Radical Candor is creating a community! Learn how we’re combining peer and expert coaching, real-time events, and curated content into one engaging platform. Tune in to hear Jason and Amy discuss the creation of Radical Candor’s new online community designed to help people leaders stress less, build stronger relationships, and connect with peers and pros.
Listen to the episode:
Episode at a Glance: Creating a Community
The TLDR Radical Candor Podcast Transcript
[00:00:07] Amy Sandler: I’m Amy Sandler. And today, Jason, I’m going to check in with you. You have been cooking up a new product and I am eager to hear about how you’ve gotten to where you’re at now. And where you’re going with this product and most of all how this is going to help our podcast audience.
[00:00:26] Jason Rosoff: Yeah excited to share, uh with you and with our intrepid listeners. So Radical Candor is building a community, an online community, to help aspiring and experienced people, leaders, stress less, build better relationships and get more done, by connecting each of you with your peers, with experts in the Radical Candor community, uh, and offering resources to make your jobs and lives easier, uh, through the application of Radical Candor.
[00:00:56] So a lot of the things that you listen to the podcast for, tips and tricks. But a way to actually interact with, uh, other folks who are on their Radical Candor journey as well as along with experts like Kim and, uh, Amy and myself. Uh, and Brandi, who will all be part of the community too.
[00:01:15] Amy Sandler: Cool. So just if I’m hearing you and just to reframe, like if I’m someone, I’m listening to the podcast, I can access the content and I’m just kind of having my own experience with the content. But this is a chance for people to actually start to connect with each other, uh, other folks who are fans of Radical Candor. And then actually get some practice time as well as some real time events. Is that an accurate summary?
[00:01:40] Jason Rosoff: Yeah, I would say that that’s even more detailed than I was, that than I was trying to be. So like the idea of this community is to create a space for development. One of the things that we often hear from people who write into the podcast, for example, is like that they don’t really have someone else that they can talk to about whatever management challenge it is that they’re trying to overcome. And they’re inspired by the ideas of Radical Candor. And so they reach out to us and say, hey, could you help if I, can you help? I have this situation and I really don’t know how to deal with it.
[00:02:16] And what we realized is like, we can answer a vanishingly few, you know, small number of those questions that people send to us. And, uh, and wouldn’t it be great if there was a place where people could hear from us. But maybe even more importantly, hear from each other about how they might apply the ideas of Radical Candor to solve their management challenges.
[00:02:40] So that’s like one of the key pieces of inspiration. And there’s a bunch of ways that we’re imagining that people will be able to do this. So one way is through peer coaching, right? So you can share your question or your story with somebody and ask if they have guidance. Another way is through expert coaching or guidance. So maybe you ask your question and a Radical Candor expert would answer it. Like maybe I would see your question and I would send you an answer, uh, electronically.
[00:03:05] And then, we might also do things like live, uh, coaching sessions or interactive sessions or sort of workshops. However you want to think about it, where, uh, we hold, you know, an hour once a month or something for people to come and share a particular experience and to receive some guidance.
[00:03:24] So we’re playing with all of those things. And then in addition to that, through the community, will be available all of the really great content that we’ve built over time. That’s kind of scattered all over the place right now. We have some on the website and the blog, some is in social media, some are in, baked into podcast episodes. And we’re gonna make all of that super easy to find and accessible, uh, in the same place. So like, uh, I’m imagining, for example, someone says, hey, I read the really great blog post that Brandi wrote about, uh, how to avoid falling into obnoxious aggression, uh, when you’re trying to apply Radical Candor but I still have a question about this.
[00:04:01] You know, in the blog post, Brandi says, blah, blah, blah. Here’s the challenge I’m having with that. How could I do it? You know, we might see that, um, or community members might see that. And hopefully we could start a, uh, a discussion and give more people the kind of benefit that some folks get right now when they write into the podcast with questions and they get a, uh, a detailed set of suggestions. I’m hoping to replicate that for more people.
[00:04:25] Amy Sandler: That’s great. Yeah. And really also thinking about folks that might be able to ask those questions with their peers during a workshop with a coach, a facilitator. Um, now we’re really broadening that. Um, I, of course, am biased. I’m super excited about this. Um, and the demand for this, you know, one of the things, Jason, that I thought would be helpful is to share with our listeners, like, how do you even think about a project like this? Like using this podcast, not only to get people excited to learn more about the community and to hear what you would like to see in it. But also just to look at kind of how do you run a project successfully?
[00:05:04] So right now we’re at July 8th. Um, so could you walk us through kind of your timeline so far. Like what you’ve done in terms of kicking off the project and research, um, setting goals, etcetera. Just kind of walk us through project management, uh, 101, 201, however much you want to go into it.
[00:05:23] Jason Rosoff: Yeah, so we have to rewind to the beginning of the year. We didn’t start out with the intention of building a community. Instead, we started with a goal, which was to build, to offer an opportunity for ongoing learning of Radical Candor, and that was one goal. And there was another goal, which was to build new revenue streams, new non facilitated revenue streams for the company.
[00:05:51] And it was really those two goals that wound up leading us to, uh, this idea of building, uh, building a community. I would like to say there was a grand plan, and I always knew this was what was going to happen. But it really started out with, like, setting those intentions. That’s how the project began. And the first set of things that I did were,
[00:06:13] Amy Sandler: Well, actually, Jason, let me pause on that. ‘Cause I think there’s some really interesting learning there for folks. So like, how did you, when you had these two goals, like, can you break down in some more detail? Like what were the steps you were taking, looking at those two goals ?And how did you tie those two goals together? ‘Cause I could imagine there’s other folks out there who are doing, you know, looking at their goals and that step from when you realize like, oh, these things could be related or, you know, sort of what was that creative spark that lit up for you.
[00:06:44] Jason Rosoff: Yeah. So perfect segue. Uh, what that led to was me scratching my head and having kind of no idea exactly how to accomplish it. Uh, and instead what I did was I, uh, I started to think about, you know, what are some things we could try?
[00:07:00] And there were a handful of things in this bucket of things we could try. One of them that we could try, because I wasn’t sure it was going to work, is we could reach out to the community. So we actually launched a, uh, a survey, in, uh, I think February or March, uh, of this year, asking people what kinds of learning experiences were they looking for, or most excited, uh, by this year.
[00:07:25] And we said, just don’t, forget Radical Candor, but like, just think broadly. Like, what are the kinds of experiences that, that you’re looking for? So that was one of the things that we wanted to try, was to see, could we gather a significant amount of data from the community to get some insight that way?
[00:07:39] The other things we decided to try were, let’s run some experiments. So like, on the continuous learning front, we had some ideas of, some technological tools or solutions that we could try to put into place with our corporate clients to see if we could get some traction there. Um, you know, this challenge of how do you ensure that people, that the learning that happens inside of a workshop really sticks is a perennial one.
[00:08:02] Anybody who teaches anything knows that these sort of moment in time learning experiences, they all, you know, significant portions of what we hear and what we think we’ve internalized slip away, uh, in the hours, let alone weeks and months after one of those sessions concludes. And you know, we really care about people effectively applying Radical Candor.
[00:08:23] And so we were like, what could we give to clients that would make it easy for them to operationalize this idea of continuous learning? And so we had a couple of ideas, producty ideas there. Um, and I had a couple of partners. So we weren’t going to build them, um, them ourselves. But I had a couple of partners that I’d been talking to about this stuff, and I said, okay, we’re going to try all three, we’re going to try three things. We’re going to try two product ideas, and we’re going to run this survey. And we got an interesting result. And the idea of the product experiments was to put them in the hands of a few clients, and start getting feedback from them. And the results of all of those things were sort of interesting.
[00:09:05] One of the things that we realized is that the products without a clear purpose, meaning without a sort of guiding, uh, an underlying emotional reason to use them, were not going to be complete solutions. So the two things that I’m referring to, one of them is a conversational practice tool that actually allows you to have, uh, simulated conversations using AI. And we’ve imbued the AI with some common scenarios that people run into. So like, someone who thinks they’re ready for a promotion, but they’re not actually ready, is an example of that. You can actually try to have that conversation with the bot. And it’s really, like, it’s quite hard. It’s quite challenging. And at the end of it, you get this really great feedback about how well you’ve applied the principles of Radical Candor to that conversation. So that was one of the product ideas.
[00:09:58] And the other one was, this sort of like, drip campaign on steroids, uh, is the way that I like to think about it. Which means we would send out some content reminders to people who had gone through a workshop. But the really cool part about this was, it wasn’t static. This was also backed by AI, so like, instead of just a prompt that says, hey, you know, maybe you should be thinking about your go-to question, listeners of the podcast will know what we mean when we say go-to question. Um, maybe you should be thinking about your go-to question, what’s your go-to question and who are you gonna ask it? And instead of that being a static prompt, it was actually interactive. So like you would tell the AI, here’s my go-to question, uh, and here’s who I intend to ask. And the AI could give you some feedback on that.
[00:10:38] Um, so those were our two product ideas. And then the survey was this sort of in-depth exploration of various different modalities of learning and types of, uh, learning experiences like, uh, courses, uh, sort of like asynchronous courses versus live learning experiences versus webinars. And then we also asked about topic areas. So would you like to learn more about how to build strong teams or how to get shit done? Um, we asked a whole bunch of questions. So those are the three experiments. We said, we’re going to try each of these things and we’re going to see how people respond.
[00:11:11] Amy Sandler: Well, I think it’s great. And first of all, if you are someone who answered the survey and shared your perspective, thank you so much. It, it really does make a difference. Obviously, we want to give people folks things that are going to be valuable. So Jason, just to repeat back what I heard and for those of you who might be starting out with something, like for me, I know when I have a really big project, I can sometimes get overwhelmed and it can be so helpful. Um, you know, one of the things I think you do really well is like breaking it down into those smaller pieces. So what I heard you say was, okay, I had these two really big goals. And so what I did was A, I figured out like what experiments I could start doing. So actually doing some product experiments. And the other thing was getting some real research, some real, um, data to work with. Is that an accurate summary of what you, sort of how you were thinking about that?
[00:12:03] Jason Rosoff: It is. And I’m going to yes, and you, to say the idea of the product experiments was to generate more data. So the goal was not to sell a million dollars at that point, right? The goal was generate some data about how and whether these experiences are actually producing either the learning result that we want. Or seem to indicate they could produce the revenue result that we’re looking for, right? We had both of those questions.
[00:12:29] And what I was saying was the reason I described the products is because I was trying to say something sort of abstract, which is that the results of these experiments are really interesting. That using the products on their own without some sort of like, wrap or motivating wrapper around them, was just insufficient, right? People weren’t going to use this entirely on their own, and it wasn’t always the type of help people needed. You know what I’m saying?
[00:12:50] Like, sometimes it was great to be able to practice a conversation. And sometimes it was great to be reminded of a core idea of Radical Candor, and even to get feedback on, for example, how to ask a great go-to question. It was very hard to time those things in a way that, like, really made an impact on people. And then when we got the results of the survey and combined it with those two product experiments, it sort of started to make sense.
[00:13:15] ‘Cause the results of the survey were very clear. People were looking for tools and tactics, like very specific tools and guidance. But the way they said that they learned how to apply those things was in community with other people, right? That they were looking for, uh, that the best experiences, we asked people about the best experience that they’ve had learning something new. And universally, the best experience was learning with other people.
[00:13:40] Like everybody talked about an experience learning with other humans. Uh, there was no like, oh, I’m learning this thing on my own. I think, especially because we, you know, we’re Radical Candor, so we’re primed to be talking about management and communication, which are these fundamentally relational activities. Everybody’s like, oh, the way you learn that is by working with other humans. Make sense.
[00:14:01] Um, uh, and when we talked about the things that, you know, people were excited to pay for, right? Like what, what are people laying down their own money for? We were asking about your personal professional development, like what were you going to spend your money on this year? And the answer there was the same, which is like, I’m looking for the opportunity to connect with peers and experts who can help me figure out how to apply complex, or like really useful guidance to complex real world problems. And so people were talking about going on retreats and doing, you know, live seminars and doing workshops and things like that.
[00:14:40] And so the combination of these experiences really got me thinking like, maybe there is a way to bring all of this together, right? Maybe the tools and the community and the learning, like the connection to your peers and all this other, like maybe there’s a way for all of that to happen together. And that’s, it was really in response to those experiments. That’s where the spark or the insight came from was seeing how people responded to the sort of naive ways that we were approaching it at first.
[00:15:10] And once, it was kind of like one of those things, you know, Amy, you and I talked about this as we were going through this process. Where as soon as we came up with the idea of building the community, it was sort of like obvious in retrospect. It was like, oh, duh, like that, that was clearly a thing that should exist. And to me, that’s actually a really good sign from a product development perspective. When you kind of, when you get to the idea and you’re like, oh, it’s almost like mundane. But the answer is like very simple. And it’s sort of smacking us in the face. Like it should have been obvious to us all along. That’s actually a good sign, not a bad sign. That doesn’t mean that you did anything wrong. Um, it means that you’re probably closer to the truth. I’m not saying we’ve actually gotten it right here. Um, but I, we’re probably closer to the truth then if we had come up with some very complex or convoluted thing, they were like, I never imagined this thing could possibly exist in the world. That’s usually a sign that you’ve maybe over engineered a solution to a problem.
[00:16:11] Amy Sandler: Well, I think that is such a helpful, uh, you know, sort of reminder for folks and also just hearing you explain how you got to, you know, that idea. And that also that frame of adding, that the actual experiments, not just the research, but that you were really looking to get the data for that.
[00:16:31] And that’s something I’ve always really appreciated, even when we might try a new class or new workshop. Like where’s the learning value, not just the revenue, um, value as well. So I always appreciate that. So Jason, now that you’ve decided, um, and if we’re in July, uh, where, what has been the last couple of months in terms of you made the decision, then how did you go about kind of project planning? And you mentioned about partners, like in terms of like locating platform requirements, etcetera.
[00:17:02] Jason Rosoff: Yeah. So we were formulating the experiments and running them, you know, really it was like February, March, April. Um, we started like into May. Um, and it was sometime in early May where I felt like we had enough data back. Uh, and this idea of the community was sort of forming and I started to test that idea with a handful of people, clients and, uh, colleagues and things like that. And the reaction I was getting was like, yes, this may, this makes a lot of sense.
[00:17:36] So now the job was to figure out, okay, so I have this idea, which is to build a community. Like, how does, how do you do that? Like, how does one build a community? Um, and I think this is where my sort of habit of continuous learning and like the, like, I was really excited. I was like, I have no idea where, like, where do I even start? Uh, that was not daunting to me, that was exciting. So I was like, started to read, um, uh, all, everything that I could find about, especially businesses or idea based communities, like people who have built a community around an idea or planning an idea. And very helpfully, people have written about their experiences trying to do this. So like, it wasn’t hard to find things, find other people’s experiences. Uh, and then,
[00:18:27] Amy Sandler: And was this literally just like Google search, or were you going to certain publications?
[00:18:31] Jason Rosoff: Yeah, I was getting publications from my Google searches, but it was primarily Google search. I will say that in the background, I did make good liberal use of AI to like keep track of notes and ideas that I was coming across as I was going. So I was like building up essentially like a background document as well as like the early stages of a strategy just by sharing, dumping ideas into a conversation with, in this case, ChatGPT. So I was like dumping all this information in there, uh, and like kind of keeping a record of what I was learning.
[00:19:07] And what became clear to me was that we had a choice to make. Like, there are lots of different types of communities. I knew that we wanted this community to have, at least a big part of this community to have an online component. And that now, like, my job was to figure out, okay, how do you build an online component, or an online sort of place for a community? And there were a handful of options. One of them was like, make it yourself, build your own, like, tool or set of tools to build a community. One of them was use an existing platform.
[00:19:41] Um, and there are different, loads of different, like, types of platforms for communities. Um, and so that began my investigation of like, what tool do we want to use, uh, to build a community? And, to do that investigation, I had to come up with a set of evaluation criteria, and my evaluation criteria were, one, does the platform that we choose, does this tool that we’re choosing natively support the types of interaction that people said they wanted, right?
[00:20:12] People said, I want to have access to experts, I want to have access to my peers, I want to be able to have real conversations with people about putting these into practice. And then, does the platform allow us to generate revenue. Like, does it make it easy for us to, um, to build new, uh, new revenue streams, uh, on top of those experiences?
[00:20:37] Uh, and that, it became pretty obvious pretty quickly that some of the really sort of hot places to have a community weren’t the best for us. So, for example, like, lots of people are building communities on Discord and Slack. And Discord and Slack, in some ways they make the types of experiences we wanted to build, um, easy, but in a lot of ways they make them kind of hard, actually.
[00:20:57] This idea of holding, like, an office hours or whatever, it’s pretty clunky in those communities from my perspective. Um, and so that eliminated a lot of these, like, really cool, uh, like, hip new community tools. Um, it got us back to this idea of, like, a core online community. Similar, like, you might have, people might have participated in a message board or something like that.
[00:21:17] But there are new versions of that layer on top of it these, like, really cool social interactions, live experiences, as well as the ability to access courses and content resources and things like that. Um, and yeah, I tested a whole bunch of them out for myself. I tried to build sample communities on each of those platforms.
[00:21:37] I spoke with sales people at each of these companies. And eventually we landed on partnering with a company called Circle, uh, to host the community who, uh, satisfied our requirements. But also I thought, um, they were really great to work with throughout the sales process. It gave me a lot of confidence that they were going to be helpful to us in the process of building the community.
[00:22:08] Amy Sandler: So just to summarize again, what I heard, because again, I think Jason, this is, at least for me, it’s really helpful and we’re hoping it’s helpful for you all as you think about projects. Like the first big ticket item of like data and research was stuff that you’re very familiar with. You’ve done a lot of it, so you could both lead the experiments and get data from the experiments as well as the actual surveys and research.
[00:22:31] And those are things that you’ve, over your career, very, um, sort of well schooled in. The second one was like, okay, we’ve made the decision and now I need this, uh, potential like community. And that was something that was actually new to you. And I think that’s important to highlight, like in a project, there might be so many different pieces and some of it, you might be familiar with, and some of it was new.
[00:22:56] And so, you know, you talked about how you always love continuous learning. But like, what would you say to someone if they feel like, oh my gosh, now I need to do this thing and I don’t know, like you are researching and creating your, you know, AI conversation. But do you have any other tips on someone who maybe isn’t wired quite like you in terms of that continuous learning, um, chip that you have?
[00:23:20] Jason Rosoff: Yeah, I, the only thing I would say is like, if I was not, if I found that I was not excited by the prospect of trying to like understand this space. Um, or, and do like do the research and learning on my own. I would have turned instead to, uh, I would have tried to find an expert, like someone who, for example, had started a community recently, uh, and had found, uh.
[00:23:52] And there are, I will say one of the nice things about be wanting to build a community is that it turns out community builders like to be in communities also. So there are a lot of, I mean, it’s, it seems obvious sort of saying it right? But like, there’s a lot of people who are very, over the course of this journey have been very generous, uh, either with me directly, like spending their time talking to me about their experiences, or indirectly by documenting their experiences, you know, by releasing, there’s like great, uh, video content, uh, as well as written content, uh, that I found about this. And then for the peep, when I found something that I thought was especially interesting, like I would often just reach out to the person and say like, hey, you know, I saw this thing that you made, like I had another question about it. And I think to a person, like everybody responded to me.
[00:24:43] Amy Sandler: That is really amazing. And also I think part of the spirit of what we’re trying to do with Radical Candor, and it feels like it’s a very similar spirit of collaboration and co creation and community.
[00:24:54] One thing, Jason, that you’ve also been doing in this project that I wanted to highlight because I really appreciate it is that you have been sharing, uh, invites for planning calls and recordings of these calls, like in a Slack channel for this project. So, uh, you know, if, uh, if people want to be included, obviously everyone’s really busy. But really including the team, but not requiring it. So I think there’s some learning there too. What was on your mind with that?
[00:25:24] Jason Rosoff: I feel like there was a lot of work that, you know, I got the input of, uh, from experts, like these other people that built communities and that gave me really good basis to make the decision about the platform. But then the really, in my mind, like, that’s when the real work began, which was to fill that, figure out, okay, like, what is the, what type of community you want to build on top of this platform?
[00:25:46] And I knew I didn’t want to make those choices entirely on my own. Like that was the place where I wanted to lean on the wisdom collective wisdom of the team. And so I chose a couple of different ways of communicating about this. So one way I communicate, commun, chose to communicate about it was, um, live.
[00:26:01] So we have team meetings and there are a handful of team meetings where I talked about, hey, here’s the idea that we’re working on. Here’s the I, here are some proposals that I have. Um, and just asking people for their feedback in the moment as well as encouraging people to reach out to me if they had any other ideas.
[00:26:17] Another way was like through asynchronous updates. So we have a habit of a sort of ritual in the company that I restarted relatively recently, um, in the last three months or so. Which is this sort of like Friday update. Where we take a moment to sort of reflect on the week and what’s been happening. And I was making sure, like, as I was making decisions or coming to, uh, coming up with new information about this that I was posting in my Friday update. Like, hey, here’s what I was thinking about this week, or here’s the decision that’s coming up, or here’s something new that I learned about, uh, the community thing, and I was posting it, uh, in those asynchronous updates.
[00:26:52] And then the last thing that I did was I built a Slack channel that contained, um, some other asynchronous updates. But most importantly, it contains it, I’ve been pushing all of the communication that I have about this project, whether that’s through email or meetings, etcetera. I’ve been pushing all the communication through there.
[00:27:13] Oh, I should say that’s the second to last thing. And the final thing that I did was like, for any meeting where major decisions are gonna be made, I made a commitment to the team to make sure that those meetings were visible to them. Uh, and that they were, to let them know that they were welcome to join, uh, if they had time. And that I would do my best to prepare them for what the conversation in that meeting was going to be about so that they could join and have, uh, and share their perspective productively in that discussion.
[00:27:40] Amy Sandler: Yeah. And just as one example, I was on vacation for a couple of days and you had put in that channel a recording and all the different information and also being very clear, like, hey, we are coming to a point where certain decisions need to be made.
[00:27:54] Um, and so having that understanding of the deadline and what you were looking for from the feedback was, was really helpful. So I could participate even though I was out at that, at that time. Um, before we close, uh, again, we are, uh, in early July. We’re probably a month or so out, Jason, from what you would call a soft launch. But right now, based on what you’re, uh, intending, how are our listeners, um, going to be able to get involved?
[00:28:26] Jason Rosoff: So I always like to under promise and over deliver, but I’m really, I’m going to push myself out of my comfort zone here. I think this is going to be an amazing experience. Uh, there are, just like viscerally, there are so many situations where I, we run into people, um, you know, at workshops or on social media or in conversation where people are like, I mean, you know, where, where can I go to learn more about this or, um.
[00:28:57] And I think the, when I thought about the audience for this, I was thinking about both aspiring people leaders as well as experienced people leaders, because my goal is to build a community that’s like, teaching each other and teaching us, right? I think that there’s like a, uh, I have a humility about this, that we’re going to learn a lot, uh, about how to better, uh, teach Radical Candor, how to make sure that Radical Candor remains relevant over time, uh, from the contributions of the community.
[00:29:24] Amy Sandler: Jason, what would success for this project look like for you? Both kind of quantitative, but maybe even more important, qualitative.
[00:29:35] Jason Rosoff: Yeah, I have, I have what I think to be like pretty modest goals, uh, quantitatively. Like I would like to get a thousand people to sign up for the community this year. Um, you know, we have big audience, the podcast audience, we get almost a hundred thousand downloads a month, uh, of podcast episodes. That’s a huge audience. We have hundreds of thousands of followers between our various social media accounts. But I think a great community starts with a small set of motivated, committed people who are excited about the idea of helping others stress less, build better relationships, and get more done.
[00:30:21] That’s really what we want. We want people to believe in that mission. And to join us on this journey into in both, uh, like providing direct help to one another, but also providing feedback and input to us, like to the creators of the community so that we can be better stewards of it. Like that’s really what, um. So quantitative, you know, a thousand members by the end of this year, um, qualitative, uh, a group of people who are excited about, uh, contributing to this community of learning, uh, both by helping each other and by, uh, giving us the feedback we need to be effective, um, in helping the community sustain itself in the long run.
[00:31:05] Amy Sandler: Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you wish I had asked, or that you feel like you haven’t had a chance to reflect on?
[00:31:13] Jason Rosoff: That’s a great question. This is a little bit less about where we’ve been so far and more about where we’re going. I, one of the really great pieces of feedback that I’ve received so far, uh, about not just what we’re trying to do, but about the challenges of building community, especially online. Really boils down to this idea of, for a Radical Candor, for a community committed to helping managers be better at their job, there’s this sort of baked in assumption that people need to be vulnerable, right? They need to say, I’m struggling with something. And people have demonstrated their willingness to be vulnerable sort of anonymously or pseudo anonymously when they send their questions in to the podcast email, right?
[00:32:01] Like, they’re willing to do that. Um, And I think that we’re set up for success because Kim, uh, does this incredibly well, right? It’s core to the way that she presents the ideas of Radical Candor, which is to talk about the mistakes that she’s made and how those mistakes and acknowledging those mistakes helps her want to get it right in the future.
[00:32:24] Um, but also, uh, you know, provides that the humility from, that comes from acknowledging those mistakes provides the foundation for being able to practice Radical Candor because you don’t assume in every conversation that you’re right, right? That’s like this foundational idea, um, is that, uh, you know, success comes from learning something, not necessarily from, you know, the, being the one who, who was right.
[00:32:49] Uh, and I think building a community that really embraces that and reinforces that, that’s gonna be a real challenge. I think there’s a, there’s a tendency on the internet to get into, you know, various forms of, you know, pissing matches about who’s right and, and who’s wrong. Uh, and I think that that will cause, I think if that spirit of discourse were to take hold in this community, it would kill it.
[00:33:18] Um, uh, and so that, that’s the thing that like is most on my mind is how do we build, so on top of the ideas and the resources, how do we build the right sort of like, guardrails and rituals that help reinforce the idea that really celebrate that sort of that kind of vulnerable sharing. And reinforce the idea that the way that we learn is by talking about our mistakes and our successes, but by vulnerably and clearly talking about our mistakes. Um, I think that that’s going to be, uh, a perennial, a perennial challenge of running a community like this. Because ultimately what we want, right, is we want people, we want the aspiring manager to get that promotion that they want, right?
[00:34:08] We want to prepare them and make sure that they actually, they get the promotion to manager that they’re looking for. And for the experienced manager, um, you know, maybe they don’t need our help. Maybe what they really need is the opportunity to mentor somebody else. And we want to give them that opportunity also. We’re hoping that this community becomes a place for that. Or maybe they’re looking to make the step from, you know, manager to executive. Um, and I’d love this community to be a place that helps people take a step in the direction of their dreams. And in order to do that, I think we need to build this place of safety for talking vulnerably about the really difficult things that we run into.
[00:34:51] So that’s the challenge that I think is like most on my mind. I think this is overcomable. There are lots of communities that do this really well and do this successfully. But that’s why I think, to some extent, that drives down, you know, I think that it’d be easy to say, oh, we want a million members. You know what I’m saying? We want a million people to join the community. But I think I’d prefer to have, um, you know, a smaller community that, that really embodies that, the spirit, the core spirit of Radical Candor and supports one another in their growth and development. Uh, I’d rather start small and, uh, and be successful at that, and then use the learning, the success, uh, from that success to build the community bigger, to scale it up.
[00:35:37] Amy Sandler: So here’s our Radical Candor checklist, and these are tips to start putting Radical Candor into practice.
[00:35:43] Tip number one, when you’re starting a new project, you’re not sure how to accomplish a goal, start with experiments. Have an experimenter’s mindset and start with some small experiments that are going to help you learn more about where to go next.
[00:36:01] Jason Rosoff: Tip number two, get excited to be wrong. It’s really easy to get attached to an idea as you’re starting to explore like a new product or, or offering. And the whole point of the experiment is to produce data. And in an ideal world, the data will show you where you are wrong. And at this stage, it’s super helpful to be wrong early in a project. So it’s helpful to reframe data that shows that you’re moving down the wrong path as like a really exciting, uh, chance to avoid spending a bunch of resources doing something that would eventually fail.
[00:36:39] Amy Sandler: Tip number three, project pioneer know thyself. When you are doing something new, are you the kind of person like Jason who’s going to go off and read and research on your own? Um, is this something new to you? Do you need some expert advice or guidance? Uh, or are you someone maybe more like me who loves to collaborate and wouldn’t do so well if you were, uh, having a lonely solo march of project planning? Uh, so know yourself and if you are someone who likes to learn on your own, uh, don’t ignore expert advice. Jason, do you have anything more to add on that? Any expert advice about ignoring expert advice?
[00:37:20] Jason Rosoff: I think, I think you nailed it. I think as long as, as long as you are willing to accept it, you’re on, you’re on the right track. The scariest part, tips 1 through 3 are really like, don’t be arrogant. Uh, like if I was to try to sum them up, that, that’s what tips 1 through 3 really say is, uh, don’t be arrogant. Like be willing to, uh, willing to, to start small, be willing to be wrong. Um, and take an approach that will work well for you and include the perspective of others.
[00:37:53] Amy Sandler: Which leads you nicely into tip number four.
[00:37:55] Jason Rosoff: Yes, don’t forget that you are almost certainly part of a team. Uh, even if that team is very small, at some point you need to make sure that the rest of your team knows not only what you’re doing, but why you’re doing it. Uh, and so pick a communication plan that allows your team to stay up to date on what is going on, uh, that makes clear what the goals are, and gives them each an opportunity to provide input into the process at those moments when their input is going to have the biggest impact. So think anytime you need to make a big decision in the product, on the product or project that you’re working on you should be soliciting the guidance from your team.
[00:38:37] Amy Sandler: For more tips and the show notes for this episode, you can find them at RadicalCandor.com/podcast. Praise in public, criticize in private. And so if you like what you hear, please do rate and review wherever you’re listening. And if you’ve got criticism for us, you can email it, we love to hear it. Podcast@radicalcandor.com. Bye for now.
Have questions about Radical Candor? Let's talk >>
Follow Us
Instagram
TikTok
LinkedIn
YouTube
Facebook
X
Radical Candor Podcast Listeners Get 10% Off The Feedback Loop
You’ll get an hour of hilarious content about a team whose feedback fails are costing them business; improv-inspired exercises to teach everyone the skills they need to work better together, and after-episode action plans you can put into practice immediately.
We’re offering Radical Candor podcast listeners 10% off the self-paced e-course. Follow this link and enter the promo code FEEDBACK at checkout.
Watch the Radical Candor Videobook
We’re excited to announce that Radical Candor is now available as an hour-long videobook that you can stream at LIT Videobooks. Get yours to stream now >>
Episodes are written and produced by Brandi Neal with script editing by Amy Sandler. The show features Radical Candor co-founders Kim Scott and Jason Rosoff and is hosted by Amy Sandler. Nick Carissimi is our audio engineer.
The Radical Candor Podcast theme music was composed by Cliff Goldmacher. Order his book: The Reason For The Rhymes: Mastering the Seven Essential Skills of Innovation by Learning to Write Songs.
Download our free learning guides >>
Take the Radical Candor quiz >>
Sign up for our Radical Candor email newsletter >>
Shop the Radical Candor store >>
Get Radical Candor coaching and consulting for your team >>
Get Radical Candor coaching and consulting for your company >>
Meet the team >>