A 5 Minute Overview Of
Radical Candor
Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
About the Author
Kim Scott is co-founder and CEO of Candor, Inc., a business consulting firm. She has served as an adviser to numerous Silicon Valley companies including Dropbox. Qualtrics, ReelGoodApp, Twitter and others. She was also a member of the faculty at Apple University where she developed a training course for managers. She led Google's online sales and operations teams for AdSense, YouTube and DoubleClick as they grew into multi-billion-dollar operations. Earlier in her career, Kim Scott was co-founder and CEO of Juice Software, business development manager at Delta Three and Capital Thinking, a policy advisor at the FCC, an analyst for the Soviet Companies Fund and the founder of a diamond cutting factory in Moscow. She is a graduate of Harvard Business School and Princeton University.
The Main Idea
Radical Candor is all about hitting the sweet spot as a boss where you provide guidance that is the right mix of praise and criticism. You're neither obnoxiously aggressive nor manipulative to your people. Nor are you so empathetic nothing gets done either. Effective bosses have Radical Candor.
'Radical Candor' is what happens when you put 'Care Personally' and 'Challenge Directly' together. Radical Candor builds trust and opens the door for the kind of communication that helps you achieve the results you’re aiming for. 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. Being a good boss is hard for everyone, no matter how successful they appear on the outside. Your humanity is an asset to your effectiveness, not a liability.
At Apple, we hire people to tell us what to do, not the other way around. I don't mind being wrong. And I'll admit that I'm wrong a lot. It doesn't really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing.
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