Can I speak with candour?

Silicon Valley – where else? – has a new ‘thing’, apparently. It’s called Radical Candor. We’re English, so we won’t be mean and quibble about the spelling. After all, there’s an important point here. (And a book and a website. And a company and a TED Talk…)

Helen Rumbelow interviewed its co-founder, Kim Scott for The Times recently to find out more about what it means, and where it draws the line between showing complete honesty rather a form that might – if we’re being frank – be called ‘brutal’. The company’s website provides a handy matrix, with axes labelled ‘Care Personally’ and ‘Challenge Directly’. Radical Candor represents the apex of both, trumping ‘Ruinous Empathy’ and ‘Obnoxious Aggression’ and leaving ‘Manipulative Insincerity’ in a dark corner, presumably crying into its hankie or pulling the legs off insects.

As The Times observed, this sounds terribly un-British. We are, after all, the country that has been the subject of a long-running web meme that helps non-Brits to understand that what we say to them is neither what we meant, nor what they thought we meant. Anyone who has watched a British Prime Minister tells journalists that one of their Cabinet continues to have their full and unequivocal support will understand, even if an English-speaking visitor might wonder why the subtitles don’t give a more… um, candid translation.

To be frank, however, the Radical Candor proposition reminded me of something we have long-considered a British workplace problem – those moments that we tend to call ‘Difficult Conversations’. Those conversations – usually initiated with the harmless sounding but fear-inducing question ‘Could you spare me a few minutes?’ – when a manager must tackle under-performance or inappropriate behaviour. 

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