Radical Candor Across Cultures: High Care, High Honesty | Lazy Leverage #81

Jon sits down with Sagan’s Head of Recruitment, Sofía Bravo, to talk about what American team leaders often overlook when working with people from Latin America.

Sofía identifies the Latin American default: when something goes wrong, the immediate response is performative work: lengthy reports, detailed timelines, exhaustive documentation. These are all designed to prove effort was made. The fear, especially among junior employees, drives them to muddy the waters with complexity rather than deliver clear, confident analysis.

Problems arising from this phenomenon often stem from a fundamental misunderstanding about what managers want. When a boss asks "what happened?", junior team members hear "who's to blame?" So they build defensive fortresses of documentation. But what Jon and Sofía actually need is the thinking: tell me what you know (facts), what you don't know (gaps), and what you think (judgment). That confident assessment is the actual value.

The solution centers on radical candor. That’s high care combined with high honesty. Jon's approach is to explicitly acknowledge when he's about to give hard feedback, but frame it with demonstrated care. This creates psychological safety for honesty in both directions.

Two years ago, Sofia would've struggled with bluntness. Now she catches herself using "we" instead of direct feedback and immediately corrects. Leadership reinforces this by selectively praising what matters. Not "everything's green" but "you owned the mistake and drove the solution."

This cultural challenge isn't unique to Latin America, but recognizing these defaults makes them addressable through deliberate modeling, selective praise, and relentless focus on judgment over justification.

KEY TOPICS:
(01:00) The Latin American Default: Justification Over Analysis
(04:08) Performative Work
(10:48) Leadership Modeling
(14:22) Radical Candor
(17:12) Building Relationship Bank Accounts Before Honesty

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