Kim Scott

This author has written 66 articles
Radical Candor

6 Ways to Roll Out Radical Candor Like a Boss

We love working closely with teams rolling out Radical Candor, and offer coaching, training and customized workshops. We can help teach you to: Share the ideas with your team and learn how to tell your feedback stories; Practice key skills like soliciting feedback, offering meaningful praise, and giving helpful criticism; and Create a culture of guidance so that all the burden of feedback doesn’t fall on your shoulders. We also work with leaders to help you build more cohesive teams…

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Humble Feedback

How to Give Humble Feedback

Here’s a question that I get pretty often: “How can I be more humble?” The first time a person in a class I was teaching asked about how to give humble feedback, I sat there with my mouth hanging open. It was all I could do not to break into the song from the 70s show HeeHaw. “Oh lord, it’s hard to be humble, when you’re perfect in every way!” How can you answer a question like that? I didn’t…

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Radical Candor Feedback

11 Ways to Get Feedback From Others

To be really great at feedback you have to get it, give it, and encourage it. All of those things feel weird to do at first, but there are some easy things you can do to make them feel much more natural. As a manager who wants to start introducing Radical Candor on your team, we suggest that you start by asking for feedback from your team. In this post, we’ll share some tips for managers who want to get…

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Radical Candor Managers

Don’t Give Feedback About Personality

There is a big difference between Caring Personally and giving praise or criticism about somebody's personality. The final tip in our HIP approach to feedback is that Radically Candid praise and criticism is not about personality. It’s about the work, not the person. People can't alter their personality, so saying things like "You're a jerk" or "You’re sloppy" is neither kind nor does it provide specifics to make the direct challenge clear. Saying "you’re a genius" when somebody does great work…

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Radical Candor Emotional Reaction

5 Things to Do When You Disagree With Feedback

Around the time the first edition of the book came out, Helen Rumbelow wrote an article about Radical Candor. I really enjoyed talking with Helen, and was so happy that she immediately understood the difference between Radical Candor and Obnoxious Aggression. Reading Helen’s article, I also realized that I haven’t talked nearly enough about what to do when you disagree with feedback you get. By not explaining this clearly enough, I have given Helen the impression that pretty much all…

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Radical Candor Obnoxious Aggression

6 Tips for Giving Helpful Feedback

The best feedback is Radically Candid. It Challenges Directly while showing you Care Personally. To make that easier to do, we break it down and say that Radical Candor is HIP: Humble, Helpful, Immediate, In person, Public praise/Private criticism, not Personalized. But, what do we mean when we say "helpful?" Techniques for delivering Helpful feedback can help you think before you speak. 1. Get clear about how you intend to help Take a moment to think through the reason why you…

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Encourage Feedback

5 Ways to Encourage Feedback Between Others

It’s a lot easier to lead by example than it is to change other people’s behavior. If you want to encourage feedback between the people on your team, you're going to have to create an environment where people fee safe and encouraged to give real feedback. When I was at Google, rather than focusing on “giving feedback” to my team, I encouraged them to tell me when I was wrong. I did everything I could to encourage people to criticize…

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Constructive Feedback

The Problem with "Constructive Feedback"

A question that we’ve gotten from a number of readers is: I tried to give X constructive feedback, but then X got all defensive. How can I get through to X? When a person begins a conversation by saying or even just thinking, “I’ve got some constructive feedback for you,” the other person’s defenses go up right away. There are three problems with the way that’s phrased. The first is the construction of the sentence--basically, “I’m gonna tell you a…

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Candor

The 3 Best Leadership Traits for Managing Through a Crisis

There’s no manual for how to lead your team through a pandemic like COVID-19. Most people in the workforce today have never lived through a global crisis of this magnitude, so it can be difficult to know what you’re getting right and what you’re getting wrong.  While there’s a lot we don’t know, there are a few things we know for sure: Everyone will remember how their boss responded during this crisis, and getting your team to challenge you can…

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Antiracist

6 Steps the Radical Candor Team is Taking to Be Antiracist

We have been compelled by recent, tragic events — including the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, as well as the disproportionate toll of COVID-19 on Black, Indigenous and People of Color — to take a hard look at ourselves and ask, how has Radical Candor contributed to systemic racism and what specific steps will we take to be part of the solution? For a company committed to helping everyone kick ass at work without losing their…

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