After noticing an uptick in inquiries from managers wanting to lock in their growth trajectory, I started hunting for a great, fresh book we could read together.

It had to capture the human complexity of managing, directing and leading.

I found Kim Scott’s 2017 book, Radical Candor. This woman sums up her entire theory as “Give a Damn, Get Stuff Done.” It was love at first read.

By the time you start to manage and grow your head count, you don’t need me to tell you what your responsibilities are: You need to ship services and products, deliver results (ideally, guiding your team and delighting customers as you go).

My role is to make sure that the way you approach your work is elevated, politically savvy, and driven.

Clients have thrived with the leadership development frameworks we apply in private session, and in turn see results with their teams and career growth trajectory. Clients who translate the tactics for trust building, political strategy and future vision from session to their actual workplace get the wins.

That said, I’m a relentless self-educator and wanted to advance the material I was providing to clients, there’s always more to learn.

Radical Candor was the best of last year’s crop of business leadership development books to my eye. The author brings her experience leading and then training leaders at both Google and Apple and also a failed start up to the page, sharing stories to illustrate the framework she’s developed.

The book can be distilled to a core equation:
Radical Candor = Caring Personally + Challenging Directly

Let’s deconstruct:

Caring Personally. Do your direct reports believe that you care about them personally? If they do, but you never challenge them directly– never tell them truth about a weak performance, that’s a blindspot in your leadership. The author calls it Ruinous Empathy. This results in terminations where, after months of getting to know your direct reports’ personal life (ex: “How IS your mom after her surgery?”) you have to let the underperforming person go and the direct report asks “Why didn’t you tell me my work wasn’t up to standards?!!”

Challenging Directly. This is an art, and much of the book is designed to help you figure out how to do this well. If you don’t have healthy relationships with direct reports who believe you care about them personally, it won’t work to challenge them directly. You start by making sure that people understand you care about them as humans. (ex: Sick? Go home and get better! Hit a milestone? Celebrate.) Once you have laid the foundation for trust and fellowship you can engage the human potential on your team. “This work you have turned in is nothing like your previous work. I know you can do better. What happened here?”

If you challenge directly with no meaningful relationships in place and with poorly chosen language the author calls it Obnoxious Aggression. Some people just call it Bro Culture. But I digress.

I adore frameworks and strategies that are deceptively simple –concepts that are relatively easy to grasp intellectually but require personal growth and study to truly adopt. Radical Candor fits into the deceptively simple category.

It turns out that among my client base of individual contributors, managers, senior managers, directors, VPs, investors and entrepreneurs that Challenging Directly is the hardest part of the equation to tackle. Some need course corrections in the Caring Personally department (and a rare few are adorably robotic at incorporating the corrections: “Hello Team. It is Time. For Our Quarterly. Drinks Event. See You Soon. Your Pal. Manager.”).

But Challenging Directly– this is the mountain to climb. It sounds good on paper but as I walked my clients through the steps listed in the book, the obvious discomfort would rise, like the George W Bush era terror threat color coded levels:

• The first thing to know is that Challenge Directly is best practiced as daily hygiene, like tooth brushing. Done right, it’s a 15 minute chat, a targeted performance conversation, and happens as soon as possible once the issue has occurred. (Terror level: Green, Low)

• Next step is to begin creating a culture where challenges to strategy and content are encouraged through debate. (Terror level: Blue, Guarded)

• And you’ll need to learn to solicit direct challenges from your team, appreciate and it and implement changes relatively quickly around the feedback you agree with. (Terror level: Yellow, Elevated)

• Finally you’ll want to solicit personal feedback from your direct reports and it’s advised that you create a go-to phrase to help you navigate your internal resistance and simply spit it out, over and over again, on a consistent basis. Again, keep it brief and consistent, like tooth brushing. Having secured trusting human relationships at work and shown that you’re receptive to new ideas and challenges, you then ask (for example) “What’s the one thing you’ve been wanting to tell me but have been holding back?” (Terror level: Orange, High Risk of Terrorist Attack)

The book is good and unlike other business development and leadership advice books, wouldn’t suffice as a pamphlet (feel me on that one?). The writing has great voice, the author is credible and she brings voice to the nuances of the team and matrixed work environment– the politics of the workplace, as many of my clients refer to it.

In order to adopt some or all of the frameworks and guidance offered in the Radical Candor method, you must be in agreement with the authors that applying intellectual rigor produces remarkable outcomes.

Seeking to fully and deeply grasp the issues shouldn’t stop at coding, product or strategy mapping. Colleagues, direct reports and even those senior to you can unlock better, higher quality results when we seek to deeply understand and engage with their perspectives.

Don’t hide behind ritualized one on ones or performance reviews, get candid.