Radical Candor
Title: Radical Candor
Author: kim scott
Quote
“Your role will be to encourage the process of listening, clarifying, debating, deciding, persuading, and executing to the point that it’s almost as if your team shares one mind when it comes to completing projects, and then learning from their results.” - pg. 200
Why I like it:
While this book is most well know for Kim’s recommendations for creating a culture of feedback, I also really love her meeting recommendations and how to scale this process after setting up radically candid relationships. She outlines multiple meeting types for different parts of the “Get Stuff Done” wheel.
1:1 conversations
Staff meeting
Think Time
Big debate meeting
Big decision meeting
All Hands
Agile ceremonies
How I use It:
During my time at Lucid, I introduced the “Big Debate” meetings with my teams.
The team were struggling with rushing to decisions and with giving feedback on ideas resulting in tickets sitting in dev for over a week. It was helpful to separate out the discussion of an idea from the decision on how to move forward.
Teams shouldn’t be adding new ideas and immediately executing without time to process. On bug tickets: speed is key. Large New features: let’s take a breath and make sure we understand the problem.
Have an agenda so people know what to prepare and have context for the discussion
Invite the right people - anyone can attend but maybe you need specific team members
Set expectations - Normalize that this meeting is to discuss. Add ideas. And disagree!
Create space for disagreement - if people start converging too quickly ask that they take the opposite view and start looking at why this idea would not work or things we need to avoid doing. It can be helpful to include this in any project templates.
Rotate facilitators and owners for different decisions to create engagement with the group
Trying to get people to explicitly disagree with each other was really uncomfortable at first. I started by having a single dissenter per topic but it didn’t work with that team. What ended up helping the most was going round robin in the meeting and asking everyone to provide a consideration against an idea. This helped people know what to expect and practice thinking from the opposite view point, especially for those who weren’t used to it. Eventually, people started to get comfortable with each other, have better discussions, and ran into fewer issues on tickets.
Honestly, rereading this book now, it I need to apply this to some of my meetings at Appfolio. Meeting purposes can drift as time goes by and teams change. I’ll be revisiting these ideas as we start to look at 2025 planning.
