10 things I want to do as a manager after reading Radical Candor

Kim Scott’s book provides an approach on how to provide guidance as a manager and get the best out of your team.

9 min readDec 3, 2023

Why I read this book

How to best give feedback as a manager has been something I’ve been thinking a lot about in 2023. It’s been a key thing I’ve had to focus on to develop my team.

I wanted to read a book on the topic, and Radical Candor was the book I kept hearing about from people and kept coming up in searches.

Why this post

I don’t agree with everything said in this book, namely some of the anecdotes. For instance, Kim shares a story about how a previous boss called her out for saying ‘um’ too much, and she was so grateful this boss pointed it out to her.

Um…um is okay, people. Filler words are a normal linguistic phenomenon. They can actually be useful. Stop making excuses to look down on people.

But on the whole, I thought there were a lot of useful takeaways from the book.

This post is a list of the things I want to change (or keep doing) in my current management practice, along with some relevant quotes on the topic from the book.

1. Get my line managees to give me feedback

Start by asking for criticism, not by giving it. Don’t dish it out before you show you can take it.

I want to encourage my team to give me feedback in the same way I give them feedback.

My team are great at giving feedback at retros about our ways of working more generally, but I should be asking for more direct feedback on my performance as a manager.

As Kim says, though, this can be tricky to do:

It’s not so easy, because when you are the boss people really do not want to criticize you or to tell you what they really think. Along with the position, you inherit a bunch of assumptions that have nothing to do with who you really are. The role often changes people’s impression of you in ways that can be bewildering.

This is something I said in my conference talk I gave over the past year about my lessons learned as a manager. Being a manager comes with this unearned power and sense of authority, and it is a bewildering thing to experience.

However, I like the questions Kim’s provides to prompt feedback from line managees. I think they’re a good way to elicit feedback instead of just asking for it:

“What could I do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?”
“In the last week, when would you have preferred that I be more or less involved in your work?”
“What’s a blind spot of mine that you have noticed?”

2. Make sure I’m giving meaningful feedback to my strongest team members

The most important thing I think you can do for somebody who’s really good…is to point out to them when…their work isn’t good enough.

This has been on my mind a lot because I think I could give a lot better feedback to strong team members.

When they do great work, I don’t think I’m specific enough about what’s so great about it.

And when the work’s not good, I think it can come as quite a shock that I’m giving negative feedback.

Then there’s also this point:

Managers often devote more time to those who are struggling than to those who are succeeding. But that’s not fair to those who are succeeding — nor is it good for the team as a whole. Moving from great to stunningly great is more inspiring for everyone than moving from bad to mediocre.

This is not an easy thing to do when there are only so many hours in a day, and other people need more support to carry out their tasks.

But I also agree with Kim on this and recognize the need to ensure all my team get the levels of support they deserve.

So I want to make regular, specific feedback the norm, and I want to make sure I’m not neglecting my strong performers.

3. Recognize my superstars from my rock stars

Rock stars are solid as a rock….The rock stars love their work. They have found their groove. They don’t want the next job if it will take them away from their craft…If you honor and reward the rock stars, they’ll become the people you most rely on. If you promote them into roles they don’t want or aren’t suited for, however, you’ll lose them — or, even worse, wind up firing them. Superstars, on the other hand, need to be challenged and given new opportunities to grow constantly.

Reading these terms gave names to concepts I recognized in my team, but didn’t know could be articulated this way.

I’d slightly change the definition for my working context, though. At the University, I see the rock stars as the people happy in their roles and working to their pay grade level.

Superstars are the ones going above and beyond and showing their desire for taking on new challenges.

4. Learn to accept that superstars go

I often thought of these people as shooting stars — my team and I were lucky to have them in our orbit for a little while, but trying to hold them there was futile.

I’m learning to accept this at the moment as I’m experiencing an amazing superstar on my team about to move on to a new job.

That’s one of the hard things about where I work. I feel like if the University had more progression paths, we could keep our superstars a little longer. But we don’t have those paths, and we don’t have competitive salaries.

Until something changes, I need to appreciate the time I get to have with superstars in my team, and take pride in the fact that they get to move on to great, new roles because of the experience we had working together.

5. Give people a chance to shine in areas they need to improve in

One of the least popular things I did with my teams at Google was to insist that people who had not done exceptional work for more than two years be given an opportunity to work on a project that would let them shine. If their work still continued to be mediocre, we began encouraging these people to look for jobs elsewhere…
If somebody hadn’t proven in the course of two years that they could do exceptional work, they almost certainly would never get there. It was time to help them find a job where they could shine and time for us to start looking to replace them with somebody who could shine on our team.

I’m taking a slightly different angle on this example from Kim. This story made me reflect on how I delegate tasks to my team.

I have high standards for the work we produce. I want our outputs to be the best they can be.

If I don’t think someone’s skill level in a particular area is where I need it to be to produce high-quality work, I tend to give those tasks to other people who I know can produce exceptional work.

But I recognize this will hinder a person’s ability to develop in an area if they’re not given a chance to grow in that skill and shine.

If they don’t shine when given the opportunity, that can prompt some conversations about their career direction.

But first, I need to give them that chance. To do that, I need to get comfortable with the idea of not everything my team produces having to be exceptional.

6. Give feedback sooner

Giving guidance as quickly and as informally as possible is an essential part of Radical Candor, but it takes discipline — both because of our natural inclination to delay/avoid confrontation and because our days are busy enough as it is. But this is one of those cases where the difference in terms of time spent and impact is huge. Delay at your peril!

Kim explicitly says not to save up feedback for a 1:1, which I know I’m guilty of.

It’s difficult when working from home most of the time. Feedback feels more weighted when you have to write it out in a message, rather than being able to casually catch up in the office.

At the same time, there have also been cases where I go into a 1:1 with a line managee who I can see is having a rough day, and I chicken out of giving them the feedback I saved up.

That’s probably why Kim says delay at your peril! If I make feedback a regular part of our team culture, though, and feedback becomes more of a two-way conversation, it hopefully shouldn’t feel like a scary, weighted thing.

7. Be confident in who I’m hiring

The best advice I ever got for hiring somebody is this: if you’re not dying to hire somebody, don’t make an offer.

As I’m going into my first external recruitment for a position on my team in two years, I want to keep this point in mind.

I have experienced the differences of hiring people I was super keen to hire, versus hiring people I was more unsure of. The former shine in their roles, and the latter need a lot of support.

It’s difficult in higher ed where our recruitment pool for design roles isn’t that competitive. You don’t always get the perfect candidate. Sometimes it’s a case of hire someone you think could grow into the role, versus hire no one and try recruiting again (where you may not find anyone better).

What I wrote in point 2, though, about making sure strong team members get the feedback they deserve, makes me think about hiring decisions through a new lens.

People I’m keen on in interviews still need support to grow in their roles. But if I’m hiring people who need even more support, it makes it harder to give the same level of feedback to everyone.

As such, I need to feel keen on who I hire next, so I have more confidence in being able to create the team culture I want to set.

8. Let my line managees lead 121s

Employees set the agenda, you listen and help them clarify.

I typically start 121s by saying what I want to cover in the session, but then ask my line managees what they want to cover first.

This is the total opposite to my 121s with my manager, where I have to write a doc each meeting sharing an update of what I’ve been working on, how it’s going, and steer the conversation.

I haven’t taken this same approach with my team because I’m more directly involved in their work, so it always seemed overkill to ask them to write up a doc of updates like this.

However, I do see the value in my line mangees leading the conversation, and by doing so, it’s also a chance for them to build up their meeting facilitation skills.

So the approach I’d like to take going forward is to ask for reflective updates on their work, alongside any practical updates we need to talk through and how I can best support them with their work.

Then I can come in with any updates I need to share at the end.

9. Block thinking time

Block time to think, and hold that time sacred.

There’s a lot of thinking and planning that has to be done as a manager, and it can be incredibly difficult to find the space to do that work.

Fridays are usually quiet, so they often become my unintentional thinking days. I need to keep them that way and make sure they don’t fill up with meetings.

10. Continue to remember my power as a manager

People do listen to you in an intense way you never experienced before you became a manager.

This relates to what I said in the first point, and again, something I mentioned in my management lessons learned talk.

I was surprised when I learned my words did suddenly hold more authority when I became a manager. I need to keep remembering that and remind my team of that.

As I said in my talk, it’s sometimes okay for me to make ‘the executive decision’ in my team because sometimes a decision needs to be made, and I’m the person to do it.

But I need my team to remember that I’m not an all-knowing being and to not take my word as gospel. Every direction I give and decision I make is open to critique. I’m here to be challenged.

10 books in 2023

This is my tenth and final book recap as part of my 2023 goal to read 10 books this year.

Read my post on why I set this reading goal