Normalizing the Radical Radical Candour is everywhere right now. If you’re not yet familiar with it, author Kim Scott distills her learnings from years of managing high-performance teams in some of the world’s most wildly innovative and wildly lucrative business, like Google and Apple. According to Kim, those companies are radically candid. There are two dimensions to radical candour: Care Personally Challenge Directly.
Caring Personally goes beyond “being professional” to actually caring about the people on your team as real, individual people and wanting to see them thrive. Challenging Directly means communicating very clearly so there’s no room for interpretation. Basically, radical candour is when you tell it like it is but from a place of good intention for the person or people involved. When they know you care personally, people are much more receptive to being challenged. Read the book. Its filled with tons of examples that we can all relate to. Apologies to everyone who is waiting for my long overdue library copy. I’ll return it this weekend! Radical Candour will transform your approach to interpersonal relationships. Period. While reading the book, I realized that the ideas behind Radical Candour are absent from most conflict resolution processes. Think about it: In lawsuits, the first thing we usually tell clients is not to talk to the other side. The process becomes one where we collect helpful information and minimize harmful facts. If a client will be questioned by opposing counsel, we remind them to “only answer the question that is asked, don’t offer additional information”. One of the benefits of having a lawyer is that they are not emotionally involved, which creates separation between the issues and the parties so we can assess the situation objectively. It’s definitely not about caring personally. Mediations or negotiations are usually still positional, with either side trying to maximize a “win”. When you want to win, you don’t usually care personally or challenge directly. Workplace investigations are an important tool, but they aren’t always voluntary processes. The people involved know significant consequences may flow from them and fear of those consequences can impede Radical Candour.
Don’t get me wrong - some problems really should end up in the processes mentioned above. I’d be the first to refer something to a litigator or investigator where appropriate. But lots of conflict isn’t yet at that stage, and may never get there. For those conflicts, the informal approach shouldn’t be overlooked. Can’t we just try to talk it out, and I mean really talk it out, first? Yes, there’s some skill needed to do that effectively. And like anything, building that skills takes practice. Most of us have no conflict resolution training, and if we do it’s about the formal processes that exist (like a respect in the workplace policy). I started my work to address this gap. I help leaders and teams build the skills and shift their mindsets so they can lean into those opportunities with care and candour. We can read and learn about how to get better at this, but there is no replacement for action. It can be awkward at first, but with someone to facilitate those first few tries and the hard conversations that accompany it, the results flow more readily. When it’s a team-wide effort, it’s even better, as the people who bear your efforts know what you’re trying to achieve and why. It makes the false starts or the missteps much less scary, and they’ll encourage you to try again. Something so simple, yet it really is radical. With practice, hopefully it will just become the norm.
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