# Kim Scott's Radical Candor: how to be direct with clients without losing their trust > Kim Scott wrote this management book for bosses. Forward deployed engineers, though, often have to speak plainly to people who don't report to them, and most often to a client who doesn't want to hear it. Original: https://fdetimes.net/en/books-courses/radical-candor-kim-scott-fde-customers/ The worst habit at a client site is not rudeness. It is nodding along in the demo, then going back to the internal channel and writing that the client's data is unusable. Kim Scott has a name for this behaviour, and it is not a flattering one: praising people to their face and criticising them behind their back. *Radical Candor: Fully Revised & Updated Edition*, subtitled "Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity", was written for managers. Much of a forward deployed engineer's job, however, is delivering bad news to people who don't report to you and whom you have no authority to direct. That is why the book is as useful to an FDE as it is to a boss. ## Who wrote it, and why trust her? According to the publisher, Kim Scott was a successful leader at Google before moving to Apple, where she developed and taught a class on management. The book's official site says it has been translated into 20 languages. It is also the foundation of a training company Kim Scott co-founded with Jason Rosoff. The framework, in other words, has been taught and applied in practice, not just set down on paper. ## What do the four quadrants look like at a client site? The publisher sums up the whole book in one line: care personally and challenge directly. The site radicalcandor.com adds one important word: the two must happen *at the same time*. Miss either one and you fall into one of the other three quadrants. Picture this: you deploy a document classification system for a client, and after two weeks it is clear that the client's team has mislabelled a good deal of the data. There are four ways to raise it. The first is Ruinous Empathy: you care, but you stay quiet or soften the message, as in "a few parts of the data need another look". The client doesn't grasp how serious the problem is, and three weeks later the model is still performing badly. The second is Obnoxious Aggression: "your labels are all wrong". It is direct, but it shows no care, so the people who did the labelling get defensive. The third is Manipulative Insincerity, where you neither care nor speak directly. In the meeting you say "your data looks great", then go back to the internal channel and type "the client's labels are garbage". The fourth is Radical Candor: "The model is underperforming because the labels in this group of documents are inconsistent. I want the system to work for your team, so I suggest we review 50 sample documents together on Thursday." **Key point:** Directness without care is aggression; care without directness is neglect. ## Does being direct mean being harsh? The most common mistake among new readers is to treat Radical Candor as permission to be harsh. People who make it keep the "challenge directly" half and forget the "care personally" half. By the official site's own definition, that is Obnoxious Aggression: direct, but showing no care. Imagine the client's data ingestion pipeline takes all night to run. An FDE who has just finished the book might open the meeting with: "Let me be blunt: your architecture is outdated." The sentence is certainly blunt, but it targets the listener, states no consequence and offers no way forward. A better version would be: "Each ingestion run is taking all night, so your team has to wait every morning before they can start work. I'd like to get rid of that wait, so I suggest we spend a week trying to split ingestion into smaller batches." It is just as direct; the difference is that the listener can see why you are saying it. A quick test before you send anything: does your message name a specific problem, a consequence, and a next step you are willing to take together? Without the next step, feedback tends to sound more like judgement than help. ## Three ideas worth keeping First: trust has to come before feedback. The official site says real trust begins when you let others see enough of yourself that they feel safe doing the same. At a client site, that means admitting early what your own team hasn't done well, before you point out their mistakes. Second: the four quadrants describe behaviour, not personality. Everyone lands in a bad quadrant sometimes. So the question to ask is not "am I a candid person?" but "which quadrant was that sentence in?", and you can check that straight after every call. Third: praise takes as much skill as criticism. The framework asks for praise that is specific and sincere, and criticism that is kind and clear. With clients, a specific compliment ("your data-cleaning script made the pipeline run much faster") makes next week's criticism far easier to hear. ## Who should read it, and in what order? If you are preparing to move from a purely technical engineering role into forward deployed work, read this book early. You already know how to write code. Telling a client's director that "the way you're doing this won't work" is something nobody has usually taught you. Start with the "Our Approach" page on radicalcandor.com: it is short and enough to give you the four-quadrant framework. Then read the book for the examples and the practice. If you are a senior FDE or a tech lead, read the sections written for managers closely, because you also have to give feedback to less experienced colleagues on the deployment team. For interviews, have a story ready that follows this framework: what the bad news was, whom you told, how you said it so that it was both direct and caring, and what happened as a result. On a CV, a line such as "identified and flagged data errors to the client early, and fixed them together before go-live" shows this skill far better than the words "strong communication skills". Telling the truth early can make a meeting uncomfortable. What is more likely to cost you trust is letting the client discover the truth for themselves when it is already too late. **Try this week:** - Reopen the last message you sent a client about a problem and work out which of the four quadrants it falls into. If you softened it until it was vague, rewrite it as a sentence that states the problem and its consequence plainly. - At your next sync, praise one specific thing the client did well: name the piece of work and spell out its impact, rather than a generic "thanks, team". - If this week you have a comment about a colleague that you have so far only shared with other people, consider telling that person directly, along with a concrete suggestion. ## Sources - [Radical Candor: Fully Revised & Updated Edition - Tradebook for Courses (Macmillan Academic)](https://academic.macmillan.com/academictrade/9781250235374/radicalcandorfullyrevisedupdatededition/) - [Our Approach (Radical Candor)](https://www.radicalcandor.com/our-approach/) - [Feedback (Radical Candor)](https://www.radicalcandor.com/our-approach/feedback/) - [Radical Candor Book: Business Leadership Book For Better Bosses](https://www.radicalcandor.com/the-book)