What is the proper nature of this boss-employee relationship? At the heart of being a good boss—at Apple, at Google, or anywhere else on earth—is a good relationship. And the term that best describes the optimum state of this relationship is Radical Candor. Radical Candor is the ability to show you Care Personally about a person you are Challenging Directly. It is a way to give feedback—what I prefer to call guidance—to people you collaborate with, at work and beyond. MiQ Bengaluru, a top global marketing intelligence firm with a passion for innovation and continuous learning recently did a radical candor workshop. The leadership team from their Asia Pacific (APAC) offices is focused on making sure MiQ is a great place to work, and the Radical Candor framework really resonated with them. They seized this opportunity to assess and improve how they communicate to their teams and each other, integrating learnings from the Indian, Singaporean, and Australian cultures while together.

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Applying Radical
Candor to feedback
KIM SCOTT, RADICAL CANDOR
Constructive feedback encompasses both ends of the spectrum—praise as well as criticism.

2. I N D I A N M A N A G E M E N T J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 9 27
Nor is it because companies there have huge
budgets for training, or some fundamental insight
into human nature released by access to all that
big data.
No,the reason why SiliconValley turned out to
be a good place to study the relationships between
bosses and the people who report to them is
because the war for talent is intense.So many great
companies there are growing and hiring there is no
reason to stay with a company if you are unhappy
or think your potential is being wasted.
If you do not like your boss, you quit, knowing
that ten other companies will be lining up to hire
you. So, the pressure on companies to get these
relationships right is enormous.
Google co-founder Larry Page cannot have
a real relationship with more than a handful
of people any more than you can. But the
relationships you have with the people who
report directly to you will have an enormous
impact on the results your team achieves; and
the ripple effect will go a long way toward
creating—or destroying—a positive culture.
Because relationships may not scale, but
culture does.
What is the proper nature of this boss-
employee relationship? Managerial capitalism
is a relatively new phenomenon, so this human
bond was not described by ancient philosophers.
Even though almost everybody today has a boss
at some point, the nature of this connection
has gotten short shrift in philosophy, literature,
movies, and all the other ways we explore the
relationships that govern our lives.
At the heart of being a good boss—atApple,
at Google, or anywhere else on earth—is a good
relationship.And the term I found that best
describes the optimum state of this relationship is
Radical Candor.
Radical Candor is the ability to show you Care
Personally about a person you are Challenging
Directly. It is a way to give feedback—what
I prefer to call guidance—to people you
collaborate with, at work and beyond.And
COVER
STORY
W
hen I first
arrived in
SiliconValley
20 years ago,
management
skills were
neither taught
nor rewarded, but today companies there are
obsessed with it.
This is not for the reasons you might think—
that SiliconValley tech companies are run by
new-age gurus in search of a theory, or that
people there are fundamentally different from
people anywhere else.

3. 28 I N D I A N M A N A G E M E N T J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 9
Radical Candor applies to praise as well
as criticism.
What makes it radical is that it is a deviation
from the norm, which tends to fall somewhere
between acting like a jerk and avoiding
confrontation altogether. Its purpose is to create
a new normal where guidance is both kind and
clear, specific and sincere.
Because Radical Candor can be hard to put
into practice, we developed a simple framework
that you can keep top of mind in the heat of
the moment.
ObnoxiousAggression, also called brutal
honesty or front stabbing, is what happens when
you challenge someone directly, but do not show
you care about them personally. It is praise that
does not feel sincere or criticism that is not
delivered kindly.
Ruinous Empathy is what happens when you
want to spare someone’s feelings in the short
term, so you do not tell them something they
need to know.You care personally but fail to
challenge directly. It is praise that is not specific
enough to help the person understand what
was good, or criticism that is sugar-coated and
unclear. Or simply silence. Ruinous empathy may
feel nice or safe but is ultimately unhelpful or
even damaging.
Manipulative Insincerity is backstabbing,
political or passive-aggressive behaviour, and
what happens when you neither care personally
nor challenge directly. It is praise that is insincere,
flattery to a person’s face, and harsh criticism
behind their back. Often it is a self-protective
reaction to obnoxious aggression.
This is not a personality test; these are
behaviours everyone can exhibit. So please do not
write people’s names in these boxes; instead, use
this framework as a compass to help you guide
your conversations to a more productive place.
Both dimensions of Radical Candor (caring
personally and challenging directly) are sensitive
to context.They get measured at the listener’s
ear, not at the speaker’s mouth.You may think
you are being radically candid, but one person
may not have heard any criticism at all, another
may have heard it as ruinously empathetic, and
yet another as obnoxious aggression.You have to
adjust for each individual.You have to be not just
self-aware, but relationally and culturally aware.
Radical Candor works only if the other person
understands that your efforts at caring personally
and challenging directly are delivered in good faith.
We have to be constantly aware of the fact that
what seemed radically candid to one person or
team may feel too obnoxious (or too touchy-
feely) to another. Radical Candor requires even
more adjustment when we go from one company
to another, and then even more when we go from
one country to another.What worked in one
culture will not translate directly to another.
Back when I was at Google, I managed teams
in Israel and Japan.The kind of argument that
would be taken as a sign of respect inTelAviv
would have felt too aggressive inTokyo. I found
my own upbringing in the Southern US helpful
in understanding the Japanese perspective; both
cultures placed a great emphasis on manners
and on not contradicting people in public. So,
I encouraged the team inTokyo to be‘politely
persistent’. Being polite was their preferred way
of showing they cared personally. Being persistent
was the way they were most comfortable
challenging Google’s product direction.
I was gratified to see the results.The team in
Tokyo became not just persistent but relentless
in their campaign to be heard.Thanks in part to
their polite persistence, a new product,AdSense
for mobile applications, was born.
While almost all the problems we have seen
companies encounter are covered in the book
RadicalCandorframework
isatrademarkofRadicalCandor,LLC.

4. I N D I A N M A N A G E M E N T J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 9 29
COVER
STORY
Kim Scott is
co-founder, Radical
Candor. She was
a member of the
faculty at Apple
University and
before that led
AdSense, YouTube,
and Doubleclick
Online Sales and
Operations at
Google.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Radical Candor:Be a Kick-Ass BossWithout Losing
Your Humanity, we have found that there are
limitations to how much people can put the
framework into practice from a book alone.
This is not the kind of change you can force
via an HR system; it is behaviour change.And
while the concept of Radical Candor is simple
to understand—caring while challenging; being
kind and clear—we recognise that putting it in
place is not easy.
You need to teach people why Radical Candor
is important, how to practise it, and help them
take steps to implement it.This is why we focus
on delivering hands-on workshops to help
teams practise giving, receiving, and observing
feedback; and support building cultures where
people are encouraged to speak up in a way that
is respectful and humble.
We recently led a workshop in Bengaluru with
MiQ, a top global marketing intelligence firm
with a passion for innovation and continuous
learning.The leadership team from theirAsia-
Pacific (APAC) offices is focused on making sure
MiQ is a great place to work, and the Radical
Candor framework really resonated with them.
They seized this opportunity to assess and
improve how they communicate to their teams
and each other, integrating learnings from the
Indian, Singaporean, andAustralian cultures
while together.The hands-on practice session
provided the team with a shared language and
tools to keep building a culture of feedback, and
they noted that “having a Radical Candor coach
and peers from other regions to practice with
was invaluable.”
If you want to create a culture of Radical
Candor, the order of operations is important, and
it may be counter-intuitive: you begin by asking
for feedback, not by giving it.You start by asking
for feedback because you need to prove you can
take it before you start dishing it out.
Soliciting guidance, especially criticism, is
not something you do once and check off your
list—this will now be something you do daily.
But it will happen in quick one-to two-minute
conversations, not in meetings you have to add to
your calendar. It is something to be conscious of,
not something to schedule.
It will feel strange at first, but once you get
in the habit, it will feel strange not to do it.You
will not ever move on from getting guidance any
more than you will ever move on from having to
drink water or brush your teeth. It is a practice.
After you have received feedback, start giving
praise.We begin with the good stuff before we
give criticism. It is important to correct for our
innate negativity bias.
Specific praise helps the person and the team
understand what success looks like.You might
think that praise is equivalent to care personally,
and criticism is equivalent to challenge directly,
but that is not the case; radically candid praise
and criticism both include care and challenge.
Finally, it is important to really encourage and
celebrate a culture of Radical Candor. Managers
can play a strong role in this, helping each other
by encouraging feedback between teams and
across all levels of an organisation.
As people use the phrase Radical Candor more
frequently, it is important to remember that if
you do not care about the object of your candor,
you are doing it wrong. I am not saying command
and control cannot work, it works especially well
in a totalitarian regime or a baboon troop.
But in a radically candid workplace, common
human decency is something we owe to
everyone.We try to find the best people for
the job, and we respect all the people and all
the jobs.