Nutshell: Towards compassionate candour – the art and science of effective feedback

Kim Scott's Radical Candor framework provides us with a compass for providing feedback at work.

We live in a world where feedback is all around us. Whether as consumers, at work or simply as users of social media, it’s become the norm for us to give, receive and collect ‘follows’, ‘likes’, reviews and a whole host of tech-enabled views and opinions as a routine part of our everyday life.

For leaders, as we move away from command-and-control-style management to a more collaborative approach, carefully calibrated feedback designed to encourage positive performance and behaviours is – intuitively – simply part of the deal. There are plenty of surveys that suggest that people at work actively crave feedback, seeing it as an important part of how we learn and progress.

Fair enough. Well-delivered, thoughtful and timely workplace feedback can be invaluable in helping people to understand the contribution they’re making, to navigate their own learning and to improve. And these are important factors when considering motivation-boosting factors such as a sense of agency, meaning and purpose. 

But alongside those feedback-hungry survey respondents, there are plenty of people who dread feedback, whether they’re giving or receiving it. How will it feel? How will the other person respond? Should I be nice or mean?

And how can we be so sure that feedback is all that it’s cracked up to be? Is it really, as leadership guru Ken Blanchard tells us, “the breakfast of champions”? Or is it more akin to Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall’s fallacy, a con that has us barking up the wrong tree when we want to help our people to “thrive and excel”.

The truth, as always, is probably somewhere in the middle. The key phrase in all this is, of course, 'well-delivered'. The world of feedback is not always easy, but that doesn’t mean it has no place. Leaders need to understand why feedback matters, to be aware of its potential pitfalls and to find a way to use it effectively.

Feedback under scrutiny

The problem with feedback at work is that so many of the processes and models for delivering and receiving it can be a bit of a mixed bag. At a most basic level, feedback is an essential component of communication: in a two-way, interactive communication loop, it’s how we know our message has been received.

But, like all communication, this feedback can only get through if the medium or channel used is appropriate and effective. The sheer range of barriers that can get in the way of even the simplest message might give us all pause for thought when it comes to the tricky business of delivering more nuanced feedback designed to praise or course correct.

Consider, for example, the growing case against annual performance reviews: poorly designed processes run inconsistently by badly trained managers; the almost impossible task of setting meaningful and measurable goals for a 12-month period; the very real possibility that annual reviews are used in isolation, leaving people feeling ignored for the rest of the year; the perennial challenge of rater bias in ratings-based systems. The list is long and far from enlightening. 

At the opposite end of the spectrum, real-time, tech-enabled solutions seem to offer the promise of feedback that’s more in tune with the rhythms of today's fast-paced workplaces. Radical transparency, for example, offers instant, real-time feedback, championed by the likes of founder and ex-CEO of US-based hedge fund Bridgewater Associates Ray Dalio.

For Dalio, success depends on complete openness between colleagues – to the extent of meetings being recorded and shared in a ‘transparency library’ for everyone to view. Staff are encouraged to routinely rate each other on a range of attributes, with ratings displayed on a personalised ‘baseball card’ for each of them.

We all want to work in organisations where we feel able to speak up and be heard, but maybe we can have too much of a good thing.

The fact is that badly delivered feedback is badly delivered feedback, whether it’s delivered once a year, once a week or all the time.

Why 'well-delivered' matters

At work, almost all of us want to improve, learn and be better at what we do. To improve, we need to make adjustments and corrections, but it’s not always easy to see or make the right adjustments without external perspective. As models such as the Johari Window show us, we all have blind spots about ourselves that can be frustratingly elusive to us, but painfully obvious to our colleagues.

In this context, it’s easy to see that feedback – defined as any information we receive about ourselves or give to others – has an important role to play. It’s how we learn about ourselves from our experience and from other people.

The problem is that feedback is only as effective as the recipient’s willingness or ability to receive and absorb it. And that’s why it’s so important that it’s properly delivered.

Buckingham and Goodall highlight research from Gallup that asked a sample of US workers whether their managers paid most attention to their strengths, their weaknesses, or to neither, and followed up to measure how engaged each employee was.

Unsurprisingly, the starkest disengagement was found among those employees largely ignored by their managers.

Even where managers were focused on fixing their people’s weaknesses, the ratio of engaged to disengaged was two to one.

But, for employees given mainly positive attention, that ratio jumped to 60 to one: 30 times more powerful than the negative attention.

Neuroscience is also a useful guide here. Research by organisational theorist Richard Boyatzis has shown that negative or poorly delivered feedback tends to stimulate our sympathetic nervous system, triggering a ‘fight or flight’ response which shuts down all but the most essential of the brain’s functions – hardly a fertile environment for any communication.

By contrast, positive, well-delivered feedback activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the ‘rest and digest’ system associated with a sense of wellbeing and cognitive openness.

So how can we master this tricky balancing act?

Kim Scott: towards compassionate candour

Years of working in top tech companies in Silicon Valley have given Kim Scott a keen insight into what makes a good boss.

For Scott, the key to effective leadership is the ability to build relationships so that we can “guide a team to achieve results”.

She outlines three core responsibilities of a leader: 

1. To create a culture of guidance (feedback) that will keep people moving in the right direction

2. To understand what motivates people to keep our teams cohesive

3. To drive results collaboratively

These three factors combine to create a virtuous circle between our responsibilities and our relationships.

We strengthen our relationships by learning how to get, give and encourage guidance, by putting the right people in the right roles and by harnessing the power of team working – and that means we can fulfil our responsibilities.

It’s a focus that places feedback at the centre of what managers do.

Scott’s guidance is not about those feedback set pieces, such as formal annual appraisals, which may or may not have their place in company-wide performance management.

Rather, it’s about regular, trust-building conversations that function as continuous course correction, what Scott calls performance development. It’s about creating cultures of guidance where feedback is simply a part of our everyday communications.

Scott is clear that building trust and relationships is not easy; after all, we’re dealing with individuals who will respond and react to us in different ways. But her radical candour framework is designed to help us “move in a positive direction”.

 The framework is based on two key dimensions: 

1. Care personally (really care about the people we work with).

2. Challenge directly (be prepared to deliver challenging feedback).

When we both care and challenge in tandem, we’re showing radical candour.

For Scott, that’s how we build enough trust to have the conversations we need to build performance. People are much more inclined to trust us if we can show we care about them, making them much more open to accepting feedback, whether praise or criticism.

It also makes them much more likely to give us feedback and to model the same behaviours with other team members.

The word 'radical' reminds us that we mustn’t avoid saying what we need to say. And candour is about being absolutely clear about the messages we’re delivering. Scott later replaced the word ‘radical’ with ‘compassionate’ after unfortunate confusion with radical transparency; she is clear that radical transparency is not the same: it’s about challenge, true, but without enough care.

The radical candour framework

Scott’s model offers us a useful response to the conundrum of how to deliver feedback that delivers the message it needs to deliver – but in a way that avoids triggering a flight or fight response and instead brings the recipient on board.

It invites us to engage both

• the heart (care personally)

• the mind (challenge directly).

to achieve the outcome we want: the chance for us to learn and develop. It’s about creating psychologically safe environments when people are open about what they say – but considerate of how they say it.

The radical framework helps us to see what might happen if we fail on one or both of Scott’s two dimensions.

All care and no challenge might lead to ruinous empathy.

This can happen when we want to spare someone’s short-term feelings, so we don’t tell them something they need to know. It might involve praise that isn’t specific enough to help the person understand what was good, or criticism that is sugar-coated and unclear. Or even just silence. It may feel nice or safe, but it’s ultimately unhelpful and even damaging.

All challenge and no care takes us into Ray Dalio territory: obnoxious aggression.

Also known as brutal honesty or 'front stabbing', it’s what happens when we challenge someone directly, but don’t show we care about them personally. It’s praise that doesn’t feel sincere or criticism and feedback that aren't delivered kindly.

Too little of either can come across as manipulative insincerity.

Often manifesting itself as backstabbing, politicking or passive-aggression, this is praise that is insincere, flattery to a person’s face and harsh criticism behind their back.

When we balance the right amount of care with challenge, we hit the compassionate candour sweet spot.

In her book Radical Candor, Scott illustrates the difference between these four approaches with the simple example of how we might respond if we notice that a colleague’s flies are undone.

This might seem like a ridiculous example, but thinking about where our response would put us on the framework gives us an insight into our natural approach – and the information to adjust accordingly.

Getting and giving both praise and criticism

To build cultures of guidance, Scott suggests that we need to “get, give and encourage both praise and criticism”.  And the first stage is for leaders to walk the walk and be open to feedback themselves.

In a Harvard Business Review article, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman shared the results of their research into people’s attitudes towards feedback, both positive and what they call ‘corrective’.

They found that, by a three-to-one margin, respondents believed that corrective feedback did more to improve their performance than positive feedback – as long as it was provided in a constructive manner (that well-delivered piece again). 

They also measured how difficult managers found it to deliver corrective feedback. Managers who found it stressful to give corrective feedback were also significantly less willing to receive it themselves.

Conversely, those who rated their managers as effective at providing them with honest, straightforward feedback tended to score higher on their own preference for receiving corrective feedback.

If we’re going to create cultures of guidance, we need to be comfortable with receiving feedback ourselves. In fact, Kim Scott is clear that we need to solicit it actively. That shows that we’re open to challenge ourselves, that guidance really is a two-way street. And it will almost certainly teach us something about ourselves.

Asking for feedback will also give us a better insight into how others might feel to be on the receiving end. 

And the experience of both soliciting and receiving feedback should also inform how we give feedback to others. When feedback is well-delivered, it’s about hitting Kim Scott’s compassionate candour sweet-spot of saying what we need to say – but in a way that’s respectful of the other person too.

It needs to be a regular part of everyday communication and not just about those big set pieces like organisation-wide appraisals. And it must be fair, balanced, specific and forward facing. It’s all about two-way conversations that help people to learn and grow.

Bill Gates cut to the heart of the matter when he said: “We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.”

And, as Kim Scott reminds us, it’s up to us leaders to be the people who both solicit feedback to boost our own performance and give the guidance that people need to develop their own.

Many of the feedback tools and processes that are under attack – including the annual appraisal – are not, in and of themselves, the disasters we believe. But they will continue to disappoint if used in isolation, haphazardly or in the wrong context.

What really matters is that feedback becomes central to how we communicate every day, that we provide the right environment for compassionate candour to flourish. When we show that we care, but are also prepared to challenge, we’re not just giving guidance; we’re also building the trust and relationships that really will drive performance and results.  

 Test your understanding

• Identify the two dimensions of Kim Scott's Radical (Compassionate) Candour model.

• Explain the difference between Kim Scott’s ruinous empathy and obnoxious aggression.

What does it mean for you?

• Consider the feedback tools and processes you use at work. Do you have annual appraisals? What more do/could you do to develop a more regular 'culture of guidance'?