CTech's Book Review: Being honest with yourself and your team

Lior Wilczynski is the Co-Founder and CEO at GreenInvoice, an invoicing and business management service. She has joined CTech to share a review of “Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean” by Kim Scott.

Title: “Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean”
Author: Kim Scott
Format: Audiobook
Where: Other

Lior Wilczynski, Co-Founder and CEO at GreenInvoice

Summary:

The book is talking about how to be a great manager and colleague. We need to build and cultivate relationships and care personally to be good bosses. To find what motivates your employee and care for him personally. To challenge others in their job, to help your employees to find meaning in what they do. Kim talks in her book about how to create the best conditions where people can do the best work in their careers and love doing it.

Important Themes:

People wish to succeed in their life, work, and relationships. As a manager, our mission is to find a way to motivate people, guide them, and be guided. To succeed in it, you need to care personally, to build a relationship with your people. To encourage them to give guidance (I, as a manager, also need feedback and to enable them to feel free to give it to me) and receive guidance. You need to challenge your employees directly.

To praise in public and criticize in private. You need to be very clear about what's going wrong and what's going right. Kim writes in her book that criticizing your employees when they screw up is not just your job; it's your moral obligation. You have to tell people when you think they're wrong or their work isn't good enough.

Scott talks about the alternative when not using radical candor:

• Ruinous Empathy
• Obnoxious Aggression
• Manipulative Insincerity

If you do not care personally, your criticism can be obnoxious aggression. If you're a jerk, you can be manipulative. And if it's hard for you to criticize and you think you'll hurt your employee's feelings, you need to know that your management is ruinous empathy, and you'll ruin the chance of your employee to be excellent in his/her job, and your ruinous empathy will damage your teamwork.

What I’ve Learned:

I’ve learned that I need to be honest with myself and always tell the truth to my employees about their work. You need always remember to criticize the work and not the person. Maybe you did a lousy job, but it doesn’t mean you’re a terrible person.

I need to encourage my whole team and managers to be radically candid. This is the only way to help each other to strive for excellence. I need to make sure that everyone on my team feels they can criticize their boss and me. I need to let them feel comfortable making a mistake and getting feedback and guidance about it.

Who Should Read This Book:

Everyone who manages people and is responsible for teams.

It's not easy to criticize people; it's always unpleasant. This book shows how destructive this unpleasantness can be, where it can lead, and how critical it is, to tell the truth, but in the right way.