Radical Candor - Kim Scott

Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss

Kim Scott (@kimballscott) has built her career around a simple goal: Creating bullshit-free zones where people love their work and working together. 

Scott shared a simple tool for ensuring that your team gets the right kind of guidance — a tool she calls ‘radical candor.’

To help teach radical candor to her own teams, Scott boiled it down to a simple framework: Picture a basic graph divided into four quadrants. If the vertical axis is caring personally and the horizontal axis is challenging directly, you want your feedback to fall in the upper right-hand quadrant. That’s where radical candor lies.

Radical candor results from a combination of caring personally and challenging directly. But what does it look like in practice? Scott has created an acronym to help people remember: HHIPP.

HHIPP: “Radical candor is humble, it’s helpful, it’s immediate, it’s in person — in private if it’s criticism and in public if it’s praise — and it doesn’t personalize.”