Educating with Radical Candor
Being a great boss and an excellent educator share a lot in common
Care personally. Challenge directly. These two components of Radical Candor are good advice in general for working with people. And while Kim Scott, the author of the book by the same name is focused mostly on how the concept of Radical Candor can help you to be an awesome boss, I think she also uncovers a lot of ideas that can help you to be a better mentor and educator too.
This week I want to explore some lessons that I took away from Radical Candor and suggest a few ways that I’m thinking about implementing this in my work as a teacher, mentor, and colleague.
A legacy is built one person at a time
Ever since the retirement celebration for my colleague Zee Duron which I wrote about a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking a lot about the type of legacy I want to have as a professor. Much of what inspired me about the mark that Zee left on his students was the way that they pointed back to their time working with him as a pivotal learning experience that helped change or shape the trajectory of their career and in particular, the way they thought about developing their own influence.
One aspect of being a professor at a small liberal arts college like Harvey Mudd that has always resonated with me is its focus on undergraduate education. This focus is well aligned with what I care about. I love working directly with undergrads and I see mentoring and teaching them as part of my calling to make a difference in the world. I want to help my students develop both the technical skills and the foundational character traits that will enable them to courageously make a difference in their own careers.
Unfortunately, developing the skills needed to be a good mentor is not often explicitly taught in the course of a Ph.D. in science or engineering, but these skills are critical for cultivating a career that matters. This summer I’m on a quest to immerse myself in resources to learn how to be a more effective mentor, with the goal of prototyping a few strategies with my summer research students. After reading Radical Candor, I think I have some new ideas on practical ways to help me be more effective. In sharing them, I hope also to spark some ideas for how you can adapt these concepts to your context and better lead those around you as well.
What is Radical Candor?
There is one central diagram that Kim uses throughout the book to explain the concept of Radical Candor. The two components of Radical Candor are care personally and challenge directly. Laying these out as two axes of a two-dimensional graph divides the x-y plane into four different quadrants as shown in the image below.
These four quadrants help us to categorize our interactions with others, whether we are the ones giving or receiving guidance. The goal is to care personally and challenge directly. This leads to radical candor. The other three quadrants describe three types of poor interactions where either personal care or direct challenge is missing. Direct challenge without personal care leads to obnoxious aggression. Personal care without direct challenge leads to ruinous empathy. And the absence of both personal care and direct challenge leads to manipulative insincerity.
The point of these four quadrants isn’t to categorize people, but rather specific interactions. A person may tend to be obnoxiously aggressive in the way that they give guidance, but it’s important to recognize that all of us can fall into that trap at times. The purpose of the quadrants is not to label or shame ourselves or others, but rather to help us recognize how the guidance we both give and receive can be made more effective.
What does it mean to care personally and to challenge directly?
Ok, fine, the goal is to live in the Radical Candor quadrant. How do we get there? To figure out how we need to unpack what it means to care personally and challenge directly.
Caring personally means that you need to deeply internalize that each of the people who work with or for you are exactly that, people. Because they are people and not cogs in a corporate machine, this must deeply shape the way that you make decisions and interact with them. As a manager, this means realizing that your actions must always be made understanding that what you do and say will be received and have an impact on a person. Whenever giving feedback we need to consider the inherent dignity of each person on your team and the respect that they deserve. We are all complex people with many different dimensions. Some aspects of our identity are more visible at work than others, but even those aspects of ourselves that are not readily apparent are important. To be an effective manager, we need to recognize that those different dimensions exist and consider them, even if they may not be directly relevant to the work at hand
The trap of ruinous empathy.
The second element of Radical Candor is to challenge directly. When we have guidance to share, we should do it in a way that is forthright and transparent. One aspect that I appreciated about Kim’s diagram was how it revealed the trap of what she called ruinous empathy. This mode of feedback appears when we care personally, but don’t challenge directly.
Of all the four quadrants, I find ruinous empathy the failure mode I most frequently struggle with. I am often tempted to hold back feedback or guidance for my students because I am unsure of how they will respond and don’t want to crush their spirits with a critical comment or highlight an area where their work is not meeting expectations. I mean, nobody likes to be the bearer of bad news, right?
The framework of Radical Candor gave me a way to see this own tendency in myself and to recognize the ways that it is not helpful to my students in the long run. A lot of times we think that if we challenge someone directly we are automatically entering the territory of obnoxious aggression. We can all look back on experiences where we received guidance in that way. It feels lousy. Whether or not the criticism was justified, getting called out by a boss in a way that not only (perhaps rightly) identifies our work as substandard but goes beyond that to suggest that we are substandard hurts.
The beauty of the Radical Candor framework is not only that it identifies these failure modes, but that it shows us how to improve our feedback. Radically candid feedback is direct and valuable guidance that doesn’t crush the spirits of the one who is receiving it. The key is to realize that when you are directly challenging someone, you need to be sure that you are always doing it through the lens of care for them as an individual. Your guidance must be given in the context of a relationship where the person you are guiding understands that the criticism you are sharing is coming from a place of care for them and a desire for them to improve.
I’m not suggesting that after reading this book you’ll automatically be better at managing other people and not have any trouble delivering bad news or needing to fire someone. But, I would be surprised if after reading Kim’s stories and reflecting on her practical suggestions for implementing Radical Candor in your own context you don’t learn something about how you can improve your own practices as a mentor and manager of people.
Teaching with Radical Candor
I already mentioned this a few paragraphs earlier, but I wanted to dwell a little more on how I think Radical Candor helps to frame effective feedback as an educator. The two elements of personal care and direct challenge are as important in the context of the relationship between a teacher and student as they are in the relationship between a person and their boss.
It’s always been a priority of mine to form relationships with my students that help them understand that I am going to push them and assess the quality of their work in a way that will not always be a guaranteed pat on the back. I want them to know that if their work doesn’t meet standards, I will tell them. But, I also want them to know that the reason I share this feedback with them is to help them to grow. Whenever we are learning something new, I explain, it’s only natural to frequently miss the mark.
While the ideas of Radical Candor resonate with a lot of what I already do, the explicit framework helps me to see ways that I can be even more effective. One idea that I’ve heard other teachers use is an “Assignment Zero” where each student in the class is required to meet with the professor individually at the start of the semester. This helps to establish a foundation of personal care. It may be time-consuming, especially if the course is large, but I can’t help but think that this investment at the beginning of the semester will pay big dividends later on and make a big difference for the students. I don’t think it needs to be a very long meeting; maybe just 5-10 minutes to get to know a bit about the student as an individual, understand a brief summary of their story, and get to know what they want to get out of the class. Maybe these meetings are even so valuable that they should get dedicated class time.
Radical Candor is also a helpful framework to communicate the philosophy and point of the feedback I give to students. I think this fall I’m going to experiment with a few slides about Radical Candor at the beginning of the class and help students to understand how I hope to use the concepts to both share and receive feedback from them. Having students think a bit about Radical Candor might also help to improve feedback on the course from students, which can often feel like it is given too late to be of any use to even the most receptive teachers.
Three Short Lessons
Here are a few lessons that I’ve been dwelling on this past week.
Your colleagues and students are people. In order to care personally, you need to know who they are. This doesn’t mean that you need to be best friends with everyone you work with, but time spent getting to know their life story and a bit about what makes them tick is time well spent.
You aren’t doing anyone any favors by not giving honest and direct feedback. But giving feedback without caring about the person you are sharing it with is a disaster waiting to happen. When you are giving guidance:
Exhibit empathy and consider the person you are giving feedback to. Are they in a place where they can actually receive what you are sharing?
When sharing feedback, consider using the SBI framework: Situation, Behavior, Impact. This helps to keep what you share focused on a specific issue instead of meandering into other issues. What is the specific situation or context for your feedback, what was the behavior or action that prompted it, and what was the impact of the behavior?
Don’t sit on feedback. We all know the feeling when we have something we know we should share right away but we don’t want to for whatever reason. Sometimes taking a beat to get some perspective is helpful, but oftentimes this is just a way for us to dodge discomfort. Most of the time feedback is most helpful if it is delivered as soon as possible in order to allow the recipient to receive and act on the advice with the experience fresh in their mind.
Two Prototypes I’m Trying this Summer
As I look forward to starting summer research in the middle of June, I’m looking for ways to embrace Radical Candor in my mentoring this summer. Here are a few new ideas I’m planning to prototype.
Weekly 25-minute 1:1 meetings with every student in my group
In past summers I’ve normally just had daily standups with my group to get an update on progress and figure out where I can be most helpful to unstick folks. While these are good, I think that they often miss some of the bigger-picture guidance that is more easily shared in a 1-on-1 meeting. This summer I’m planning to schedule weekly, 25-minute meetings with each student in my group to prototype a more regular check-in both with their individual progress and give and receive feedback on how I can better help them to achieve their goals.
Career Development Conversations
This idea is inspired by Russ Laraway's career conversations framework which Kim shares in Chapter 7.
I’m planning to prototype this with three conversations:
What is your life story? Starting with kindergarten, tell me about your journey to this point in your life. What were the pivotal points? The major influences? I love how this embodies the prototyping mindset framework of storytelling.
What are your dreams? This conversation is designed to get folks thinking outside the box. Where do you want to go? These remind me a lot of Odyssey Plans, an exercise from the Stanford Life Design lab that we use in our Prototyping Mindset classes at Harvey Mudd. This idea embraces divergent thinking. One place to start is three dreams: the story you’re telling everyone right now, what you’d do if your top story was no longer an option, and the no-limit, crazy, infinite resources plan.
Eighteen-month plan. The idea here is to converge down from the dreams and figure out what can I do in the near future to make progress on my dreams. What can I do today to take one step closer? Eighteen months seems like a good amount of time where it’s not so short to prevent the time needed to make a significant dent in your goal, but not long enough that it seems hard to plan.
Get it right
One refrain that rings through the book a few times is a story Kim shares from an interview with former Intel CEO Andy Grove. In one conversation with Andy, he remarked that Steve Jobs “always got it right.” Kim pushed back: no one is always right! Andy replied.
I didn't say Steve is always right. I said he always gets it right. Like anyone, he is wrong all the time, but he insists--and not gently, either--that people tell him when he's wrong. So, he always gets it right in the end.
The point is not to be right all the time. The point is to be iteratively working toward the right answer, asking others along the way to help point out where you are wrong so that together, you can get the right answer. That is the essence of the prototyping mindset. If you want a framework to help you make progress on that together with your colleagues, look no further than Radical Candor.
The Book Nook
The lessons I shared above hardly scratch the surface of what I learned from Radical Candor. If you are managing others or being managed, I highly recommend picking up a copy of this book. It’s not only a quick and fun read with lots of engaging stories from Kim’s career but it’s packed with practical tips for taking the ideas she presents and putting them into practice.
The Professor Is In
One of the things I realized by the end of my Ph.D. was that much of the work done to publish cutting-edge research is not always well aligned with helping others reproduce those results. The incentive structure for high-impact publications is in general more concerned with the impact of the results and not as much with the more mundane details or incremental improvements that enable those results. It’s one thing to share the setup of the optical components used to build a system, but it’s another to build, align, and tune that system from scratch.
That’s one reason I’m excited about a new special issue that my colleagues Ivo Vellekoop, Sébastien Popoff, and I are co-guest editing in JPhys Photonics. The goal of this issue is to help firm up the foundation for new developments in wavefront shaping by creating resources that will broaden access by lowering the barriers that prevent adoption. We hope that this issue will help to democratize access to the important technical details that help researchers to effectively build these systems. If you’re interested in reading more about the special issue, check out the full description here.
Leisure Line
I love when technology helps to stimulate your curiosity in the real world. After hearing it recommended by Kevin Kelly on a podcast a few weeks ago, I’ve really been enjoying using the Seek app to identify plants and animals around me. Amazing technology that has made me a lot more curious about the plants that I see on my walks. Check out more about the app here.
Still Life
The line was longer than I’ve ever seen it at Rich Farm Ice Cream in Oxford, CT, the other day but it was still worth the wait. Rich Farm is still at the top of the heap for ice cream as far as I’m concerned. If you’re in the area, stop by to check them out! They also have a location out in SoCal in Placentia, CA.
