“You sound stupid and insecure”.. Learn how to give feedback effectively
I will be summarising how to effectively give feedback at work “to build the best relationships of your career”. Kim Scott wrote a book called Radical feedback where she describes the best way to give feedback is to make sure it is direct and that you care about the individual. I will give examples of her stories throughout her career so you can learn how to give feedback in the best way possible to help push your career forward.
Topics:
What is the Radical Candor way of giving feedback
The authors back story
The 2 axis for the framework
How to apply this technique yourself
The 4 quadrants to the feedback framework
How you can use this to improve the way you give feedback
Introduction
I’m on my journey to becoming a manager.. again. The first time I did this, I didn’t enjoy it as I felt like I was making it up as I went along however this time I’m going through the training (I had no training last time, and almost felt it wasn’t necessary) and also approaching it from a different place.
So for part of my training we were discussing how to provide feedback and we discussed the book Radical Candor by Kim Scott.
What is Radical Candor?
Radical Candor is a book discussing how you should be providing feedback to your team and colleagues.. or even friends. She created this feedback framework to “help you build the best relationships of your career”.
In the book Kim says it is “Your moral obligation to say what you really think, and allow yourself to challenge others but also be challenged yourself”.
Kim’s back story
“You sound stupid and insecure”
This is what Kim’s manager said to her after she gave a big presentation to the CEO of Google.
“I felt the meeting went pretty well, in fact I felt like a genius” This is how Kim felt leaving that meeting..
Kims manager then explained to her how she kept saying “erm” when presenting after every few words. Kim mentions how she is aware of this and brushes it off. Her manager then replies with “You sound stupid and insecure when you keep saying erm”
And one of the first thoughts Kim had was why had nobody told me this? She said she had been doing hundreds of presentations for years and years and none of her colleagues or mentors had told her this.
She described it like walking around for years with her trousers undone and nobody telling her.
Kim knew Sheryl cared for her and wasn’t worried about hurting her feelings which made it easy for her to give Kim that feedback. This was a great example of Radical Candor - which she describes as caring personally and challenging directly.
What is caring personally and challenging directly?
So here is the framework Kim created to explain what Radical Candor is and where it sits amongst other types of feedback.
Caring personally —> not caring at all
The vertical axis is caring personally. Do you care personally about the person you’re talking to? She also calls this the “Give a damn” axis.
She talks about how caring personally has become a difficult thing to do at work because since the first job we got we’ve been told to “be professional” at work. We have then translated “being professional” as leaving our emotions, humanity and personality at home. Therefore being “professional” pushes us down that axis s you can’t be caring personally if you are leaving the human part of your personality at home and bringing a robot to work - the relationships won’t be genuine or authentic.
What can I do?
So the first thing to do would be to start showing up as your true self at work more and developing these authentic relationships with your team.
Kim’s manager Sheryl was able to give Kim this direct feedback because she cared about Kim and Kim was aware of this because of the relationship they had developed.
Challenging direction —> Not challenging directly
This is the horizontal axis. Kim also calls this skill the “ability to piss people off”. She mentions how leadership is being “wiling to piss people off”.
The reason we find it so difficult to challenge people directly is because since we were children we have been told “if you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all” and we take this belief into the workplace with us. However Kim says as a manager it is YOUR JOB to say the things which aren’t “nice”.
What can I do?
So this isn’t an easy thing to do. Especially because in many cultures this is frowned upon and we do everything to avoid saying something negative to someone about what they’re doing. But here are some questions on the right from an article about how to give feedback effectively, which you can try and use which make this a lot easier to do.
The framework
She created a 4 quadrant grid where people can fall into any of the 4 quadrants when giving feedback and you should aim to fall into the “Radical Candor” one.
Which one do you fall in to most of the time?
Radical Candor
The ability to care personally and challenge directly to the individual.
Obnoxious Aggression
When we challenge directly but we don’t show that we care personally about the individual.
This was also referred to as “The arsehole quadrant” by Kim which she changed because people started to put names of their managers in this quadrant.
Manipulative Insecurity
This is when you don’t care about your team member and you don’t challenge them directly. This situation leads to being passive aggressive, being political and back stabbing behaviour.
Ruinous Empathy
So this is the quadrant most of us fall into often. Typically we do care about our team mates. But we either care too much to say something bad or we don’t know how to.
What you can do with this framework
It’s important to realise that this framework isn’t about picking name of people and adding them to the quadrant. We can all fall into these quadrants at different times during different situations.
It’s important to be aware of which quadrant you are in for different situations so you can actively move towards the Radical Candor quadrant. Practicing these techniques does take some practice but can be developed over time and you will start to see the impact in your relationships.
How to start giving feedback in a radical candor way?
Kim talks about in order to do this you need to start asking for it first, this puts you in a better position to the feedback.
She describes radical candor as being more about the praise and how it is important to focus on the good things first. But don’t ignore the problems.
If you want more information, listen to the talk Kim gives about this framework.
Conclusion
I’ve started to apply this approach to not just my work relationships but also my personal relationships. I have to admit, it isn’t easy. I personally fall into ruinous empathy a lot! I always want to avoid any soft of conflict so I don’t say anything and try and avoid it. The questions I listed above really helped with starting. I also started to become very aware of when managers would give feedback to me an dI started to take notes on the phrases they used wand what words they would say.
Hopefully this has helped someone to improve the way they give feedback in the future so ultimately we can work better with one another.
See you in the next blog!
A
