Radical Candor: Rocket Fuel for Your Teams
Tags: Radical Candor, Team Building, Agile Methodology

What did we learn?

Anecdotally, we’ve seen some incredible growth, and some missteps, from folx exploring this material. It’s been encouraging to hear that Radical Candor is helping people think through their relationships (both personal and professional) differently, and what we owe to each other in terms of feedback. It’s also been heartening to see the places we’ve over-extended — sometimes with a preamble that they realize hasn’t been quite tuned enough, like I’m going to be Radically Candid here — and then been self-reflective enough to realize that’s not quite how to apply the concepts in practice.

I wanted to hear, and share, reflections from participants. Feedback was copious. I’ve selected a few thoughts across the organization that hopefully give a sense of the impact the series has had and why we continue to invest in it.

About the material and model

If a team signs on to implement Radical Candor and has trust in each other to be kind, that team can focus on the work and get more high quality work accomplished. It’s an un-blocker. — Jeremy Brett, Software Engineer

Using Radical Candor to constantly point out each and every flaw in a colleague is not helpful. I think the book calls it Obnoxious Aggression and it is definitely both those things. I have also noticed obnoxious aggressors are the least likely to actually take constructive feedback in the spirit it is offered. I think there is this happy middle ground that requires judgment and good intentions to find. — Mike Ryan, Director of Engineering

Rock Stars have a different motivation. As an organization, how can we structure our HR tools and techniques to support these concepts? I’d like to use the book when we are recommending new things like our career mapping conversations… how do we align our processes, tools, etc to Rock Stars vs Super Stars? — Robin Morrison, Head of Agile Solutions

I tend to think in systems, and I have a hard time with consistency without them. Radical Candor gives me a system for managing interpersonal interactions that I never really had before. It finally made ‘There’s a difference between nice and kind’ make sense. — Chris Terry, Platform Engineer

Understanding how other people have the same blockers to being candid helped me acknowledge that discomfort and push through it myself… the harder something is to say, the more important it is for you to give that feedback. — Kellan Folkers, Director of Client Solutions

About the book club framework

I got to bounce my interpretations off other people, hear angles I wouldn’t have thought about, and through those, better understand the concept model. It felt especially useful hearing from others who had experiences they could tie Radical Candor to. — Chris Terry, Platform Engineer

My learning from the book club was less regarding the book material itself. Instead, I learned more about the people in the book club series within my group: how they think and feel, how they perceived the material of the book, and how they felt challenged by the book. — Dennis D. Kirkpatrick, Platform Engineer

The open, honest discussions amongst our cohort were insightful and highlighted that different readers can come away with nuanced understandings of the text. The discussions about those nuances were the highlight of the sessions for me. — Bill Schwanitz, Technical Architect

Getting to hear others’ perspectives and insights is always extremely valuable. As we discussed in the CS book club, no two people have the same experience, so hearing these varied perspectives could not only help us expand our insights into the material, in this instance it could help provide fuel for caring personally.. — Jeff Grow, Senior Manager, Client Solutions

Listening to others enabled me to learn from situations that I may face in the future. Hearing from others how to apply the methodology to situations I haven’t yet faced helped me to speed up maturing as a manager without having to pay the price. — Jaffid Landeros, Director of Engineering

Radical Candor needs context — if left unguided it can definitely end up in ruinous empathy or obnoxious aggression. It is an uncomfortable topic and can be hard to operationalize without guidance. To that end, I love that we did it as a book club series and that Elisa championed it around the organization with a rigorous, thoughtful approach. — Ming Linsley, Head of Kenzan

Paying it forward

If you’ve gotten this far, perhaps you are interested in leveraging Radical Candor in your organization to make meaningful change in your operations and communication. No sense in reinventing the wheel… in our next post we’ll share our blueprint for running your own book club.

Are you using Radical Candor personally or in your organization? I’d love to hear your thoughts and how it’s working! Find me on LinkedIn.

If you enjoyed this article, catch up on all the articles in Elisa’s series on Radical Candor:

Part 1, The Daily Practice of Crit(ique)

Part 2, Calling Yourself Out

Part 3, Management Style: Sunny With a Chance of Bananas

Part 4, Pink Hair, Piercings, and Professional Services

Part 5, Pandemically Candid