Excerpts from the book: Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean

Excerpts from the book: Is my series where I share some highlights and notes I made while reading some book that I think is good, thought provoking and worth sharing.

Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean

Radical Candor is the sweet spot between managers who are obnoxiously aggressive on the one side and ruinously empathetic on the other. It is about providing guidance, which involves a mix of praise as well as criticism – delivered to produce better results and help your employees develop their skills and increase success. Great bosses have a strong relationship with their employees, and Scott has identified three simple principles for building better relationships with your employees: make it personal, get stuff done, and understand why it matters.

• By failing to confront the problem, I’d removed the incentive for him to try harder and lulled him into thinking he’d be fine. To make matters worse, I kept making the same mistake over and over for ten months. As you probably know, for every piece of subpar work you accept, for every missed deadline you let slip, you begin to feel resentment and then anger. You no longer just think the work is bad: you think the person is bad. This makes it harder to have an even-keeled conversation. You start to avoid talking to the person at all.
• As is often the case when people are not sure if the quality of what they are doing is appreciated, the results began to suffer, and so did morale.
• Lack of praise and criticism had absolutely disastrous effects on the team and on our outcomes.
• Results has a lot more to do with listening and seeking to understand than it did with telling people what to do; more to do with debating than directing; more to do with pushing people to decide than with being the decider; more to do with persuading than with giving orders; more to do with learning than with knowing.
• Relationships may not scale, but culture does. Is “relationship” really the right word?
• We are all more likely to be “ruinously empathetic” or “obnoxiously aggressive” or “manipulatively insincere” toward people who are different from us. Learning how to push ourselves and others past this discomfort, to relate to our shared humanity, can make a huge difference. PART I A NEW MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY
• Richard Tedlow’s biography of Andy Grove, Intel’s legendary CEO, asserts that management and leadership are like forehand and backhand. You have to be good at both to win.
• RELATIONSHIPS, NOT POWER, DRIVE YOU FORWARD
• Very few people focus first on the central difficulty of management that Ryan hit on: establishing a trusting relationship with each person who reports directly to you.
• Nevertheless, these relationships are core to your job. They determine whether you can fulfill your three responsibilities as a manager: 1) to create a culture of guidance (praise and criticism) that will keep everyone moving in the right direction; 2) to understand what motivates each person on your team well enough to avoid burnout or boredom and keep the team cohesive; and 3) to drive results collaboratively. If you think that you can do these things without strong relationships, you are kidding yourself. I’m not saying that unchecked power, control, or authority can’t work. They work especially well in a baboon troop or a totalitarian regime. But if you’re reading this book, that’s not what you’re shooting for.
• Your ability to build trusting, human connections with the people who report directly to you will determine the quality of everything that follows.
• And yet challenging people is often the best way to show them that you care when you’re the boss. This dimension I call “Challenge Directly.”
• “Radical Candor” is what happens when you put “Care Personally” and “Challenge Directly” together.
• It turns out that when people trust you and believe you care about them, they are much more likely to 1) accept and act on your praise and criticism; 2) tell you what they really think about what you are doing well and, more importantly, not doing so well; 3) engage in this same behavior with one another, meaning less pushing the rock up the hill again and again; 4) embrace their role on the team; and 5) focus on getting results.
• Why “candor”? The key to getting everyone used to being direct when challenging each other (and you!) is emphasizing that it’s necessary to communicate clearly enough so that there’s no room for interpretation, but also humbly. I chose “candor” instead of “honesty” because there’s not much humility in believing that you know the truth. Implicit with candor is that you’re simply offering your view of what’s going on and that you expect people to offer theirs. If it turns out that in fact you’re the one who got it wrong, you want to know. At least I hope you want to know!
• Why some people live productively and joyfully while others feel, as Marx put it, alienated from their labor—was central to a boss’s job. In fact, part of my job was to figure out how to create more joy and less misery. 
• To most bosses, being professional means: show up at work on time, do your job, don’t show feelings (unless engaged in “motivation” or some such end-driven effort). The result is that nobody feels comfortable being who they really are at work.
• Just remember that being a boss is a job, not a value judgment.
• Why do I say “caring personally” instead of just “caring”? Because it’s not enough to care about the person’s work or the person’s career. Only when you actually care about the whole person with your whole self can you build a relationship.
• It’s about finding time for real conversations; about getting to know each other at a human level; about learning what’s important to people; about sharing with one another what makes us want to get out of bed in the morning and go to work—and what has the opposite effect.
• In the end, caring personally about people even as you challenge them will build the best relationships of your career.
• The hardest part of building this trust is inviting people to challenge you, just as directly as you are challenging them.
• “If we have the data about what works, let’s look at the data, but if all we have are opinions, let’s use yours,”
• Radical Candor is also not an invitation to nitpick. Challenging people directly takes real energy—not only from the people you’re challenging but from you as well. So do it only for things that really matter. A good rule of thumb for any relationship is to leave three unimportant things unsaid each day.
• BOTH DIMENSIONS OF Radical Candor are sensitive to context. They get measured at the listener’s ear, not at the speaker’s mouth. Radical Candor is not a personality type or a talent or a cultural judgment. Radical Candor works only if the other person understands that your efforts at caring personally and challenging directly are delivered in good faith.
• Giving meaningful praise is hard. That’s why it’s so important to gauge your guidance—to find out how it lands for people.
• But here’s a paradox of being a good boss. Most people prefer the challenging “jerk” to the boss whose “niceness” gets in the way of candor. I once read an article that claimed most people would rather work for a “competent asshole” than a “nice incompetent.” This article was a useful expression of the Catch-22 that worried me about being a boss. Of course I didn’t want to be incompetent. Nor did I want to be an asshole.
• THERE’S A RUSSIAN anecdote about a guy who has to amputate his dog’s tail but loves him so much that he cuts it off an inch each day, rather than all at once. His desire to spare the dog pain and suffering only leads to more pain and suffering. Don’t allow yourself to become that kind of boss!
• In my experience, people who are more concerned with getting to the right answer than with being right make the best bosses. That’s because they keep learning and improving, and they push the people who work for them to do the same. A boss’s Radically Candid guidance helps the people working for them do the best work of their lives.
• Not all artists want to own a gallery; in fact, most don’t. If you honor and reward the rock stars, they’ll become the people you most rely on. If you promote them into roles they don’t want or aren’t suited for, however, you’ll lose them—or, even worse, wind up firing them. Superstars, on the other hand, need to be challenged and given new opportunities to grow constantly.
• No person is always an “excellent performer.” They just performed excellently last quarter.
• You don’t want to be an absentee manager any more than you want to be a micromanager.
• mediocre. And seeing what truly exceptional performance looks like will help those who are failing to see more clearly what’s expected of them.
• David noticed when things were broken and rolled up his sleeves to fix them, even if they weren’t in his job description. Clearly David would always push for excellence in his work, no matter what job he had. He would not just do more than was required; he’d do things you didn’t even think were possible. He exemplified the advice from Ecclesiastes: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.”
• In many ways, your job as the boss is to set and uphold a quality bar. That can feel harsh in the short term, but in the long run the only thing that is meaner is lowering the bar. Don’t get sucked into Ruinous Empathy when managing people who are doing OK but not great! Everybody can excel somewhere.