Big Picture Thoughts
The Main Ideas
- Giving candid feedback is one of the best things you can do to improve someone's performance.
- Giving effective feedback requires you to care personally about the person while challenging them directly.
- Firing someone who is underperforming can be the best thing you can do for both that person and your team.
Summary Notes
Radical Candor is a framework for communicating with your colleagues, direct reports and bosses. It is built around the principal that both praise and critical feedback are essential to great results and a great work culture.
What it is:
- A management philosophy based on Caring Personally while Challenging Directly
- A system of practices to get and give feedback (praise and criticism)
What it is not:
- Just for managers - everyone can benefit from employing this in their work relationships
- A license to be a jerk
Background: We’re told to be professional. We’re told “if you don’t have anything nice to say…” These two things can hurt our ability to be good bosses, colleagues and employees in important ways. Feedback is essential to well performing individuals and teams. But it can be hard to give and receive.
In order to have radically candid conversations, you must care personally about the person you are engaging with. If you don’t care personally and you give criticism, you’re going to be a dick about it.
If you do care personally but you don’t challenge directly with criticism, you are not doing that person, yourself, or your team any favors (ruinous empathy).
The same applies for praise. If you don’t care personally and give praise, it is insincere. If you do care personally but remain silent with praise, that’s bad for obvious reasons.
Giving Radically Candid feedback, when done correctly, is one of the best things you can do to improve performance, team cohesiveness, and actually demonstrate that you give a shit about someone. With criticism especially, is often easier to remain silent and more challenging to rise above the awkwardness to say something critical that would help the person.
- Never label people (“You’re not a very good _____”). It discourages improvement. Labeling pushes a fixed mindset (vs growth) and implicitly tells the person there is nothing they can do about sucking at something.
- Don’t personalize criticism. It is ESSENTIAL that you make a distinction between the person and their work, or else people will fall victim to attribution error
- Criticism must be delivered in a way that doesn’t make the person think you are no longer confident in their abilities
- When delivering praise, be specific and go deep. Spend as much time getting the facts right for delivering praise as you would for delivering criticism.
- Praise is more important than criticism. It encourages people to keep improving and tells them what to do more of. You should offer more praise than criticism
- Avoid particular ratios when giving praise and criticism because they drive insincerity (e.g. praise, then criticism, then praise - or as Ben Horowitz calls it, “a shit sandwich”)
How to start delivering criticism without discouraging people?
- Make sure your focus on the relationships is sound
- Ask for criticism before giving it
- Offer more praise than criticism
- Offer criticism immediately, impromptu
- Offer guidance for a resolution at the same time criticism is delivered
- Praise in public, criticism in private
- Never personalize - ensure it’s clear the problem is not due to their personality.
- Share stories of your own to relate and show vulnerability
Mental trick for delivering criticism (which can be hard): approach the delivery of criticism as though you were just telling someone that their fly is down or they have food in their teeth
- Deliver criticism and praise impromptu style (immediately after the fact) rather than in a big wave during reviews
When people are underperforming:
- Assuming that people who are not thriving are therefore mediocre and can’t do any better is both unjust and unkind. Allowing them to continue down that path may be the worst kind of ruinous empathy that managers can display and a great source of wasted possibility.
- Treating them fairly requires you to understand why they aren’t thriving. You must care personally to be a fair person.
- For management and direct reports, it is your job to set and uphold the quality bar. Don’t get sucked into ruinous empathy with people who are doing ok but not great. Everyone should be doing great. Accepting mediocrity isn’t good for anybody. If your employment doesn’t offer them the ability to be great, those people would probably be happier at other jobs. Realizing this is an important part of caring personally and being a good boss.
- When someone is performing poorly and having received clear communication about the nature of the problem and showing no signs of improvement, you must fire that person.
How to know when to fire? Three things to consider:
- Have you given them radically candid guidance? Substantive and specific, with solutions, multiple occasions over the course of time?
- Do you understand the impact of this persons performance on their colleagues?
- Have you sought advice from others? You may think you’ve been clear when you haven’t been. Talk to someone who has fired if you haven’t.
Because firing people is hell for everyone, common lies managers tell themselves about firing:
- It will get better. Reality: BSing yourself. Ask yourself how will it get better? Need precise metrics.
- Somebody is better than nobody. Don’t want a hole on the team. Reality: poor performers create as much work as they accomplish themselves
- People’s career trajectories are dynamic, not fixed. Example: Someone may be incredibly ambitious but have a year where their trajectory is lower because they’re taking care of a sick family member. This doesn’t mean that their trajectory has changed permanently! Do not pigeon hole people. Be adaptive to changes.
Debate and criticism of ideas, plans is essential to success.
- No one wants a boss, colleague who issues commands from stone tablets without question or seeking input.
- Follow this cycle: Listen. Clarify. Debate. Decide.
- When debating:
- Keep egos out of it. Don’t allow people to attribute ownership to ideas
- Ask people to switch roles and try to argue from the other side
- Consider separating the debate time from the time at which a decision is made (to encourage thinking about it vs. deciding now)
- Mind your language to decrease personalization “I think that’s wrong”, not “You’re wrong”
To start building a culture of Radical Candor:
- Explain to your team what it is
- Prove you can take it before you dish it out - ask for criticism
- Starting giving out impromptu praise
- Start giving out impromptu criticism
- Encourage others to do it
Misc tip:
- To ensure your feedback (praise and criticism) is of great quality, leave 3 unimportant things unsaid each day