Book: Radical Candor - Kim Scott

A gem of a book. Very eye-opening & thought provoking. Leaving here a few lines that I want to save and refer to in the future.

My goal was to create an environment where people would love their work and one another. Friends often laughed when I said that, as if I were talking about a commune instead of a company. But I was serious. I spent a lot more than eight hours a day at my job. If I didn’t enjoy my work and my colleagues, the majority of my brief time on this planet would be unhappy.

Leslie, a fiercely opinionated ex-Microsoft executive, could barely contain herself. “This is not babysitting”, she said. “It’s called management, and it is your job!”

In World War II, the U.S. Air Force took their very best pilots from the front lines and sent them home to train new pilots. Over time this strategy dramatically improved the quality and effectiveness of the U.S. Air Force. The Germans lost their air superiority because they flew all their aces until they were shot down; none of them trained new recruits. By 1944 new German pilots had clocked only about half of the three hundred hours an Allied pilot would have flown in training.

“Get Stuff Done” wheel: Listen -> Clarify -> Debate -> Decide -> Persuade -> Execute -> Learn -> (goto Listen again)

When Steve Jobs was a kid, his neighbor showed him a rock tumbler = a can that spun on a motor. The neighbor asked Steve to gather up some ordinary rocks from the yard. He took the stones, threw them into the can, added some grit, turned on the motor, and, over the racket, asked Steve to come back two days later. When Steve returned to the noisy clatter of the garage, the neighbor turned off the contraption and Steve was astounded to see how the ordinary rocks had become beautiful polished stones. Steve would later say that when a team debated, both the ideas and the people came out more beautiful - results wel worth all the fiction and noise.

Your job as a boss is to turn on that “rock tumbler”. Too many bosses think their role is to turn it off - to avoid all the friction by simply making a decision and sparing the team the pain of debate. It’s not. Debate takes time and requires emotional energy. But lack of debate saps a team of more time and emotional energy in the long run.

Have a go-to question. […] “What could I do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?”

Embrace the discomfort. […] One technique is to count to six before saying anything else, forcing them to endure the silence. The goal is not to be a bully but to insist on a candid discussion - to make it harder for the person to say nothing than to tell you what they’re thinking. If they can’t come up with anything on the spot, you can always arrange a time to meet again.

Make it not just safe but natural to criticize you.

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, or if the last employee survey took too long to fill out, or if the promotion system seemed unfair, and so on.

This simple technique reminds you to describe three things when giving feedback: 1) the situation you saw, 2) the behavior (i.e., what the person did, either good or bad), and 3) the impact you observed. This helps you avoid making judgments about the person’s intelligence, common sense, innate goodness, or other personal attributes. When you pass blanket judgments, your guidance sounds arrogant.

Multiple nodes. I found that praising people at a public all-hands meeting was a great way to share significant accomplishments. However, I often found that following up in person at a 1:1 carried more emotional weight, and following up with an email to the whole team carried more lasting weight.

Share meeting notes right after the meeting. When there are about eight minutes left in the meeting, ask everyone to look at the notes, reminding them that you’ll be sharing the document with their boss momentarily. This has a way of focusing the conversation and making people feel accountable for their suggestions. The immediacy - you’re going to share this with the person you were talking about eight minutes from now! - makes the conversation feel less like it is happening behind the person’s back. It also means you don’t have to remember to send the notes out to all the participants to double-check that everybody is comfortable with them, and then remember to share it with your direct report. You do all that in the meeting and spare yourself the unnecessary “next steps” that too often clutter your brain or just don’t happen. This also alleviates the anxiety of the person who is being evaluated. They want to know what was said right away!

Absentee management	Partnership	Micromanagement
hands-off, ears off, mouth off	hands-on, ears on, mouth off	hands-on, ears off, mouth on
lacks curiosity, doesn’t want to know	displays curiosity, recognizes when they need to know more	lacks curiosity, pretends to know all
doesn’t listen, says nothing	listens, asks why	doesn’t listen, tells how
is afraid of any details	asks about relevant details	gets lost in the details
has no idea what’s going on	is informed because hands-on	asks for make-work presentations, reports, and updates
sets no goals	leads collaborative goal-setting	sets goals arbitrarily
remains unaware of problems	listens to problems, predicts problems, brainstorms solutions	tells people how to solve problems without fully understanding them
causes collateral damage by tripping on grenades unawares	removes obstacles and defuses explosive situations	tells people how to remove obstacles/defuse situations, but watches from a safe distance
is ignorant of both the questions and the answers	shares what they know; asks questions when they don’t	pretends to know when they don’t
is unaware of context	shares relevant context	hoards information

When your direct reports own and set the agenda for their 1:1s, they’re more productive, because they allow you to listen to what matters to them. However, I recommend setting basic expectations for the agenda and how it’s delivered. Do you even want a structured agenda? If you do, and you want to see it in advance, say so. If you don’t, and you won’t even look at it in advance, set expectations accordingly.

When we learn most skills - math, sales, engineering, piano, sports - we practice to improve. But when it comes to communication, we don’t often get this kind of practice. That’s why practicing using the Feedback Triangle or improv is a really helpful way to become more conscious of our own intention and what we need to bridge the gap between those intentions and the way others experience what we say. Practice also demonstrates how giving and receiving feedback, developing self awareness and relational awareness are skills that we can develop with practice.

Soliticism criticism first There is an important order of operations to Radical Candor:

1. solicit criticism
2. give praise
3. give criticism
4. gauge the criticism and adjust
5. encourage praise and criticism between others

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 mor eor less involved in your work?”

Don’t ask questions that can be answered with a yes or a no. Any parent knows that asking their kid a question like “Did you have a good day?” is likely to get little more than a “yes” or “no”. Question like “tell me the best and worst parts of your day” tends to elicit more information. The same is true when soliciting feedback. In fact, 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?” If they can’t think of anything, encourage them to think a bit more. Warn them you’ll ask them again next week, and don’t forget to ask again.

Here are a few great questions from workshop participants. You’ll see that tone varies a lot person to person.

• In the last week, when would you ave preferred that I be more or less involved in your work?
• Tell me why I’m off base here.
• What’s something that I could have done differently this week to make your job easier?
• How could I best support your professional development right now?
• What’s something I’ve done in the last week that made it difficult to work with me?
• What’s a blind spot of mine that you have noticed?
• The most important thing you can do for both of us is to tell me when I’ve screwed up.
• I feel like I didn’t do as well as I could have in that meeting, but I’m not sure what I did wrong. Can you help me figure it out?
• I’m really trying to do X better. I know in theory it’s a problem but I’m not always aware in the moment. Can you help me by pointing it out when you see it?

Here are four common categories [for performance management] expressed as “generic terms” so they’ll be broadly applicable:

1. Results. Is the person achieving their goals, doing what they are supposed to do? Do they have the skills or domain expertise necessary to be effective in their role?
2. Teamwork. How well does the person work with others to get the results? Do they help others succeed, or leave the proverbial trail of dead bodies in their wake? Do they exhibit Radical Candor, both challenging directly and caring personally?
3. Innovation. Does this person come up with new ideas that change the game, or help the team do old work in a new, better way? Innovation is not just about step-function ideas that result in, say, the iPhone. It;s also about incremental ideas. For example, the employee who figures out that programmable keypads will allow the team to answer routine customer-support questions more quickly, allowing them to focus on work that is more interesting and impactful.
4. Efficiency. Does this person work productively and quickly and contribute to the team’s ability to do so? For example, the employee who can do the work asked them a little more quickly than others, and who shows others how they do it.

Remember, this twice-a-year- recommendation is just for a rating - i’ts performance management, not development. Impromptu development conversations should be happening weekly, but they should be private and take two minutes and not involve a rating or a process. The move to having more frequent ratings is often a result of the confusion between performance management and development. Development is a daily/weekly thing. But if ratings happen too frequently, they get conflated with development, and conversations that ought to hook into the intrinsic desire to improve instead trigger the resistance that happens when we are judged and the judgments carry extrinsic rewards and punishments with them,