LEARNING
P
erhaps the most extreme example of such
new thinking is the idea of radical
transparency, instant, real-time feedback
championed by founder and ex-CEO of US-
based hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, Ray Dalio.
In his book, Principles, Dalio shares his view that success
depends on complete openness — to the extent of
meetings being recorded and shared in a ‘transparency
library’ for everyone to view, and staff being encouraged
routinely to rate each other on a range of attributes,
with ratings displayed on a personalised ‘baseball card’
for each of them. It’s interesting that radical transparency
has been adopted by other companies too, including
Netflix, Fitbit, Amazon and Patagonia.
The Radical Candor framework:
a compass, not a personality test!
Care personally
Compassionate
candor
Ruinous empathy
Manipulative
insincerity
Obnoxious
aggression
Use this framework like a compass to guide individual
conversations to a better place.
Please do not use it as a personality test to judge yourself or others. Don’t
write names in boxes. We all fall into each quadrant multiple times a day.
L
That doesn’t mean that it’s easy or straightforward
to deploy such a brutally honest, real-time feedback
strategy. In principle, it’s true that, when it comes to
feedback, regular input is more beneficial than annual
input. But just as the feedback in a communication loop
can be distorted by an ineffective medium, too much,
or the wrong kind of, noise can also get in the way of
delivering the message.
In the revised edition of her book, Radical Candor,
Kim Scott is forced to defend and adapt her thesis —
about how to give and receive feedback with candour
— after concerns that her concept of radical candour
was being appropriated by leaders “as a licence to
behave like jerks”. Reframing the feedback debate has
not, it seems, been enough to lead us to an entirely new
dawn. Badly delivered feedback is badly delivered
feedback, whether it’s delivered once a year, once a
week or every day.
Scott’s revised model, where the phrase radical
candour is replaced by compassionate candour, offers
a useful antidote. While not ducking the difficult stuff,
compassionate candour engages both the heart (care
personally) and the mind (challenge directly), reminding
us again that feedback can be an inherently messy
business — because it involves people. Crucially, Scott’s
interpretation of candour puts “building good
relationships at the centre of a boss’s job”. She outlines
three core responsibilities of a manager:
• t o create a culture of guidance (praise and criticism)
that will keep people moving in the right direction
• to understand what motivates people to keep your
team cohesive
• t o drive results collaboratively.
This clearly places feedback (guidance) as a core
component of what managers do. But, for Scott,
feedback is about performance development rather
than performance management. She is not against
annual performance reviews, but sees them as an
entirely separate exercise: company-wide set pieces
necessarily focused on results and consequences.
In contrast, performance development is about
regular, trust-building conversations that function
as continuous course correction.
At work, almost all of us want to improve, learn and
be better at what we do. To improve, we need to make
Badly delivered feedback is badly delivered
feedback, whether it’s delivered once a year,
once a week or every day
February – May 2020 // 85