Hi, my name is Mark Mitford. I spent 20 plus years working as a high level HR executive in corporate America with many fortune five hundreds and several middle market sized companies. If you're a small business owner, CEO, or any other professional, given the task of solving your company's HR issues, then you're in the right place today . You talk about a book that I actually did with a client and walk their leadership team through that in a good part of 2020. So I wanted to focus on that.
The book is Radical Candor by Kim Scott. I would tell you that if you haven't checked out that book, then I would highly advise you take a look at it. It's, it's a fairly straightforward read. And for those of you that love to read good books on leadership that really , uh , present something that's fairly innovative and very insightful, I would highly recommend it. So let's jump into this.
So the key thing is here that Kim's model is really focused on for leaders working with employees, it's really focused on two basic concepts. It's really focused on caring, personally, caring for your employees as individuals, and then also challenging them directly. I think through my years in working in corporate America, one of the hardest things to do is actually challenging your employees directly.
So many times, I think that employee managers would come in and leaders would come to me, very frustrated that so-and-so's not doing that, and so-and-so's not doing this and how frustrated they are. And then we talk about, well, what kind of feedback have you given them? And it's, it's so hilarious because a lot of times the feedback they give is just so , uh, intangible and nebulous while I tell them to try to work harder.
And I tell them to be more of a team player, I'm like, okay, if you were an employee and I asked you to work harder or be more of a team player, what do you, how do you actually action that? How do you make that actionable, actionable and change your behavior by doing something like that? If I was that employee and the manager told me to do that, I would have no clue.
And that's one of the key things that Kim, the basis of what Kim says is really by challenging, directly tell the person exactly what they did wrong.
And that's huge because so many times, I think, as a leader, and I'm sure many of you have been in leadership roles, whether you run your own business or you've had a leadership role or managerial role, you may feel like you're giving really good feedback, but I would guarantee you that 90% of the time, your feedback is very, it's almost like oatmeal. It's kind of blamed unless you put something in it. So make sure when you give feedback to your employees be specific.
And that's one of the key things that employees want. If they're doing something wrong, I always go back to the premise that, you know, 98, 90 9% of your employees want to do the right thing. They to work hard and they want to actually give a lot of time, effort, and energy into their job. And so you owe it to them to give them direct feedback . If they're screwing something up, if they're not doing the greatest job, tell them exactly what good looks like and make sure you give it to them.
In very specific terms. I won't go into details on what that looks like here, but depending on their role, just making sure that, you know, I was thinking of , first of all, if they're in customer service and they have to answer a phone, it's a tough job. I actually did customer service , uh, years and years ago before I started my career. Uh, but I was on a phone and 800 number and the phone rang and rang.
So making sure that they are pleasant, they have a pleasant voice that they are taking care of the issues. And there's always, when we talk about customer service, there's, you know, sometimes you get off the phone and you've had a really pleasant experience with that person. They're actually empathetic. They'd sell it. They tell you that I understand how frustrated you are by this. I may help you fix the problem. And that's probably somebody who's received a huge amount of training.
Um, so that's one demographic of Kim's model. The other thing, which is just so profound, but again, so painfully simple is caring, personally caring for your employees personally. Again, it sounds so simple. It's like, okay, Kim, what else do you have for us? But the key thing is how much do you know about your employees? Uh , last year.
And again, the company that was working with doing this was really great about this during the height of COVID and the pandemic, they actually asked their employees, and this is a blue collar environment, the client that I'm describing, they actually, so they have a lot of folks who are working hard, working in the field, working outside in the cold and the heat , um, who have a high school education who are being paid hourly, but they would actually find out about what was going on with them,
how their family was doing, how were they doing? And it's amazing how that really helped open up doors because, and a lot of cases, you're, you're instructed to not get, don't get to know your employees too well, because if something happens, you have to fire them, you have to discipline them. Then that could be tough. But the key thing is, if you really understand what the employees about, in some cases there , they had a death in the family from COVID. They had a spouse who lost their job.
They had kids who weren't doing well with online school. And it's amazing. Once you got to know that individual then, and you got to really care for that individual personally, that really made it that much more , uh, easy to actually give them direct feedback, because you knew that person is an individual, just not a number that works for you or a person that you don't even know whether they're married or they have a boyfriend or girlfriend, or they have kids.
If you can do those two simple things, it's amazing how that can actually open up a lot of avenues for you to be a much better, a much better leader within your organization.
It doesn't matter if you have your own small coffee shop or you're a manager or a VP, you as a team of 500 people, if you can actually get to know the individual as a person versus somebody who's just there to do a job, it's amazing how they will open up a new avenue for those individuals to actually , uh , share a lot more things for you.
And , uh, you can actually then challenge them directly, especially if you know, they can do more and they can work harder for you if they're not doing their best job or they're disengaged. As we talked about before around employee engagement, you will know that much on a much better and much greater level than you did before. So those are the two things I would say, but there's so much more meat in here.
I could go on for several hours, but I know you , um, you don't want me to go into too much detail here, but I would just say, if you haven't taken a look at Kim Scott's book, radical candor, check it out. It's a, one of my favorite books now, and we'll do a couple of other book reviews at a later date, but that's what I wanted to share with you right now. So that about covers it For today. Thanks for listening.
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