Leading With Radical Candor
I recently read Radical Candor written by Kim Scott. This book contains timeless advice on how to become a great manager and act as a leader. Kim promotes a management and leadership style that...
Great leadership and people management are hard skills to acquire. Like any other expertise, this craft takes time and effort to develop. I recently read Radical Candor written by Kim Scott. This book contains timeless advice on how to become a great manager and act as a leader. It is based on Kim Scott’s professional journey in large US Tech corporations. She promotes a management and leadership style that blends openness, courage, personability, and humility.
Radical Candor resonated with me so much that I decided to take a short break from writing my AI article series. I wanted to explore some of the critical leadership and management concepts covered in the book and put some perspective on them. There’s so much to say that I split the article in two. This is part one.
The Radical Candor Framework
Radical Candor is built on the premise that leaders should act as guides instead of bosses. This quote from the book summarizes the concept best:
THE ULTIMATE GOAL OF RADICAL Candor is to achieve results collaboratively that you could never achieve individually. You’ve created a culture of guidance. You’ve created an exemplary team that embodies the Radical Candor ethos of caring personally and challenging directly
By acting with Radical Candor, you build deep, trusted relationships with each individual and lay the foundation for great team results. Kim Scott defines the Radical Candor framework around two central axes:
Challenge Directly: your ability to challenge right away individuals in your team
Care Personally: your ability to care about individuals in your team in a deeply personal way
As a result:
“Radical Candor” is what happens when you blend Care Personally and Challenge Directly.
Candor is the quality of being open and honest in expression, i.e., a straight shooter. Candid is is the adjective form that defines someone who exhibits that quality.
At age 13, one of my school assignments was to read Candide from Voltaire, a satirical novel published in 1759. This book is 500 pages long and printed in 8-point font. At that age, it was torture. The book narrates a love, life, and societal story, teaching us good lessons along the way. It critiques blind optimism, values practical work, exposes human cruelty and hypocrisy, and suggests happiness can be found in simple everyday actions.
The book was not my favorite. Kim Scott helped me rediscover the positive meaning of candor. Radical Candor leaves no other choice but to be your true self, driven by a strong ethos.
Let’s explore what Kim means by that and why she says (and I agree) that Radical Candor represents a superior form of management and leadership.
Caring Personally
Kim Scott puts the individual at the center of everything you do as a manager:
The most important thing you can do for your team collectively is to understand what growth trajectory each person wants to be on at a given time and whether that matches the needs and opportunities of the team
What a refreshing view! Instead of trying to make someone fit into your corporate mold, she suggests finding the best career and growth opportunity for that person. Then she goes on saying:
…your job is not to provide purpose but instead to get to know each of your direct reports well enough to understand how each one derives meaning from their work
Have you ever heard such advice in leadership training? Leading with empathy is the closest I can think of.
Instead, you want to be a partner—that is, you must take the time to help the people doing the best work, overcome obstacles, and make their good work even better
Caring personally is a super skill. You have to look beyond the professional expertise of individuals in your teams. Being genuinely curious about each individual's background and story helps. When I get a new report, I like to spend some time in the first couple of months talking about personal stuff: their history, personal interests, their family, etc. When at the office, I make a point to grab a coffee or lunch with my reports and have a casual chat with no work topics.
It goes without saying that it is a two-way street. I have seen individuals on both sides of the fence being reluctant to go beyond the strictly professional exchanges. In such circumstances, arm yourself with patience. It is okay to take six months or a year to get to know someone fully and build trust.
Building Trust
The Radical Candor framework promotes strong Trust foundations through its Care Personally and Challenge Directly precepts. Kim S. emphasizes the importance of building Trust within a team and fostering a result-driven culture. I wrote about the importance of Trust in the past. The book helped me reflect on the benefits of Trust in the context of managing and leading a team.
Trust as team foundation
“You can guide your team to get results if you’ve built a trusting relationship with each person reporting to you, and there can only be real trust when people feel free at work.”
Protecting Trust
Meeting your team for a hard discussion? Recognize it upfront and tell them this is a trusted environment where everyone is expected to share their opinions. Remind your team that we respect and value the opinions of each individual. This trust setting exercise sets expectations for the types of interactions allowed and expected behaviors.
Trust drives performance
If you can build a trusting relationship with people so that they feel free at work, then they’re much more likely to do the best work of their lives. But you’re not “getting it out of them”; you’re creating the conditions for them to bring it out of themselves
Being Yourself
Do not try to behave like someone else in front of your team; it will feel unnatural and make your team feel less comfortable. Instead, be aware of your flaws and weaknesses and work on improving your behavior.
Being Consistent
If you display inconsistent behavior, your team will notice, and it may impact their work or behavior. Recognize such behavior and correct it over time. When it happens to me, I recognize it publicly in the meeting and apologize.
Being a Guide. Giving Feedback
We discuss it in more detail below. Feedback is a gift, and your team expects the right level of guidance from you to move ahead. Do not confuse feedback with making a decision on their behalf. Most of the time, the decision is theirs.
Feedback Is a Gift
Kim S. emphasizes the need to give feedback immediately and regularly. Interestingly, she does not recommend waiting for 1:1 meetings and says that you should promptly provide feedback in-between meetings. While possible pre-Covid, this does not seem practical anymore. In this case, weekly 1:1s are your best bet. Feedback should never be given in a performance review. It is too late.
Kim S. offers several helpful tips for delivering feedback:
Praise in public, criticize in private
Avoid the “attribution error” and stay factual, e.g.: say ‘that’s wrong” and not “you’re wrong.”
Avoid “Don’t take it personally”; it achieves the opposite effect
Challenge directly; “just say it” with criticism and “be specific” with praise
Critique men and women equally; remember, feedback is a gift!
No “reply all” to criticize; instead, reply to the individual who made a factual error and ask him to “reply all” and correct his mistake
Finding help is better than offering it.
Sometimes I see people waiting until the end of the meeting to deliver bad news. It is always better to deliver negative feedback early. After the casual opening chat in 1:1s, I tell my report that I have some feedback to discuss. I do not rush it and let him command the agenda since it is his time. I simply make sure we have enough time to chat about it.
Giving feedback can be tricky. The SBI framework, Situation-Behavior-Impact, helps leaders be more precise and less arrogant. With this technique, you can describe the situation you observed or that was reported to you, the behavior of the person, and the impact observed by you, team members, or peers. This helps avoid blank judgments.
Kim S. offers a great way to get started. She suggests saying:
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.
I like it because it is direct and simple, without assuming guilt. It also offers a safe space for the receiver to reply to the feedback, therefore increasing their chances of being heard.
Managers have an easier time giving praise. It is tempting to give high performers a label like “rock star” or “superstar". Kim S. is clearly against it. People change over time. By labeling them, you create a bias that may not reflect future reality. It is your job as a manager to recognize this flawed judgment and remain consistent.
Time For Ideation And Debates
Once you have created a team culture based on trust, respect, and listening, the next step is to promote healthy debate and internal discussion to think through ideas before submitting them to leadership.
This phase is an essential component of a high performing team. I compare it to cutting a rough diamond into a beautiful piece of jewelry. This process of refining a rough idea into a strong proposal takes multiple steps.
I could write a few blog posts on this topic alone. I like how Kim S. always separates the ideation process from the debate and refinement phases. This system principle offers a clear progression to nurture the best ideas for your product vision and strategy.
All ideas are not created equal. As a leader, it is your duty to identify early the ideas with the most potential and have your team spend time on those. At Salesforce, we use the V2MOM process to identify big bets. This process forces us to be very selective which investments to follow and ensures we drive value for the business
Here, we are focusing on internal team ideas that you want to pitch to leadership. It is your job as a boss to help people think through their ideas. You do this by poking holes in the idea, challenging some assumptions, and asking to prove the business value.
This is a team sport, and you want to ensure that everyone feels empowered to contribute to this debate. Unless you build a trust culture, it may be hard to have team members challenge each other. As a manager, you have to promote healthy debate and even push for conflict at times. It may sound counterintuitive, but the best team discussions I have had in my career came from debates with individuals holding opposite points of view. The keys are respect, listening, intellectual honesty, and staying grounded in facts.
Another way I like to challenge my reports is through role plays. As a manager, you know very well how your leadership team thinks and makes decisions. Role play consists of acting as the decision-maker and asking hard questions from that person’s perspective. This approach offers first-hand exposure to the hard questions your team will get in the executive arena.
Kim S. stipulates that, as a boss:
Your job is to help your team nurture new ideas before they get bruised in debates… you need to push them to communicate with such precision and clarity that it’s impossible not to grasp their argument
It is not just about clear communication; understanding your target audience and meeting their needs is key to your success (emphasis added).
…making an idea clear requires a deep understanding not only of the idea but also of the person to whom one is explaining the idea.
In short, a manager should embrace healthy debate and even conflict at times. Kim S. cautions us that debates take time and require emotional energy. Pick your battles wisely!
What if you are the one promoting an idea to your team? Kim S. offers a safe way to break it out by saying:
Please poke holes in this idea—I know it may be terrible. So tell me all the reasons we should not do that
This approach is humble—you do not come as the boss pushing his agenda and invite everyone to contribute. We all suffer from personal bias and think highly of our own ideas. This approach leaves our egos and biases outside the room and promotes healthy discussion.
You can read part two here.
Great post. I found the key to giving good, constructive feedback is first learning how to take (any) feedback yourself. Can be a struggle, particularly when you put some much of yourself into your work. So hard not to default to feeling personally attacked from negative feedback, when in fact it’s just work.
If you can pause, internalise it, and respond with a clear head, soon you learn how to give constructive feedback yourself.
Easier said than done though. As a PM, you have the advantage of not being anyone’s boss which you can use as a superpower when giving feedback.