Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Malone ScottMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Kim Scott has worked at Google and Apple. The book is the collection of her experiences from there as well as her management beliefs packaged into an advice for managers.
At times, overly simplistic (yes, you need to provide feedback and encourage receiving it; yes, you need to organise and lead well-planned meetings) and repetitive, it nevertheless is a rather good management book in my view. Some of the lessons I take from it:
Radical candor: provide direct feedback and care personally thereby. You need both. Providing feedback without caring is obnoxious. Caring and never challenging directly is ruinous empathy.
How to fire people so that it is right for you, for the person in question and for the others? "When you fire someone, you create the possibility for the person to excel and find happiness performing meaningful work elsewhere. Part of getting a good job is leaving a bad one, or one that’s bad for you." and "Retaining people who are doing bad work penalizes the people doing excellent work. Failing to deal with a performance issue is not fair to the rest of the team."
Driving results collaboratively by "Get Stuff Done" wheel: Listen-Clarify-Debate-Decide-Persuade-Implement-Learn-Listen. Every step needs to be taken separately to ensure the best results.
"Loud listening": the best type of listening and debating culture in organisation is “strong opinions, weakly held”.
A distinction between "Big Debate" and "Big Decision" meetings: sometimes it is useful to have both kinds, separately, in that order.
Managing decision-making: "Don’t grab a decision just because the debate has gotten painful. A boss’s job is often to keep the debate going rather than to resolve it with a decision."
The right way to provide feedback is using technique “situation behavior impact”: 1) the situation you saw, 2) the behaviour (i.e. what the person did, either good or bad), 3) the impact you observed. This helps avoid making judgements about the person's intelligence, common sense, innate goodness, or other personal attributes.
Another useful tip on providing feedback: "Don’t “save up” guidance for 1:1 or a performance review."
Planned think time: "In addition to regularly planned meetings, people are going to want to talk to you about this or that; urgent matters will arise that you must deal with. You need time to clarify your own thinking, or to help the people who work for you clarify theirs. You should not be tyrannised by your calendar."
