Why Leading a Remote Team Requires Radical Candor

How to build better relationships with your team when everyone’s stressed out and miles away

Kim Scott
Marker
Published in
7 min readApr 3, 2020

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A woman closing her eyes in thought while sitting in front of her laptop at home.
Photo: Westend61/Getty Images

WWhether you run a company, lead a team, or just find yourself navigating the challenges of working with others at a moment of uncertainty and social distance, it’s obvious why it’s important to care personally about your colleagues now more than ever.

But caring is only one half of the formula we need to keep our teams and organizations functioning. If we are to not only endure but prevail in these times, we need to know how to challenge one another, too.

Teams everywhere are facing unprecedented challenges, and it’s tempting not to share scary information when there is already so much bad news.

Radical Candor” is what happens when you care personally and challenge directly at the same time. It’s easy to fall into the trap of ignoring one of these at the expense of the other, or feel the temptation to withdraw into ourselves and do neither.

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Kim Scott
Marker

Kim Scott is the author of Radical Candor & Radical Respect and co-founder of Radical Candor which helps teams put the ideas from the book into practice.