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

by Kim Malone Scott

Corrections, factual observations, disagreements, and debates are different from criticism. It’s vital to be able to correct somebody’s work, to make a factual observation, or to have a debate in public. But criticizing a person should be done in private—“

It is not your moral obligation to criticize your boss if it will cost you your job. If you find you cannot be Radically Candid with your boss, I recommend that you consider finding a new job with a new boss. But do it on your own terms. Don’t get fired. Protect yourself.

Give your boss a chance to challenge you, but assume good intent. If you get some positive signals, try getting and then giving some guidance.

If your boss says no, or that’s not your job, let it drop and polish up your résumé! If your boss says yes, start with something pretty small and benign and see how they react. If they react well and reward the candor, keep going. If they don’t, give up immediately or assume ill intent. Try again, carefully, but if you get the same reaction the next time, it may be time to move on. You deserve a better boss.

A strong leader has the humility to listen, the confidence to challenge, and the wisdom to know when to quit arguing and to get on board.

you find you have this reluctance, don’t beat yourself up. Just remember, if you’re a boss, it’s your job to manage your fear of tears and not pull your punches when criticizing women. Criticism is a gift, and you need to give it in equal measure to your male and female direct reports.

But if teachers and bosses become wary of exposing students or employees to facts that might be perceived as “threatening” or “disturbing” due to their fear of reprisals, both schools and companies are in trouble. Combine that with gender politics, and learning takes a real hit.

We must stop gender politics.

Context matters, but the context of gender politics and gender bias is becoming untouchable—to everyone’s detriment.

Really imagine a man on your team doing exactly the same thing the woman did. Now, how would you react? If you’d react differently, you’re about to fall into the trap.

Never stop challenging directly. Too often, the advice to women who are perceived as abrasive (or worse) is to stop challenging directly. This is almost always the wrong answer. You must challenge directly to be successful.

if he’d been another man, I might have been tempted to commit the fundamental attribution error—to write him off as hopeless, a misogynist, a sexist pig, or some other epithet. Don’t do that. Because it won’t help you solve the problem. Just keep challenging directly and showing you care personally until they get it.

Four people is about the right size for an interview committee. Ideally, the interviewing committee is diverse.

Make interviews productive by jotting down your thoughts right away. Write down your interview feedback; doing that is as clarifying for you as it is for the rest of the committee, and it will result in better hiring decisions.

Here’s a tip: schedule an hour, interview for forty-five minutes, and write for fifteen.

The best advice I ever got for hiring somebody is this: if you’re not dying to hire somebody, don’t make an offer.

And, even if you are dying to hire somebody, allow yourself to be overruled by the other interviewers who feel strongly the person should not be hired.

You don’t want to fire a person out of anger, and you don’t want to fail to fire a person out of denial. Many people get lost in their own heads around this highly charged issue; your boss and your peers can help you think more clearly.

You have a relationship with the person you’re about to fire. You still give a damn about this person. Think hard about how to do it in a way that will make it easiest on them—even if it makes it harder on you, or if you have to take some risks.

When you have to fire people, do it with humility. Remember, the reason you have to fire them is not that they suck. It’s not even that they suck at this job. It’s that this job—the job you gave them—sucks for them.

Announcing promotions breeds unhealthy competition for the wrong things: documentation of status rather than development of skill.

The importance of the simplest things, like thank-yous, are most often forgotten by bosses—even good bosses.

1s are valuable meetings for your direct reports to share their thinking with you and to decide what direction to proceed with their work. They are also valuable meetings for you, because these meetings are where you’ll get your first early warning signs that you are failing as a boss.

Cancellations. If people who report to you cancel 1:1s too often, it’s a sign your partnership is not fruitful for them, or that you’re using it inappropriately to dispose of criticism you’ve been stockpiling.

My advice is that you schedule in some think time, and hold that think time sacred. Let people know that they cannot ever schedule over it. Get really, seriously angry if they try. Encourage everyone on your team to do the same.

At least part of the friction and frustration in a lot of meetings results from the fact that half the room thinks they are there to make a decision, the other half to debate. The would-be deciders are furious that the debaters don’t seem to be driving toward an answer. The would-be debaters are furious that the deciders are refusing to think things through carefully enough, to consider every angle of the argument. When everybody knows that the meeting will end with no decision, this source of tension is eliminated.

The sole product of the debate should be a careful summary of the facts and issues that emerged, a clearer definition of the choices going forward, and a recommendation to keep debating or to move on to a decision.

The simple act of being explicit and conscious about when I’m deciding versus when I’m debating is the single most helpful way to figure out when a decision really needs to be made. That’s the main reason why I recommend two separate meetings.

Being ruthless about making sure your team has time to execute is one of the most important things you can do as a boss.

Too often a boss is the last to know when something is going wrong. The reason is generally not because people are intentionally hiding problems, but because they only want to bring the important things to your attention. But a problem may be more important than they realize.

"CULTURE EATS STRATEGY for lunch.”* A team’s culture has an enormous impact on its results, and a leader’s personality has a huge impact on a team’s culture. Who you are as a human being impacts your team’s culture enormously.

Given the level of scrutiny you’re under as the boss, it’s important to clarify what you’re saying—even when you think you’re not saying anything.

Tell your stories to your team. Show some vulnerability. Your personal stories will explain, better than any management theory, what you really mean and show why you really mean it.

once you build Radically Candid relationships with the people who report to you, you will eliminate a terrible source of misery in the world: the bad boss.

Relational awareness doesn’t mean what you have to say is never upsetting to the other person; it does mean you need to learn how to see when you’ve upset someone and to show that you care even when what you have to say may be hard to hear.

The goal of soliciting feedback is not only to help you be more self-aware, but also to create an atmosphere in which all employees feel sufficient psychological safety to give each other Radically Candid feedback.

Another great time to solicit feedback is when people are really angry with you. It’s instinctive to avoid people when they are mad, but this is the moment when you’re most likely to hear the unvarnished truth.

Don’t ask questions that can be answered with a yes or a no.

If you have a tendency toward perfectionism, remind yourself that you’re human and you’re going to make mistakes; in fact, that’s how you get better. Work on developing a “Not Yet” mindset,

So much of putting Radical Candor into practice is being able to move through social awkwardness.

When someone offers you criticism, they are taking a risk. It’s your job to make sure they are rewarded for taking that risk, or they won’t do it again. We’ve found the best way to reward valuable feedback is to address the problem quickly or explain clearly why you can’t and seek a work-around.

When you’re leading a team, criticism is like your brake and praise is like your accelerator. If you want to go somewhere, you’ve got to use your accelerator more than your brake. If you never use your brake you crash and never get anywhere. And you’ll feel safer pressing your accelerator if you know your brakes work.

The goal of guidance is to help others succeed, not to prove how smart you are.

Good praise is specific and sincere, and inspires others rather than making odious comparisons.

An empty “great job!” can sound condescending and be demoralizing, exactly the opposite effect than you may have intended. Specific praise helps the person and the team understand what success looks like.

Often just naming an emotion can help a person feel seen. Our tendency in the face of negative emotions is to pretend they aren’t happening. Ignoring emotions makes the other person feel invisible or invalidated—not a good way to show you care.

Eliminate “don’t take it personally” from your vocabulary! When all else fails, a simple response to negative emotions is to ask, “How can I help?”

The biannual or annual review is performance management, which is different from developmental feedback! Radical Candor is mostly about developmental feedback, which has to occur regularly—ideally every week—in impromptu two-minute chats. You risk undermining all of your hard work spent making your culture more Radically Candid if you conflate development and performance management.

it would be unfair to promote incompetence or to pay the person who’s doing sloppy work the same bonus as the person who is doing excellent work.

arbitrariness is the enemy, fairness is the goal. The whole point of performance reviews is to demonstrate to employees that you are committed to maintaining a fair system for compensating their work, and that doing so is an integral part of achieving the company’s mission.