Radical Candor by Kim Scott

This book is great for: New People Managers, Giving Powerful Feedback

Radical Candor is a great blueprint and starting point of how to give specific and actionable feedback, but some of its advice no longer rings true.

In a politically divisive world, post pandemic, in the throes of remote work and hyper online visibility, how radical can candor be?

The author Kim Scott originally wrote this book in 2017 and the bulk of her leadership examples come from one of Google’s golden eras, when they valued different opinions, had more of a moral code, and let’s be honest, a mammoth office and learning budget that a normal sized company would not be able to repeat a thousand times over.

Frequent nature-centric employee retreats and walks around the acres of the Google campus where managers can build their relationships with their reports is not realistic for most companies, and the work-life balance she promotes is especially not evident within modern day Google.

With all of that being said, I did take away a few useful pieces:

1. To get real change going, you must give specific and actionable feedback.
2. If there is feedback to be given to improve your working relationship with someone, or to help them improve at work, (for me, on my SVS team), it’s better to do it sooner than later.
3. Instead of making recommendations, present all of the facts. The better choice will usually present itself.
4. It’s okay to care about your colleagues and clients (that being said, I take that with a grain of salt given my very corporate, high-metrics-required last place of work).
   1. Because you care, managing can be emotionally exhausting - and that’s normal.
5. Don’t get too attached to an idea - this is something that gets easier with time!
6. There’s a right place and a right time to give feedback. After knowing your colleagues a little more you can learn where and when that will be, i.e. this person responds better in a group setting, or this person responds better in private.

There is some considerable idealization that happens in Radical Candor, and in the last 5 years, we’ve seen some of that corporate dreamworld bubble burst through hearings, testimonials, and other literature. What we say can be recorded and transcribed, what we write even outside of work can be documented.

If Kim Scott wrote the book now, perhaps she’d call it “Reasonably Radical Candor”.