How to manage without loosing humanity
Bad bosses are one of the major sources of unhappiness in the world and problems in the workplace.
Among the modern nonfiction literature, there are rather little applied literature that is really helpful for middle managers to learn about how to manage a team. That is not a surprise — books are often written by people who are far from practice, or by brutal and tough CEOs like Jack Welch.
Kim Scott, the author of Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, is an exception. Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and other tech companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University and before that led AdSense, YouTube, and DoubleClick teams at Google.
The author is quite self-critical, despite the whole experience: a number of workplace problems has been lived through the hard way, not taken from the side. That is the main message — there is no shame in admitting if you still need to learn how to manage teams, because it isn’t easy even for those who seems to be successful.
The book has two parts: in the first one, Kim outlines the methodology for Radical Candor; in the second one, she doles out random advice on common topics.
According to the author, the management process is divided into three parts: guidance through critique or praise, team building and delivery monitoring.
Providing guidance is effective only when the manager is involved in the staff development. The highest form of this involvement is tidy but timely critique that makes employees be better. The question is what we can do to this critique to be delivered how to deliver.
Kim offers four options, one of which is the coolest, the second is acceptable, and the other two are failures. So, providing guidance falls into four categories:
- Radical Candor is kind and helpful (the best way),
- Obnoxious Aggression, also called “brutal honesty” or “front stabbing” (acceptable but rough way),
- Ruinous Empathy,
- Manipulative Insincerity (forbidden ways).
To deal with this whole thing, let’s see the book example.
Let’s assume Alex’s fly is down and he doesn’t even know it. You could take him aside to give a quiet word — that is an example of Radical Candor, i.e. how colleagues should communicate with each other.
Publicly humiliate Alex for his open fly is Obnoxious Aggression. Aggression has its benefits: although he will be embarrassed, the problem will be solved and the employee won’t feel like a jerk after several hours passed with the fly open.
However, such an approach will not contribute to the establishment of strong business relationships. When seeing somebody with their fly down, but, not wanting to embarrass them, saying nothing, with the result that 15 more people see them with their fly down — that is an example of Ruinous Empathy.
And finally, if you don’t say anything about the fly out of fear that Alex will stop respecting you or tell his colleagues how strange you are — that is the worst option, Manipulative Insincerity.
In addition to the methodology review, Kim shares very specific advice on sensitive subjects: how to praise and scold your team members, how to hold private meetings, how to get the colleagues level, etc. These are pretty interesting thoughts that will be useful to a wide readership
A noticeable fact: Kim isn’t aware of modern methodologies, such as OKR or Scrum.
Why is this book 11 out of 10 points? Because it is undoubtedly a systematic, rich and powerful modern book on management. If you want to achieve results from the team, you are a good leader. If you want to achieve specific behavior, you are an excellent leader. If you want to create emotions that shape behavior that produces results, you are an undoubted leader.
