LEADERSHIP ROOM Articles

Red Lines Employee Feedback

Radical Candor

Kim Scott St. Martin’s Press, 2017 Abridged + Rebutted

Red Lines is our series on classic leadership writing. Each edition condenses an influential article and highlights advice that deserves another look. Select a red passage to see the original claim, where we disagree, and one action to try at work this week.

First published in 2017, Radical Candor gave managers a memorable frame: care about people as humans, tell them the hard truth, and guidance gets better. Scott was right that specific praise and clear criticism beat vague niceness, and that silence which spares short-term feelings can damage careers. We disagree with treating that frame as enough on its own. Harder feedback still fails under impossible load, bad scorecards, and rooms where only some people can challenge without losing the next project.

Read Radical Candor from the publisher.

  1. Caring personally and challenging directly creates trust and results

    When dissent is punished, power decides whose candor is safe

  2. Ruinous empathy (silence + sugarcoating) is the main guidance failure

    Overload, bad measures, and unclear roles wreck guidance too

  3. Know who wants craft depth vs. who wants a climb so you can staff and motivate

    Fix promotion paths, role design, and measures — not only private ambition mapping

Abridged from Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, drawing on Chapter 2 (guidance) and Chapter 3 (motivation and team). Marks highlight claims we challenge.

The “Um” Story

Shortly after I joined Google, I gave a presentation to the CEO and founders on AdSense. The business was growing fast. Eric Schmidt’s head snapped up from his laptop when I said how many new customers had signed up. Afterward I felt that mix of euphoria and relief that follows a talk that landed. My boss was waiting by the door. Instead of a high five, she asked me to walk back to her office.

“You are going to have an amazing career here at Google,” Sheryl Sandberg began. She named specific things I’d done well — intellectual honesty about both sides of an argument, how I’d handled hard questions. Then the axe. “You said ‘um’ a lot. Were you aware of it?” I brushed it off. Who cared about a verbal tic when I had a tiger by the tail? She offered a speech coach. I shooed the idea away with my hand. Sheryl laughed and got more direct: . That got my attention. She repeated the offer of help.

Think about how she handled it. She didn’t let a strong overall result stop her from naming something I needed to fix. She did it immediately, so the problem didn’t keep hurting my reputation. She praised thoroughly and sincerely — there was no attempt at “sandwiching” the criticism between bogus positives. When I wasn’t hearing her, she became more direct, but she was careful not to personalize. She said I “sounded” stupid rather than I was stupid. And I wasn’t alone: she offered tangible help. After three sessions with a coach, the “um” problem improved. More than that, the way she gave praise and criticism made me want to give better guidance to my own team.

Care Personally and Challenge Directly

Anyone can learn this. . . Fail on one dimension and you land in Ruinous Empathy. Fail on the other and you land in Obnoxious Aggression. Fail on both and you get Manipulative Insincerity. Being clear about those fail modes helps you avoid sliding back into habits too common to all of us. The quadrant names describe guidance, not personality traits. Don’t personalize.

Obnoxious Aggression

When you criticize without taking even two seconds to show you care, your guidance feels obnoxiously aggressive. If you can’t be Radically Candid, I regret to say that being obnoxiously aggressive is the second-best thing you can do — at least people know what you think and where they stand. I still refuse to work with people who can’t bother with basic human decency. Still, at the extreme, bosses who belittle, embarrass, or freeze people out do real damage. This Obnoxious Aggression sometimes gets great results short-term but leaves a trail of dead bodies in its wake in the long run. The worst version targets someone’s vulnerabilities on purpose — cruel empathy. When criticism is a weapon rather than a tool, trust erodes fast.

Manipulative Insincerity

When you neither care nor challenge, guidance becomes political: praise as flattery, criticism as backstabbing, or silence dressed as niceness. Jony Ive once pulled punches with his team because he “cared.” Steve Jobs told him he was just vain — he wanted to be liked. Jony knew Steve was right. That’s why Colin Powell said leadership is sometimes about being willing to piss people off. When you are overly worried about how people will perceive you, you're less willing to say what needs to be said. Give a damn about the people you challenge. Worrying whether they give a damn about you is not caring personally — it’s caring about yourself. After I sent an obnoxiously aggressive email to Larry Page and got called out, my instinct was to reverse my position to keep my job. That move was worse: Manipulative Insincerity. Larry’s look said everything. A colleague muttered, “He likes it better when you disagree with him.”

Ruinous Empathy

There’s a Russian anecdote about a man who has to amputate his dog’s tail but loves him so much that he cuts it off an inch each day rather than all at once. His desire to spare pain only creates more of it. Don’t allow yourself to become that kind of boss! I’ve seen in my career. Most people want to avoid tension at work. Bosses rarely intend to ruin someone’s chance of success by letting poor performance slide — yet that is often the result. Ruinous Empathy also stops bosses from asking for criticism, and from encouraging teammates to challenge one another, because “being nice” feels safer than improving the work.

Bosses sometimes hang out in Ruinous Empathy hoping to build a relationship first, then move to Radical Candor. Over time employees realize the only guidance they’ve received is “good job” and other vaguely positive comments. Their direct reports never know where they stand, and they aren’t given a chance to learn or grow. They stall or get fired. Not such a great way to build a relationship.

Moving Toward Radical Candor

People often agree with Radical Candor and still feel nervous putting it into practice. My advice: explain the idea, then ask people to be Radically Candid with you. . There are several reasons to begin building a culture of Radical Candor by asking people to criticize you. You show you know you’re often wrong. You learn a lot. You feel how criticism lands. You build trust. If somebody criticizes you inappropriately, listen with intent to understand — and reward the candor. Then, when you give guidance, start with sincere praise. When you criticize, know where Radical Candor ends and Obnoxious Aggression begins. You already know how to care and challenge.

Rock Stars and Superstars

To build a great team, you need to understand how each person’s job fits their life goals. A leader at Apple had a useful way to think about ambition on her team. To keep a team cohesive, you need both rock stars and superstars. Rock stars are solid as a rock — the Rock of Gibraltar, not Bruce Springsteen. They love their craft. They don’t want the next job if it pulls them away from the work. Honor and reward them and they’ll become the people you most rely on. If you promote them into roles they don’t want or aren’t suited for, however, you'll lose them — or worse, wind up firing them. .

To distinguish the two, let go of your judgments and your own ambitions long enough to know each person as a human being. The axes are past performance and future growth trajectory. Rock stars are just as important as superstars. Stability is just as important as growth. Performance is not a permanent label. No person is always an excellent performer — they performed excellently last quarter. To manage growth well, you need to find out what motivates each person on your team. Learn their long-term ambitions and how current circumstances fit those goals. Only then can you put the right people in the right roles.

Partner, Not Absentee

One common mistake is to ignore people doing the best work because “they don’t need me” or “I don’t want to micromanage.” Ignoring somebody is a terrible way to build a relationship. Dick Costolo compared “hire the right people and leave them alone” to marrying well and then avoiding your spouse. The “choose and ignore” strategy is just as crazy for management as it is for marriage. in the team’s results more than time spent with somebody who’s failing. Don’t be an absentee manager or a micromanager. Be a partner: know enough detail to help remove obstacles and make strong work stronger.

When It’s Time

Sometimes you’ll have to fire people. Managers almost always wait too long. Before you decide, ask three questions. Have you given Radically Candid guidance? Do you understand how this person’s performance affects colleagues? Have you sought advice from others? And remember: . How you fire matters as much as whether you fire. Care personally even then — and don’t lie to yourself to avoid the hard call.

You do not need another way to say the hard thing. Harder feedback fails when people are already underwater. It fails when the scorecard punishes bad news. It fails when disagreement never reaches the decision. Room practices that live problem — from pressure and capacity out to how groups decide.

Try Room.