How to have difficult conversations the right way.
For the longest time, I struggled with giving direct feedback.
I felt I was being too harsh, I felt they will feel hurt, they might not like me, they will confront me and I will not know how to defend.
A million things used to go on in my head.
Until, I read the book 'Radical Candor'.
In this brilliant book by Kim Scott, Kim explains 4 types of feedback and how only one of them is effective.
To explain that, she uses two determinants.
One, do you care personally about the person you are giving feedback to - whether your friend, your relative, your colleague, whosoever!
Second, are you direct with that person or not? Or do you twist and turn or sugar coat your feedback?
Basis these 2 determinants, Kim showed the four types of feedback.
Let's try and understand them:
Bottom Right Quadrant:
If you challenge the person directly, but you do not care for the person - then that is obnoxious aggression!
This is when you are harsh, you are rude, you are not being helpful.
We all know how that feels, because we have felt it.
The end result of such an approach is instant defensiveness. With little change in the person we gave the feedback to.
Bottom Left Quadrant:
If you do not care about the person but you do not challenge directly either, instead sugar coat and pretend to be all nice and warm - that is manipulative insincerity.
Most toxic relationships lie here.
This results in mistrust and again, no change!
Top Left Quadrant:
If you do care about the person, but do not challenge directly, it is ruinous empathy.
It results in ignorance (people do not even know what to fix, if at all to fix anything) and thus no change.
This is what I was guilty of, for the longest time!
Top Right Quadrant:
It is ONLY when you challenge directly AND you care personally about the person you are giving feedback - that it is Radical Candor.
RC leads to instant change and needless to say, profound in nature!
The book hit me hard.
Because now I had a way of managing my guilt of being harsh towards someone I cared for.
So today, before giving any feedback to any of my known ones, I ask these 3 questions:
Question 1: Am I saying this because I feel anger or frustration?
In hindsight - none of those remarks ever helped.
It just made them more defensive or exercise authority if they could.
Now, I ask a different question:
“What is it that they know that I do not?”
That helps me see their side and approach it from that direction.
Question 2: Do I want the other person to truly win, or would I feel happy watching them lose?
I found myself in situations where I wanted the person to lose, so that I could pin point their mistakes, go one up on them and thus establish authority the next time I said something.
Today, I make sure that I want them to win by whatever I say.
For ex:
"You do not even know why I am angry" - is an unfair statement to make.
It makes it sound like you WANT the other person to forget, and use that as an excuse to remind them of their failure.
Question 3: Will this feedback help them or help me?
Things that I said which, in hindsight helped only me and not them, was not feedback.
It was just my need to express myself.
The chart above helped me a lot.
I am most guilty of ruinous empathy.
It’s my biggest weakness because I still fall in that trap.
Of wanting to help myself (they should feel I am a nice person), than helping them!
I have come to believe that most relationships falter because they never engage in Radical Candor.
I hope this helped you realize where you could be going wrong.
Or, where someone you know could be going wrong and you can now, through Radical Candor, help them see it :)
Candor is a compliment.
It implies equality.
It is how true friends talk.
- Peggy Noonan
You can read this thread on Twitter by Ankoor Warikoo here.
Posts
