What We're Reading Now

The Best Bosses are Comfortable with Candor

15 December 2015

Allison read Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss and appreciated Kim Scott’s advice on how to care personally, challenge directly, and provide the thing all employees crave… guidance!

Tags: allison read, leadership, management and supervision, thoughtful candor

One of my former clients sent me Kim Scott’s article, Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss, and thanked me for teaching him how to do what she recommends. I was delighted, not just to get the compliment, but to have this great article to share with others.

Scott does a wonderful job of explaining how the best bosses care personally and challenge directly. She begins by reminding us that while the word "feedback" often makes us feel like fingernails are dragging down a chalkboard, that "guidance is something most of us long for." She then explains how her former boss at Google, Sheryl Sandberg, gave her guidance about how her tendency to say "um" during presentations essentially made her sound stupid.

Yikes! How is it possibly okay to tell someone she sounds stupid? First of all, there’s a big difference between "you sound stupid" and "you are stupid." Second, if people are talking about how you sound stupid, don’t you want someone to figure out how to let you know so you can address the situation? But if you’re still feeling uneasy about Scott’s approach, check out this first story in her article to see how the fact that Sandberg cared about her personally made this radical candor work out well.

Scott then goes on to explain "that criticizing your employees when they screw up is not just your job, it's actually your moral obligation." She tells a story about one of her greatest failures as a manager when she fell into the trap of "ruinous empathy."

"'There was this guy who was working for me. We'll call him Bob. I really liked Bob. The problem was that Bob was absolutely terrible at his job,' she says. Whenever Bob would express worries about his performance, Scott would try to reassure him. But after nearly a year, she realized that Bob’s weak performance was impacting her whole team — and she was in danger of losing several top performers as a result. Trying to be 'nice' to Bob, she'd been unfair to the people who were doing great work. And things didn’t work out so well for Bob, either.'"

Scott realized she had to fire him. As she sat in front of Bob delivering that difficult message, he asked, “Why didn't you tell me? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

Finally, Scott gives advice on how to resolve conflict between your direct reports (eliminate back stabbing) and how to get feedback for your managers from their direct reports (skip-level meetings). She closes with suggesting that all managers put on their own oxygen masks first (take care of your own well-being). I’m especially fond of this suggestion. I even wrote a blog post about it in 2012.

Be forewarned, Scott uses a few more curse words than would normally be my preference, but the underlying guidance she provides on how to be radically candid is too good not to share. While difficult feedback will never be a bosses favorite moment, I think Scott frames those tough conversations in a way that will help supervisors think of challenging directly as one of the kindest things they can do for their employees.

If you struggle with how to find the words and the courage to be radically candid, Crucial Conversations and everything else written by the VitalSmarts team will be helpful. If you’re looking for an overall framework for how to be a great boss and how to get what you need from your boss, it doesn’t get much better than Bruce Tulgan’s approach. I recommend these three books of his every time I teach our course, The Art of Being a Great Boss:

• It's Okay to Be the Boss: The Step-by-Step Guide to Becoming the Manager Your Employees Need
• It's Okay to Manage Your Boss: The Step-by-Step Program for Making the Best of Your Most Important Relationship at Work
• The 27 Challenges Managers Face: Step-by-Step Solutions to (Nearly) All of Your Management Problems

Radical candor by challenging directly and caring personally is something I hope all bosses will consider adding to their supervision approach. I’ll go so far as to say it's a great resolution for 2016.

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