Radical Candor

Radical Candor by Kim Scott gives guidance for giving guidance. The Radical Candor, or Radical Compassion, framework outlines the importance of giving and receiving good praise and criticism along with how to do it effectively to create a healthy work culture. Some of the key takeaways I had from the text were the importance of understanding each person on your team, how time and frequency play a role in the effectiveness of guidance, and that feedback is a bidirectional channel.

Kim Scott’s framework is based on the idea that good feedback should both challenge directly and care personally. Based on how well these two characteristics are met, guidance can fall into four categories.

• Ruinous Empathy- Being too empathic to someone by not challenging them. Giving them time to identify and fix their mistakes instead of embarrassing them by pointing them out. This creates conflict when something bad does happen once action must be taken, and the offender finds out that the problem was visible the whole time to management but never brought to their attention so they could fix it.

• Manipulative Insincerity- A toxic behavior where people say something ingenuine to gain favor from someone. Complementing a higher ups decision only to bad mouth the idea to another teammate.

• Obnoxious Aggression- Being overly negative with feedback. Feedback that does not show that the person giving feedback genuinely cares about the person and is trying to help. This behavior can be a result of a miscommunication from either involved party or poor practice from the person giving feedback.

• Radical Candor- Radical Candor is giving personal, honest feedback that’s goal is to help a person improve their performance and reach their goals, both short and long term.

To give praise and criticism that shows that you care personally, you need to know that person personally. Their work metrics reveal nothing important about who they are. Understanding their long-term goals, current values, and who they are outside of work helps this. Scott also identifies rockstars and superstars as the two categories of workers when it comes to work goals. Rock stars are people satisfied with their current role and have a gradual career growth trajectory and super stars are people who have a much higher career growth trajectory. People fluctuate between rock stars and super stars during their careers based on their personal values and knowing what they are allows you to better give them what they need to succeed personally and professionally.

Good praise and guidance should be given as quickly as possible after something happens and as often as possible. It shouldn’t be reserved for 1:1s or weekly meetings because a person may have forgotten about the thing they are getting guidance on or more importantly the person who wanted to say something will forget to say it. Scott recommends the platinum rule when it comes to providing praise and feedback which is to do what is most comfortable for each individual person.

Radical Candor is more than just a way for managers to give criticism but a way for managers to invite criticism on themselves to normalize the behavior and create a better work environment. This is hard and uncomfortable to do at first. Scott brings up Toyota’s red box which was a painted red square that new hires would have to stand in after their first week until they gave three criticisms over the line. Practices like this encourage and normalize giving management criticism.

Praise and criticism are time consuming and require an adjustment period. Even after you think you may have mastered it, it doesn’t matter if the person you’re practicing with doesn’t understand it. If the recipient of praise or criticism believes a comment is ingenuine or harsh it is the job of the conveyer to understand why the recipient feels that way and figure out how to give their message in a helpful manner. This is where I’ve seen the most real struggle in both experiences of giving and receiving feedback.

Radical Candor is not restricted to praise or feedback but is incorporated into the way decisions are made. Scott’s GSD (Get Stuff Done) wheel is a guide for making sure a team makes a decision that everyone understands even if not everyone agrees. I won’t take the time to go through each step in this article here, but I will highlight some points about the process that I found the most insightful. First is the idea of always getting it right which was coined by Steve Jobs. No person always makes the right choice, but they always have the opportunity to make it right. Understanding decisions and debating the options allows that to happen quicker. When something goes wrong, you learn from the mistake and correct it by continuing the cycle. On the subject of making the right decision, there is never a correct way to do something, only the best decision at that time. Not all mistakes are avoidable, and some bad things can happen even if all the correct steps are taken. Lastly was the technique Pixar used called plussing (disgusting word) which disallowed poking holes and tearing apart new ideas before they could be properly formed. Instead, they need to be clarified and solutions to problems with the ideas should be thought up so that ideas get the chance to survive.

Radical Candor was a fairly long but good read. Some aspects I don’t think I’ll need to be too knowledgeable of for a little while like conducting 1:1s and managing performance evals but the ability to give and take good praise and criticism is something that can set me up for performing better now and in the future. I don’t know if I’ll ever be working in a truly radically candid culture, if such a thing exists, but I’m glad that I can try to practice it. I liked the description of sandwiched feedback as a shit sandwich since that’s a perfect summary of the effect I’ve seen it have. The importance of understanding personal motivations really resonated with me as my own motivations are often atypical from my peers. Especially with the field I’m currently in, I’ve seen a stark difference in what’s driving me versus them. Now I have a formula to help me navigate these differences by understanding them and helping them understand me.