Radical Candor

Radical Candor will teach you how to connect with people at work, push them to be their best, know when and how to fire them, and create an environment of trust and innovation in the workplace.

If you’re like me you might be wondering what radical candor even is. Let’s see what the definitions are, according to Google:

Radical: far-reaching or thorough.

Candor: being open and honest in expression.

In other words, radical candor is the quality of being thoroughly open and honest with others. When it comes to work and management, this means balancing care for your team members with helping them know where they need to improve.

Developing this skill starts with building a personal relationship with each person you work with. Show that you care by being open and talking about things other than business. 

As you continue working with individuals, having radical candor will require you to challenge them to do better when they’re not doing what they should. It means being honest with them about where they are at, even if it’s not easy.

An example from the author’s experience working for Google perfectly encompasses how to do this right. Scott had just given a presentation and her boss came up afterward to compliment how well she did and give some feedback. 

Interestingly, the way her boss delivered the constructive criticism was to wrap it within a compliment. She told Scott to not say “um” as much, explaining that it can make people sound stupid. 

But she added that this would be a shame in Scott’s case because she was so smart.

Have you ever thought about how exciting it is that you get to work around so many brilliant people? And if you’re a leader it’s really fun to get to lead the discussions and work closely with each individual. The best leaders know that this is how to get stuff done. Bad managers, on the other hand, just try to boss people around. Steve Jobs gave us the perfect example of what the author calles collaborative leadership. He knew that he wasn’t always going to be right, so he challenged his employees to speak their mind when they disagreed with him. He even got angry once because an employee who had given up on convincing Jobs to change his mind ended up being right! Jobs had to let the man know that he was hired to make sure that Jobs didn’t make mistakes. Here’s the author’s four steps to reproducing this collaborative leadership yourself: Listen to people’s ideas and create a safe space for them to speak openly. Let your team have the time to refine their ideas. Have debates to let all…