★★★☆☆
Radical Candor by Kim Scott says most behavior by bosses falls into one of four quadrants: ruinous empathy, radical candor, manipulative insincerity, or obnoxious aggression. As the book title suggests, the most effective relationship between a supervisor and an employee is based on radical candor, defined as caring personally and challenging directly.
This book had some useful nuggets about why too much empathy can be harmful. Scott presented evidence that “most people prefer the challenging jerk to the boss whose niceness gets in the way of candor.” As someone who can slip into the ruinous empathy category if I’m not vigilant, the reminders of the problems this behavior can cause were good.
I also appreciated the references to continued personal and professional growth and wish this had been explored more in the book. I subscribe to Scott’s philosophy of “that which does not grow, rots.” The reminder to ask myself: “What do I need to learn in order to move in the direction of my dreams?”
However, in the spirit of being radically candid, this book does have its flaws. Like most leadership or management books, the advice was repetitive. Several times, I thought, “Alright, already, how much more can we talk about ruinous empathy?”
“Ruinous Empathy is responsible for the vast majority of management mistakes I’ve seen in my career.”
Kim Scott, Radical Candor
Scott also namedrops a lot, using examples from Steve Jobs, Sheryl Sandberg, and Larry Page. In most cases, these references were from her personal experiences working with these individuals. Still, it gave the advice an inaccessible, unrelatable feel since most of us will never work for famous managers like this. Many solutions and examples in the book work best for those who lead teams in large, well-resourced organizations. For example, Kim details when she talked to Sandberg about the challenges of getting pregnant while traveling to manage her team. Sandberg offered to fly the employees to her instead. Most organizations don’t have the resources to fly multiple employees across the country, so their manager could focus more on starting a family.
Ultimately, I felt like I could have read a few articles about this book or watched a TedTalk and gotten as much from it as I did reading the entire book.