Direct Reports and Radical Candor: 5 Tips for Giving Guidance and Feedback
Your relationships and your responsibilities at work reinforce each other positively or negatively, and this dynamic is what drives you forward as a manager — or leaves you dead in the water. What’s more, your relationships with your direct reports affect the relationships they have with their direct reports, and your team’s overall culture.
Like it or not, your ability to build trusting, human connections with the people who report directly to you will determine the quality of everything that follows. Despite these relationships being vitally important, most of us are at a loss when we set out to build relationships with our direct reports. Learning the principles of Radical Candor can help guide you in the right direction.
What is Radical Candor?
Radical Candor is about more than just “being professional.” It’s about giving a damn about the people you work with, sharing more than just your work self, and encouraging everyone who reports to you to do the same.
It’s not enough to care only about people’s ability to perform a job. To have good relationships, you have to be your whole self and care about each of the people who work for you as a human being. It’s not just business; it is personal, and deeply personal. I call this dimension of Radical Candor “Care Personally.”
Practicing Radical Candor also involves telling people when their work isn’t good enough — and when it is; when they are not going to get that new role they wanted, or when you’re going to hire a new boss “over” them; when the results don’t justify further investment in what they’re working on. Delivering hard feedback, making hard calls about who does what on a team, and holding a high bar for results — isn’t that obviously the job of any manager?
I’m listening to you because I want to develop the skills and the team I’ll need to succeed.
Of course it is, but most people struggle with doing these things. Challenging people generally pisses them off, and at first that doesn’t seem like a good way to build a relationship or to show that you “Care Personally.” And yet challenging people is often the best way to show them that you care when you’re the boss. This dimension I call “Challenge Directly.”
Radical Candor is what happens when you put “Care Personally” and “Challenge Directly” together. Radical Candor builds trust and opens the door for the kind of communication that helps you achieve the results you’re aiming for.
It turns out that when people trust you and believe you care about them, they are much more likely to accept and act on your praise and criticism; tell you what they really think about what you are doing well and, more importantly, not doing so well; engage in this same behavior with one another, meaning less pushing the rock up the hill again and again; embrace their role on the team; and focus on getting results.
So, how can you deliver guidance and feedback to your direct reports without sounding patronizing? The answer is simple, but it’s not easy.
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