My friend John shared with me this article that describes “Radical Candor” - an idea by Kim Scott about feedback. I appreciate the spirit of the article (for some reason found in the third paragraph) that “The single most important thing a boss can do…is focus on guidance.” I find myself disagreeing with the label she’s chosen to use, “radical candor”, as it sounds like she was looking for a title for a book or workshop series. I do agree, as a leader you need to give constant guidance to your staff.

You can call it what you like. The folks at Manager Tools feel strongly about calling it “feedback”. This term isn’t used, according to the article, because “feedback is screechy.” I found that line in the article particularly simple minded. People can be screechy. People can seem insincere because of the words they use or how they say them. It seems like focusing on the word “feedback” is missing the point about delivering good insights to your staff.

I empathize with the negative reaction that folk have to the word “feedback”. I found that I was in an environment in one of my last jobs where “feedback” was given a bad name by some bad manager behavior. I experienced managers who used the annual review cycle to give “feedback” that was mostly criticism that was too little and too late. So I began to use the word “observations”. I’m not overly attached to it now that I’m not in that job anymore. It was just how I needed to adapt to provide feedback to my staff.

The heart of the “radical candor” idea appears to be a two-by-two matrix that she plots “care personally” against “challenge directly”. The upshot is that the best guidance is given when you care the most and are challenging the person directly. I agree here that empathy (caring directly) is key to providing good feedback. I don’t agree that you need to “challenge directly”. Boy that sounds like you’re caring about someone while you get into the octagon with them.

For my money, I think the second axis is really just honesty. Think about when you get caring, honest feedback from someone. It’s really helpful. You don’t need to be challenged. Maybe you do. There are lots of people with behavior styles that don’t want to be challenged. They would still value honesty.

It gets worse when the article creates an attention grabbing insight "I would argue that criticizing your employees when they screw up is not just your job, it's actually your moral obligation.” Seriously, we need to give guidance. Make observations. Help folks improve. This article not only focuses solely on the negative feedback, it’s happy to say “let’s criticism them.” If you just criticize them all the time (no matter how much your staff thinks you care deeply about them), they’ll leave. No question. Oh, and the article concludes if you can’t care "the second best thing is to be an asshole.” Seriously, you’ll be someone who understands feedback and has nobody to give it to because they hate you and they’ll all go work somewhere else.

In the end, you need to make observations of behavior you see in your staff. Both behavior you want to see more from your staff, and those you don’t. If your staff is largely doing well, there are lots of things you want to see over and over. Give them “caring honesty.” Do it often. You can keep your staff and keep them improving.