The manager who tells someone "great work, just a few small things" when the work actually needs real changes has not been kind. They have just made the correction harder to hear later, from someone else, once it matters more.
What Radical Candor actually argues
Kim Scott, drawing on her time managing teams at Google and running a leadership training program at Apple, developed a framework called Radical Candor built on a simple tension, feedback needs to come from genuinely caring about the person and it needs to be direct enough to actually be useful. Feedback that has the caring but not the directness, Scott calls this ruinous empathy, is comfortable in the moment and useless for actually improving anything. Her argument is that softening feedback past the point of usefulness is not kindness. It just moves the discomfort to a later, worse moment.
Why vague feedback feels safer but costs more
"Good job, just tighten it up a bit" protects the giver from an uncomfortable conversation today. It does nothing for the person trying to actually improve, who now has no idea what to change, and it does nothing for the giver either, since the same problem will resurface later, at a moment with higher stakes and less patience for it.
Where to start
The next time you are about to give feedback and notice yourself reaching for a vague, softened version, name one specific thing, the exact behavior or decision, and the exact effect it had. Not a character judgment, a specific instance.
Pair it with something equally specific that is working, not as a cushion, but because specific positive feedback is exactly as useful as specific critical feedback, and both get lost in vague, general praise.
Reading how direct a specific person can actually hear feedback, versus how much softening a given relationship currently needs, is a judgment only you can make with the people you actually work with. What this gives you is the standard to aim for once you know how much room you have.
There is a specific way to open a piece of direct feedback so it lands as care rather than as criticism, and it is worth having ready before the next moment that calls for it.