As a student of Instructional Design and Program Management, I found this book to be a useful benchmark on what it means to be an effective manager or boss. It was very insightful and includes extensive user content to implement in your own situation.

A must-read for anyone who works with anyone. All leadership should be devouring this book on a regular cadence.

Love the idea of Radical Candor but I believe the book could've been written better.

Giving the rating for the audiobook. Good tips and techniques. Narration was grating and really took away from the value.

This book is packed with real life examples of good management (and poor) from big companies everyone knows. Those examples are the most valuable part of the book. What I liked most about the author’s advice is that she undergirds every lesson with the importance of creating real connection with staff and starting any question over performance with what the manager didn’t do well. Feedback is essential for everyone, especially managers. My one complaint about this book is that she doesn’t spend any meaningful time considering her advice alongside DEIB. She does mention — and has great examples, I thought — about the challenges of sexism and feedback in the workplace, but nothing else in terms of diversity. She does apologize for this in her forward (only in the second addition, which she wrote after feedback on the first), but she wrote essentially saying she didn’t have answers. I did find that weak. That aside, I do believe there is a lot of helpful, basic advice here, and she provides productive prospectives, if not nuance, to all situations she covers. I still think it’s worth a read and would recommend to anyone either considering management or feeling disempowered or disengaged with their current management position. My advice is just to adopt the perspective that we’re not inclusive / creating an environment where everyone feels comfortable sharing feedback… unless a full 100% of people are participating in the feedback loops.

I really like this concept of radical candor vs. ruinous empathy and how/why to convey feedback, how to make it habitual and take the tension out of huge planned feedback sessions, etc. As always, frustrating that the advice is so corporate-office-specific, and also there is a weird tangent about gender that was weird (either omit it or explore the issue with all power imbalances??)

Some good practical management tips, well-structured and more or less jargon-free. Loses a star for the incessant name-dropping and terrible title.