A Framework for Giving Feedback | Lessons from Radical Candor by Kim Scott

Do you avoid hard conversations, or handle them so bluntly they backfire? 

In this episode, Desiree read the book Radical Candor by Kim Scott, so you don't have to. 

This episode breaks down the framework from Kim Scott's Radical Candor, the one Desiree teaches more than almost anything else with the leaders she coaches.

In this episode:

• The four types of feedback, and which one is quietly wrecking your team's trust
• Why "good intentions don't erase bad impact"
• The order most leaders get backwards when resolving conflict at work
• Rock stars vs superstars at work - is it a season, or a category? 

One question to try before your next hard conversation: am I about to avoid this, or am I about to be harsh about it?

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Radical Candor Framework 
• Buy Radical Candor on Amazon 
• Podcast Episode on the Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni 
• Sign up for the newsletter at desireepetrich.com under the resources tab 

This podcast for managers is here to help you:

• Grow your leadership development
 • Navigate team management with confidence
 • Learn how to handle conflict at work
 • Apply real, practical leadership tips

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Transcript

Desiree (00:01.634)
Why is my team not willing to have hard conversations? Or if I am willing to have a hard conversation, how do I go about it?

How do I give feedback? How do I make my team hold one another accountable? These are all questions that can be answered by using the framework within the book Radical Candor. So this episode is I read Radical Candor by Kim Scott so that you don't have to, although I always recommend that you do. But I want to go through the Radical Candor framework with you so that you can understand not only why is it hard to have hard conversations, but how can we change our mindset around them.

so that they can become a little bit easier and definitely more effective. So welcome back to You're the Boss Now What? I'm your host, Desiree Petrick, and our goal here is to help you lead yourself and your team with confidence. So lean in and let's get started.

Desiree (01:02.712)
So radical candor, what is it? Honestly

Desiree (01:11.36)
Ultimately, candor is just honesty, transparency, vulnerability, our willingness to say what needs to be said with good intentions. and it requires two things. It requires us to challenge directly and to care personally.

To challenge directly and to care personally. So it's gonna be a little bit hard to visualize. So I'm gonna put a link in the show notes if you wanna go and actually pull up the picture of what this framework looks like. But if you draw an arrow from the bottom to the top, it says care personally. From the bottom to the top is care personally, from the left to the right is challenge directly.

Now, in the bottom left-hand corner of this, in other words, if a team member is unwilling to challenge someone directly, and they're and they really don't care about that person, they don't care about their feelings, they don't care about their growth, they don't care about how something's gonna impact them, then what ends up happening is they have what's called manipulative insincerity. And it's also known as like backstabbing, passive-aggressive behavior.

It's when managers fail to both like they don't care about someone. They don't they don't tell them how it is. They don't give them feedback because ultimately at the end of the day, it just doesn't matter to them whether or not this person grows.

It's not they don't give clear specific praise. If they do, it seems very insincere. the criticism that they do give, like the feedback that they give, might come across really unkind. And what happens is if a leader or even an employee or team member is approaching candor in this way, if they are approaching candor in a way of like, I just don't care and it's not even worth my time to challenge this person directly because I don't believe that they can grow.

Desiree (03:04.281)
Or it doesn't matter to me, what we end up with is manipulative insincerity. So if we have, we're the leader, okay. I'm gonna give you a scenario here where we can use this to visualize it a little bit easier. If I'm the leader and Fred is one of my employees, and Fred stinks, okay, Fred has a hygiene problem. There's a lot of different ways that this can be approached, but in this scenario, just imagine I don't care about Fred.

He's a new employee. I have no attachment to him. Honestly, he's kind of annoying. And you know what? He stinks and it's bothering other people, but they're dealing with it. Yeah, they're gossiping and yeah, they're kind of making fun of him and they're being passive aggressive by walking past him and covering their nose. And it's just it's not good. It's causing some toxicity on the team. I can see it as the leader, but I don't want to challenge him directly because it feels very uncomfortable and I just don't want to and I don't really care about him in general. So

I'm gonna just live in this place of manipulative insincerity.

I know that sounds so harsh, and it is harsh. And I don't see this one all that often, but it does happen. And I think that this place of manipulative insincerity is what happens when trust has broken down so fully that team members just stop caring about the outcome of the team. It's like, I'm gonna hate my job anyway. I'm just here for the paycheck. I'm gonna go home and vent to my husband or my wife, regardless. So it is what it is. It's almost like admitting.

defeat.

Desiree (04:46.327)
But what happens if

You know what? I am a really aggressive personality and I'm the leader and I am willing to challenge that person directly. I'm willing to challenge Fred directly because you know what? He stinks, but I don't really care about him as a person. I don't care personally for him. How is that going to come across? Well, this is where we move over to the bottom right hand corner of this framework into obnoxious aggression. You could also call it brutal honesty or some people call it front stabbing instead of.

backstabbing where you just say the thing to the person. And what it would sound like is me going up to Fred in the middle of a meeting and saying, hey Fred, you stink. Go home, shower, don't come back till you do.

That's obnoxious aggression. Again, the leader or maybe even another employee is willing to challenge that person directly. Like they're more than willing to be assertive, but it does not come off in a caring way whatsoever. So you're being clear, you're giving feedback, but it's by no means kind. And it can be confused with candor sometimes. It can be confused as honesty and transparency because at the end of the day, the thing.

Is being said, but it's very insincere and it doesn't create a good relationship between the team. It creates a lot of fear amongst other employees that if they do something wrong, they're also gonna get treated in this way. It makes people scared to make mistakes, etc. So obnoxious aggression happens when you have a lot of very strong personalities on the team. Like if you know anything about disc, this would be de personalities who.

Desiree (06:31.191)
Are very task oriented and know, you know, I'm just gonna say the thing and get it done because I care about time and you know the end result more so than I do about people's feelings. Wow, SDs sound so we sound so friendly, but it can happen when we are really focused on getting things done quickly and forget to look at the human side of it, we can fall into this place of challenging directly without any personal care. So that's the bottom right hand corner. That's hey Fred, you stink get.

Out. This is the one that I feel like I see the most. This next one is on the top left-hand corner. We have now moved up into caring about this person. We care personally about our team, about the person who's in our office. We care personally about Fred. We don't want to see his feelings hurt. We don't want him to be embarrassed, etc. But I, as a leader, don't like conflict.

If I don't like uncomfortable and tense situations, if I am unwilling to say hard things, even if the outcome would be better, ultimately I'm not going to say what needs to be said. I am going to.

Desiree (07:50.914)
I'm going to ultimately be what looks like nice and caring and careful not to hurt a person's feelings in the short term.

But what happens in the long term is it creates even more problems. We call this artificial harmony, like from the outside looking in, everything looks great. you can call it walking on eggshells, you can call it collusion, in other words, we're just saying what needs to be said in order to not cause any problems. This all falls into this place of we care about the people that we're working with on a personal level, but we're unwilling to engage in any type of conflict.

So if we go back to Fred, I'm the boss and Fred stinks. But because I don't want to hurt his feelings and I don't want to make him feel sad, I am just not going to say anything. I am not going to make it worse for him. I'm not going to tell people to stop gossiping because that would also be conflict. I'm going to just keep telling Fred that he's doing a good job and sugarcoat the criticism that I give to him and it's going to be fine.

But ultimately at the end of the day, that's not helping anybody. You are putting a band-aid on a problem that needs to be solved. You're caring personally, but you're unwilling to challenge directly. Runeous empathy. And that's the one that I see the most on teams.

I know in this moment it might feel like it's not that big of a deal. And if Fred's feelings don't get hurt, then it's okay. But if someone misses a deadline and we are in this place of ruineous empathy and don't say anything to them and then it happens over and over again, eventually we get to this point of needing to make a change, but we haven't given them any feedback to have them fix the problem. And so then we're frustrated and we're like, okay, this person needs to leave, but if HR were to look at our notes, there are none.

Desiree (09:39.918)
And so we can't let things fester. We can't put a band-aid on a problem that's not going to go away on its own, which is why Rune is empathy, although it sounds like the nicest approach out of all of them, is is not going to help us in the long run. So what if we can do the perfect combination of caring personally about our team and being willing to challenge directly?

This is honestly the best way to provide feedback because the person getting the feedback is going to see both the positives and negatives of any situation. They're going to hear sincere feedback because, right, we care about this person. It's going to be clear because we're willing to challenge directly. It's going to be specific and direct, but also kind and hopefully unheartful.

So what does this look like in the Fred situation? Fred stinks. I'm the boss and I have to deal with it. I have heard the gossip at the water cooler. I have seen the rest of the team that's maybe stuck in manipulative insincerity, you know, cover their nose as they walk by or shift away in their chair at the conference room table, whatever it looks like. I've seen this as a leader. I now have to make a choice. And if my choice is to engage in radical candor, this is what it would sound like.

I pull Fred into my office. I don't beat around the bush. I say to Fred, Fred, I'm noticing lately that your hygiene is not to the level that it used to be. This is the challenging directly. I am concerned that it is affecting our team in a negative way.

Is there anything I can do to help you with this situation? Is there anything that I don't understand that would help me to help you? This is the caring personally part because ultimately we don't want to hurt Fred's feelings. We want to make sure that the team has the best outcome at the end of the day, which would be to get Fred help and to help him to see maybe where his blind spots are. And at the end of the day, the only way that we can help Fred change is if we help him to see that he needs to.

Desiree (11:46.783)
Radical candor is just

Desiree (11:58.654)
candor is just mixing our desire to care for pers for people with a willingness to engage in what we would call productive conflict. Productive because at the end of the day, it needs to happen. It needs to be said.

Desiree (12:28.983)
So there it is. That's the framework. It's super simple, a two by two, four different kinds.

Desiree (12:40.365)
So that's it. That's the entire framework. And it seems really simple, but there's a couple of additional pieces that I pulled out of the book that I want to touch on because I think they're really important. So Kim Scott, the author, says that we get the order wrong with how we try to put a feedback culture into our companies. Often we start by trying to give feedback to people.

And we forget that it's really important to ask for feedback, to model what it looks like to be gracious in the way that we receive it. So asking, what are my strengths and my weaknesses? What could like what could I do to help you better? What is it that I could do that would make your job easier? This is all how we get feedback.

to solicit it before trying to give it. And it's the only way that we can build a culture where we can then encourage our teams to give that feedback, even if we're not in the room.

It's part of the Patrick Lincioni five dysfunctions of a team model. Accountability is not meant to be solely on the leader's shoulders. If we do it right and we are not only willing to graciously receive feedback, to radically to be radically candid in the way that we give feedback, but then also encourage our teams to engage in giving and receiving feedback. We can build a culture where that is normal and it doesn't feel as scary.

Desiree (14:19.177)
One of the things that Scott says is good intentions don't erase bad impact. Good intentions don't erase bad impact. So if we look at the Fred situation again, if we are living in this place of runeus empathy where we're not saying anything because we know it's going to hurt Fred's feelings.

Our intentions are good. Our intentions are good, but it doesn't erase the fact that the impact that it's going to have on our team is bad. Fred is still going to show up with bad hygiene. Team members are still going to be gossiping or snickering or whatever it looks like, or they're just going to feel really bad, or maybe it gets bad enough that they quit because they can't handle it and they don't want to deal with the conflict. Our good intention does not erase the bad impact.

And as a leader, it's our responsibility to be willing to do the hard thing, which is to be radically candid with that person.

One thing I thought was really interesting because I've worked with a lot of teams and done this with a lot of teams. And I feel like Runeous Empathy is where most teams kind of self-assess or place themselves when they hear all of the four different types. But Kim Scott says that caring personally is actually the harder skill.

Desiree (15:41.931)
Like most people just assume that yeah, we care personally. Of course we do. We

Desiree (16:03.009)
But Scott actually argues that caring personally is the hardest skill for most managers, especially the ones who are taught to quote unquote stay professional and to show the picture perfect version of themselves and to show up with confidence. It's hard to care personally when we have to build a wall between ourselves and our employees because we've been told that that's how we're supposed to lead.

So I don't know that I've seen this in practice as much, but I thought it was a really interesting point as far as this soft skill of caring personally with our teams, that she probably has a wider research area for it. And that's a pattern that she's seeing is that it's hard for employees and employers to care personally about the people that they work with.

So I don't know if I fully agree with it, but it's definitely a point to consider. And then the last thing that I wanted to touch on was this concept around rock stars versus superstars. So rock stars versus superstars. And ultimately, the original thought that Kim Scott was trying to get across was that.

Desiree (17:18.497)
There are two types of people on our teams. There are superstars, which are the people who are like really hungry and really driven. They want to do a good job, they want to have a steep growth trajectory. They want promotions and they want to learn and do leadership development. Those are the superstars. Whereas there's other, the other group is the rock stars. These are the ones that value stability.

That do a good job but don't necessarily want to grow. They don't have higher things in their sights. They're just kind of there. And they show up and they do a good job and they go home. And what's interesting is that after she published the book, she actually got a lot of critic criticism for implying that some employees are less ambitious by nature. So she revised it and talks about it a little bit differently now, kind of like.

We are all rock stars and superstars in different seasons of life, like in your twenties. You might be a superstar because you have a lot of growth plans and then maybe you have a baby or you get married or something along those lines and you turn into a rock star, someone who is just searching for that stability. And then maybe after your kids move out, you're a superstar again. But I

You know, I think that there are just people that are work-centric. In other words, they have this hunger and desire to grow and constantly be growing. And there are individuals who just want to feel safe and secure. So I find it really interesting that she went back on her original statement of the superstars versus rock stars. Because in the accelerator class that I lead, we were talking about another book, The Ideal Team Player, which I can link in the show notes for you.

I did a similar episode with that book. But we were talking about this concept of hunger and how it's the hardest thing to teach in our employees. It's the hardest thing to motivate out of our employees because if that person doesn't already have hunger, they don't have drive, can we make them want it? Like, is there any way that we can motivate them to have it? And one of the accelerator students said, no, you can't motivate them.

Desiree (19:32.674)
And we ended up in a really long in-depth discussion about hunger. Because I said, Well, okay, so maybe you can't, you know, get people to want to move up the ladder or to want to learn or grow or read books or etc. But does that mean that the person who shows up every day and does a really good job and works hard is not hungry if they don't have a desire to grow? And he said, No, they're not hungry if they don't have a desire to grow. But I don't know. I I think I could still argue.

The point that hunger could mean both things. It could mean rock stars and superstars. They can still be really motivated, assuming that they are showing up every day and doing a good job. And you know, they don't it doesn't have to be their whole identity. I don't know. I would I would love to hear what you think. Is hunger

Simply about our desire to grow and do more and be more? Or is it our desire to show up and do a good job and constantly strive to meet an expectation and a high standard? Are they the same thing? I don't know. But that's really all I have for this. I think, you know, I read the book and I'm gonna be totally honest. It was very long, slightly dry. The concepts were great, super interesting, and I teach the framework more than anything because I think that there

place for it. I think almost any conflict that you get into in the workplace can be discussed within the four quadrants of the runeus empathy versus obnoxious aggression versus the manipulative insincerity versus what we want, which is radical candor. It works in a lot of different situations. but I would love to hear your thoughts on the hunger piece of it on the rock stars versus superstars. So send me a message on LinkedIn. I send out a new.

newsletter every single week. I don't know if you knew that because I don't talk about it very often. But if you're not signed up for the newsletter, if you don't get the newsletter, you can go to the link in the show notes. All I need is your name and email address. And every week I will send you a newsletter with the most recent podcast episode. I write a little letter in there every week. I do a health and wellness tip. I will link my favorite products and it's it's not just leadership. I think last week I I put in like my kids' favorite water balloons and books and the things

Desiree (21:54.677)
So it's super fun. If you want to sign up for that, go into the show notes and then you can just respond to that email and let me know what you think about the hunger conversation because I would truly love to hear from you. But until next time.

Thank you for tuning in. If you never want to go and read this book, I'm just glad that you are taking the time to learn a little bit more about different things that can help you in your leadership because leadership is a privilege, but it's also a really big responsibility. And you're the boss now. So what are you going to do with it?