization, you can’t have a relationship with everybody. But the relationships you have with your direct reports will impact the relationships they have with their direct reports. The ripple effect will go a long way toward creating—or destroying—a positive culture. Relationships may not scale, but culture does.
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- Your humanity is an asset to your effectiveness, not a liability.
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- We undervalue the “emotional labor” of being the boss. That term is usually reserved for people who work in the service or health industry: psychiatrists, nurses, doctors, waiters, flight attendants. But as I will show in the pages to come, this emotional labor is not just part of the job; it’s the key to being a good boss.
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- many people feel they aren’t as good at management as they are at the “real” part of the job. Often, they fear they are failing the people who report to them.
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- 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.
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- Nevertheless, these relationships are core to your job. They determine whether you can fulfill your three responsibilities as a manager: 1) to create a culture of guidance (praise and criticism) that will keep everyone moving in the right direction; 2) to understand what motivates each person on your team well enough to avoid burnout or boredom and keep the team cohesive; and 3) to drive results collaboratively. If you think that you can do these things without strong relationships, you are kidding yourself.
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- DEVELOPING TRUST IS not simply a matter of “do x, y, and z, and you have a good relationship.” Like all human bonds, the connections between bosses and the people who report to them are unpredictable and not subject to absolute rules.
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- The first dimension is about being more than “just professional.” It’s about giving a damn, sharing more than just your work self, and encouraging everyone who reports to you to do the same. It’s not enough to care only about people’s ability to perform a job. To have a good relationship, you have to be your whole self and care about each of the people who work for you as a human being. It’s not just business; it is personal, and deeply personal. I call this dimension “Care Personally.”
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- The second dimension involves telling people when their work isn’t good enough—and when it is; when they are not going to get that new role they wanted, or when you’re going to hire a new boss “over” them; when the results don’t justify further investment in what they’re working on. Delivering hard feedback, making hard calls about who does what on a team, and holding a high bar for results—isn’t that obviously the job of any manager? But most people struggle with doing these things.
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