Are you facing problems with an employee’s work or behavior? Leadership experts say to try a direct approach infused with compassion. Here’s how to utilize radical candor to build strong employee relationships and results.
Tech managers and team leaders eventually encounter situations where they need to address employee work or behavior problems, and, in most cases, that difficult discussion rarely goes well, leadership experts say.
“We often overestimate the harm that these difficult conversations can bring and underestimate the benefits of honestly communicating our opinions and feedback,” says Taya Cohen, professor of organizational behavior and business ethics at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business.
As a result, 21% of managers avoid giving feedback because they find it stressful or difficult, according to a Harvard Business Review report. Leadership experts say a lack of candid feedback can harm the employee, team and company. Here’s how to effectively deliver radial candor, and why taking this step is important.
“The most important thing a company gets out of radical candor is better results. You can set goals, but you won’t achieve them without feedback. Radical candor can improve your results,” says Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor and co-founder of the executive education company with the same name.
What is Radical Candor?
Scott says that radical candor is a management philosophy where you show that you care personally about the employee, while simultaneously challenging them directly.
Depending on how you move along the care personally axis and the challenge directly axis, your feedback can come across as obnoxious, manipulative or too empathetic, versus the desired level of radical candor, Scott warns.
Other feedback methods similar to radical candor include benevolent honesty and be kind, be brave, say leadership experts. Benevolent honesty is a mixture of kindness and directness that can be applied when holding difficult employee conversations, says Cohen, co-author of Difficult Conversations: Navigating the Tension Between Honesty and Benevolence.
“There’s an element of kindness and goodwill towards the person, which is different than blunt honesty or rudeness,” she adds.
Be kind, be brave is a feedback method used by Ed Mangini, director of engineering and senior principal technologist at Method, a strategic design and digital product development consulting company.
“Someone once said to me that they thought radical candor was a license to say whatever you wanted to someone. I don’t think that’s true. I think it is more about a license to be direct, and you still have to find ways to use empathy and other techniques to make sure your message lands,” says Mangini, who is also involved in organizational leadership at Method.
How to Deliver Radical Candor — the Right Way
Radical candor is not a license to be brutally honest with no compassion, leadership experts say.
“When you challenge and don’t show you care, that’s obnoxious aggression, which hurts people. I think people sometimes mistake radical candor as a license to act like a jerk, and that’s not radical candor,” Scott says. “If that’s happening in your organization, I recommend calling it compassionate candor instead.”
When an employee’s feelings are hurt, they can go into a flight or fight mode, and miss the message you are trying to deliver, Scott adds.
Although obnoxious aggression is a problem when it occurs, the vast majority of managers (75%) go to the other extreme and engage in ruinous empathy, Scott says.
“They’re so worried about not hurting someone’s feelings or not offending them that they fail to tell them something they’d be better off knowing in the long run, and that’s ruinous empathy,” says Scott.
She stresses the importance of continuing to deliver feedback, even if the other person is sad or angry, while ramping up caring comments, such as, “My goal here is to help you succeed on this project” or “I maybe didn’t say this as well as I could have.”
The emphasis on caring personally or challenging directly will depend on how the person responds to your feedback, Scott explains. If the employee is sad or upset when bringing up criticism, increase your compassionate comments as you continue to give feedback. However, do not minimize or downplay the importance of your comments, because it will send a mixed message, Scott says. On the flip side, if the employee is brushing you off, escalate the directness of your feedback, she adds.
Once you understand the radical candor framework, explain to your team or workforce why you use this management philosophy, Scott says.
Additionally, she suggests sharing personal stories of when you received feedback that you found difficult to hear but later found invaluable to your career growth, or stories of when you engaged in ruinous empathy and it was damaging to the employee or company.
From here, launch into this order of operations, she notes:
- Solicit Feedback. Don’t dish out feedback before you can prove you can take it.
- Give Praise. Radical candor is not all about criticism. Paint a picture of what is possible, and praise is a better tool than criticism.
- Act Quickly. When you notice something is amiss that’s important, give feedback right away.
- Gauge Response. Evaluate how your comments are landing with the person you are speaking to.
Mangini advises managers and team leads to practice giving criticism in front of a mirror to increase the odds the message lands as intended.
“Anytime I try new communication techniques, I practice them in front of a mirror. It’s important to say it out loud because things sound different in our head,” Mangini says.
The framework for Cohen’s benevolent honesty also calls for four steps, which she provides in this video.
How to Measure Your Radical Candor Success
“Radical candor gets measured not at the speaker’s mouth, but at the listener’s ear,” Scott says, noting that a key measurement in evaluating your radical candor’s success is how it lands with the recipient.
“Very often, it takes a person a while to fix a problem or issues. You might see two steps forward and one step back. Don’t get too upset because it usually takes time to solve a problem,” Scott says.
Mangini suggests starting by establishing a baseline of how the employee usually responds after receiving feedback, and whether improvement follows the change in communication style to radical candor, benevolent honesty, or be brave, be kind.
To make the comparison, consider reviewing your notes or recording the feedback conversation, Mangini says, adding that viewing the materials may yield ideas for better techniques when giving feedback. This review, for example, can show if you need to be more kind when being brave.
“If you think you’re going to be brave without being kind, you will erode relationships with your sharp tongue, and the long-term damage you will create will result in spending more time correcting this type of culture than what you would have actually spent creating tight-knit relationships,” says Mangini.
