BookYol

Concept

Radical candour

Radical candour is Kim Scott's name for feedback that both cares personally and challenges directly: the manager gives a damn about the person and says the hard thing clearly to their face. Of her four quadrants, it is the one in which, she argues, people improve.

Scott's two axes produce four quadrants. Challenge without caring is obnoxious aggression, the manager who is right and cruel. Neither caring nor challenging is manipulative insincerity, the false praise and the feedback given to a third party. Caring without challenging is ruinous empathy, the silence that feels kind. Radical candour is the fourth corner, and the order of the words matters: the caring has to be real and visible before the challenge lands, which is what regular one-on-ones are for. Then the challenge. Scott's model is the feedback her own boss at Google, Sheryl Sandberg, gave her after a presentation that had gone well: that she said 'um' so often it made her sound stupid, and that a speech coach would help. It was specific, prompt and about the behaviour and its effect, and it came with the reason, which was that Sandberg wanted her to succeed. Radical candour is not bluntness as a personality; it is the discipline of saying the true thing to someone you have shown you care about, and of asking them to do the same to you.

A real-life example

A product manager in Ankara has watched a capable analyst present unclear dashboards to clients for two months, and has said 'looks fine' each time. She books twenty minutes, tells him that clients leave the meetings unsure which number matters, shows him two slides where it happened, and says why she is raising it: she wants him to lead client reviews next year. He redesigns the dashboards that week.

How to use it

  1. 1Build the caring first, in one-on-ones, by listening to what someone wants from their work.
  2. 2Say the hard thing about the behaviour and its effect, and add why: because I want you to succeed here.
  3. 3After each hard conversation, ask which quadrant you were in; silence is a quadrant too.