Radical Candor

“I would even say it's even more important in Latin America in some Asian countries. Where you have a culture, and I'm Latin American, so I can talk a little bit about stereotypes without it becoming offensive especially ones that are true, where there's a lot …”

“Where I try to go a step further than radical candor is to not just say, hey, here's my feedback, you know, just wanting you to know, but to say, and I want something, right? Like I would like to see an outcome.”

“I think there's a major gap in the leadership or organizational culture, that whole world between theory and application. So somebody reads a book about maybe radical candor or some, like, concept, and then the way that they apply it is completely different.”

“However, praise is even more important than criticism in terms of radical candor. Radical candor is not all about The boss giving the employee criticism. It should always start with soliciting feedback and it should include more praise and criticism.”

“There's really an order of operations to radical candor, and if you begin with soliciting criticism, then you take the first and most important step to improving your relationship with that person enough that, that it becomes easier for you to give it as well …”

“Very often the leaders who are low on the care personally dimension, they do care about their results and they do care about their own careers. And so when you sort of explain this to them in terms of enlightened self-interest, they tend to get better at it.”

“Part of the problem with obnoxious aggression is that you harm other people, but it's also inefficient because when you act like that, people can't hear what you're saying, so you're wasting your breath, you know.”

“I believe that the more novels people read, the better, that's the, if people often ask me, like, what can I do to move up on the care personally dimension of radical candor? And read more novels. This is the best way I know of to build compassion for other pe…”

“Interestingly enough, Kim Scott was at Dropbox for a short period of time. So when I joined Dropbox, she was actually on my interview panel and we overlapped for three months. And she actually workshopped that book with our team before, or before she published…”

“I also think it's kind of like in some ways the reverse of radical candor from Kim Scott, which like I generally view that as you as a manager, what's the best way to land feedback with your employee. But I think it works in the reverse where it's like give yo…”

“So we introduced that book to the team early. It's a mandatory reading for everyone on the float team.”

“As you start trying to challenge people directly and you care deeply about them, they are open to receiving that feedback because they understand what place you are coming from. So that's the first exercise is to share the two by two with them, have people sho…”

“There's another side to the equation, which is if you are a woman giving radical candor, you're much more likely to get unjustly accused of obnoxious aggressions.”

“If you take just a second to establish a human connection, and if you don't let the concern, the worry about the other person's short-term feelings get in the way of telling them something that is really good for them to hear in the long run, then you wind up …”

“And so the combination of those two factors of pretending at work that we don't have any emotions, that we're not fully human, and having been trained since we learned to speak, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it at all, makes radical candor …”

“It's a disaster. Don't try to be more likable. There's a giant difference between caring personally and wanting to be liked. So it is really important to realize that a key aspect of radical candor is really focusing on the other person and their well-being an…”

“And you build it over time by encouraging and praising every time you get challenged directly and never defending yourself or asking necessarily for examples.”