The air conditioning vent above my head was rattling. A low, insistent hum that seemed to sync up with the tremor in my hands, which were clasped tightly in my lap to keep them still. Across the small, white table, my manager, Mark, leaned forward. He had the self-satisfied look of someone about to impart profound wisdom he’d just learned from a 42-minute audiobook summary.

“Look,” he started, and my stomach tightened. Nothing good ever follows a sentence that starts with ‘look.’ “I’m just going to be radically candid with you. That presentation you gave to the executive team? It made our entire department look incompetent.”

He sat back, arms crossed, nodding slightly as if he’d just handed me a gift. The words hung in the rattling air. Not, ‘Here’s what we can do to improve the messaging next time,’ or ‘The data was solid, but the narrative got lost.’ Just a drive-by shooting with a silencer. He had used a popular management framework as a hall pass for cruelty, and the worst part is, he thought he was being a good boss. He thought this was leadership.

The Peril of Misapplied Frameworks

This is the great, tragic flaw in the mass adoption of management fads. Frameworks like ‘Radical Candor’ are nuanced instruments designed for surgeons, but they’re being handed out like box cutters in the corporate lobby. The book itself, by Kim Scott, is brilliant. It’s built on a simple but powerful 2×2 matrix: ‘Care Personally’ on one axis and ‘Challenge Directly’ on the other. Radical Candor is what happens when you do both. You care about the person deeply, so you are willing to have the tough, direct conversation that helps them grow.

But a funny thing happens when these ideas filter down through the corporate ecosystem. People, especially those who already lean towards being aggressive or emotionally distant, hear only half of the message. They hear ‘Challenge Directly’ and translate it to ‘Permission to be Brutal.’ They conveniently ignore the prerequisite, the non-negotiable foundation of the entire philosophy: ‘Care Personally.’ They eagerly embrace the ‘radical’ part and discard the ‘candor’-which implies truth for the sake of help-in favor of whatever unfiltered, unhelpful criticism is on their mind. It becomes a shield for their own lack of emotional intelligence.

I’ve seen it dozens of times. A tool designed to build trust is weaponized to create fear. It’s the business equivalent of someone stealing your parking spot and then rolling down the window to tell you they’re just being an ‘assertive driver.’ They’ve taken a concept and stripped it of its social contract, of the unspoken rules that make it work, leaving only the raw, selfish benefit for themselves. The result isn’t Radical Candor. It’s just obnoxious aggression, dressed up in a bestselling author’s clothing.

My Own Mistakes

And I have to admit, with a deep sense of shame, that I’ve been that person. Years ago, long before I knew better, I managed a small team of 2 analysts. I had just read a book-not this one, but a similar one-about the importance of directness. I thought I was a revolutionary. I gave a junior analyst feedback on a report he’d spent 82 hours on by telling him it was ‘analytically sloppy’ in a team meeting. I thought I was being efficient. I thought I was challenging him to be better. What I was actually doing was humiliating him.

The Case of Ava W.

Take the case of a woman I once worked with, let’s call her Ava W. Ava was an assembly line optimizer for a major manufacturing firm. She was a genius of process, a virtuoso of workflow. She could watch a conveyor belt for 12 minutes and find a way to save the company $232,000 a year. Her world was concrete, measurable, and logical. People, to her, were not illogical, but they operated on a different, more complex kind of logic she was still learning to decode.

Her new director was a recent convert to the gospel of Radical Candor. He’d just finished the audiobook on his commute. In their first one-on-one, he decided to give her some ‘developmental feedback.’ He told her, “Ava, I’m just being radically candid. Your communication style is abrasive and you don’t build rapport with the team. You come across as cold.”

Ava was floored. She had just increased line efficiency by 42 percent. She had hit every single one of her targets. This feedback wasn’t about her work; it was about her personality. And it wasn’t actionable. What does ‘be less cold’ even mean? The director offered no examples, no suggestions, no path forward. He just dropped the grenade and walked away, proud of his own courage.

He wasn’t being radically candid. He was being lazy. He took a complex human issue-interpersonal communication-and tried to fix it with a blunt instrument because he didn’t have the skill, patience, or empathy to use a scalpel. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t try to understand Ava’s perspective. He didn’t stop to consider that her direct, no-nonsense style was precisely what made her so brilliant at her job. He just slapped a label on her and called it feedback.

For the next few months, Ava’s performance dipped. She second-guessed every email she wrote. She became quieter in meetings, afraid that her directness would be perceived as coldness. The director, in his attempt to ‘optimize’ his employee, had thrown sand into the gears of a high-performance engine. He had sacrificed psychological safety for the sake of a buzzword.

In a follow-up meeting via video call, he doubled down on his critique. As he was speaking, a small child, maybe 2 years old, ran into the room behind him, laughing. He turned, his face a mask of annoyance. “Get out, I’m in a meeting!” he hissed, shooing the child away. He then turned back to Ava, his composure regained, and continued talking about the importance of personal connection. She saw a flash of brightly colored fabric as the child was hurried off-screen. It was a small, human moment, the kind that made you think about things outside of work, like the absurd cost of everything, even simple things like Kids Clothing NZ. And in that instant, his entire argument crumbled. The dissonance was deafening. He was preaching about caring personally at work while demonstrating a complete lack of it in his own life, right there on camera.

He wasn’t a management guru. He was just a stressed-out person failing to connect, and using a business book to justify his own shortcomings. That moment of seeing the messy reality behind his sterile corporate-speak broke the spell of his authority completely. He didn’t see people. He saw problems to be fixed. He saw human beings as inefficient systems to be streamlined.

Building True Connection

This is the core of the problem. When feedback becomes a weapon, it teaches people one thing: vulnerability will be punished. Sharing a half-formed idea becomes a risk. Admitting a mistake becomes a liability. Asking for help becomes a sign of weakness. The very culture of openness and innovation that these frameworks are supposed to foster is suffocated by the fear they create in the wrong hands. You don’t get a culture of candor; you get a culture of silence, where everyone is afraid to speak up until a problem is too big to hide.

The real work of leadership, the hard part that can’t be summarized in a TED Talk, is building a foundation of safety and trust so that candor is even possible. It’s the accumulation of hundreds of small, consistent actions: remembering someone’s kid’s name, asking about their weekend and actually listening to the answer, admitting your own mistakes, showing up with coffee for no reason. It’s the slow, unglamorous, manual labor of actually caring about the human beings you work with. There is no shortcut for this. There is no 2×2 matrix that can replace genuine human connection.

The Right Question

Ava W. eventually left that company. She went to a competitor where her new manager didn’t talk about frameworks at all. Instead, during her first week, he asked her, “What do you need from me to do your best work?” It was a simple question. But it was also a profound one. It wasn’t a judgment or a critique. It was an offer of support. It was a question that assumed competence and partnership.

It was, in its own quiet way, more radically candid than any weaponized feedback she had ever received.