The Blog: Radical Reading

Read stories and advice to help you bring Radical Candor to life.
Radical Candor Emotional Reaction

Emotional Reactions At Work Are Awkward: Here’s How To Deal

When you’re delivering difficult feedback, even in a caring way, people are likely to get emotional. That’s OK; emotional reactions are normal. While you might be tempted to deliver feedback you know will elicit strong emotions in email, chat, or on the phone to avoid awkwardness, in-person or video conversations are best for two big reasons. The clarity of your feedback gets measured not at your mouth, but at the other person’s ear. So if you can’t see the reaction,…

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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

Applying Radical Candor to Dysfunctional Family Dynamics

This post, Applying Radical Candor to Dysfunctional Family Dynamics, was contributed by one of our readers.  My mother, now deceased, (“K” for respectful privacy) had been moving through her early and middle senior years. Our relationship had never been easy — boundaries are not something she understood or respected. This worsened and became a serious crisis as K encountered financial and relationship troubles. She expected me to instantly solve any issue she encountered, frequently late at night, or in impossible situations…

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Radical Inclusion

Radically Inclusive Virtual Workshops: Real-Time Learnings From Zoom

This post about Radically Inclusive virtual workshops is by Candor Coach Melissa Andrada. As a Candor Coach, I’ve been fortunate to facilitate remote workshops on creating cultures of Radical Candor through a lens of diversity, equity and inclusion for myriad organizations over the past few months. For those facilitating any kind of virtual workshop, I want to share real-time learnings from the field on how to create a radically inclusive virtual workshop as we adapt to this new normal over Zoom.  Begin…

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Feedback

4 Ways to Help New Managers Succeed

I’ve had a 22 year operational management career, and naturally, I’ve had a lot of new managers in my organizations over the years. ‘New managers,’ in this case, means ‘new-to-management’ not so much ‘new-to-me’ or ‘new-to-the-org.’ I’m talking specifically about people new to the practice of management. Oh yeah, I was also a new manager once, many moons ago as a young Lieutenant in the US Marines. So I really understand the struggles and challenges of being a new manager.…

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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 Schools

The Need for Radical Candor In Schools

*This blog post about the need for Radical Candor in schools is by Katie Novak and Mirko Chardin, authors of Equity by Design: The Power and Promise of UDL. Our schools, despite our best efforts, are not meeting the needs of all learners. Beverly Daniel Tatem, a nationally recognized authority on racial issues in America, educator and author of the critically acclaimed book, Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race, urges…

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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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