Best of Radical Candor, Vol. 1: Get Stuff Done

A show about how to kick ass at work without losing your humanityThe Radical Candor® approach—Caring Personally while Challenging Directly—can move you from a command-and-control culture to one of collaboration. Developed by Kim Scott, Radically Candid guidance is feedback that’s both kind and clear, specific and sincere.

The Radical Candor Get Stuff Done Wheel: Guide Your Team To Achieve ResultsThe Get Stuff Done Wheel has 7 steps: Listen, Clarify, Debate, Decide, Persuade, Implement, and Learn. When run effectively, the GSD Wheel will enable your team to achieve more collectively than anyone could ever dream of achieving individually.

Listen: Your team should know what the company is trying to achieve, and they likely have some of the best ideas for what your team should be achieving. First, listen to their ideas in trying to figure out which goals your team should be pursuing. If you can build a culture where people listen to one another, they will start to fix things you as the boss never even knew were broken.

Clarify: Remember that new ideas are fragile and therefore easily squished. A critical role a manager can play is to augment the voice of their team by helping the team clarify their ideas and by clarifying the manager’s understanding of the ideas.

Debate: Allowing the team time and space to publicly debate the ideas is a critical step. Guidelines for good debate include making the discussion about the ideas and not about egos. It’s about finding the best answer together, not about who won the debate.

Decide: The best bosses often do not decide themselves, but rather create a clear decision-making process that empowers people closest to the facts to make as many decisions as possible. Not only does that result in better decisions, but it also results in better morale.

Persuade: This isn’t easy, and it’s vital to get it right. Persuasion at this stage can feel unnecessary and make the decider resentful of people on the team who aren’t fully in agreement. The decider has painstakingly gone through the listen, clarify, and debate steps and made a decision. Why doesn’t everyone else get why it’s obvious we should do this—or at least be willing to fall in line? But expecting others to implement a decision without being persuaded that it’s the right thing to do is a recipe for terrible results. And don’t imagine that you can step in and simply tell everyone to get in line behind a decision, whether you have made it or somebody else has.

Implement: As the boss, part of your job is to take a lot of the “collaboration tax” on yourself so that your team can spend more time implementing. The responsibilities you have as a boss take up a tremendous amount of time. One of the hardest things about being a boss is balancing these responsibilities with the work you need to do personally in your area of expertise. Here are the four things I’ve learned about getting this balance right: Don’t waste your team’s time; keep the “dirt under your fingernails;” block time to implement and fight meeting proliferation.

Learn: By the time you’ve reached Learn—the last spot on the Get Sh*t Done Wheel—you and your team have put in a ton of work, you’ve achieved something, and you want it to be great. And it is human nature for us to become attached—often unreasonably attached—to projects we’ve invested a lot of time and energy into. It can take almost superhuman discipline to step back, acknowledge when our results could be a lot better or are simply no good, and learn from the experience.