Encouraging Feedback Archives

Feedback, the Law, and Mandated Manipulative Insincerity

I spend a lot of time these days showing people how to put the Radical Candor framework of “Care Personally + Challenge Directly” into practice by providing frequent feedback, and how to use the framework as a way to guide difficult conversations to avoid falling into Ruinous Empathy, Obnoxious Aggression, or Manipulative Insincerity. When it comes to difficult conversations, some of the most difficult are around gender. I have found that gender politics and fear of tears pushes men away from being as radically candid with…

What’s the Ideal Manager-Employee Relationship?

You may have seen me featured as "The Candid Boss" for The Muse, an online career resource destination. One of the questions I am often asked is, can managers and employees be friends at work? An even more essential question to ask is, what does an ideal manager-employee relationship look like? How is it different from a friendship? The “boss-employee” relationship is relatively new. For most of human history, we accomplished our great collaborative feats through terrible brutality — forced labor. During…

The Star Intern: A Mentor’s Radical Candor Journey

We recently heard from Dimitar Simeonov, who shared his story about reading Radical Candor while managing an intern when he was working at Twitter as a senior data scientist. While Dimitar's no longer at Twitter, at the time he had been there for four years and was responsible for the intern’s technical mentorship. Thanks for sharing the learning and the love, Dimitar! *** Two weeks in as an intern mentor, I had a dilemma. My intern was performing with the cadence and…

Rolling Out Radical Candor: Part One

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…

Video: A Ruinous Empathy Story

Kim shares a story about a time that she describes as the worst moment of her career. She learns a hard lesson after being Ruinously Empathetic with one of her employees for a period of several months. Although she Cares Personally and tries to be "nice," her lack of Direct Challenges causes issues for her, for the employee, and for her whole team. Watch her story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uN0DQRqmQNs Listen to episode 4 of the Radical Candor podcast to hear Kim and Russ discuss this story…

Reward the Candor

One of the tips we shared in our post about how to get more feedback is to reward feedback to get more of it. If you want to get others to open up and tell you what they think, you have to show them that you appreciate it. It’s a risk for them to tell you what they think, and if the risk isn’t worth it -- if they are punished for their real-talk or see that it is ignored…

5 Ways to Encourage Feedback Between Others

We’ve written a lot recently about getting feedback from others and also giving feedback to them. You have to lead by example, so it makes sense to start by soliciting feedback and then to focus on giving it. But real managerial leverage comes when you learn to encourage feedback between others. As just one person, if all the praise and criticism goes through you, you become a bottleneck. In order to foster a feedback culture and ensure that it scales…

Video: Sam Adams and the FU Rule

When you’re the boss, it’s really hard to get people to tell you what they really think -- to be Radically Candid with you. Showing that you want feedback and genuinely appreciate it when it’s given is key. The worst thing you can do is to criticize the criticism you get. In fact, it can actually be helpful to encourage people to be Obnoxiously Aggressive with you. Here’s a funny example of Jim Koch, co-founder of the Boston Beer Company…

How to Introduce Radical Candor in Your Organization

When we talk about Radical Candor at companies or with individuals, we see a lot of heads nodding in agreement. People understand that Radical Candor can improve performance, reduce politics and make work more fun. But how do you make sure that these ideas that resonate in the moment actually get implemented, rather than forgotten? Here’s a question from one of our readers: As a CEO who hasn't been practicing Radical Candor, is it advisable to transition into the practice…

3 Steps for Offering Radical Candor to Executives

DILEMMA: Providing criticism to senior executives can be a daunting undertaking. How do you practice Radical Candor with executives, especially if you know they haven’t been receptive to criticism in the past? We received this question from one of our readers: How do you solve the problem of senior executives who tend to shut down and adopt an Obnoxious Aggressive position when faced with criticism? I’ve found that the Obnoxious Aggressive ones are often challenged internally by feelings of embarrassment…

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Care Personally + Challenge Directly