You will be able to recognise the four feedback styles in Kim Scott's Radical Candor and spot your own default.
Ravi has been on Wei Ling's team for two years. They used to have lunch together most days, back when they were peers. For the past month his client follow-ups have been slipping: calls promised for Tuesday happen on Thursday, and twice a client has emailed Wei Ling to ask where things are. She has mentioned it to him once, in passing, with a laugh: "Eh, don't forget the follow-ups, ah." He laughed too. Nothing changed.
Wei Ling tells herself she is being kind. She doesn't want to damage the friendship, and he probably has a lot on. Kim Scott would say she has made the most common feedback mistake there is.
Kim Scott, who managed teams at Google and Apple, wrote Radical Candor about exactly this problem. Her argument rests on two dimensions of how you give feedback.
The first is caring personally: showing that you care about the person as a human being, not just as someone who produces work. The second is challenging directly: telling people clearly when their work isn't good enough, or when something they did had a cost.
Most of us treat these as a trade-off. Be direct and you risk the relationship, be caring and you soften the message. Scott's point is that the best feedback does both at once, and that caring about someone is the reason to tell them the truth.
Put caring personally on one axis and challenging directly on the other, and you get four styles.
Radical candor is high on both. You care about the person and you tell them clearly what isn't working, because you want them to succeed. "Ravi, I want to talk about the client follow-ups, because I think it's starting to affect how the clients see you, and I'd hate that. The Tan & Co call was promised for Tuesday and happened Thursday, and they emailed me to ask. What's going on?"
Obnoxious aggression is challenge without care. The message is clear but delivered in a way that ignores the person: criticism in front of others, harsh words, no interest in their side. It sometimes gets the behaviour to change, but at a cost to trust that builds over time.
Manipulative insincerity is neither. You don't care enough to be honest and you don't challenge. It shows up as praise to someone's face and criticism behind their back, or vague, political feedback designed to protect yourself.
Ruinous empathy is caring without challenging. You like the person, you don't want to hurt them, so you say nothing or say it so softly it doesn't register. Wei Ling's laughing reminder sits here.
Scott says ruinous empathy is the mistake she sees most often, and it's easy to see why. It feels like kindness. The person you avoided criticising is still friendly with you. Nobody had an awkward conversation. Everything seems fine.
The cost arrives later, and mostly to the person you were protecting. Ravi doesn't know his follow-ups are a real problem, because his manager laughed about it. He keeps doing what he's doing. The clients' patience wears thin. In three months, when Wei Ling finally has to say something serious, perhaps in a review, he will feel ambushed, and fairly so. Nobody told him.
There's also a cost to the rest of the team. Farid and Hui Min can see that Ravi's clients are getting late callbacks. If nothing happens, they learn that standards on this team are optional.
Scott's framework applies to any manager, but new managers who were promoted from a friendly team tend to drift toward ruinous empathy, and Wei Ling is a textbook case. When your reports were your lunch companions three months ago, correcting them feels like a betrayal of the friendship. You worry that you'll seem like you've changed, gone cold, let the title get to your head.
The fear is understandable, but it gets the friendship backwards. A friend who could see you were heading for trouble and said nothing wasn't being a good friend. Telling Ravi clearly, privately and with real concern for how it's affecting him is the caring choice. Module 8 comes back to the wider question of leading former peers in lesson 8.1, Your old peers now report to you.
If you took Communicate at work, you met Scott's idea briefly in lesson 7.3, Give feedback to your peers and your manager. As a manager, it matters more, because your silence costs more.
Most people have a default quadrant they slide into under pressure. Some managers, especially those who were blunt high performers, tend toward obnoxious aggression when stressed. Most new managers who were well liked in their old role tend toward ruinous empathy. A few, in very political organisations, learn manipulative insincerity as a survival habit.
Knowing your default helps you catch it. If you know you go soft, you can plan the sentence in advance and say it as written. If you know you go hard, you can open by saying why you care before you get to the problem.
Scott also stresses that radical candor is judged by how it lands, not by how you meant it. If Ravi walks away feeling attacked, it wasn't radical candor, whatever Wei Ling intended.
Look back at the last few times you gave feedback, or chose not to, and be honest about where each one sat.
Recall the last three pieces of feedback you gave or avoided giving and place each one in Scott's four quadrants.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).