Hi, I'm Brandy Neal, the writer and producer of the Radical Candor podcast. Today, to kick off

2023, we're going to hear some stories from our radical candor coaches and core team

about times when they received radical candor or times when they behaved with obnoxious

aggression or manipulative insincerity. If you can relate to any of these stories or you'd like to write in and tell us your

radical candor story, you can do so by sending it to podcast at radical candor.com.

Here we go.

Hi, I'm Amy Sandler, the lead coach and podcast host at Radical Candor.

And I want to take you back in time about 15 years ago, long before Zoom and video calls. I'm working on this really big technology project. And my role, I'm responsible for content for the website, as well as for user research. So questions like, what was it people

wanted from the website? Why would they visit it? What kind of content, what kind of

functionality would make it really engaging for people? I also was responsible for internal

promotion for getting the word out about this project. And it was really exciting. The project

consumed most of my waking and non-waking hours. There was just one problem with this project.

There were a lot of technical issues. And so every time there'd be this big deadline,

we'd rush to meet the deadline, and it just

wouldn't work. It was really frustrating for everyone. And by everyone, I mean me, because at

that time in my career, it was all about me. Now, because there were so many technical issues,

the project owner who was several layers above me in what was at the time a very hierarchical organization.

They didn't prioritize the work I was doing. So I'd produce research reports, reviews of functional

requirements, creating content, editing content, and it just felt like all of this was going

into a huge black hole.

Getting more and more frustrated, it became clear there was just one thing for me to do.

I wrote an email to the CEO, chairman of the board, outlining how this project owner was wasting millions and millions of dollars and tens of thousands of hours of people

...