#pm_library: “Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity”
At #pm_library, I’d like to share a true gem: “Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity” by Kim Scott. An extraordinary book about team management.
Although Product Managers aren’t usually the direct bosses of any teams members, they are responsible for the working atmosphere in teams and their results. Therefore, “team leadership” is one of the essential skills for a PM position.
The primary advice repeated many times by Kim Scott is: “care personally and challenge directly.” Depending on how you care personally and challenge directly, you can place your relationship with the team in one of the four quadrants: Ruinous Empathy, Manipulative Insincerity, Obnoxious Aggression, and Compassionate Candor (see the photo illustrating my post). The author thoroughly presented each type of relationship, discussing its advantages and disadvantages.
Of course, the desired relationship is Compassionate Candor. In the book, you will find many tips that will allow you to get there: how to build trust in a team, how to conduct meetings (1:1’s, staff meetings, all hands), how to avoid burnout and boredom.
Kim Scott explains everything using stories from her career, including when she worked for Google and Apple. Thanks to this, the book is not only practical but also fascinating.
At many managerial pieces of training, I have heard that avoiding giving negative feedback or sometimes firing people causes the most damage to people who should listen to it or be dismissed. I have always believed that this was just kind of talk to make these problematic topics more accessible. I had to read “Radical Candor” to truly understand the negative consequences of postponing these decisions.
This book surely can make you a kick-ass boss without losing your humanity. But for me, it has a small bonus. After reading it, you look at your relationship with your current and past superiors differently. If you have had a great boss, you can appreciate it, even if you cannot be sure they are. You deserve one of those.
