Radical Candor

Principles for giving effective feedback

• Avoid manipulative insincerity. 

Manipulatively insincere guidance happens when you don’tcare enough about a person to challenge directly.

When you are overly worried about how people will perceive you, you’re less willing to say what needs to be said. You may feel it’s because you care about the team, but really, in those all-too-human moments you may care too much about how they feel about you - in other words, about yourself.

·        Avoid ruinous empathy. 

There’s a Russian anecdote about a guy 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 the dog pain and suffering only leads to more pain and suffering. 

o  Challenging others and encouraging them to challenge you helps build trustingrelationships because it shows you care enough to point out both the things that aren’t going well and those that are and that you are willing to admit when you’re wrong and that you are committed to fixing mistakes that you or others have made. 

o  “Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.” - Colin Powell. You have to accept that sometimes people on your team will be mad at you. If nobody is ever mad at you, you probably aren’t challenging your team enough.

Share constructive feedback as early as possible, ideally immediately. 

We all were going throught this topic someday, it´s naturally really important to share opinions with each other. Just to make the air cleaner.

o  Most people want to avoid creating tension or discomfort at work. They are like the well-meaning parent who cannot bear to discipline their kids. 

Praise in public, criticize in private. 

o  Adapt to an individual’s preferences. While the majority of people do like to be praised in public, for some any kind of public mention is cruel and unusual punishment. 

Keep slack time in your calendar to give feedback. 

o  Don’t schedule back-to-back meetings or have twenty-five and fifty-minute meetings with hard stops. 

o  Give feedback in 2-3 minutes between meetings. 

o  Or be willing to be late to your next meeting. 

>       Instead of saying, “You’re wrong,” say “I think that’s wrong.” 

>       State your good intentions. 

o  “I’m going to describe a problem I see; I may be wrong, and if I am I hope you’ll tell me; if I’m not I hope my bringing it up will help you fix it.”

It is honestly pretty meaningful to start acting like this during the BM or dialogues. I am trying to give feedbacks like this since I attended Tiimiakatemia.

Decision making

• Don’t ask people for their recommendations, seek facts instead. 
• Don’t ask, “What do you think we should do?” 
• Ask for facts directly. 

That is a huge problem that we are often out of the main point and we base our solution on our thoughts only. I am trying

• When you are the decider, it’s really important to go to the source of the facts. 
• If Steve Jobs was making an important decision and wanted to understand some aspect of it more deeply, he’d go right to the person working on it. There were numerous stories about relatively new, young engineers who’d return from lunch to find Steve waiting in their cube, eager to ask them about a specific detail of their work.

Receiving feedback

• If a person is bold enough to criticize you, do not critique their criticism. 
• Listen to and clarify the criticism, but don’t debate it. 
• Even if somebody criticizes you inappropriately, your job is to listen with the intent to understand and then to reward the candor. 
• Encourage criticism. 
• A story from Toyota. Wanting to combat the cultural taboos against criticizing management, Toyota’s leaders painted a big red square on the assembly line floow. New employees had to stand in it at the end of their first week, and they were not allowed to leave until they had criticized at least three things on the line. 
• Turn feedback into action. 
• If you agree with the criticism, make a change as soon as possible. 
• If the necessary change will take time, do something visible to show you’re trying. 

Self-management

• Figure out your recipe to stay centered and stick to it. Learning contract can help the whole process of self-management. Thanks that we know what do we want to achieve in the future.
• Prioritize doing it. It’s even more important to focus on making for whatever keeps you centered when you are stressed and busy than when things are relatively calm.