Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean

by Kim Malone Scott

Author and Zen Buddhist teacher Joan Halifax explains the relationship between empathy and compassion: “Healthy emotional empathy makes for a more caring world. It can nurture social connection, concern, and insight. But unregulated emotional empathy can be the source of distress and burnout; it can also lead to withdrawal and moral apathy. Empathy is not compassion. Connection, resonance, and concern might not lead to action. But empathy is a component of compassion, and a world without healthy empathy, I believe, is a world devoid of felt connection and puts us all in peril.”*

compassion is empathy plus action.”*

Compassionate Candor engages the heart (care personally) and the mind (challenge directly).

knew from firsthand experience that my response to him—“Radical Candor gets measured not at the speaker’s mouth but at the listener’s ear”—barely scratches the surface of the complexity involved in how we offer one another guidance.

SUCCESSFUL START-UPS often begin with a culture where people challenge one another directly and even fiercely, but also show they care personally. That’s because they start small, involve people who get to know each other really well, and are fighting for survival.

By failing to confront the problem, I’d removed the incentive for him to try harder and lulled him into thinking he’d be fine.

It’s brutally hard to tell people when they are screwing up. You don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings; that’s because you’re not a sadist. You don’t want that person or the rest of the team to think you’re a jerk. Plus, you’ve been told since you learned to talk, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Now all of a sudden it’s your job to say it. You’ve got to undo a lifetime of training. Management is hard.

You can draw a straight line from lack of guidance to a dysfunctional team that gets poor results.

all teams need stability as well as growth to function properly; nothing works well if everyone is gunning for the next promotion.

Every time I feel I have something more “important” to do than listen to people, I remember Leslie’s words: “It is your job!”

We undervalue the “emotional labor” of being the boss.

Bosses guide a team to achieve results.

“Radical Candor” is what happens when you put “Care Personally” and “Challenge Directly” together. Radical Candor builds trust and opens the door for the kind of communication that helps you achieve the results you’re aiming for.

It turns out that when people trust you and believe you care about them, they are much more likely to 1) accept and act on your praise and criticism; 2) tell you what they really think about what you are doing well and, more importantly, not doing so well; 3) engage in this same behavior with one another, meaning less pushing the rock up the hill again and again; 4) embrace their role on the team; and 5) focus on getting results.

When people love their job, the whole team is more successful. The resulting happiness is the success beyond success.

It’s about finding time for real conversations; about getting to know each other at a human level; about learning what’s important to people; about sharing with one another what makes us want to get out of bed in the morning and go to work—and what has the opposite effect.

Eliminate the phrase “don’t take it personally” from your vocabulary—it’s insulting.

“If we have the data about what works, let’s look at the data, but if all we have are opinions, let’s use yours,”

Radical Candor is also not an invitation to nitpick. Challenging people directly takes real energy—not only from the people you’re challenging but from you as well. So do it only for things that really matter. A good rule of thumb for any relationship is to leave three unimportant things unsaid each day.

Radical Candor works only if the other person understands that your efforts at caring personally and challenging directly are delivered in good faith.

“It’s not mean, it’s clear!” has become a management mantra, helping me to avoid repeating the mistake I described in the Introduction, which was not telling Bob when his work wasn’t good enough.

This time, the comment was contextualized, far more personal, and specific. And, this time, Russ said, “Now that was Radically Candid praise!”

Start by getting feedback, in other words, not by dishing it out. Then when you do start giving it, start with praise, not criticism. When you move on to criticism, make sure you understand where the perilous border between Radical Candor and Obnoxious Aggression is.

“How long do you spend making sure you have all the facts right before you criticize somebody? How long do you spend making sure you have all the facts right before you praise somebody?” Ideally you’d spend just as long getting the facts right for praise as for criticism.

From the moment you learned to speak, you started to challenge those around you. Then you were told some version of “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Well, now it’s your job to say it. And if you are a boss or a person in a position of some authority, it’s not just your job. It’s your moral obligation. Just say it!

In order to build a great team, you need to understand how each person’s job fits into their life goals. You need to get to know each person who reports directly to you, to have real, human relationships—relationships that change as people change.

SHIFTING FROM A traditional “talent management” mind-set to one of “growth management” will help you make sure everyone on your team is moving in the direction of their dreams, ensuring that your team collectively improves over time. Creativity flourishes, efficiency improves, people enjoy working together.

TO BE SUCCESSFUL at growth management, you need to find out what motivates each person on your team. You also need to learn what each person’s long-term ambitions are, and understand how their current circumstances fit into their motivations and their life goals.

your job is not to provide purpose but instead to get to know each of your direct reports well enough to understand how each one derives meaning from their work.

You don’t want to be an absentee manager any more than you want to be a micromanager. Instead, you want to be a partner—that is, you must take the time to help the people doing the best work overcome obstacles and make their good work even better.

It often requires you to help do the work, rather than just advising.

honoring tenure was an important alternative to promotions for people who’d been doing the same job for years.

When you fire someone, you create the possibility for the person to excel and find happiness performing meaningful work elsewhere. Part of getting a good job is leaving a bad one, or one that’s bad for you.

Retaining people who are doing bad work penalizes the people doing excellent work. Failing to deal with a performance issue is not fair to the rest of the team.

First, you have to listen to the ideas that people on your team have and create a culture in which they listen to each other. Next, you have to create space in which ideas can be sharpened and clarified, to make sure these ideas don’t get crushed before everyone fully understands their potential usefulness. But just because an idea is easy to understand doesn’t mean it’s a good one.

Next, you have to debate ideas and test them more rigorously. Then you need to decide—quickly, but not too quickly. Since not everyone will have been involved in the listen-clarify-debate-decide part of the cycle for every idea, the next step is to bring the broader team along. You have to persuade those who weren’t involved in a decision that it was a good one, so that everyone can execute it effectively. Then, having executed, you have to learn from the results, whether or not you did the right thing, and start the whole process over again.

I found that they were much more likely to say what they really thought—even if it wasn’t what I was hoping to hear—when I was careful not to show what I thought.”

If quiet listening involves being silent to give people room to talk, loud listening is about saying things intended to get a reaction out of them.

Loud listening—stating a point of view strongly—offers a quick way to expose opposing points of view or flaws in reasoning. It also prevents people from wasting a lot of time trying to figure out what the boss thinks. Assuming that you are surrounded with people who don’t hesitate to challenge what you say, stating it clearly can be the fastest way to get to the best answer.

most importantly, it encouraged people to listen to each other’s ideas, to take them seriously, and to help one another implement them without waiting for management’s blessing. It’s so easy to lose “small” ideas in big organizations, and if you do you kill incremental innovation.

If you can build a culture where people listen to one another, they will start to fix things you as the boss never even knew were broken.

ONCE YOU’VE CREATED a culture of listening, the next step is to push yourself and your direct reports to understand and convey thoughts and ideas more clearly. Trying to solve a problem that hasn’t been clearly defined is not likely to result in a good solution; debating a half-baked idea is likely to kill it. As the boss, you are the editor, not the author.

Be clear in your own mind Create a safe space to nurture new ideas

While we know our subject matter, we may fail to know the person to whom we are explaining the subject, and therefore may fail to get our idea across.

Choosing what to select, what to eliminate, and what to emphasize depends not only on the idea but on the audience.

The essence of making an idea clear requires a deep understanding not only of the idea but also of the person to whom one is explaining the idea.

Make sure that individual egos and self-interest don’t get in the way of an objective quest for the best answer.*

If you’ve gotten to know each person on your team well enough, you’ll be sufficiently aware of everyone’s emotions and energies so that you’ll know when it’s necessary to step in and defer the debate till people are in a better frame of mind.

it was clear that he’d skipped the important steps of “listen,” “clarify, “debate,” and “decide” and instead gone straight to “persuade” mode.

“What did you do to address their emotions?”