Care Personally and Challenge Directly

It took me a while, but I've finally finished Radical Candor! I found the book tough to get through, but do believe it was time well spent. I would recommend the book to aspiring managers as it tells stories about a variety of situations that can arise on the job and helps you think through them.


The book starts with encouraging the reader to build meaningful relationships with people you work with, arguing that maintaining these relationships will be key when you later try to get, give and encourage guidance.

Kim Scott emphasizes the importance in understanding what motivates each person on your team - which part of their job to they particularly enjoy; which parts do they suffer through; is there something else they're eyeing? - so that you then can drive results collaboratively.

In part 2 of the book, Kim gives you a series of tools and techniques to build these relationships, establish trust and gives you ideas for getting, giving and encouraging praise and criticism (we need to know what we are doing wrong, so that we can improve).

She then demonstrates techniques for avoiding boredom and burnouts in teams, e.g. using career conversations (but also talking listening to their life story and dreams (which are likely not involving you and your company 😉)) and personal development plans to understand which ones of your team members want to quickly grow into their next role, and which ones want to broaden their skillset in their current one.

How can we get stuff done together faster? Kim recommends a series of meeting formats to reach different kinds of results. One thing that stood out for me was her idea of "big debate meetings": 

Big debate meetings are reserved for debate, but not for decisions, on major issues facing the team. ... They lower tension. At least part of the friction and frustration in a lot of meetings results from the fact that half the room thinks the are there to make a decision, the other half to debate.

I have definitely felt this tension!

Another interesting idea was employing "study halls", something I've come to understand is/was frequently used in Amazon: For meetings that require preparation / a read through of material before a discussion take place, dedicate 15 minutes of the meeting for just that: For everyone to just sit silently and read through the material in peace, before the discussion starts. Interesting!

The book ends with hands-on tips of how to get started, encouraging you to put what you've just learnt into practice, followed by a bonus chapter that serves as a part summary, part example.

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