Radical Candor: Why ‘Nice’ Leaders Finish Last

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Morning friend ☕️ 

Hope your weekend was good!

Last week, I had an interesting chat with my wife:

“How do you give tough feedback to someone at work?”

Her colleague was not delivering the goods.

She wanted to help them, but was worried about damaging the relationship.

I immediately thought of Kim Scott’s Radical Candor framework.

(I also thought about House and his sarcasm and obnoxiousness).

It’s a model that has been my go-to for communicating in the workplace.

What is it about?

How can you use it to improve your work communication?

Grab your coffee ☕️ 

Let’s chat!

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Who is Kim Scott and What is Radical Candor

Kim Scott is a seasoned Silicon Valley leader, turned author.

She led AdSense and YouTube, at Google, then joined Apple University to develop and teach a leadership course.

She also spent some time as CEO coach at Dropbox, Twitter and other tech companies. Her ideas in Radical Candor draw from her experience running large teams in the tech industry.

I stumbled on this framework soon after she published it back in 2017, and it’s been helping me ever since with delivering feedback effectively.

So, what is Radical Candor?

In simple terms, it is a communication framework for specific and sincere praise and kind and clear criticism.

What are the traps to avoid?

You don’t want to end up delivering feedback on these ends of the scale:

Obnoxious Aggression → Defensiveness

Obnoxious Aggression, is what happens when you challenge someone directly, but don’t show you care about them personally. It’s praise that doesn’t feel sincere or criticism and feedback that isn’t delivered kindly.

Ruinous Empathy → Ignorance

Ruinous Empathy is what happens when you want to spare someone’s short-term feelings, so you don’t tell them something they need to know. You Care Personally, but fail to Challenge Directly. This ultimately unhelpful and even damaging. It’s a feedback fail.

Manipulative Insincerity - Mistrust

Manipulative Insincerity is backstabbing, political or passive-aggressive behavior. It’s what happens when you neither Care Personally nor Challenge Directly. It’s praise that is insincere, flattery to a person’s face and harsh criticism behind their back. Often it’s a self-protective reaction to Obnoxious Aggression. This is the worst kind of feedback fail.

How to practice Radical Candor?

Follow these 4 steps, and you can implement Radical Candor into your management style. Start reaping the benefits of improved feedback and communication with your people:

1. Build the Foundation of Care: Get to know their goals, understand their challenges and show up consistently.

2. Master Direct Challenge: Be specific and helpful in your feedback. Eg. "Your email responses are taking 48+ hours" not "You're slow".

3. Create Safety: Start difficult conversations with "I'm sharing this because I care about your success."

4. Practice on Yourself: Ask your team what you should stop, start, or continue doing. Then actually listen and act.

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Key Takeaway

Radical Candor is a simple, but great model for effective communication and feedback.

It can move you from a command-and-control culture to one of collaboration.

Get to know your people personally and show you care.

Challenge them directly in a helpful way.

That’s it for today folks.

Till next week! ☕️ 

Vaugan

Chess

White to play and force mate

Move the pieces and try to solve here.