Thread by @andybudd

Reading the “No Rules, Rules” book about the Amazon feedback culture is making my British self squirm.

While many of the examples are positioned as “Radical Candour” I’m getting very little sense that the people giving said feedback “cared deeply” about the target of said feedback. As such a lot of it comes across as “obnoxious aversion” or simply rudeness, to my British ears.

I’ve always worried that “Radical Candour” favours people in power. I’ve actually done product management consultancy at companies where their adoption of this practice borders on management bullying.

That being said there was one idea I took from the book which was for leaders to normalise receiving feedback from their reports by putting it as an agenda item on 1:1s.

The Radical Candour approach requires navigating the line between “caring deeply” while avoiding being a “brilliant jerk”. However I suspect the latter is affected by cultural norms and anchored to a US definition of Jerk like behaviour.

I know a lot of Northern Europeans who have upset sensitive Californian tech workers by their abrupt but well meaning feedback. Similarly I know plenty of Brits who have felt that the feedback they received from a US manager was unintentionally rude.

The wonderful @heyfarai gave an excellent talk at @UXLondon on the role cultural difference can play in managing designers from different backgrounds, if you’re interested.

vimeo.com/377501568

Of course this book is about Netflix, not Amazon. Appreciate my friend @bensauer for candidly and we’ll meaningly pointing that out. Must have been a Freudian slip. Can’t think why!

Super telling case study in the book about a french employee given feedback that their french approach to positioning an argument wasn’t direct enough from American colleagues, and how it caused her to change her style. Sounds like forced code switching to me.

All the examples seem to come from the perspective that the person giving the feedback is correct and the person receiving the feedback is expected to change.

In the above example it feels equally reasonable to expect people at a a multi-national company to be able to make accommodation for a variety of different, culturally specific, communications styles rather than choosing one culture as right.