Radical Candor and Growth Management

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Screen Shot 2019-09-29 at 5.37.34 PMKim Scott’s “Radical Candor” is the manager’s day-to-day playbook for building a team culture that accelerates execution by prioritizing two major communication styles when interacting with team members.

Radical Candor is a framework of how to communicate with teams based on a position of both personal caring and directly challenging. It is also a new management philosophy, instead of a focus on talent management, the radical candor approaches is focused on growth management.

The first dimension of the radical candor framework is about being and sharing yourself and encouraging the same from everyone on your team. The second dimension requires being immediately straightforward with individuals when their work wasn’t good enough but also when it does deliver the results. The interplay of these two dimensions is based on the notion that “Challenging people is often the best way to show them that you care.” In this way, the manager attitudinally conveys to the team that they are both empowered and supported.

The last chapter of the book outlines how to get started. Here is a quick outline of those steps.

Step 1: Share Your Stories – Explain Radical Candor- Include Personally Stories 

Step 2: Prove you can take it before you start dishing it out – Start asking your team to criticize you.

  • Start having career conversations
  • Perfect your 1:1 conversations
  • Providing Impromptu guidance
  • Take a deep breath: Assess
  • Return to guidance
  • Flight meeting proliferation
  • Plan for the future of your team
  • Return to guidance
  • Walk around
  • Begin to take a more radically candid approach to the process outside of the team

Step 3: Simply Making Resolutions

“The best way to begin transforming your workplace is to think hard about why you want to make the change, and then hold on to those ideals as you identify the specific things you can begin to do differently.”

“Remember: once you build Radically Candid relationships with the people that report to you, you will eliminate a terrible source of misery in the world: the bad boss.

Radical Candor; Be a Kick-Ass Boss without losing your Humanity, Kim Scott, 2017, St. Martins Press, 175 5th Ave, NY, NY 10010

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Published by bnorrisinc

I have extensive experience leading both inbound and outbound product management activities that transform existing product lines, based on agile and human centric design, in companies ranging from startup to mature. My expertise is in defining and delivering business solutions for complex customer problems based on emerging technologies, innovation best practices, and customer-centric research. I am well known for balancing vision with execution and creating strong alignment with both corporate stakeholders and strategic partners. My teams value my leadership style that empowers a team of equals to envision solutions that create important new value for customers, partners, and cross-functional teams.

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