Wikipedia defines “tough love” as an expression used when someone treats another person harshly or sternly with the intent to help them in the long run. In most uses, there must be some actual love or feeling of affection behind the harsh or stern treatment to be defined as tough love.
That’s the general idea behind the article “Radical Candor – The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss”. If you are a frontline sales manager and, especially, if you are a first-time manager, this article is a must-read.
Here are the big ideas:
- The single most important thing a manager can do is focus on giving, receiving, and encouraging guidance.
- Guidance is nothing more than praise or criticism.
- We fear giving and getting feedback. We love giving and getting guidance.
- ‘Radical Candor’ results from combining genuinely caring personally for the individual’s well-being and development while challenging directly when the moment warrants it.
- Core concept: criticizing your employees when they screw up is not just your job, it’s your moral obligation.
- Radical candor is humble + helpful + immediate + in-person (private if criticism and in public if praise) + about the behavior not the person
- To drive team-wide commitment, encourage the whole team to be radically candid
- Seek opportunities for impromptu feedback
- Push for radical candor every day
- Make sure that everyone on your team feels they can criticize the manager
To be an effective sales manager you need to be a great coach. To do this, you need to set high activity, behavior, and performance standards and employ the combination of “tough” and “love” to help your salespeople achieve them.
A word of caution: Be careful not to error on leaning on one approach versus the other. All tough creates unnecessary stress for you and the team. All love results in no sense of commitment or accountability. Think about the best managers and if you played sports the best coaches you’ve had that brought out the best in you. I’ll bet that they were masters at applying the artful mix of tough and love.
Kim Scott, the author of the article and a book by the same title, offers a framework to help make “radical candor” your default coaching style. You’ll find details including a video here.
With whom on your team do you have an opportunity or, better put, a responsibility to provide a strong dose of tough love?
One comment
Comment by Katie Brunette on October 10, 2017 at 7:29 PM
Dan – love your points here. I currently work at Lessonly, a start-up tech company where radical candor is the foundation of our culture. I’ve never worked anywhere with this mindset before and it has been one of the most rewarding job of my career. One of our core values is to critique with love, which is something you touch on here.
My manager has been done a great job of leading with candor. He definitely embodies all of the points you made above. We utilize every other 1:1 to focus on a leadership topic to help me prepare to lead my own team someday. The topic for this week is having difficult conversations. This article has helped me prepare for that discussion!
I love defining the difference between guidance and feedback, and how guidance can be both praise and criticism. The point that resonated with me most was “Radical candor is humble + helpful + immediate + in-person (private if criticism and in public if praise) + about the behavior not the person” – it’s a great reminder that when you have these difficult conversations, it’s about the behavior, not the person. Keeping this in mind will help me as I grow and develop into a leader. Thank you!
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