As director of people operations at Gem, a Los Angeles-based blockchain technology company, Madeline Mann regularly has walk-and-talks along the Venice Beach boardwalk with each of the firm’s 20 local employees. During these informal chats, employees divulged that they often left company meetings feeling like they hadn’t expressed themselves directly enough.
“Their feedback was couched because they were being sensitive to others’ feelings,” Mann said.
That motivated her, with buy-in from senior leadership, to begin developing a direct feedback culture at Gem, based on Kim Scott’s radical candor framework.