Understand What Motivates Each Person on Your Team: Helping people take a step in the direction of their dreams Well, stop repressing your innate ability to care personally. Somehow the training you got to “be professional” made you repress that. As Scott says, You were also born with a capacity to connect, to care personally. You can praise – but make it contextualized and specific, so people know you did notice their achievements. You can criticize – but only with the noble aim to help see mistakes and correct them. Their praise is superficial and feels like flattery, not proved by any serious background. Ruinously empathetic bosses do not criticize at all – they do not insist on solving issues but rather let them go. Ruinous Empathy occurs when bosses are trying to reduce tension but instead create even more pain, prioritizing friendly communication over improving performance. Even Aggressive Obnoxious guidance is better – at least, you know what to expect. In this case, both criticism and praise are used to play on other people’s emotions. Manipulative Insincere guidance is the result of a boss’s desire to be liked and take advantage of it. Obnoxiously aggressive criticism can be effective but at a very high cost: it “sometimes gets great results short-term but leaves a trail of dead bodies in its wake in the long run.” Similarly, praising people aggressively (for example, under wrong circumstances) can make them feel underestimated or even ashamed instead of valued. Obnoxious Aggression happens when a boss treats employees without respect, belittling and publicly embarrassing them. This way, she comes up with three other types of guidance, analyzing those through the prism of criticism and praise. But what if you fail, in one of those or in both? To demonstrate that, Scott draws a coordinate system, where Care Personally is Y, and Challenge Directly is X. If you succeed in two of the dimensions, your guidance is Radical Candor. Get, Give, and Encourage Guidance: Creating a culture of open communication The resulting happiness is the success beyond success. When people love their job, the whole team is more successful. Scott further explains that when put together, these two dimensions form “Radical Candor”: When Radical Candor is encouraged and supported by the boss, communication flows, resentments that have festered come to the surface and get resolved, and people begin to love not just their work but whom they work with and where they work. It is not pleasant, but it will let you see how your people perceive you. This also works the opposite direction: you need to be able to hear things that may upset you. The second dimension is “Challenge Directly”, and it is about being open enough to tell people when they are doing something wrong. Another one, less virtuous, is a tendency to become arrogant once you find yourself in a boss chair. One reason is that work culture encourages us to stay professional and hide our feelings. The first dimension is “Care Personally”: you see your employees not as robots but as human beings. The author views trust as a two-dimensional phenomenon. The core of a deep relationship is trust. However, there is a more human approach – developing strong relationships. One way to do that is through power and authority – totalitarian regimes prove that it can be pretty effective. A group of people working together will always need someone who will guide them. Build Radically Candid Relationships: Bringing your whole self to work Understand What Motivates Each Person on Your Team Scott calls it “radical” implying that bosses should literally mean what they say, and “candor”, not “honesty”, emphasizing that they must sincerely believe in what they say and do.īelow you can read a “Radical Candor” book summary and find out what these rules are about. Radical Candor is a term she uses for a specific type of guidance. Throughout her career, she learned numerous rules of a thumb which she presented in her book “Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity.” Having analyzed her advising experience in several technology companies including Google, Apple, and Twitter, as well as managing experience in other companies, Kim Scott came to a simple conclusion: as a boss, you need to stay human but straightforward. So how can you reach the balance? What is the secret of giving people freedom at work, yet not allowing anarchy? Is it a godlike, cold-blooded tyrant with a strict face, or an open-hearted and sympathetic person trying to make everyone happy? Of course, these are the two extremes, and the truth is the golden middle. Let’s think a little and imagine a perfect boss.
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