Book summary

Radical candor is a must read book for anyone, who wants to improve his management skills.

Radical: thorough, making impact

Candor: being open and honest

Kim Scott

The author of this book is a busines woman, who managed AdSense and YouTube at Google, developed a leadership course at Apple University and was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Twitter and many other companies.

Chapter 1: Build Radically Candid Relationships

The author believes, that the core of a productive team, are deep and open relationships between it's members. And they cannot be reached without trust.

Care Personally

To care personally means seeing your team members not as machines, but as human beings, that have their own priorities and goals.

Challenge directly

A very simple main though of this book is about being open and straight forward with your colleagues without being afraid of challenging and criticising them.

Chapter 2: Get, Give, and Encourage Guidance

The second chapter contains main mistakes you can face as a manager and a leader.

Obnoxious Aggression

This unsought state means embarassing your colleagues publicly. On the other hand praising others under wrong circumstances can also make the underestimated instead of valued

Manipulative Insincere

Many people fall into a trap of being very nice and polite to other by not being fully truthful and keeping important thought for themselves. This leads to people not knowing what to expect from you, which is even worse than being obnoxiously aggressive

Ruinous Empathy

Do not become ruinously empathic because of being afraid of critiism or struggle. Criticize specific action, not a person or his character.

Chapter 3: Understand What Motivates Each Person on Your Team

Help people take a step in the direction of their dreams. Everyone in your team propably has a thing he cares about more than the work you do. So do not forget about other people priorities. Help them achieve their goals and they will do their best return the favour.

Chapter 4: Drive Results Collaboratively

Telling people what to do does not work. That is why Kim comes with a Get stuff done wheel that consists of 7 steps

1. Listen

There are two main ways get the most feetback from others - silent and loud. Both of them work better with different people and under different circumstances. Listening silently means showing very little reaction to what the other person says, so that they open their minds in comfortable monologue. By listening loudly you insist on challenging you back.

2. Clarify

Clarification process can be done 1:1 or as a team brainstorming.

3. Debate

Discuss the ideas in comfortable and friendly environment.

4. Decide

The decision making process is the key to becoming a good manager and leader. You are not gonna get everyone agree, but you have to find the best decision.

5. Persuade

Everyone needs to know the reason why they are doing the things they are doing.

6. Execute

Once the decision is made you have to be with your team until the tasks are accomplished.

7. Learn

You always have to take a stepback from what you have done and evaluate it objectively.

-> Repeat

Chapter 5: Relationships

First of all you need to have a good relationship with yourself and care about your physical and mental health.

Then you need to establish an environment of trust and friendship between your team members.

Ice melting team buildings work, but not always and you should not insist on attending them.

Chapter 6: Guidance

Bosses need to be critisized in public and praise the criticizm immediately

Critisize a specific action and what it leads to, so that people knwo exactly what is wrong and why.

Chapter 7: Team

Boredom and bornout are two states you want to avoid. One of the great techniques are "career conversations", so that the others see the path the are on and do not get stuck in presence loop.

Chapter 8: Results

Your goal as a leader and a manager is to help others get where they would not have gotten by themselves.

Desicion making and debating meetings are important. However you can not make others bored by attending them. Control who is talking too much and who on the other hand does not participate in the discussions.

Summary

As we can see the from the main ideas mentioned above, Kim's advice on being a "kick-ass", but human leader is to imrpove open communication and trust on all the levels of your organisation.

First step is to make a friendly, stress-free and trustful environment.

Praise critisism and invite others to critisize you then one another openly and objectively.