Radical Candor: Be A Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

Radical Candor Book Club Discussion Questions: A Complete Guide

A great way to practice the principles of Radical Candor is by starting a virtual book club. We’ve put together this list of Radical Candor book club questions to get you started with the discussions for each chapter. In addition, this guide to rolling out Radical Candor can help you bring the concepts to your team. There are tons of tools to help you create your virtual book club. If you want to use one platform to manage everything, head…

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How to Practice Radical Candor With Strangers

"I can see how Radical Candor works when I already have a relationship... but what about with people I barely know. Isn’t it too risky?" Our Radical Candor coaches get this question fairly often, and I won’t pretend it isn’t risky to offer feedback to a complete stranger. It is. But not being Radically Candid is also risky. And the rewards of being Radically Candid for you and for the other person can be enormous. In fact, the idea of…

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The Biggest Reason We Run from Challenging Conversations

In order to build Radically Candid relationships, it's important that you don't try to prevent, control or manage other people’s emotions. Instead, acknowledge the emotions, react compassionately and try to master your reactions to other people’s emotions versus the emotions themselves. This is especially important when you're engaging in challenging conversations. In this guest blog post, Radical Candor Coach Farrah Mitra explains why challenging conversations are difficult and how caring personally and challenging directly can help you master them by…

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Brutal Honesty and Radical Candor: 6 Ways You’re Getting Radical Candor Wrong and 5 Ways to Get It Right

We have learned something really important from the way that the press sometimes covers Radical Candor. And we want your advice on how to communicate this idea more clearly. We want to learn to describe Radical Candor in a way that is not open to misinterpretation: too often press articles assert that Radical Candor is the same thing as brutal honesty, as front-stabbing, or that it is some sort of license to be a jerk. It is none of those…

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Acting Like a Jerk by Not Caring Personally is a Radical Candor Fail

What makes Radical Candor radical is that it’s a deviation from the norm, which tends to fall somewhere between acting like a jerk and avoiding confrontation altogether. The purpose of Radical Candor is to create a new normal where guidance is both kind and clear, not to reinforce bad behavior. This means that if you don’t Care Personally about the person you’re delivering feedback to, you’re exhibiting Obnoxious Aggression, not Radical Candor. Ever since the book Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss…

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Lights! Camera! Feedback! Second City Works and Radical Candor Get Guidance from Strategic Partners on ‘Improvising Radical Candor,’ a Workplace Comedy-Based Online Learning Program

Second City Works and Radical Candor bring together learning and development leaders from some of the world’s top organizations to exchange ideas, gather insights and share laughs at a Launch Partner Summit for Improvising Radical Candor, a workplace comedy online learning program available in early 2020. In advance of the release of Improvising Radical Candor’s comedy-based online learning program, Radical Candor and Second City Works invited early adopters to an exclusive Launch Partner Summit on Nov. 7, 2019 at world-famous…

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Direct Reports and Radical Candor: 5 Tips for Giving Guidance and Feedback

This article about practicing Radical Candor with direct reports originally appeared on Deliberate Directions. Your relationships and your responsibilities at work reinforce each other positively or negatively, and this dynamic is what drives you forward as a manager—or leaves you dead in the water. What’s more, your relationships with your direct reports affect the relationships they have with their direct reports, and your team’s overall culture. Like it or not, your ability to build trusting, human connections with the people…

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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 push men away from being as radically candid…

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A Happy Marriage of Growth and Stability

I recently learned that my great-grandfather Taylor Malone started a company with my husband’s great-great uncle, Joe Hyde, in Memphis, Tenn., my hometown. Oddly, it took us 11 years of marriage to learn this. We just found out thanks to a visit to a cemetery in Connecticut, but we’re happy to know now. It’s a great story about how we all need a balance of growth and stability to build great teams, to have successful careers, and to live the lives…

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Keeping it Real

The good news is that the term “Radical Candor” has entered the lexicon. The bad news is that there’s a risk it becomes a meaningless buzzword. We need your help to fight this. Please let us know which ideas in the book or the podcast you have rolled out with your team. What’s working? What’s not? If you’re willing, we will feature your stories in our blog and email newsletter. If you want it kept confidential, we will honor that…

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