How To Give Hard Feedback
Matt Abrahams teaches strategic communication at Stanford’s business school and hosts the podcast Think Fast, Talk Smart. In this episode he sits down with Kim Scott, the author of Radical Candor and a former executive at Google, Apple, and Twitter, to talk about how to actually give feedback that lands. It is a real interview, not a scripted training video, so everything you are about to hear is unrehearsed.
This clip is worth slowing down for because you get to hear the actual structure built in real time, not a slide, not a summary. Matt walks through the order of operations Kim recommends, solicit first, then praise, then the real criticism, then check how it lands, and Kim jumps in with her own real-time example of what happens when that order breaks down. It’s one of the few moments where you can hear a senior American executive build the whole method out loud, unscripted, correcting herself as she goes.
Watch the clip.
Choose what you want to work on.
The warm-up is not the wrap-up
“You’re doing a great job. We’re learning a lot. I’m learning a ton.” comes right before Matt pivots to his actual question about structure. It sounds like padding meant to soften what’s coming, but listen to what happens next: he doesn’t soften his real point at all, he just asks it straight. This is a habit worth noticing in American professional conversation. Genuine warmth up front, often vague and low stakes (“learning a ton” doesn’t need to be earned by anything specific), followed by a direct pivot with no cushioning at all. The praise and the point are not actually connected to each other. That separation is the whole method: warmth doesn’t have to be spent to make room for the real point.
Directness is not the opposite of politeness
In Japanese, politeness is built into the grammar itself, keigo, sentence endings, how indirect you are willing to be. It is natural to assume the same rule applies in English: the more hedged and roundabout the sentence, the more polite it must sound. In American professional register, that mapping mostly does not hold. Politeness here comes from somewhere else, naming the good thing you noticed, asking instead of declaring, saying “we” instead of “you,” and getting to the point instead of making someone wait for it. “The argument’s strong, but the last three slides will lose the client, can we fix them before tomorrow?” sounds respectful in this register precisely because it trusts the listener with real information and does not waste their time. A heavily hedged version, “Maybe at some point we could possibly look at tightening the last few slides?,” reads as less confident, not more polite, and it makes people work harder to figure out what you actually mean. Contractions like “can’t,” “isn’t,” and “we’re” are part of this too, they are the normal professional register here, not a casual shortcut. Down in Match the Moment, every option shows a directness reading next to the feedback, use it to compare what feels safest against what actually works.
Confidence sounds like a flat statement, even mid-stumble
“Yeah, yeah, that’s that’s…” Listen to the repetition: “yeah, yeah” and “that’s that’s.” This isn’t a rehearsed line, you can hear her formulating the thought in real time. But underneath the stumble, the claim that follows comes out flat and hedge-free, not I think there might be an issue. In American professional register, rough delivery doesn’t undercut confidence the way it might elsewhere. The repetition reads as a genuine, immediate reaction, not uncertainty about the point itself. A smoother, more rehearsed-sounding version would actually sound less credible here, not more. The rough edges are part of what makes it land.
Exaggeration as a teaching tool
“Kim, I like your glasses, your book looks terrible, but those are nice shoes, like it’s not really going to make me feel better.” is deliberately absurd, nobody actually gives feedback like this. Kim invents a wildly mismatched example on the spot to make the flaw impossible to miss: trivial praise on either side of devastating criticism. Notice the small “like” tucked in right before the last line, a genuine filler word, not a script. This kind of improvised, self-aware exaggeration shows up often in senior American professionals’ speech, especially when they want a point to land quickly. It isn’t sarcasm aimed at a person, it’s a small performance aimed at an idea. The expected reaction is a knowing laugh or a follow-up question, not confusion about whether she really has an opinion on shoes.
Next time you catch yourself adding extra praise just to cushion a hard point, try saying the real thing first instead of burying it in the middle. If the praise still feels necessary as padding, it might be worth asking whether you believe it yourself.