RADAR

Good for

Communicating with that person who makes communication very difficult.

Background

For this scenario, I want to virtually introduce you to Joe.

Joe is a senior software engineer.

He takes pride in being able to solve any and all problems - all by himself.

When he gets stuck on a problem, he doesn’t want to be bothered until he figures it out.

When Joe is in this mode, it’s hard to communicate with him, even if want to share a solution. It seems impossible to even get on his radar.

You could offer Joe some choice words, but, you have to remember you’re at work.

So, we’re going to play Joe’s game with the RADAR framework so you can get your voice heard.

How to implement

Relate
Start your message with something that let’s the recipient know that you know what they’re dealing with.

Acknowledge
Acknowledge how they might be feeling about it.

Describe
Describe the reason that you’re reaching out to them to begin with.

Affirm
Affirm what you described in a way that shows the silver lining or benefit.

Request
Ask them to do something as a follow-up.

Example

Reaching out to prickly Joe about a code deployment issue that he’s looking into - that you’ve fixed before.

Getting on Joe’s RADAR

”Hey Joe, I heard that you ran into a deployment issue on Project X [Relate].

It’s frustrating how fragile the deployments are [Acknowledge].

I ran into a similar issue and fixed it by making X,Y,Z changes in the config file [Describe] and thought you might want to look into that if you haven’t already.

It works now (after 3 hours of messing with it) and the changes will prevent it from blowing up again [Affirm].

Take a look at lines 45, 124, & 132. Let me know if you want to walk through what I did. [Request].”

This gives Joe everything he needs to decide if he wants to accept your invitation 👍or keep ignoring you 🌵.