As a manager or team leader, you’ve probably come across tons of advice on how to manage giving your team feedback. This advice might range from “You have to be tough, or else your team will not take you seriously”, to “Sugar coat your feedback, or else people will take it too personally”.
Giving and receiving honest feedback remains one of the areas that cause stress to most leaders. Kim Scott in her book“Radical Candor: How To Get What You Want By Saying What You Mean”, calls this feedback Radical Candor.
In the book, Scott nudges managers to challenge their teams and encourage them to learn and grow. However, in order for this to happen effectively, you have to care personally for your team members – both about their personal and professional lives. You need to understand what drives each individual, and be genuinely interested in their growth.
The concept of Radical Candor entails caring about your team members personally while challenging them directly. Challenging people directly might seem counterintuitive to some. However, if you first show your team that you care about them personally, they’ll be more open to taking your negative feedback positively and improving on their areas of weakness. This is beneficial for both individuals and the entire team.
We recently facilitated a session on Radical Candor for our Leadership for Growth program alumni in Nairobi and below are some of the key takeaways:
- Care personally and challenge directly:
This entails expressing genuine care and concern for the people you work with, even as you challenge them to be better. When you show people that you care about them, it creates a solid foundation to then challenge them on their shortcomings. Demonstrating genuine care builds trust. When people trust that you have their best interests at heart, they are more likely to accept constructive criticism.
However, if you care personally about your team but fail to challenge them directly, you’ll likely limit their growth and progress. On the other hand, if you give them negative feedback but fail to care for them personally, they are less likely to take your feedback kindly, and will probably not use it to make the necessary improvements.
There are leaders who get very uncomfortable, especially when it comes to delivering negative feedback, either due to their personalities, leadership styles, or other reasons. However, it is possible to build your feedback muscle, especially by showing empathy and being clear and honest.This can be followed up with encouraging dialogue(questions and reactions) on the feedback and extending support and following up to see how the individual is progressing and offering further guidance if needed.
2. Identify the rock stars and superstars in your team:
According to Scott, every team comprises both rock stars and superstars. Rock stars are those team members who are consistent high-performers. They can be trusted to do their jobs effectively, and reliably contribute towards the organization’s success. They are the backbone of any successful team.
Superstars are those team members who constantly push boundaries and come up with innovative ideas. They are also performers, perfect in situations that need out-of-the-box thinking, especially when traditional methods fail to work.
As a team leader, you need to understand who in your team falls under which category, and find ways to utilize their working styles and their unique abilities. It is also important to understand their long-term ambitions, and how their current circumstances fit into their motivations and life goals.
For instance, superstars are likely to prefer a steep growth trajectory when it comes to their careers and will likely desire regular promotions or having increased impact over time. Rock stars, on the other hand, might prefer a more stable, gradual growth trajectory, while continuing in their roles longer.
Understanding these different preferences will make it easier to create customized growth management plans for each individual. Otherwise, you might end up assigning a rock star a superstar role, and vice versa, to the detriment of the team and organization. That being said, most people shift from rock stars to superstars and vice versa in different phases of their careers and lives. Therefore, it is important to not put permanent labels on your team, but rather adjust accordingly.
3. Learn to accept feedback and not just dish it:
Seeking feedback is as important as giving it. Leaders who aspire to build a culture of open communication understand that it is a two-way street, which means they have to be as open while receiving feedback as they are while giving it.
Scott encourages building the kind of work environment that allows team members to challenge their leaders as well. This leads to better solutions to challenges, as opposed to just agreeing with the boss (even when the boss is wrong).
Since team members might shy away from giving negative feedback to their managers, managers must ask for this feedback explicitly, since it is likely to help them in becoming better leaders.
Asking the right questions can help to facilitate these conversations.You can also incorporate 360° feedback, which will help in getting comprehensive feedback from the entire team.
4. Build trust and long-term work relationships:
The core of Radical Candor is building a healthy work environment where people challenge each other and spur each other’s growth. Building genuine and fruitful work relationships helps your team to see that you care about their well-being, as well as their learning and growth.
Accepting their candid feedback even as you dish it to them also indicates leadership by example, which leads to overall team trust. Once this trust has been established, it becomes less about persuading your team to follow you, since they’ll naturally gravitate towards that.
The Radical Candor Framework: A useful framework for team leaders and managers
This framework comes from Scott’s book. It is a way to gauge praise and criticism, while helping people to remember to do a better job at offering both.
Key point to note: The names on each quadrant refer to guidance/feedback, not personality traits. Therefore, it is important to avoid using them to label people, since labeling limits improvement. Everyone also spends some time in each quadrant, sometimes even multiple times a day. No one is perfect.

image via Kim Scott
- Obnoxious Aggression:
This quadrant represents situations where managers or team leaders challenge their teams directly, while failing to care personally for them, their learning and growth.
Someone displaying obnoxious aggression is usually upfront or brutally honest in providing feedback, while neglecting personal care. This results in either delivering criticism hurtfully or giving insincere praise. This guidance/feedback ends up feeling obnoxiously aggressive.
2. Ruinous Empathy:
Under this quadrant, leaders care personally about their teams, but fail to challenge them directly. This might present as sugar-coated criticism or non-specific praise, which are both unhelpful. Neither of these help someone to learn and grow both personally and professionally.
3. Manipulative Insincerity:
Under this quadrant, managers deliver vague feedback without caring about their team members. Criticism ends up being unkind and unconstructive, whereas praise is insincere. Someone might give fake praise to be liked or to gain political advantage. The negative feedback may also come off as harsh. Both of these end up being passive-aggressive and unhelpful, and are unlikely to help a team member learn and grow. It is also likely to lead to a toxic work environment.
4. Radical Candor:
This is the sweet spot, where ‘Caring Personally’ meets ‘Challenging Directly’. It is the best of the 4 quadrants.
It entails providing specific, kind and constructive feedback that helps your team grow. It also means being direct and honest when delivering negative feedback, while being supportive and not hurtful to your team members.
Both dimensions of Radical Candor are sensitive to context. They are measured at the listener’s ear, not the speaker’s mouth. Therefore, to implement Radical Candor effectively, the speaker should understand the listener’s context, choose the right timing and words, and actively listen to their reactions. Encouraging open dialogue and being empathetic and adaptable can enhance the feedback experience and ensure it is constructive.
Understanding what Radical Candor is not:
When all is said and done, it is important to understand what Radical Candor is not. Radical Candor is not a personality type or a cultural judgment or a talent. It is also not a license to “front-stab” people or to be extremely harsh with them. Neither is it permission to be a jerk or an invitation to nitpick. It is not a hierarchical thing either, but something that needs to be practiced “up”, “down” and “sideways”.
Radical Candor is also not unique to certain cultures only. It is not about endless extroversion, or about manipulating others. Nor is it about having endless dinners, getting drunk or playing fantasy football with colleagues. While these activities might be good for blowing off steam with your colleagues, they might not necessarily help in getting you to care personally about those on your team.
It is important to note that Radical Candor only works if the recipient understands that your efforts at caring personally and challenging directly are delivered in good faith. Moreover, what seems Radically Candid to one team or person might feel too sentimental or obnoxious to another. What works for one context might not necessarily work for another.
Radical Candor therefore needs adjustment across different organizations and cultures.