Kim Scott: How to Give Candid Feedback

Kim Scott shares how managers should approach giving feedback with their team and how to build a culture of trust.

Kim has been an advisor at Dropbox, Twitter, and several other Silicon Valley companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University and before that led AdSense, YouTube, and Doubleclick Online Sales and Operations at Google.

She's taken her deep management experience and developed a framework called Radical Candor that's aimed at improving how employees provide feedback to each other. Too often employees are scared to share how they really feel, and, often times, procrastinate sharing feedback. This dynamic is detrimental to the employee-manager relationship — according to Kim, criticizing your employees when they screw up is not just your job, it's actually your moral obligation.

To help teach people how to be more radically candid, Kim has created a framework that's focused on the ability for managers to both "challenge directly" (x-axis) and "care personally" (y-axis) for the their direct reports. Successful managers are able to share feedback that has both of these attributes, and that's where Radical Candor lives.

Radical Candor results from a combination of caring deeply for your employees, while also not being afraid to tell the hard truth. This is a far cry from the old saying, "if you don't have something nice to say, don't say it all.'" But for Kim, the worst thing you can do is sugar coat or procrastinate sharing feedback, as it ultimately hurts your employees.

If you'd like to learn more about Radical Candor, order Kim's new book here.