Retail, hospitality, and food service workers face significant risks
The two pillars of the model–caring personally and challenging directly–are its foundation. When used correctly, they help to build strong working relationships.
Caring personally means showing empathy towards someone. It involves understanding the person you’re talking to and conveying a message without hurting them.
Challenging directly means speaking directly to the topic at hand. It is important to be as clear, concise, and direct as possible when conveying a point.
To achieve radical candor, both pillars must be present. For example, if you challenge directly but don’t care personally, you’ll arrive at "obnoxious aggression."
This is what happens when you focus on the issue at hand, but you completely disregard a person’s emotions and state of mind.
With obnoxious aggression, the negative emotions a person experiences will likely negate the message you were trying, albeit clearly and concisely, to convey.
By contrast, if you care personally but fail to challenge directly, you’ll arrive at what is referred to as "ruinous empathy."
The result of ruinous empathy is that nothing ever gets done and very little progress is made, because people are afraid of speaking up and giving their opinion.
This is the opposite of radical candor and tends to be what happens in an organization where the culture is completely toxic, and no one cares about each other or the organization.
It seems clear, then, that radical candor is what we should be aiming for. But what are the tangible benefits of adopting this communication model?
The first reason to adopt radical candor is that it allows for open and honest communication within an organization.
When people feel they can be open and honest with one another, they can develop trust and build strong relationships with one another.
Furthermore, when people in an organization feel comfortable giving and receiving candid feedback, it can lead to higher performance and productivity.
Giving and receiving candid feedback also enables people to identify and address issues more quickly.
As well as encouraging the growth of an organization, radical candor can help drive personal growth and development.
If individuals feel comfortable receiving candid feedback, they can take the comments on board and make improvements.
Finally, adopting radical candor helps an organization prevent a toxic culture developing where people feel uncomfortable speaking up.
Overall, radical candor seems essential for any healthy and productive organization. So, how can you find opportunities to put radical candor into practice?
If you are a manager, one way to practice radical candor is to schedule regular check-ins with your team members, perhaps on a weekly basis.
Use these sessions, which do not need to be as formal as a performance review, to discuss their progress and provide candid feedback.
Performance reviews are another great opportunity to exercise radical candor, although this time in a more formal setting.
This time both the employee and the manager should have the opportunity to provide feedback on how the employee is doing.
Finally, regular team meetings where employees can share and discuss feedback can help foster a culture of radical candor.
It is essential that team members feel comfortable giving and receiving feedback among themselves as well as with their superiors.
Sources: (Roslin)
See also: What is nonviolent communication and how can we practice it?
Get in the habit of treating each completed project as an opportunity to provide feedback on what went well and what could still be improved on.
It is also a good idea to provide candid feedback each time that your team completes a specific task or project.
We all have an idea of what poor communication is like, and most of us have worked in a place where it's common. Sometimes people lack empathy when talking to others, and other times they beat around the bush. Perfect communication, on the other hand, is more difficult to define. Enter: radical candor. This term, popularized by Kim Scott's 2017 book of the same name, refers to a communication model that includes both caring personally and challenging directly.
Curious? Check out this gallery to learn more.
What is radical candor, and how can you use it?
Making this communication model work
LIFESTYLE Communication
We all have an idea of what poor communication is like, and most of us have worked in a place where it's common. Sometimes people lack empathy when talking to others, and other times they beat around the bush. Perfect communication, on the other hand, is more difficult to define. Enter: radical candor. This term, popularized by Kim Scott's 2017 book of the same name, refers to a communication model that includes both caring personally and challenging directly.
Curious? Check out this gallery to learn more.