Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
Kim Malone Scott
Top 10 Best Quotes
“When bosses are too invested in everyone getting along they also fail to encourage the people on their team to criticize one another other for fear of sowing discord. They create the kind of work environment where being "nice" is prioritized at the expense of critiquing and therefore improving actual performance.”
“The essence of leadership is not getting overwhelmed by circumstances.”
“There's several reasons why it make sense to begin building a culture of radical candor by asking people to criticize you. First, it's the best way to show that you are aware you are often wrong and that you want to hear about it when you are. You want to be challenged. Second, you'll learn a lot. Few people scrutinize you as closely as do those that report to you. [...] Third, the more first hand experience you have with how it feels to receive criticism, the better idea you'll have of how your own guidance lands for others. Fourth, asking for criticism is a great way to build trust and strengthen your relationships.”
“If you don’t teach that dog to sit, she’s going to die!” said the tall bearded man in blue jeans standing next to me. He pointed at the ground, bent down to get in Belvy’s face, and bellowed at her, “SIT!!” To my astonishment, Belvy sat. She didn’t just sit, she pounded her butt into the pavement, and looked up at the man wagging her tail. The man was in my face now. “See? It’s not mean, it’s clear.” The light changed, and the man strode across the street, leaving me with words to live by.”
“There’s nothing like emotional bondage to create the conditions for Ruinous Empathy.”
“Your mind-set will go a long way in determining how well the 1:1s go. I found that when I quit thinking of them as meetings and began treating them as if I were having lunch or coffee with somebody I was eager to get to know better, they ended up yielding much better conversations. p202”
“When I was at business school, one of my professors told a story about a meeting between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the economist John Maynard Keynes. FDR was enormously busy, but he spent well over an hour with this academic. If FDR had understood Keynsian economics some think the Great Depression might have ended sooner and enormous suffering could have been prevented. But at the end of the meeting, the president was not persuaded. My professor asked the question, "Whose fault was it? FDR's for not understanding, or Keynes's for not explaining it well?" This was one of those moments in my education that changed my life. I'd always shifted the burden of responsibility for understanding to the listener, not to the explainer. But now I saw that if Keynes's genius was locked inside his head, it may as well not have existed. It was his responsibility to make the ideas that seemed so obvious to him equally obvious to FDR. He failed. Far too often we assume that if somebody doesn't understand what we're telling them, it's because they are "stupid" or "closed minded". That is rarely the case. While we know our subject matter, we may fail to know the person to whom we are explaining the subject, and therefore may fail to get our ideas across. p92”
“They may never repay you, but they are likely to pay it forward. The rewards of watching people you care about flourish and then help others flourish are enormous.”
“Relationships may not scale, but culture does.”
“It's also tempting to tell yourself that you're not firing somebody because doing so would discourage the team. But keeping someone on who can't do the job is far worse for morale- yours, the person who's doing a crummy job, and everyone else who's doing a great job. p68”
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Book Keywords:
love, empathy, leadership, discipline, constructive-criticism, management, self-improvement, toxic-relationship
