I recently read Radical Candor, by Kim Scott, the former CEO coach at Dropbox and Twitter. She specializes in providing honest guidance on leadership with the hope that it transform your relationships at work.

The book had some excellent takeaways on giving and receiving praise and criticism. In this post, I collected some of my personal highlights.

Focus on establishing a strong relationship where it’s clear that you care personally about your colleagues.

Ask for criticism before giving it and offer more praise than criticism.

Ideally, you want to create a culture where someone’s behavior would naturally be brought to their attention by their colleagues if it’s poor.

From Kims’ experience working at Apple, she notes the framework which Steve Jobs used when giving criticism: Strive to give criticism in a way that does not call into question your confidence of a person’s abilities – while not leave too much room for interpretation.

Tell people clearly and directly when their work isn’t good enough.

How long do you spend making sure you have all the facts right before you criticize somebody? How long do you spend making sure you have all the facts right before you praise somebody? Ideally, you’d spend just as long getting the facts right for praise as for criticism.

Challenging others and encouraging them to challenge you helps build trusting relationships because it shows 1) you care enough to point out both the things that aren’t going well and those that they are and 2) you are willing to admit when you’re wrong and are committed to fixing mistakes that you or others have made.

False praise messes with the recipient’s mind and deceives others to think they can continue along the same course.

We hire people to tell us what to do, not the other way around.

Solicit guidance from others and encourage it between them.

Although this is a bit of a cluster of scattered thoughts there are two really great common threads. Firstly, establish strong relationships so you can begin a dialog of radical candor. Secondly, withholding criticism or giving false praise is often a negative to you and your team.