The projector hummed with a low, predatory frequency that seemed to vibrate the very water in my glass, while the 16 people around the mahogany table stared intently at the dust motes dancing in the light. It was Tuesday, and the humidity in the room had reached a stifling 66 percent. Marcus, the VP of Sales, didn’t even wait for Sarah to finish her sentence. He leaned back, his chair creaking with 26 years of corporate entitlement, and folded his hands behind his head. ‘I’m going to be radically candid with you, Sarah,’ he said, his voice dropping into that faux-intimate register that usually precedes a car accident. ‘That presentation was an absolute disaster. It was unorganized, the data was 46 percent fluff, and frankly, I’m wondering if you even looked at the brief.’
Axis Kept
Axis Discarded
Sarah’s face didn’t just turn red; it transformed into a map of visible trauma. Her pulse, I could see it thrumming in her neck, was likely hitting 116 beats per minute. There was no ‘care personally’ in Marcus’s eyes. There was only the ‘challenge directly’ part, wielded like a serrated knife. This wasn’t feedback; it was an execution performed under the neon banner of a management philosophy that has been hollowed out and stuffed with sawdust. I’ve force-quit this writing application 26 times today trying to find a softer way to say this, but there isn’t one. We have reached the point where ‘honesty’ is just a synonym for being a jerk with a corner office.
The Illusion of Efficiency
Kim Scott’s original framework for Radical Candor was built on a two-axis graph: Caring Personally and Challenging Directly. It was supposed to be the antidote to ‘Ruinous Empathy,’ where you’re too nice to tell someone they have spinach in their teeth until they’ve finished a whole day of meetings. But in the wild, in the gray-carpeted cubicle farms and the glass-walled boardrooms, we’ve discarded the ‘caring’ axis like a piece of 6-day-old sushi. We kept the ‘challenging’ part because it’s easier. It feels like power. It feels efficient. If I can just call your work ‘garbage’ and label it ‘candor,’ I don’t have to do the hard emotional labor of coaching you. I don’t have to understand your 36-month career trajectory or the fact that your kid has been sick for 6 nights in a row.
I spent some time last week talking to Wyatt H.L., a cemetery groundskeeper who has spent the last 46 years digging holes and smoothing the earth over the quietest residents of our county. Wyatt doesn’t have an MBA… But Wyatt understands something about human fragility that Marcus never will. Wyatt told me that every headstone he cleans represents a person who probably spent 366 days a year worrying about what their boss thought of them, only to end up in the same 6-foot-deep silence as the rest of us.
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People are like the grass. If you trample it every day and call it “toughening it up,” eventually the roots just give up. You can’t shout at a rose to make it bloom faster. You just provide the right soil and get out of the way.
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Wyatt’s perspective is colored by the finality of his work. He sees the end of the line. In the corporate world, we act as if our 46-slide decks are eternal documents, and our ‘brutal honesty’ is a necessary fire to forge better employees. But fire doesn’t always forge; sometimes it just turns things to ash.
Personal Admission: The Marcus in Me
I remember a time, about 6 years ago, when I was the Marcus of the story. I was managing a team of 16 developers, and the pressure from the board was hitting me in the chest like a physical weight. I told a junior engineer that his code was ‘architectural garbage’ during a sprint review. I justified it to myself. I told myself I was being ‘radically candid’ for the sake of the product. The reality? I was just tired, scared, and looking for someone to kick so I could feel taller for 6 minutes. He quit 16 days later. I lost a brilliant mind because I mistook my own lack of self-control for a leadership style.
The Cost of Unchecked Challenge (Metrics)
This weaponization of feedback creates a specific kind of psychological rot. When you know that any meeting could be the one where you are publicly shamed under the guise of ‘improvement,’ your brain enters a state of chronic hyper-vigilance. Your amygdala takes over. You stop being creative because creativity requires the safety to be wrong. You start producing 46 percent less original thought because you’re busy building defensive walls.
The Somatic Cost of Candor
We have to ask ourselves: who does this ‘candor’ actually serve? If you are giving feedback that leaves the other person feeling smaller, less capable, and more isolated, you aren’t helping them. You are satisfying an urge. True Radical Candor is an act of service. It’s the 16 minutes of awkward silence you endure while you help someone navigate a mistake because you actually want them to succeed. It’s the 6-word sentence ‘I know you can do better’ followed by 46 minutes of brainstorming how to get there.
The Final Tally of Lost Value
I think back to that meeting with Sarah. Marcus thought he was being a ‘strong leader.’ He probably went back to his office, feeling $366 more important than he was an hour ago. But he didn’t fix the presentation. He didn’t improve Sarah’s skills. All he did was ensure that for the next 6 months, Sarah will be looking for a new job while doing the absolute bare minimum to avoid his gaze. He traded a long-term asset for a short-term ego boost. It’s a bad trade. It’s a trade made by someone who doesn’t understand that the people sitting around that table are more than just units of production.
Wyatt H.L. once showed me a section of the cemetery where the headstones were so old the names had been worn away by 116 years of rain.
‘In the end,’ he said, ‘the only thing that matters is how you treated the people who are still standing.’
It’s a simple lesson, one that seems to get lost in the 26th floor of glass skyscrapers. If we can’t be honest without being cruel, then our honesty is worthless. Cruelty is easy. It’s the default setting for people who are too lazy to be kind. Kindness takes 46 times more effort because it requires you to hold your own ego in check. It requires you to realize that your ‘candor’ might be the thing that breaks someone’s spirit for 6 years.
Retiring Brutality: The Path to Helpfully Honest
We need to retire the phrase ‘brutally honest’ and replace it with ‘helpfully honest.’ Brutality has no place in a professional setting. If you find yourself enjoying the process of giving ‘hard’ feedback, you should probably step away from the management track and spend 6 months reflecting on why you like causing pain.
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The best managers I’ve ever had-all 6 of them-never once used the word ‘disaster.’ They used words like ‘opportunity,’ ‘gap,’ and ‘next time.’ They understood that their job wasn’t to be a judge, but to be an architect of growth.
The Final Pause
I’ve force-quit this app one more time. I’m looking at the screen, thinking about the 16 different drafts of this article. I’m thinking about Sarah. I’m thinking about Wyatt and his shovel. The world is hard enough without us turning our workplaces into arenas of psychological combat. If you want to be radical, don’t just be candid. Be compassionate. Be patient. Be the person who helps someone else carry the weight, rather than the person who adds another 46 pounds to their back and calls it ‘growth.’
The next time you’re about to deliver a ‘radically candid’ critique, wait for 6 seconds. Ask yourself if you’re doing it to help the person in front of you, or if you’re doing it to feel like the smartest person in the room. If the answer is the latter, keep your mouth shut. The silence will do far less damage than your words. And in that silence, maybe you’ll find the space to actually become the leader you think you are. Or at the very least, you won’t be the reason someone has to spend their evening trying to quiet the 46 different voices in their head telling them they aren’t enough.
[Feedback is a gift only if it isn’t wrapped in barbed wire.]