Radical Candor
Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
BBB Library: Leadership, Operations Management
ISBN: 978-1427283122
Editorial Review
Radical Candor is a simple idea: to be a good boss, you have to Care Personally at the same time that you Challenge Directly. When you challenge without caring it’s obnoxious aggression; when you care without challenging it’s ruinous empathy. When you do neither it’s manipulative insincerity. This simple framework can help you build better relationships at work, and fulfill your three key responsibilities as a leader: creating a culture of feedback (praise and criticism), building a cohesive team, and achieving results you’re all proud of. Radical Candor offers a guide to those bewildered or exhausted by management, written for bosses and those who manage bosses. Taken from years of the author’s experience, and distilled clearly giving actionable lessons to the reader; it shows managers how to be successful while retaining their humanity, finding meaning in their job, and creating an environment where people both love their work and their colleagues.
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Wisdom to Share
From the time we learn to speak, we’re told “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” While this advice may work for everyday life, it is a disaster when adopted by managers.
A central difficulty of management, the thing that goes to the heart of being a good boss but often goes overlooked, is establishing a trusting relationship with each person who reports directly to you.
It’s not enough to care only about people’s ability to perform a job. To have a good relationship, you have to be your whole self and care about each of the people who work for you as a human being. It’s not just business; it is personal.
It happens all too often that bosses view employees as lesser beings who can be degraded without conscience; that employees view their bosses as tyrants to be toppled; and that peers view one another as enemy combatants. When this is the toxic culture of guidance, criticism is a weapon rather than a tool for improvement.
When bosses are too invested in everyone getting along, they fail to encourage people to criticize one another. They create the kind of work environment where “being nice” is prioritized at the expense of critiquing, and therefore, improving actual performance.
Even though relationships don’t scale, culture does. Your relationships and your responsibilities reinforce each other, and from that interaction your success flows and your culture grows.
What we bring to work depends on our own health and well-being. Managers who create a stable foundation for themselves are invariably more effective at building teams on which people can do the best work of their lives.
Building radically candid relationships requires you to walk a fine line between respecting other people’s boundaries and encouraging them to bring their whole selves to work.
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