Book Review: Radical Candor by Kim Scott

Former Google executive (and by extension, my former Google co-worker) Kim Scott suggests a compelling and intuitive remedy to many performance issues in our organizations. When someone's not cutting it, tell them. But demonstrate you care about that someone long before it comes time to deliver the direct feedback. Scott's book, "Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity" is well-summarized by her catchphrase "care personally, challenge directly." An important read in organizations that struggle with difficult conversations, Radical Candor is especially valuable for these days of asynchronous digital communication and work from home.

The concept of radical candor comes from Scott's 2x2 grid of caring and challenging. When we care personally about our peers and challenge them directly, we exhibit "radical candor." Conversely, to challenge directly without caring personally is to exhibit "obnoxious aggression," something far too common in techy, start-up environments.

Scott suggests that caring personally without challenging directly is an example of "ruinous empathy," a practice that perpetuates poor performance while entrenching a culture of passive aggression and back-stabbing. Finally, to not care and to not challenge directly is to exhibit "manipulative insincerity."

The Radical Candor framework is effective for its simplicity. Anyone who has ever worked in an organization can attest to the times when poor performance went unchallenged. Many can relate to the instances in which the only critical and constructive feedback came from the most aggressive, dislikable personality in the room. But few will be likely to describe a time when a deeply trusted, respected colleague provided timely, meaningful, and actionable feedback. It is likely that we all would benefit from more constructive coaching, not from some anonymous or untrustworthy voice, but from the voicest closest to us. And that is the foundation of Kim Scott's work - to turn us away from passive aggression, while steering us clear of aggression, to inspire us to have the necessary conversations with those whom we admire, respect, and love working with.

Having spent my career in the technology industry, I have plenty of experiences with "ruinous empathy." The tech industry creates desirable workplace cultures because teammates genuinely care for one another. As a co-worker of mine described during a weekend social outing (at an archery range!) during my Google years, we weren't so much co-workers, as we were "a group of close friends who happened to work together."

While this altruistic attitude creates an environment that anyone would want to be a part of, it causes friction in feedback conversations. It's far easier to give necessary criticism to a casual acquaintance or stranger. It's far more challenging to share that same criticism with a colleague that plays on our volleyball team and meets us for a happy hour every Thursday.

"Radical Candor" is effective not just in its diagnosis, but in its prescriptions. The second half of the book includes tools, templates, and conversation starters for implementing radical candor in one's organization. With so many tools for so many scenarios, the ideas of "Radical Candor" can be as meaningful to readers working in the tech as it can be to readers within the non-profit sector. The wisdom of this book can be just as applicable those working for a large enterprise as to those working for a small LLC.

Still, the book is not without opportunities for improvement (would I sincerely be reviewing a book on feedback if I left out areas for development?). At times, the author is prone to name-dropping. One wonders if she, a leader of Google's AdSense organization, really engaged Google execs Larry Page and Eric Schmidt as frequently as the book implies. And while the tools and frameworks in the book's second-half are intriguing, the section makes for slow reading at times. Much of this content would have been better suited for an appendix or as a digital supplement.

The book also skews too far towards addressing "obnoxious aggression." While this quadrant of Kim Scott's framework undoubtedly exists, it's my experience that passive aggression is far more common than aggression, that the real challenge in an asynchronous, virtually-driven workforce is that of ruinous empathy. Further revisions might choose to focus on moving from ruinous empathy to radical/compassionate candor in a distributed workplace.

Finally, using the word "boss" in the title suggests that this is a book about management. It's better understood as a book about conversations. Holding a management position in an org chart is not a prerequisite to reading and applying this book, regardless of what the title might infer. The insights are too important to be confined to those with managerial responsibilities.

Those who invest the time to read this book will be challenged to work more effectively, to become more coach-like, to hold themselves and their colleagues accountable to the highest standards. Amidst this pandemic, many leaders are reexamining the workplace, re-imagining the future of work. During this time of discernment and consideration, it's time to expect the best from one another as we commit to deeply caring for each other. It's never been a better time to put Radical Candor into practice.

What Every Church Leader Should Know about Google My Business

This is the first post in a new series on digital marketing for churches!

For all the attention that churches focus on their website, there's another (easier!) tool that determines how, when, and where you show up in Google's search results.

And no, I'm not talking about Google Ads, or paid listings in the Google search results. I'm talking about Google My Business (formerly Google Places), the app that feeds a church's address, phone number, website, and operating hours into Google's all-powerful search engine. Google My Business (GMB) is a free service that helps organizations to increase website and foot traffic by providing key pieces of information to people searching for local resources.

An animated GIF showing local search results taken from Google My Business

In this article, we'll explore why Google My Business is so critical to a church's online presence, especially during COVID-19, and how you, the church leader, can make the most of this free technology.

Google My Business: An Essential Marketing Tool

Perhaps the fastest-growing category of web searches is for services "near me." When searchers turn to Google for information, they increasingly do so with the intent of finding directions, operating hours, contact information, and customer reviews for nearby businesses and organizations. This matters a great deal for churches.

While searches for "church" have stagnated or declined in the past decade, searches for the query "church near me" have increased by nearly 100x since 2013.

This shapes church marketing tactics because the search term "near me" tells Google to search Google's own local search data, listings that are populated from Google My Business.

From the standpoint of acquiring web traffic, today's church leader will find more value from claiming and optimizing their Google My Business listing than their own website! Unfortunately, 56% of all local organizations (those with some brick-and-mortar presence) have not claimed their Google My Business listing. Among churches, where tech adoption usually lags businesses and other non-profits, this percentage is likely much higher.

The information you include in your church's Google My Business listing will show up on Google.com. It will show up on Google maps. It will tell searchers if your ministry is open or closed. It provides photos, answers user questions, and lists user reviews. It is critical that today's church leader keeps this listing accurate and up to date!

An unclaimed Google My Business listing with little to no information about the church

GMB doesn't require much active maintenance. It's likely far less work than your church website. All you, the church leader, must do is to:

• Claim your listing. You'll need a Google (ie, Gmail) account. Google has thoroughly documented the steps involved in claiming a listing, and they're fairly easy to follow. While it can take several days for Google to complete the verification process, most church leaders I have worked with have no difficulty with this step.

• Ensure an active church leader has access to edit the listing. It's important that an active church leader be listed as a GMB owner, meaning they can make changes when needed. For this reason, it's advisable to log into GMB with a church email address, one that remains within the church during staff transitions. Transferring ownership is, again, a simple process that Google has documented.

• Upload core church information. Add business hours, update addresses and phone numbers, link social media accounts, and include recent photos. Logos, cover photos, and additional photos don't just make your listing more visually appealing, they also help with boosting your ranking in Google's search results.

• Update the listing when you change worship times, operating hours, or contact information.

Updating Google My Business Listings for COVID-19

COVID-19 continues to disrupt church operations, especially with regard to worship. Since your church's Google My Business listing continues to show up in search results, it's critical that this listing accurately reflect current operations. Updating your listing for COVID-19 makes it clear to searchers how they can engage with your ministry, while likely boosting your search rank on Google's search engine.

Some churches have marked themselves as "temporarily closed" on Google My Business. I would advise against this. A "temporarily closed" flag on Google My Business suggests to searchers that your ministry is offering no services at all at the moment, either online or in-person. Unless your ministry has completely shut down (ie, no online worship, no online community whatsoever), you shouldn't use the "temporarily closed" flag.

Instead, use the "Online Attributes" feature within Google My Business to highlight what your ministry is up to online. Online attributes don’t show when a business is marked "Temporarily closed." When logged into your church Google My Business account, navigate to the "Stay connected during COVID-19” dashboard card. You'll have option to provide information about online worship, virtual events, and other aspects of the digital community within your congregation. GMB managers should also consider adding a brief "COVID-19 Post" to provide the search engine with a synopsis of how your ministry has adapted.

What To Do With Reviews

Creating, updating, and changing a listing for COVID might seem daunting, but each of these tasks can be accomplished in one or two sittings. But there's one area of GMB that requires some active maintenance. As a church leader, you'll want to regularly check your Google My Business listing to engage with new reviews. From a user's standpoint, searchers want to click on listings and explore ministries with a high rating. This makes Google more-likely to feature the listings with the highest reviews atop its rankings.

To that end, I recommend the following three practices for handling Google My Business in a way that is empathetic, pastoral, and aligned to the realities of search engine marketing. First, encourage your community to leave a review for your church by clicking the "Write a review" link atop your search listing. Second, regularly respond to most, if not all, reviews. Thank your positive reviewers for their affirming message. Invite your negative reviewers (if you have any) to contact a pastor for a follow-up conversation. Every organization has some negative reviews, churches are no different. What matters is that you try to turn negative reviews into a conversation. Third, flag reviews that are inappropriate or dishonest. Churches can be targets for trolling and cyber-bullying. Take the time to report malicious reviews to Google.

Google My Business does not require hours of active maintenance or strategic thought. It doesn't take a web marketing guru to curate an effective Google My Business listing. By following the steps in this guide, you'll help your ministry to stand out in this digital age, during COVID and beyond.

Book Review: The Advice Trap by Michael Bungay Stanier

Best-selling author Michael Bungay Stanier wastes no time getting to the point in his latest book, "The Advice Trap: Be Humble, Stay Curious & Change the Way You Lead Forever." Whereas business authors often rely on circuitous, indirect reasoning in an attempt to generalize their ideas to as broad an audience as possible, Michael Bungay Stanier jumps right to it: "Your advice doesn't work."

Why the crusade against giving advice? Whether you're a Fortune 500 CEO, a middle manager at a startup, or just starting your career in a frontline position, you likely give advice to friends, to coworkers, to customers. But the advice doesn't work. It doesn't solve problems. It doesn't make our peers, friends, and colleagues wiser, more productive, more autonomous. Not only does the advice not work, but it's also adversely affecting both your performance and the performance of your team. To Bungay Stanier, our propensity to dole out advice freely and excessively is a leading cause of dysfunction within our organizations, one that renders us less engaged, less autonomous, and less happy. Our cultural inclination to sling advice leads to a collective sense of learned helplessness.

For Bungay Stanier, the act of jumping to advice is a tacit statement that we, the advice giver, are "better than the other person." When you give advice, "You're saying they're not smart enough, wise enough, resilient enough, capable enough, competent enough, generous enough, trustworthy enough. You're saying that they're not good enough." Since we don't fully understand the situation of those to whom we are giving advice, since we don't appreciate their context and the scope of the problems, our advice is weak and flimsy at best, condescending at worst. Regardless of intention, our advice is rarely put into practice.

Bungay Stanier argues that our whole tendency to launch into advice-giving comes from our innate need to exert control over a situation. We develop advice-giving habits and even advice-giving cravings. Situating advice in the frameworks of "Atomic Habits" and "The Power of Habit," the book argues that we become wired for advice-giving in response to ambiguity or distress, which in turn triggers a dopamine release leading to repeated advice-giving.

As one might expect from the author of "The Coaching Habit," this book proposes a remedy that relies on coaching. The artful application of seven coaching questions empowers our colleagues to solve problems for themselves, making it all the more likely that they'll actually solve the problem. But it's insufficient to know about these seven questions. What's needed instead is the establishment of a new habit, a new way of relating to our peers, friends, and family. For Bungay Stanier, that new habit is being "coach-like." Not hiring a professional coach, not seeking out coaching training, but gradually integrating "coach-like" behaviors into our practices. Coach-like behaviors include asking questions, staying curious, being comfortable with silence, and clarifying ambiguity. None of these comes easily in a fast-paced, advice-prone culture. But when we find opportunities to be intentional in applying them, we see that they are intrinsically rewarding. And we observe that they actually solve problems, they actually get things done.

That's why "The Advice Trap" is an essential follow-up to "The Coaching Habit," because it shows us what we're up against when we seek to be more coach-like. In turn, it gives us the tools to break through this resistance, the tactics we need to establish a culture of coaches.

Beyond the insightful content, "The Advice Trap" is a fun, laugh-out-loud read. It's the rare business book that you'll actually want to read and apply right away, it's the rare coaching text that you'll want to devour all at once. Through sharp wit, well-used brevity, and innovative type-setting, "The Advice Trap" can easily be read in one or two sittings, just as it can be re-read in brief moments between meetings, when faced with the demands of an uncertain world, when we set an intention to be more coach-like.