In Radical Candor, borrowing a phrase from Richard Tedlow, Kim Scott explains how strategic candor can help to “defy the quintessential pull of organizational mediocrity.” She focuses on two “dimensions”:
“The first dimension is about more than ‘just professional.’ It’s about giving a damn, sharing more than just your work self, and encouraging everyone who reports to you to do the same. 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, and deeply personal. I call this dimension Care Personally.”
“The second dimension involves telling people when their work isn’t good enough — and when it is; when they are not going to get that new role they wanted, or when you’re going to hire a new boss ‘over’ them; when the results don’t justify further investment in what they’re working on. Delivering hard feedback, making hard calls about who does what on a team, and holding a high bar for results — isn’t that obviously the job of any manager? And yet challenging people is often the best way to show them you care when you’re the boss. This dimension I call Challenge Directly.”
Also of special interest to me is what she has to say about what she characterizes as “the destructive power of Ruinous Empathy”: More specifically, it is responsible for the vast majority of management mistakes I’ve seen in my career. Most people want to avoid creating tension or discomfort at work. They are like the well-meaning parent who cannot bear to discipline their kids…
“Bosses rarely intend to ruin an employee’s chance of success or handicap the entire team by letting poor performance slide. And yet that is often the net result of Ruinous Empathy, Similarly, praise that is ruinously empathetic is not effective because its primary goal is to make the person feel better rather than point out really great work and push for more of it…
Ruinous Empathy can also prevent a boss from asking for criticism. Typically, when a boss asks for criticism, the employee feels awkward at best, afraid at worst. Instead of pushing through the discomfort to get the employee to challenge them, bosses who are being ruinously empathetic may be so eager to ease the awkwardness that they simply let the matter drop…
When giving praise, “investigate until you really understand who did what and why it was so great. Be as specific and thorough with praise as with criticism. Go deep into the details.”
All this and more, much more, is explained thoroughly in Chapter 2.
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Kim Scott is the co-founder and CEO of Candor, Inc.. To learn more about her and her firm, please click here.
Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity was published by St. Martin’s Press (March 2017).
I also highly recommend Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Second Edition, co-authored by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Granny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, and published by McGraw-Hill (2011).