I have worked in international schools in Asia for nearly a decade. I know how much communication norms vary — between countries, between school cultures, between teams within the same building. When I joined Millennia Education at the start of the academic year, I knew that Vietnam would have its own set of nuances at every level, and that I didn’t yet know what they were.
It was with that in mind that I designed a training session for the team in my first few months. I realised that Radical Candor — Kim Scott’s framework for giving honest, direct feedback without sacrificing care for the person receiving it — could serve as a useful lens through which to approach the conversation. My purpose was not to deliver the framework as a model for how we should work. Rather, I set out to use it to create a safe environment in which the team could talk openly about how they, and others, communicate.
The session opened with what I called a ‘cultural lesson for Rob’. Before introducing the framework, I asked the group to work through a set of professional scenarios (a colleague who sends reports late, a manager who changes plans at the last minute). For each one, they wrote down what they would probably say in that situation, and what they would probably be thinking. I had asked a Dutch colleague and a British one to do the same in advance, so we could compare. The degree of directness varied. But the gap between what was said and what was thought was consistently there. Whatever the cultural starting point, people tended to soften their response, often to the point of failing to communicate their true feelings entirely.
This is also the observation with which Scott begins her book. She illustrates it with her own failure — a direct report she liked, whose underperformance she never addressed, and who she eventually had to let go. Ruinous empathy, as she calls it, is not a cultural peculiarity. In my experience, it shows up across many contexts. In the education sector, it feels like it has increasingly become the default in communication between colleagues in recent years.
What the session gave us was not a set of rules to follow, but a shared vocabulary to think with. The team left with a clearer sense of how to name what they were experiencing in their professional relationships, and I left with a clearer sense of how they communicate. Radical Candor gave us a neutral enough context to have that conversation without it feeling like a lecture delivered from one culture to another. We understood each other a little better than we had when we walked in.