What do you do if you're a Sales Director asking staff about their ambitions and the answer comes back: to be a spirulina rancher? Read this book and find out: Radical Candor, by Kim Scott. You'll also find out how supporting the spirulina idea will help keep them on side for longer than you might think…alongside a whole load of other really useful ideas that might have grown up in silicon valley but can thrive anywhere.
I'm not a Sales Director. I'm not even a team leader anymore, so why I am reading Radical Candor at all?
Partly because I was hooked by the subtitle: how to get what you want by saying what you mean. A fairly radical idea in most businesses, but also something that I thought might be transferable out of the arena of dealing within teams, to dealing with suppliers and customers (albeit in a modified version) and also outside of the business arena altogether. Given my current work/life mix, I came to the book with this last view in mind.
Let's start with context: Scott is a former CEO coach at Dropbox and Twitter and one-time executive at Google and Apple, as well as having founded her own companies – some of which have done better than others. She has the experience in other words; she knows whereof she speaks.
In many ways, this is a story book. It is full of stories from the management trials of Silicon Valley: the approaches and strategies and tactics and successes and failures of the folk who work there trying to manage the folk who also work there. Just in case you think that what works in the valley won't work in your little corner of south Durham or north Cornwall or backstreets Birmingham, hang fire. Not all of the stories are from the big-namers – but those that are can be most enlightening, because they show how important organisational culture is in determining an approach that will work. Having worked for both Google and Apple, Scott quite succinctly draws the distinctions between the two environments, which could not be more different…and yet which both – given a commitment to developing their staff alongside their products – are, whatever else we might think of them, highly innovative, highly successful organisations.
The premise of Radical Candor is that our boss has one of the biggest impacts on our lives. As bosses, therefore, we have significant impact on the lives of our direct reports (indeed on our wider team members) but the focus here is on the direct reports, the direct relationships. The theory is: get those right, encourage others to follow, and the ripple flows down and out. It won't always, but hey! You tried. You did your bit.
That's one of the things that Scott emphasises. Don't wait for permission to try this. Just try it, adapt it, see what happens.
So what is it? This 'radical candor' thing? Scott might say that it boils down to 'how to be a good boss'. But actually, with little tweaks, it also speaks to 'how to be a good employee', 'how to be a good supplier' 'how to be a good customer and how to have good relationships generally.
There are two dimensions to 'radical candor'. They are: care personally and challenge directly.
Using these as the axis, you can create the typical management four-quadrant chart. Where both are high, you have radical candor, where both are low you have manipulative insincerity. High challenge and low care gives you obnoxious aggression, which Scott feels is still better than low challenge and high care which results in ruinous empathy. I can speak personally to the fact that the challenging boss got me further than the nicest one - the fact that he was radically candid by instinct and we had trust almost automatically definitely helped.
The first half of the book goes into what this really means and gives lots of stories to illustrate how it can work. The second half looks at more concrete methods for actually making it work for you. Hints and tips to get you started round it off. And for those who treat their books with more respect than I do there's a solid index to discourage you from defacing your copy.
There are many good messages in this book, but the one I really want to highlight is that it is the first that I have read that gives REAL recognition that not everyone wants promotion – and that companies need to find a way of rewarding equally those people who do a damn good job, and actually, just want to keep on doing a damn good job but feel that their increasing contribution, because of their growing experience and expertise, doesn’t get the same recognition of those who want to move up the hierarchy.
Scott identifies two important aspects of this.
Firstly she talks about 'growth trajectories' – which may be gradual or steep. These are partly determined by the individual's learning styles and capability, but also partly by their personal priorities at any given point in their life. Some folk will always be on one kind of trajectory or the other; other people will switch between them.
Then secondly, she also says this:
Lack of interest in managing is not the same thing as being on a gradual
growth trajectory, just as interest in managing is not the same thing as
being on a steep growth trajectory. Management and growth should not
be conflated.
Hallelujah! Somebody gets it!
Too many of us clamber unwillingly into management because it's the only promotion route there is. Guess what, once we've got there, we find that either we're not very good at it or we don't enjoy it or both. I remember a former colleague sitting in a staff conference and turning to me and saying: it's all very well, but what if I don't want to be captain? What if I just want to be lieutenant? I'm not allowed to progress and continue here. I have a friend who repeatedly complains that they don't want to be developed. It isn't actually true, this person is learning new stuff all the while – but does have a slow growth trajectory. There is this endemic problem that managers feel the need to dictate what growth and development MUST look like for their teams.
Radical candor is part of the solution to that. It is about having personal conversations, finding out what matters to the individuals and designing development plans that reflect that. It is also about challenging behaviours that don't support the objectives, which if you've got the first bit right are genuinely personal objectives as well as corporate ones…challenging behaviour right through to accepting that the person and the job do not belong together and doing something about it…but the challenge part cannot achieve the best results if you do not keep that proportion of your really good people whose ambition isn't a step into management – or indeed whose ambition is a step out of management. There needs to be a way to reward the 'rocks', the 'individual contributors' whatever you want to call them: the people who just want to do what they do better and better and better and get the recognition and reward that deserves.
That alone was worth the cover price for me…to know that I'm not shouting in the wilderness on this.
What else did I like?
- Splitting debate meetings from decision meetings
- Describe team fit as rigorously as you define skills
- Whoops the monkey
- The myth of trying to depersonalise – work IS personal
What did I not like?
- The notion that you could have weekly 1to1s with even 5 direct reports.While accepting that meetings proliferate beyond all sense, Scott still seems to advocate having more than most managers could fit it, given that most managers also have operational duties.
- She is speaking from a high level, and many first time and lower-middle managers might struggle to make some of this stuff work – especially in control&command organisations.
People who know me know that the mark of my having loved a non-fiction book to the extent that I will go on to make good practical use of it, is measurable by the number of pages that are defaced by corner turn-downs. I can state that for this one, the answer is 24. If that doesn't sound like a lot, it's one in ten. So for every 10 pages I found something that I will want to go back to. That's just the corner-turns…it doesn't count those pages where I highlighted stuff, but didn't specifically mark the page. I enjoyed this book, and I know it's going to be useful…but if you take only one thing from it, please let it be this: recognise, reward, but don't [necessarily] promote. Reward your rocks.
