Radical Candor: A Few Notes from Kim Scott’s Book
I enjoyed this book. While it covered familiar ground for me, it also pushed my thinking in some useful directions and left me with pages of notes.
The core idea is simpler than most leadership books make it sound: good feedback is both compassionate and direct. You challenge people because you care about them, not despite it. The author calls this Radical Candor, and she’s right that most managers default to one or the other — soft without substance, or blunt without warmth. The balance is the hard part.
One thing that stuck with me: we all know that useful feedback describes the situation, the behavior, and the impact. What’s less obvious is that praise works the same way. Vague compliments don’t land. Specific ones do.
One thing managers often get wrong: The agenda in a one-on-one belongs to your direct report. Not you. If you’re running the meeting, you’re running the wrong meeting.
A few other lines I underlined:
- “Don’t make an offer if you’re not dying to hire someone.”
- “Listen with the intent to understand, not to reply.”
- Rick Hanson: “The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.”
The question list at the end of the book is worth printing out and keeping somewhere visible.
These are the ones I’d actually use:
- How can I help?
- What can I stop doing or start doing to make your job easier?
- What keeps you up at night?
- What are you working on that you don’t want to?
- What are you not working on that you want to?
- How do you feel about the priorities of the teams you depend on?
- What’s something I could have done differently this week to make your job easier?
- How can I best support your professional development right now?
- What’s a blind spot of mine that you have noticed?
That last one takes some nerve to ask, which is probably why most managers never do.
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