Radical Candor Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

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Author: Kim Scott
Full Title: Radical Candor Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
Category:#books

Highlights

My goal was to create an environment where people would love their work and one another. (Location 26)
In an effort to create a positive, stress-free environment, I sidestepped the difficult but necessary part of being a boss: telling people clearly and directly when their work wasn’t good enough. I failed to create a climate in which people who weren’t getting the job done were told so in time to fix it. (Location 30)
he knew his work wasn’t good, and so my false praise just messed with his mind. It allowed him to deceive himself into thinking that he could continue along the same course. Which he did. By failing to confront the problem, I’d removed the incentive for him to try harder and lulled him into thinking he’d be fine. (Location 50)
It’s brutally hard to tell people when they are screwing up. You don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings; that’s because you’re not a sadist. (Location 52)
kept making the same mistake over and over for ten months. As you probably know, for every piece of subpar work you accept, for every missed deadline you let slip, you begin to feel resentment and then anger. You no longer just think the work is bad: you think the person is bad. This makes it harder to have an even-keeled conversation. You start to avoid talking to the person at all. (Location 56)
the impact of my behavior with Bob didn’t stop with him: others on the team wondered why I accepted such poor work. (Location 59)
Covering for people is sometimes necessary for a short period of time— say, if somebody is going through a crisis. But when it goes on too long it starts to take a toll. People whose work had been exceptional started to get sloppy. We missed key deadlines. Knowing why Bob’s colleagues were late, I didn’t give them too hard a time. Then they began to wonder if I knew the difference between great and mediocre; perhaps I didn’t even take the missed deadlines seriously. As is often the case when people are not sure if the quality of what they are doing is appreciated, the results began to suffer, and so did morale. (Location 61)
Lack of praise and criticism had absolutely disastrous effects on the team and on our outcomes. (Location 74)
You can draw a straight line from lack of guidance to a dysfunctional team that gets poor results. (Location 74)
Silicon Valley, you don’t fall down; you fall up.” (Location 84)
Rather than focus on “giving feedback” to my team, I encouraged them to tell me when I was wrong. I did everything I could to encourage people to criticize me, or at least simply to talk to (Location 97)
We were obsessive about efficiency, and we managed to shrink headcount in North America even as revenue grew dizzyingly— the definition of scaling. (Location 108)
Apple U’s mandate like this: “We want to defy the gravitational pull of organizational mediocrity.” (Location 119)
Then a leader at Apple pointed out to me that all teams need stability as well as growth to function properly; nothing works well if everyone is gunning for the next promotion. (Location 126)
She called the people on her team who got exceptional results but who were on a more gradual growth trajectory “rock stars” because they were like the Rock of Gibraltar on her team. These people loved their work and were world-class at it, but they didn’t want her job or to be Steve Jobs. They were happy where they were. The people who were on a steeper growth trajectory— the ones who’d go crazy if they were still doing the same job in a year— she called “superstars.” They were the source of growth on any team. She was explicit about needing a balance of both. (Location 127)
Apple made room for people with all sorts of different ambitions. You had to be great at what you did and you had to love your work, but you did not have to be promotion-obsessed to have a fulfilling career at Apple. (Location 132)
“At Apple we hire people to tell us what to do, not the other way around.” (Location 144)
a boss’s ability to achieve results had a lot more to do with listening and seeking to understand than it did with telling people what to do; more to do with debating than directing; more to do with pushing people to decide than with being the decider; more to do with persuading than with giving orders; more to do with learning than with knowing. (Location 146)
“You need to do that in a way that does not call into question your confidence in their abilities but leaves not too much room for interpretation … and that’s a hard thing to do.” He went on to say, “I don’t mind being wrong. And I’ll admit that I’m wrong a lot. It doesn’t really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing.” (Location 152)
My point is not that you need to cuss or shout or be rude to be a great boss. In fact, I wouldn’t recommend it, because even if your relationship evolves to the point where you think mutual respect is understood, as boss you sometimes just misread signals. The point is, rather, that if you are someone who is most comfortable communicating in that way, you have to build relationships of trust that can support it, and you have to hire people who can adapt to your style. (Location 168)
the reason why Silicon Valley turned out to be a good place to study the relationships between bosses and the people who report to them is that the war for “talent” there is intense. (Location 177)
the relationships you have with your direct reports will impact the relationships they have with their direct reports. The ripple effect will go a long way toward creating— or destroying— a positive culture. Relationships may not scale, but culture does. (Location 184)
at the very heart of being a good boss— at Apple, at Google, or anywhere else on earth— is a good relationship. The term I found that best describes this relationship is Radical Candor. (Location 191)
no matter how supportive the environment, bosses often feel alone. (Location 196)
you might occasionally feel overwhelmed by the number of things I’m suggesting you do as a manager. Take a deep breath. My goal is to save you time, not to litter your calendar with meetings. You do need to spend time with your direct reports to be a great boss, but you don’t need to spend ALL your time with them. If you implement every single idea, tool, and technique in this book, the time you dedicate to managing your team will come to approximately ten hours a week, and those ten hours should save you enormous lost time and headaches later. I’ll also suggest you block out about fifteen hours a week for you to think and execute independently in your area of expertise. That leaves another fifteen hours in a forty-hour work week. Hopefully you can claim them as your own, though if you’re like me you’ll have to use most of them to deal with the unpredictable. (Location 205)
managers typically make the same mistakes over and over again. Despite the predictability, successful intervention proved dishearteningly elusive. (Location 212)
“This is not babysitting,” she said. “It’s called management, and it is your job!” (Location 246)
Every time I feel I have something more “important” to do than listen to people, I remember Leslie’s words: “It is your job!” (Location 247)
We undervalue the “emotional labor” of being the boss. That term is usually reserved for people who work in the service or health industry: psychiatrists, nurses, doctors, waiters, flight attendants. But as I will show in the pages to come, this emotional labor is not just part of the job; it’s the key to being a good boss. (Location 249)
many people feel they aren’t as good at management as they are at the “real” part of the job. Often, they fear they are failing the people who report to them. (Location 261)
most people don’t like the words for their role: “boss” evokes injustice, “manager” sounds bureaucratic, “leader” sounds self-aggrandizing. I prefer the word “boss” because the distinctions between leadership and management tend to define leaders as BSers who don’t actually do anything and managers as petty executors. (Location 264)
management and leadership are like forehand and backhand. You have to be good at both to win. (Location 269)
bosses are responsible for results. They achieve these results not by doing all the work themselves but by guiding the people on their teams. Bosses guide a team to achieve results. (Location 273)
three areas of responsibility that managers do have: guidance, team-building, and results. (Location 275)
Guidance is often called “feedback.” People dread feedback— both the praise, which can feel patronizing, and especially the criticism. (Location 276)
Building a cohesive team means figuring out the right people for the right roles: hiring, firing, promoting. But once you’ve got the right people in the right jobs, how do you keep them motivated? (Location 282)
results. Many managers are perpetually frustrated that it seems harder than it should be to get things done. (Location 287)
Guidance, team, and results: these are the responsibilities of any boss. This is equally true for anyone who manages people— CEOs, middle managers, and first-time leaders. (Location 293)
establishing a trusting relationship with each person who reports directly to you. If you lead a big organization, you can’t have a relationship with everyone; but you can really get to know the people who report directly to you. Many things get in the way, though: power dynamics first and foremost, but also fear of conflict, worry about the boundaries of what’s appropriate or “professional,” fear of losing credibility, time pressure. (Location 302)
If you think that you can do these things without strong relationships, you are kidding yourself. (Location 308)
You strengthen your relationships by learning the best ways to get, give, and encourage guidance; by putting the right people in the right roles on your team; and by achieving results collectively that you couldn’t dream of individually. (Location 311)
When you fail to give people the guidance they need to succeed in their work, or put people into roles they don’t want or aren’t well-suited for, or push people to achieve results they feel are unrealistic, you erode trust. (Location 313)
Your relationships with your direct reports affect the relationships they have with their direct reports, and your team’s culture. Your ability to build trusting, human connections with the people who report directly to you will determine the quality of everything that follows. (Location 317)
The first dimension is about being more than “just professional.” It’s about giving a damn, sharing more than just your work self, and encouraging everyone who reports to you to do the same. It’s not enough to care only about people’s ability to perform a job. To have a good relationship, you have to be your whole self and care about each of the people who work for you as a human being. It’s not just business; it is personal, and deeply personal. I call this dimension “Care Personally.” (Location 325)
The second dimension involves telling people when their work isn’t good enough— and when it is; (Location 328)
Challenging people generally pisses them off, and at first that doesn’t seem like a good way to build a relationship or to show that you “care personally.” And yet challenging people is often the best way to show them that you care when you’re the boss. This dimension I call “Challenge Directly.” (Location 332)
“Radical Candor” is what happens when you put “Care Personally” and “Challenge Directly” together. Radical Candor builds trust and opens the door for the kind of communication that helps you achieve the results you’re aiming for. (Location 334)
It turns out that when people trust you and believe you care about them, they are much more likely to 1) accept and act on your praise and criticism; 2) tell you what they really think about what you are doing well and, more importantly, not doing so well; 3) engage in this same behavior with one another, meaning less pushing the rock up the hill again and again; 4) embrace their role on the team; and 5) focus on getting results. (Location 337)
The most surprising thing about Radical Candor may be that its results are often the opposite of what you fear. You fear people will become angry or vindictive; instead they are usually grateful for the chance to talk it through. (Location 346)
I realized the question that led me to study Russian literature— why some people live productively and joyfully while others feel, as Marx put it, alienated from their labor— was central to a boss’s job. (Location 369)
IT SEEMS OBVIOUS that good bosses must care personally about the people who report directly to them. (Location 376)
Part of the reason why people fail to “care personally” is the injunction to “keep it professional.” That phrase denies something essential. We are all human beings, with human feelings, and, even at work, we need to be seen as such. When that doesn’t happen, when we feel we must repress who we really are to earn a living, we become alienated. That makes us hate going to work. To most bosses, being professional means: show up at work on time, do your job, don’t show feelings (unless engaged in “motivation” or some such end-driven effort). The result is that nobody feels comfortable being who they really are at work. (Location 379)
Bringing your whole self to work is one of those concepts that’s hard to define precisely, but you develop a feel for it when you start to open up to it. This often means modeling the behavior yourself by showing some vulnerability to the people who report to you— or just admitting when you’re having a bad day— and creating a safe space for others to do the same. (Location 387)
There are few things more damaging to human relationships than a sense of superiority. That’s why I detest the word “superior” as a synonym for “boss.” I also avoid the word “employee.” (Location 392)
Caring personally is the antidote to both robotic professionalism and managerial arrogance. Why do I say “caring personally” instead of just “caring”? Because it’s not enough to care about the person’s work or the person’s career. Only when you actually care about the whole person with your whole self can you build a relationship. (Location 396)
It’s about acknowledging that we are all people with lives and aspirations that extend beyond those related to our shared work. It’s about finding time for real conversations; about getting to know each other at a human level; about learning what’s important to people; (Location 401)
you must also care deeply about people while being prepared to be hated in return. (Location 404)
Once people know what it feels like to have a good boss, it’s more natural for them to want to be a good boss. They may never repay you, but they are likely to pay it forward. The rewards of watching people you care about flourish and then help others flourish are enormous. (Location 409)
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 are and that 2) you are willing to admit when you’re wrong and that you are committed to fixing mistakes that you or others have made. (Location 418)
being responsible sometimes means pissing people off. 1 You have to accept that sometimes people on your team will be mad at you. In fact, if nobody is ever mad at you, you probably aren’t challenging your team enough. (Location 421)
When what you say hurts, acknowledge the other person’s pain. Don’t pretend it doesn’t hurt or say it “shouldn’t” hurt— just show that you care. Eliminate the phrase “don’t take it personally” from your vocabulary— it’s insulting. Instead, offer to help fix the problem. But don’t pretend it isn’t a problem just to try to make somebody feel better. (Location 424)
The hardest part of building this trust is inviting people to challenge you, just as directly as you are challenging them. You have to encourage them to challenge you directly enough that you may be the one who feels upset or angry. (Location 430)
Building enough trust between people to enable reciprocal challenge irrespective of reporting relationship takes time and attention. (Location 438)
Challenging people directly takes real energy— not only from the people you’re challenging but from you as well. So do it only for things that really matter. (Location 451)
To be Radically Candid, you need to practice it “up,” “down,” and “sideways.” Even if your boss and peers have not bought in to this method, you CAN create a Radically Candid microcosm for yourself and the people on your team. You are entitled to proceed with a little more caution with your boss and your peers. (Location 454)
Radical Candor works only if the other person understands that your efforts at caring personally and challenging directly are delivered in good faith. (Location 465)
was raised in the American South, where people will do almost anything to avoid conflict or argument. In Israel, the opposite was true. (Location 471)
There are two dimensions to good guidance: care personally and challenge directly. As discussed in chapter one, when you do both at the same time, it’s Radical Candor. (Location 551)
They are a way to gauge praise and criticism, and to help people remember to do a better job offering both. They are not to be used to label people. Labeling hinders improvement. (Location 558)
Let’s (Location 561)
“It’s not mean, it’s clear!” has become a management mantra, helping me to avoid repeating the mistake I described in the Introduction, which was not telling Bob when his work wasn’t good enough. My efforts to be nice ended with my having to fire him. (Location 580)
great way to get to know somebody and to build trust is to offer Radically Candid praise and criticism. (Location 583)
The secret to winning, he said, is to point out to great players what they could have done better, even when they have just won a game. Especially when they have just won a game. (Location 602)
WHEN YOU CRITICIZE someone without taking even two seconds to show you care, your guidance feels obnoxiously aggressive to the recipient. (Location 606)
I regret to say that if you can’t be Radically Candid, being obnoxiously aggressive is the second best thing you can do. At least then people know what you think and where they stand, so your team can achieve results. This explains the advantage that assholes seem to have in the world. (Location 607)
it’s the fear of being labeled a jerk that pushes many people toward Manipulative Insincerity or Ruinous Empathy— both of which are actually worse for their colleagues than Obnoxious Aggression, (Location 618)
This Obnoxious Aggression sometimes gets great results short-term but leaves a trail of dead bodies in its wake in the long run. (Location 621)
It happens all too often that bosses view employees as lesser beings who can be degraded without conscience; that employees view their bosses as tyrants to be toppled; and that peers view one another as enemy combatants. When this is the toxic culture of guidance, criticism is a weapon rather than a tool for improvement; it makes the giver feel powerful and the receiver feel awful. (Location 628)
Blaming people’s internal essence rather than their external behavior leaves no room for change. (Location 640)
Fundamental human decency is something every person owes every other, regardless of position. (Location 658)
Guidance that is manipulatively insincere rarely reflects what the speaker actually thinks; rather, it’s an attempt to push the other person’s emotional buttons in return for some personal gain. (Location 703)
Colin Powell said leadership is sometimes about being willing to piss people off. When you are overly worried about how people will perceive you, you’re less willing to say what needs to be said. (Location 710)
THERE’S A RUSSIAN anecdote about a guy who has to amputate his dog’s tail but loves him so much that he cuts it off an inch each day, rather than all at once. His desire to spare the dog pain and suffering only leads to more pain and suffering. (Location 733)
When bosses are too invested in everyone getting along, they also fail to encourage the people on their team to criticize one another for fear of sowing discord. They create the kind of work environment where “being nice” is prioritized at the expense of critiquing, and therefore, improving actual performance. (Location 745)
when giving praise, investigate until you really understand who did what and why it was so great. Be as specific and thorough with praise as with criticism. Go deep into the details. (Location 762)
There are several reasons why it makes sense to begin building a culture of Radical Candor by asking people to criticize you. First, it’s the best way to show that you are aware that you are often wrong, and that you want to hear about it when you are; you want to be challenged. Second, you’ll learn a lot— few people scrutinize you as closely as do those who report to you. Maybe it will prevent you from sending out ill-conceived emails like the one I sent to Larry. Third, the more firsthand experience you have with how it feels to receive criticism, the better idea you’ll have of how your own guidance lands for others. Fourth, asking for criticism is a great way to build trust and strengthen your relationships. (Location 770)
If you see somebody criticizing a peer inappropriately, say something. But if somebody criticizes you inappropriately, your job is to listen with the intent to understand and then to reward the candor. (Location 777)
a story about Toyota that I’d learned in business school. Wanting to combat the cultural taboos against criticizing management, Toyota’s leaders painted a big red square on the assembly line floor. New employees had to stand in it at the end of their first week, and they were not allowed to leave until they had criticized at least three things on the line. (Location 792)
Balance praise and criticism Worry more about praise, less about criticism— but above all be sincere We learn more from our mistakes than our successes, more from criticism than from praise. Why, then, is it important to give more praise than criticism? Several reasons. First, it guides people in the right direction. It’s just as important to let people know what to do more of as what to do less of. Second, it encourages people to keep improving. In other words, the best praise does a lot more than just make people feel good. It can actually challenge them directly. (Location 799)
When I am criticizing, I try to be less nervous, and focus on “just saying it.” If I think too much about how to say it I’m likely to wimp out and say nothing. And when I am praising, I try to be at least aware of how praise can go wrong, and put more energy into thinking about how to say it. (Location 816)
Google emphasizes caring personally more than challenging directly, so I’d describe criticism there as Radical Candor with a twist of Ruinous Empathy. Apple does the opposite, so I’d describe its culture of criticism as Radical Candor with a twist of Obnoxious Aggression. (Location 823)
people who are more concerned with getting to the right answer than with being right make the best bosses. That’s because they keep learning and improving, and they push the people who work for them to do the same. (Location 870)
When you’re faced with telling a person something that will be extremely hard to hear, pretend you’re just saying, “Your fly is down,” or “You have spinach in your teeth.” These less-fraught scenarios can help you approach bigger problems (Location 876)
You know Alex will be embarrassed when you point out the zipper, but if you say nothing, ten more people will probably see Alex looking ridiculous. So you pull Alex aside and quietly say, “Hey, Alex, your fly is down. I always appreciate when people point it out to me when I’ve done the same thing. I hope you don’t mind my mentioning (Location 880)
If you know Alex is shy and will be embarrassed, maybe you decide to say nothing and hope Alex notices the fly without your saying anything. This behavior puts you in the Ruinous Empathy quadrant. In this scenario, ten more people see Alex’s fly down with the ridiculous white shirt sticking out of the front, and by the time Alex notices, it’s obvious her fly has been down for a really long time. (Location 886)
In order to build a great team, you need to understand how each person’s job fits into their life goals. (Location 918)
To keep a team cohesive, you need both rock stars and superstars, she explained. Rock stars are solid as a rock. Think the Rock of Gibraltar, not Bruce Springsteen. The rock stars love their work. They have found their groove. They don’t want the next job if it will take them away from their craft. (Location 923)
If you honor and reward the rock stars, they’ll become the people you most rely on. If you promote them into roles they don’t want or aren’t suited for, however, you’ll lose them— or, even worse, wind up firing them. Superstars, on the other hand, need to be challenged and given new opportunities to grow constantly. (Location 926)
for too long I believed that pushing everybody to grow super-fast was simply “best practice” for building a high-performing team. I was always looking for the best, the brightest, the brashest, and the most ambitious. (Location 957)
We were discussing the performance-potential matrix that so many companies use for succession planning or “talent management.” McKinsey & Company originally developed it to help General Electric decide which businesses to invest in, and HR departments at thousands of organizations have adapted it for talent management. 1 This matrix asks managers to assess both the performance and the potential of all employees and then put them into one of nine boxes—“ high performance/ high potential” being the best and “low performance/ low potential” being the worst. “‘ Potential’ (Location 964)
“What growth trajectory does each person on my team want to be on right now?” or “Have I given everybody opportunities that are in line with what they really want?” or “What growth trajectory do my direct reports believe they are on? Do I agree? And if I don’t, why don’t I?” (Location 976)
Sometimes people really want to grow and are capable of contributing more than they have been allowed to; at other times, they simply want more money or recognition but don’t really want to change the way they work or contribute any more than they do already. (Location 978)
SHIFTING FROM A traditional “talent management” mind-set to one of “growth management” will help you make sure everyone on your team is moving in the direction of their dreams, ensuring that your team collectively improves over time. Creativity flourishes, efficiency improves, people enjoy working together. (Location 987)
The (Location 994)
The most important thing you can do for your team collectively is to understand what growth trajectory each person wants to be on at a given time and whether that matches the needs and opportunities of the team. (Location 995)
When assessing a person’s past performance, it’s useful to consider both their results and more intangible things like “teamwork.” (Location 1002)
The intangibles are usually impossible to measure but not too hard to describe, and so expectations should be clear here as well. Performance is not a permanent label. No person is always an “excellent performer.” They just performed excellently last quarter. (Location 1004)
TO BE SUCCESSFUL at growth management, you need to find out what motivates each person on your team. You also need to learn what each person’s long-term ambitions are, and understand how their current circumstances fit into their motivations and their life goals. (Location 1009)
Only when you get to know your direct reports well enough to know why they care about their work, what they hope to get out of their careers, and where they are in the present moment in time can you put the right people in the right roles and assign the right projects to the right people. (Location 1011)
“Steep growth” is generally characterized by rapid change— learning new skills or deepening existing ones quickly. It’s not about becoming a manager— plenty of individual contributors remain on a steep growth trajectory their entire careers, and plenty of managers are on a gradual growth trajectory. Nor should steep growth be thought of as narrowly as “promotion.” It’s about having an increased impact over time. (Location 1014)
Gradual growth is characterized by stability. People on a gradual growth trajectory, who perform well, have generally mastered their work and are making incremental rather than sudden, dramatic improvements. (Location 1017)
People in a superstar phase are bad at rock star roles, and people in a rock star phase will hate a superstar role. (Location 1020)
Most people shift between a steep growth trajectory and a gradual growth trajectory in different phases of their lives and careers, so it’s important not to put a permanent label on people. (Location 1026)
“Only about five percent of people have a real vocation in life, and they confuse the hell out of the rest of us.” (Location 1048)
Keep your top performers top of mind BEFORE DELVING INTO the differences between how to manage rock stars or superstars, it’s useful to focus on what both need from you. Your role is to focus on them and to make sure they are getting everything they need to continue doing great work. (Location 1064)
Be a partner, not an absentee manager or a micromanager (Location 1068)
One of the most common mistakes bosses make is to ignore the people who are doing the best work because “they don’t need me” or “I don’t want to micromanage.” Ignoring somebody is a terrible (Location 1069)
If you don’t take the time to get to know the people who get the best results, you can’t understand how they want and need to be growing in their jobs at that particular moment in their lives. You’ll assign the wrong tasks to the wrong people. You’ll promote the wrong people. Also, if you ignore your top performers, you won’t give them the guidance they need. Every minute you spend with somebody who does great work pays off in the team’s results much more than time spent with somebody who’s failing. Ignore these people and you won’t, in short, be managing. (Location 1075)
You don’t want to be an absentee manager any more than you want to be a micromanager. Instead, you want to be a partner— that is, you must take the time to help the people doing the best work overcome obstacles and make their good work even better. (Location 1079)
Moving from great to stunningly great is more inspiring for everyone than moving from bad to mediocre. And seeing what truly exceptional performance looks like will help those who are failing to see more clearly what’s expected of them. (Location 1085)
What I am saying is we all have periods in our lives when our professional growth speeds up or slows down. Recreation is essential for creation. (Location 1106)
Just as there is nothing inherently ignoble about ambition, there is no shame in being in the same job for many years. (Location 1107)
What’s the best way to manage rock stars, the people whom you can count on to deliver great results year after year? You need to recognize them to keep them happy. For too many bosses, “recognition” means “promotion.” But in most cases, this is a big mistake. (Location 1128)
The key is to recognize their contribution in other ways. It may be a bonus or a raise. (Location 1130)
If your organization gives performance ratings and/ or bonuses, make sure they are fair to the rock stars. (Location 1133)
A lot of companies ration the number of top ratings. Avoiding “grade inflation” is a good idea. However, an unintended consequence is often that rock stars get lower ratings than they should. (Location 1136)
all of your top performers should get top ratings. (Location 1137)
great way to recognize people in a rock star phase is to designate them as “gurus,” or “go-to” experts. Often this means putting them in charge of teaching newer team members, if they show the aptitude for it. (Location 1141)
In World War II, the U.S. Air Force took their very best pilots from the front lines and sent them home to train new pilots. Over time this strategy dramatically improved the quality and effectiveness of the U.S. Air Force. (Location 1145)
Too many companies hire people for training whom they would never hire to do the actual job. Or, worse, rather than fire people who are not performing well in a particular role, they send them off to teach others how to do it. (Location 1148)
Generally, people who are great at a job enjoy teaching it to others; giving them this role can not only improve the performance of the whole team but also give the rock stars a different sort of recognition. (Location 1151)
The company’s organizational design optimized for deep functional expertise. There were no “general managers.” There was no iPhone division. Instead, there were operating system engineers, camera experts, audiophiles, and glass gurus who came together around the iPhone. (Location 1156)
I was struck by the deference given to people who had been in a particular role for years at Apple. At Google and many other Silicon Valley companies, being in the same role for too long was a badge of shame. (Location 1159)
This focus on tenure at Apple was confusing to me at first, because I tended to think of tenure rewards as something that happened at traditional companies or in academia, not at fast-growing tech companies. I realized, though, that honoring tenure was an important alternative to promotions for (Location 1162)
Life is so much better when people are great at their work and love it. The idea of climbing a corporate ladder is not inspiring to plenty of people. And yet those on a gradual growth trajectory are often referred to pejoratively as “B-players,” or as having “capped out.” (Location 1176)
Those who find work they can continue to love for five or ten or thirty years, even if it doesn’t lead to some sort of advancement, are damn lucky. And their teams and their bosses are lucky to have them. Kick-ass bosses never judge people doing great work as having “capped out.” Instead, they treat them with the honor that they are due and retain the individuals who will keep their team stable, cohesive, and productive. (Location 1179)
The Peter Principle results in people getting promoted beyond their level of competence— an unhappy situation for everyone, especially the person who’s been promoted. (Location 1184)
PART OF BUILDING a cohesive team is to create a culture that recognizes and rewards the rock stars. (Location 1190)
The best way to keep superstars happy is to challenge them and make sure they are constantly learning. Give them new opportunities, even when it is sometimes more work than seems feasible for one person to do. (Location 1219)
But make sure you don’t get too dependent on them; ask them to teach others on the team to do their job, because they won’t stay in their existing role for (Location 1222)
It’s vital not to “squash” these people. Recognize that you’ll probably be working for them one day, and celebrate that fact. (Location 1225)
Google did the best job of putting safeguards in place so that managers couldn’t curb the ambitions of their direct reports. This was directly tied to the company’s efforts to limit the power of managers to quash rather than accelerate the careers of people on a steep growth trajectory. (Location 1229)
Bosses at Google can’t simply promote people on their teams at their own discretion. In engineering, managers can encourage or discourage a person from pursuing another job, and they can lobby for the person or not, but people nominate themselves for promotion, and a committee makes the decision. Once a “promotion packet” consisting of a list of accomplishments and recommendations has been assembled, a committee reads it and decides if the promotion should go through. The manager is not on that committee. The manager can appeal a decision, but the manager is not the decider. This prevents managers from curbing the ambition of their direct reports or from offering promotions to reward personal loyalty rather than great work. (Location 1231)
Google also makes it pretty easy for people to seek new opportunities by transferring from one team to another team. No boss can “block” such a transfer. (Location 1236)
Allowing transfers is important because it prevents bosses from blackballing employees who want to move on, and allows for the fact that sometimes two people just don’t work that well together. (Location 1239)
Lack of interest in managing is not the same thing as being on a gradual growth trajectory, just as interest in managing is not the same thing as being on a steep growth trajectory. Management and growth should not be conflated. (Location 1246)
Google’s engineering teams solved this problem by creating an “individual contributor” career path that is more prestigious than the manager path and sidesteps management entirely. This has been great for the growth of these engineers; it’s also good for the people whom they would otherwise have been managing. When people become bosses just to “get ahead” rather than because they want to do what bosses do, they perform, at best, a perfunctory job and often become bosses from hell. (Location 1258)
When management is the only path to higher compensation, the quality of management suffers, and the lives of the people who work for these reluctant managers become miserable. (Location 1261)
Everyone can be excellent at something. That’s very different from saying anyone can be good at anything— definitely not true. (Location 1265)
Assuming that people who are not thriving are therefore “mediocre” and can’t do any better is both unjust and unkind. Allowing them to continue down that path may be the worst case of Ruinous Empathy that managers regularly display and a great source of wasted possibility. (Location 1272)
treating these people fairly requires that you know them well enough to understand why they aren’t thriving; if they are simply going through a rough period, it’s better to give them the time and space to recover than to push for more than they have to give just then. (Location 1274)
One of the least popular things I did with my teams at Google was to insist that people who had not done exceptional work for more than two years be given an opportunity to work on a project that would let them shine. If their work still continued to be mediocre, we began encouraging these people to look for jobs elsewhere. (Location 1277)
did it because I believed that everyone can be exceptional somewhere and that it was my job to help them find that role. I also believed that we should strive to have 100 percent of the team doing exceptional work. (Location 1282)
If somebody hadn’t proven in the course of two years that they could do exceptional work, they almost certainly would never get there. It was time to help them find a job where they could shine and time for us to start looking to replace them with somebody who could shine on our team. (Location 1284)
In many ways, your job as the boss is to set and uphold a quality bar. That can feel harsh in the short term, but in the long run the only thing that is meaner is lowering the bar. Don’t get sucked into Ruinous Empathy when managing people who are doing OK but not great! Everybody can excel somewhere. And to build a great team that achieves exceptional results, everybody needs to be doing great work. Accepting mediocrity isn’t good for anybody. (Location 1289)
WHEN SOMEBODY IS performing poorly and, having received clear communication about the nature of the problem, is showing no signs of improvement, you must fire that person. (Location 1294)
How you do it goes a long way to defining your long-term success as a boss, because it sends a clear signal to everyone on your team whether or not you truly care about people for more than what they can do for you on the job. (Location 1295)
The knowledge that you are about to inflict some measure of suffering on someone you may care a lot about obviously makes actually doing it very hard. (Location 1300)
Let’s say that someone on your team, “Peggy,” is terrible at her job, not getting any better, or even getting worse. Is it time to fire her? There’s no absolute answer to that question, but here are three questions to consider: have you given her Radically Candid guidance, do you understand the impact of Peggy’s performance on her colleagues, and have you sought (Location 1306)
Have you given Radically Candid guidance? Have you demonstrated to Peggy that you care personally about her work and her life, and have you been crystal clear when you have challenged her to improve? Has your praise been substantive and specific about what she has done right, rather than simply a salve to her ego? Have you been humble as well as direct in your criticism, offering to help her find solutions rather than attacking her as a person? And have you done these things on multiple occasions over the course of time? If the answer is yes and you have not seen improvement, or have seen only flickers of improvement, it’s time. (Location 1309)
How is this person’s poor performance affecting the rest of the team? Peggy’s shortcomings aren’t only your problem. As a manager, it’s your job to make sure you understand everyone else’s perspective, as well, and how her poor performance affects other members of the team. Generally, by the time one of your direct report’s poor performance has come to your attention, it’s been driving their peers nuts for a long time. (Location 1314)
Have you sought out a second opinion, spoken to someone whom you trust and with whom you can talk the problem through? Sometimes you may think you’ve been clear when you haven’t been. Getting an outside perspective can help you make sure you’re being fair. Also, if you don’t have experience firing somebody, talk to somebody who does. (Location 1317)
people. Being too cautious may be preferable to being too hasty, but I’d say that most managers wait far too long to do it because they have fooled themselves into believing that it’s unnecessary. (Location 1323)
1. It will get better. But of course it won’t get better all by itself. So stop and ask yourself: how, exactly, will it get better? What are you going to do differently? What will the person in question do differently? How might circumstances change? Even if things have gotten a little better, have they improved enough? If you don’t have a pretty precise answer to those questions, it probably won’t get better. (Location 1326)
Somebody is better than nobody. Another common reason why bosses are reluctant to fire a poor performer is that they don’t want a “hole” on the team. If you fire “Jeffrey,” who will do the work he was doing? How long will it take you to find a replacement? The fact is that poor performers often create as much extra work for others as they accomplish themselves, because they leave parts of their job undone or do other parts sloppily or behave unprofessionally in ways that others must compensate for. Steve Jobs put it succinctly, if harshly, when he said, “It’s better to have a hole than an asshole.” (Location 1329)
A transfer is the answer. Because firing people is so very hard, it’s often tempting to instead pass them off to an unsuspecting colleague at your company, even if they don’t have skills your colleague needs or are a poor cultural fit. It feels “nicer” than firing them. This is obviously not so nice for the unsuspecting colleague and is generally a mistake for the person you’re trying to be “nice” to as well. (Location 1334)
It’s bad for morale. It’s also tempting to tell yourself that you’re not firing somebody because doing so would discourage the team. But keeping someone on who can’t do the job is far worse for morale— yours, the person who’s doing a crummy job, and everyone else who’s doing a great job. Again, this comes down to having built a good relationship with the person you’re firing, and the rest of the team. It comes back to having demonstrated that you care personally. (Location 1338)
The way you fire people really matters, and to do this hard job well, it’s important not to distance yourself from the person you’re about to fire. If you try to avoid feeling the pain that is inherent in the situation, especially for the person you’re firing, you’ll make a hash of it. (Location 1342)
When you fire someone, you create the possibility for the person to excel and find happiness performing meaningful work elsewhere. Part of getting a good job is leaving a bad one, or one that’s bad for you. As my grandmother once said to me, “There’s a lid for every pot.” Just because the person is not good at the job they do for you doesn’t mean there isn’t another job out there they could be great at. I know that this can sound very Pollyanna-ish, so before our meeting, I try to imagine specifically what that job might be. I also try to reframe the problem, for both me and the person I’m firing: it’s not the person who sucks, it’s the job that sucks— at least for this person. (Location 1353)
Retaining people who are doing bad work penalizes the people doing excellent work. Failing to deal with a performance issue is not fair to the rest of the team. Work undone generally winds up getting picked up by the top performers, overburdening them. (Location 1359)
Sometimes you will put a great person into the wrong job. That is why I call this the “look at yourself in the mirror” quadrant— if you put somebody in the wrong role, their poor performance is actually your fault. (Location 1371)
when you hire someone who has never done a job before and they have to learn it from scratch, they sometimes take longer than expected to progress. If the person gives you reason to believe they can be great in the role, if they show signs of “spiking,” it’s worth investing more. But sometimes it isn’t that obvious. (Location 1398)
can help to ask yourself these questions: are expectations clear enough? Is the training good enough? If the problem is that you have not explained the role or the expectations clearly enough, you should invest more time to do so if you think the person can become a kick-ass employee. (Location 1401)
Sometimes managers simply have unreasonable expectations about what one human being can do. Other times, managers map their own capacity onto the people who work for them. They forget that a person with ten years less experience than they have simply doesn’t know certain things. (Location 1404)
Sometimes people who have been on a tear in their careers suddenly stop performing well because they are having a personal issue. If the problem is a temporary one, it’s best simply to give such people the time they need to get back on track. (Location 1407)
Sometimes a person seems to be in the perfect role, given their experience and expertise, but just can’t get traction at a particular company or on a team because there is a misalignment between the culture of the group and the individual’s personality. (Location 1412)
I knew a person whose “launch and iterate” approach made him enormously successful at Google. Google’s culture was all about experimentation. When he got to Apple, which had a culture of perfecting and polishing ideas before launching them, he tried the same thing, and it killed his credibility. There was nothing wrong with the person or with Apple— it was just a bad fit. (Location 1416)
My biggest concern with the terms “rock star” and “superstar” is that you’ll use them as permanent labels for people. Please do not! It’s tempting to see certain people as fit only for a certain role or having a certain set of skills/ weaknesses that will never change. The truth is, people really do change. Somebody who’s been on a gradual growth trajectory may suddenly become restless and yearn for a new challenge at work. Or, a person who’s been on a steep growth trajectory for years may be craving a period of stability. (Location 1422)
why you have to manage. Being a great boss involves constantly adjusting to the new reality of the day or week or year as it unfolds. But you can’t adjust if you haven’t been paying attention or if you don’t know the person well enough to notice that something significant has shifted. (Location 1426)
It’s not only important to remember that nobody is always on a steep or growth trajectory; people’s performance changes over time, too. Be careful not to label people as “high performers.” (Location 1428)
To combat permanent labels, Qualtrics cofounder (and my colleague from Juice and Google) Jared Smith came up with the performance ratings “off quarter,” “solid quarter,” and “exceptional quarter.” (Location 1430)
Make sure that you are seeing each person on your team with fresh eyes every day. People evolve, and so your relationships must evolve with them. Care personally; don’t put people in boxes and leave them there. (Location 1439)
You’ll get more done if you take the time to incorporate their thinking into yours, and yours into theirs. Don’t let your focus on results get in the way of caring about the people you work with. (Location 1453)
it could be a lot better if we operated less like a soccer team of seven-year-olds: all of us chasing the ball, none of us in position. (Location 1464)
Rather than having a team of one hundred in which everybody did a little bit of everything, with a random management structure, I created five smaller teams. I made each of the managers working for me accountable for just one thing: approvals or on-boarding or account management or customer support or policy. (Location 1479)
She agreed with the way I’d restructured the work, but not with the way I’d gone about it. “Kim, you’re moving too fast. (Location 1487)
Telling people what to do didn’t work. At a time when we were obviously in need of big changes, it had seemed like it was the fastest way forward, but it wasn’t. First, because I didn’t involve my team in decision-making; I just made the decisions myself. Second, because even after making them I didn’t take the time to explain why or to persuade the team I’d made good decisions. (Location 1491)
even if you work at a place that allows you to act in a more authoritarian way, you’ll get better results if you lay your power down and work more collaboratively. (Location 1509)
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” (Location 1523)
“But this was your idea,” said my colleague. “Yes, and it was your job to convince me I was wrong,” Steve replied, “and you failed!” From then on, my colleague argued longer and more loudly, and he kept arguing until either he convinced Steve he was right or Steve convinced him he was wrong. (Location 1530)
the relentless focus on challenging himself and those around him to “get it” right rather than to “be” right was part of what drove (Location 1537)
the “Get Stuff Done” (GSD) wheel, is relatively straightforward. But the key, often ignored by people who think of themselves as “Get Stuff Done” people, is to avoid the impulse to dive right in, as I did in the example that begins this chapter. Instead, you have to first lay the groundwork for collaboration. (Location 1548)
When (Location 1550)
First, you have to listen to the ideas that people on your team have and create a culture in which they listen to each other. Next, you have create space in which ideas can be sharpened and clarified, to make sure these ideas don’t get crushed before everyone fully understands their potential usefulness. But just because an idea is easy to understand doesn’t mean it’s a good one. Next, you have to debate ideas and test them more rigorously. Then you need to decide— quickly, but not too quickly. Since not everyone will have been involved in the listen-clarify-debate-decide part of the cycle for every idea, the next step is to bring the broader team along. You have to persuade those who weren’t involved in a decision that it was a good one, so that everyone can execute it effectively. Then, having executed, you have to learn from the results, whether or not you did the right thing, and start the whole process over again. (Location 1552)
they are designed to be cycled through quickly. Not skipping a step and not getting stuck on one are equally important. If you skip a step, you’ll waste time in the end. If you allow any part of the process to drag out, working on your team will feel like paying a collaboration tax, not making a collaboration investment. (Location 1560)
You may very well be in a situation where your boss is skipping steps and just telling you what to do. Does that mean you have to do the same with your team? No, of course not! You can put these ideas into practice with the people who report to you even if your boss doesn’t subscribe to this method of getting things done. (Location 1562)
Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer, once said at an Apple University class that a manager’s most important role is to “give the quiet ones a voice.” (Location 1573)
This is your goal as well, but there is more than one way to achieve it. You have to find a way to listen that fits your personal style, and then create a culture in which everyone listens to each other, so that all the burden of listening doesn’t fall on you. (Location 1575)
he tried to make sure to spend at least ten minutes in every one-on-one meeting listening silently, without reacting in any way. He would keep his facial expression and body language totally neutral. (Location 1587)
found that they were much more likely to say what they really thought— even if it wasn’t what I was hoping to hear— when I was careful not to show what I thought.” (Location 1590)
Quiet listening clearly works for many managers, but I cannot pull it off. Luckily, there is another model. (Location 1602)
If quiet listening involves being silent to give people room to talk, loud listening is about saying things intended to get a reaction out of them. (Location 1604)
here’s a dopey idea…” He wasn’t quiet about his idea, but he was inviting Jony to challenge it by calling it dopey. (Location 1614)
opinions, weakly held.” Saffo has made the point that expressing strong, some might say outrageous, positions with others is a good way to get to a better answer, or at least to have a more interesting conversation. I love this approach. I’ve always found that saying what I think really clearly and then going to great lengths to encourage disagreement is a good way to listen. I tend to state my positions strongly, so I have had to learn to follow up with, “Please poke holes in this idea— I know it may be terrible. So tell me all the reasons we should not do that.” (Location 1621)
Loud listening— stating a point of view strongly— offers a quick way to expose opposing points of view or flaws in reasoning. It also prevents people from wasting a lot of time trying to figure out what the boss thinks. Assuming that you are surrounded with people who don’t hesitate to challenge what you say, stating it clearly can be the fastest way to get to the best answer. (Location 1627)
Figure out how to listen to give the quiet ones a voice without weirding out their louder colleagues. You don’t want a tyranny of the most verbose on your team; you want to get to the best answer together. (Location 1633)
The keys are 1) have a simple system for employees to use to generate ideas and voice complaints, 2) make sure that at least some of the issues raised are quickly addressed, and 3) regularly offer explanations as to why the other issues aren’t being addressed. (Location 1636)
thousands of “small” innovations can create benefits for customers that are impossible for competitors to imitate. One big idea is pretty easy to copy, but thousands of tweaks are impossible to see from the outside, let alone imitate. 3 (Location 1643)
We created an ideas tool (basically just a wiki) that allowed people to submit an idea, have it reviewed by the team, and voted up or down. That was a form of listening, and people whose ideas got voted up definitely felt heard by their colleagues. People whose ideas were not voted up knew that their ideas had been explicitly rejected: a much clearer signal than radio silence from overburdened management. (Location 1652)
the ideas team helped people get the selected ideas implemented. Occasionally this was about getting time for people to work on them, or getting some input from me, but often all it took was just the validation and encouragement that came from listening and responding. “Yes, that’s a cool idea! Do (Location 1658)
It’s so easy to lose “small” ideas in big organizations, and if you do you kill incremental innovation. (Location 1673)
If you can build a culture where people listen to one another, they will start to fix things you as the boss never even knew were broken. (Location 1676)
When just a couple of people were doing all the talking at a meeting, I’d stop and go around the table to ensure that everyone got heard. Other times, I would stand up in the next meeting and walk around, physically blocking a person who was talking too much. Sometimes I’d have a quick conversation with people before a meeting, asking some to pipe up and others to pipe down. In other words, part of my job was to constantly figure out new ways to “give the quiet ones a voice.” (Location 1681)
By taking time to get to know people and by just listening she was able to build trust and show she cared deeply about the peace process. (Location 1696)
ONCE YOU’VE CREATED a culture of listening, the next step is to push yourself and your direct reports to understand and convey thoughts and ideas more clearly. (Location 1702)
Trying to solve a problem that hasn’t been clearly defined is not likely to result in a good solution; debating a half-baked idea is likely to kill it. As the boss, you are the editor, not the author. (Location 1703)
Take the time to help your direct reports explain what they mean, so that they can do something about fixing the problem or pursuing the opportunity rather than just complaining about it. (Location 1713)
It’s important to push the people on your team to clarify their thinking and ideas so that you don’t “squish” their best thinking or ignore problems that are bothering them. (Location 1715)
Part of your job as the boss is to help people think through their ideas before submitting them to the rough-and-tumble of debate. (Location 1719)
There’s a lot of research demonstrating that when companies help people develop new ideas by creating the space and time to clarify their thinking, innovation flourishes. (Location 1729)
People came up with a project they wanted to work on and could apply to Blue Sky. If approved, they got two weeks off from their day job to further develop the idea. (Location 1735)
1: 1s more productive.) These meetings should be a safe place for your direct reports to come and talk to you about new ideas. In this context, you shouldn’t judge the ideas but rather help your direct reports clarify their thinking. This is a form of “plussing.” You can point out problems but with the aim of figuring a way around those problems, not killing ideas. (Location 1743)
You’ll be heard more accurately if you take the time to understand the people you are talking to. What do they know, what don’t they know? What details do you need to include to make it easy for them to understand— and, more importantly, what details can you leave out? (Location 1757)
You need to push them to communicate with such precision and clarity that it’s impossible not to grasp their argument. (Location 1761)
The essence of making an idea clear requires a deep understanding not only of the idea but also of the person to whom one is explaining the idea. (Location 1766)
Your job as a boss is to turn on that “rock tumbler.” Too many bosses think their role is to turn it off— to avoid all the friction by simply making a decision and sparing the team the pain of debate. It’s not. Debate takes time and requires emotional energy. But lack of debate saps a team of more time and emotional energy in the long run. (Location 1782)
Make sure that individual egos and self-interest don’t get in the way of an objective quest for the best answer. 6 Nothing is a bigger time-sucker or blocker to getting it right than ego. (Location 1787)
Redirect them to focus on the facts; don’t allow people to attribute ownership to ideas, and don’t get hijacked by how others who aren’t in the room might (or might not) feel. Remind people what the goal is: to get to the best answer, as a team. (Location 1791)
Another way to help people search for the best answer instead of seeking ego validation is to make them switch roles. If a person has been arguing for A, ask them to start arguing for B. If a debate is likely to go on for some time, warn people in advance that you’re going to ask them to switch roles. When people know that they will be asked to argue another person’s point, they will naturally listen more attentively. (Location 1795)
“obligation to dissent.” If everyone around the table agreed, that was a red flag. Somebody had to take up the dissenting voice. (Location 1800)
There are times when people are just too tired, burnt out, or emotionally charged up to engage in productive debate. It’s crucial to be aware of these moments, because they rarely lead to good outcomes. Your job is to intervene and call a time-out. If you don’t, people will make a decision so that they can go home; or worse, a huge fight stemming from raw emotions will break out. (Location 1806)
when I find a way to have fun with a debate, others often follow suit. (Location 1812)
But a boss’s job is often to keep the debate going rather than to resolve it with a decision. It’s the debates at work that help individuals grow and help the team work better collectively to come up with the best answer. (Location 1830)
the decisions into the facts.” Here is what I’ve learned about what that means— how to help a team make the best possible decisions— or to “always get it right.” (Location 1845)
You’re not the decider (usually) (Location 1846)
objectives that were clear and ambitious, key results that were measurable. (Location 1854)
was clear that he’d skipped the important steps of “listen,” “clarify, “debate,” and “decide” and instead gone straight to “persuade” mode. (Location 1867)
Primer on Decision Making, James March explains why it’s a bad thing when the most “senior” people in a hierarchy are always the deciders. What he calls “garbage can decision-making” occurs when the people who happen to be around the table are the deciders rather than the people with the best information. (Location 1874)
That is why kick-ass bosses often do not decide themselves, but rather create a clear decision-making process that empowers people closest to the facts to make as many decisions as possible. (Location 1878)
people tend to put their egos into recommendations in a way that can lead to politics, and thus worse decisions. So she recommended seeking “facts, not recommendations.” Of course “facts” come inflected with each person’s particular perspective or point of view, but they are less likely to become a line in the sand than a recommendation is. (Location 1883)
As the boss, you do have the right to delve into any details that seem interesting or important to you. You don’t have to stay “high level” all the time. Sometimes you will be the decider. And even when you’ve delegated the key decisions, you can still plunge into the details of some other, smaller decision from time to time. You can’t do that for every decision, but you can (Location 1886)
when you are the decider, it’s really important to go to the source of the facts. This is especially true when you’re a “manager of managers.” You don’t want the “facts” to come to you through layers of management. (Location 1891)
In order to make sure they were able to understand and challenge facts as presented, leaders at Apple were expected to know details many “layers” deep in their organizations. (Location 1894)
YOU’VE MANAGED TO drive your team to a decision, but there are still people who don’t agree with it— the same people who will be responsible for helping to implement it. (Location 1902)
Persuasion at this stage can feel unnecessary and make the decider resentful of people on the team who aren’t fully in agreement. The decider has painstakingly gone through the listen, clarify, and debate steps and made a decision. (Location 1905)
expecting others to execute on a decision without being persuaded that it’s the right thing to do is a recipe for terrible results. And don’t imagine that you can step in and simply tell everyone to get in line behind a decision, whether you have made it or somebody else has. (Location 1909)
to be legitimately persuasive a speaker must address the audience’s emotions but also establish the credibility and share the logic of the argument. (Location 1922)
Aristotle’s elements of rhetoric— pathos, logos, and ethos, which I’ll translate loosely as emotion, logic, and credibility. 7 (Location 1925)
But if you fail to take into account your listener’s emotions, too, you won’t be persuasive. (Location 1929)
Dick’s warm sense of humor helped him connect to people’s emotions and earn their trust, which made him a persuasive leader. Dick often had everyone at Twitter’s company all-hands meetings doubled over with laughter, most especially with his unexpectedly candid responses to somewhat hostile impromptu questions. (Location 1946)
Focus on your expertise and past accomplishments. Be humble and invoke a “we” not an “I” whenever possible. Bragging doesn’t work, but neither does false humility. Don’t forget to establish your credibility or to help the deciders on your team to establish theirs when it’s time for them to persuade others to execute on a decision. (Location 1965)
the logic may seem self-evident to you, so you fail to share it with others. When you know something deeply, it’s hard to remember that others don’t. (Location 1971)
AS THE BOSS, part of your job is to take a lot of the “collaboration tax” on yourself so that your team can spend more time executing. (Location 1977)
One of the hardest things about being a boss is balancing these responsibilities with the work you need to do personally in your area of expertise. Here are the three things I’ve learned about getting this balance right: Don’t waste your team’s time; Keep the “dirt under your fingernails”; and Block time to execute. (Location 1979)
She’d make us have debates as a team, but just before they started to feel tedious, she’d identify a “decider,” and ask that person to come back to the rest of us with a decision by a particular date. (Location 1986)
When some ridiculous time-wasting mandate would come down from on high at Google, Sheryl would figure out a way to shield us from it. All of that protection gave everyone who worked for her a lot more time to execute. (Location 1989)
In order to be a good partner to the people on your team, and in order to keep the GSD wheel spinning efficiently, you need to stay connected to the actual work that is being done— not just by observing others executing but by executing yourself. (Location 1996)
you need to spend time listening to people in 1: 1s, leading debates, and so on. But you need to learn to toggle between leading and executing personally. Don’t abandon the first for the second; integrate the two. If you get too far away from the work your team is doing, you won’t understand their ideas well enough to help them clarify, to participate in debates, to know which decisions to push them to make, to teach them to be more persuasive. The GSD wheel will grind to a halt if you don’t understand intimately the “stuff” your team is trying to get done. (Location 1999)
execution is a solitary task. We use calendars mostly for collaborative tasks— to schedule meetings, etc. One of your jobs as a manager is to make sure that collaborative tasks don’t consume so much of your time or your team’s time that there’s no time to execute whatever plan has been decided on and accepted. (Location 2004)
something, and you want it to be great. And it is human nature for us to become attached— often unreasonably attached— to projects we’ve invested a lot of time and energy into. It can take almost superhuman discipline to step back, acknowledge when our results could be a lot better or are simply no good, and learn from the experience. (Location 2010)
“It’s unbearably painful to admit it when you have an ugly baby!” (Location 2023)
denial is actually the more common reaction to imperfect execution than learning. (Location 2024)
Pressure to be consistent We are often told that changing our position makes us a “flip-flopper” or “erratic” or “lacking principles.” I prefer John Maynard Keynes’s idea that “When the facts change, I change my mind.” (Location 2026)
Sometimes we’re overwhelmed by our work and personal lives, and these are the moments when it is hardest to learn from our results and to start the whole cycle over again. (Location 2034)
I learned that too much emphasis on shareholder value actually destroys value, as well as morale. Instead, I learned to focus first on staying centered myself, so that I could build real relationships with each of the people who worked for me. Only when I was centered and my relationships were strong could I fulfill my responsibilities as a manager to guide my team to achieve the best results. Shareholder value is the result. (Location 2072)
What we bring to work depends on our own health and well-being. (Location 2083)
Your problems at work and at home are compounding each other. Hard times are made much harder when you’re not at your best. And they can make it particularly hard to “care personally” about the people you work with, not to mention those you live with. (Location 2088)
The essence of leadership is not getting overwhelmed by circumstances. (Location 2090)
Don’t think of it as work-life balance, some kind of zero-sum game where anything you put into your work robs your life and anything you put into your life robs your work. Instead, think of it as work-life integration. (Location 2095)
It’s even more important to focus on making time for whatever keeps you centered when you are stressed and busy than when things are relatively calm. (Location 2104)
Put the things you need to do for yourself on your calendar, just as you would an important meeting. (Location 2111)
Show up for yourself Don’t blow off those meetings with yourself or let others schedule over them any more than you would a meeting with your boss. (Location 2113)
You can guide your team to get results if you’ve built a trusting relationship with each person reporting to you, and there can only be real trust when people feel free at work. (Location 2117)
people that will make them feel free at work is to relinquish unilateral authority. (Location 2119)
It’s natural to crave a little control. But power and control are illusory and won’t get you where you really want to go. Relationships are more effective, and more satisfying. (Location 2121)
The basic premise here is that when everyone on your team is able to bring the best of what they’ve got mentally, emotionally, and physically to their work, they are more fulfilled in their jobs, they work better with one another, and the team gets better results. (Location 2122)
Authority derives naturally from merit, not the other way around.” (Location 2127)
there are few things more damaging to building a trusting relationship with another person than unilateral authority or a sense of superiority. (Location 2130)
the only thing worse than tyranny is anarchy, (Location 2136)
Performance ratings were influenced by 360-degree feedback on each employee, not just the manager’s subjective opinion, and then calibrated across teams to make sure standards were similarly upheld across teams. (Location 2151)
When you have too much unilateral authority, you’ll inevitably do things that will erode trust, ruin your relationships, and make your direct reports want to escape from their jobs the way they’d want to break out of jail. Sometimes even just a tiny bit of unilateral authority is enough to make people behave badly. (Location 2155)
it is best to remember that mostly you get to know the people you work with on the job, every day, as an integrated part of the work rhythm, not at the annual holiday party. (Location 2167)
when these events are introduced by management, they can feel both obligatory and forced— unintentionally undermining a culture of freedom and autonomy. (Location 2173)
You already spend a lot of hours every day with your colleagues and direct reports. Use that time to build relationships. For the most part, it’s better to use the time after work to keep yourself centered than to socialize with work colleagues. (Location 2174)
bear these warnings in mind: even non-mandatory events can feel mandatory. And booze can land you in dangerous territory. (Location 2176)
It’s important to avoid those ironic moments when attempts to team-build and improve morale actually make things worse. (Location 2183)
Sometimes, the greatest gift you can give your team is to let them go home. (Location 2186)
A drink or two can be a social lubricant. But it can also backfire, and badly. (Location 2188)
BUILDING RADICALLY CANDID relationships requires you to walk a fine line between respecting other people’s boundaries and encouraging them to bring their whole selves to work. (Location 2195)
Building trust in any relationship takes time because trust is built on a consistent pattern of acting in good faith. (Location 2200)
On the other hand, you do need to start somewhere. If you never ask a single question about a person’s life, it’s hard to move up on the “care personally” axis. (Location 2202)
Holding regular 1: 1s in which your direct report sets the agenda and you ask questions is a good way to begin building trust. (Location 2204)
The way you ask for criticism and react when you get it goes a long way toward building trust— or destroying it. (Location 2205)
“career conversations” is also an excellent way to strengthen your relationship with each person who reports directly to you (Location 2206)
The important thing to do is to stay in touch with your personal values, and to demonstrate them in how you manage your team, not by writing down things like “hard work,” “honesty,” and “innovation” on a piece of paper. Live your values. (Location 2220)
But you do need to respect other people’s values when they do share them with you. (Location 2225)
why it’s crucial to remind people that an important part of Radically Candid relationships is opening yourself to the possibility of connecting with people who have different worldviews or whose lives involve behavior that you don’t understand or that may even conflict with a core belief of yours. (Location 2231)
The fastest path to artificial relationships at work, and to the gravitational pull of organizational mediocrity, is to insist that everyone have the same worldview before building relationships with them. (Location 2234)
A radically candid relationship starts with the basic respect and common decency that every human being owes each other, regardless of worldview. (Location 2235)
the work is the bond everybody on a team does share, and the most productive way to strengthen that bond is by learning how to work together in ways that benefit everyone involved. (Location 2236)
their teachers were speculating why boys raise their hands more often than girls. Then I attended a class and heard the questions: “OK, you guys, who knows what four plus one is?” No wonder the girls weren’t raising their hands! Children are literal, and girls are not guys. (Location 2242)
real hug may be the world’s most effective way to show you care personally. (Location 2255)
“Interesting fact: to be most effective at optimizing the flow of the chemicals oxytocin and serotonin— which boost mood and promote bonding— hold a hug for at least six seconds.” (Location 2268)
If all you ever give is hugs and you never challenge the other person, then your hugs may be ruinously empathetic. (Location 2272)
The “golden rule” says do unto others as you’d have them do unto you. The “platinum rule” says, figure out what makes the other person comfortable, and do that. If most people on your team are comfortable with hugs but a couple are not, you need to figure out a way to make sure that they don’t feel excluded from all those hugs they don’t want. (Location 2276)
Everybody notices what kind of mood the boss is in. We have to. It’s adaptive.” (Location 2286)
The best you can do is to own up to how you feel and what’s going on in the rest of your life, so others don’t feel your mood is their fault. (Location 2290)
If you have a truly terrible emotional upset in your life, stay home for a day. You don’t want to spread it around any more than you’d want to spread a bad virus around the office, and emotions are just as contagious as germs. Mental-health days should be taken more seriously than they are. (Location 2293)
All people, including the people who report to you, are responsible for their own emotional lives. There are fewer faster paths to Manipulative Insincerity than imagining you can control another person’s emotional reactions or maneuver around them. (Location 2298)
To build Radically Candid relationships, do not try to prevent, control, or manage other people’s emotions. Do acknowledge them and react compassionately when emotions run high. (Location 2299)
Emotional reactions can offer important clues to help you better understand what’s really going on with the people you manage. They can offer you a shortcut to the heart of the matter. So don’t respond to outbursts or sullen silences by pretending they are not happening. Don’t try to mitigate them by saying things like, “It’s not personal,” or “Let’s be professional.” Instead say, “I can see you’re mad/ frustrated/ elated/____” (Location 2304)
When somebody is frustrated or angry or upset enough about a situation at work that they react emotionally, this is your cue to keep asking questions until you understand what the real issue is. Don’t over-direct the conversation; (Location 2308)
If you feel guilty about the fact that they are upset, you’re more likely to have a defensive reaction than a compassionate one. (Location 2313)
When somebody is upset, it’s not necessarily your fault. Their upset may have nothing to do with you. Focus on them, not on yourself. (Location 2316)
If you tell somebody they can’t have a particular emotional reaction, it becomes almost inevitable they will have that reaction; your injunction is likely to elicit the very emotions you most fear. (Location 2321)
If you see that somebody is getting upset, offer a bottle of water. Often, the simple pause to unscrew the top and take a sip of water is enough to help the person feel calmer. (Location 2336)
When planning a difficult conversation, try taking a walk instead of sitting and talking. When you’re walking, the emotions are less on display and less likely to start resonating in a destructive way. Also, walking and looking in the same direction often feels more collaborative than sitting across a table and staring each other down. * (Location 2338)
you need to get, give, and encourage both praise and criticism. (Location 2352)
he encouraged Matt to challenge with gusto by grinning encouragingly when Matt started to get passionate. Larry never said, “Don’t get emotional.” The more intense Matt’s criticism got, the wider Larry’s grin got. (Location 2357)
when you are the boss people really do not want to criticize you or to tell you what they really think. Along with the position, you inherit a bunch of assumptions that have nothing to do with who you really are. (Location 2360)
Don’t think for a minute that because you’re a nice person, or because you used to eat lunch every day with the people you now manage, that people won’t see you differently now that you’re the boss, (Location 2365)
the minute you assume the role of boss you’ll be fighting preconceptions. And the authority that comes with the role is, in fact, likely to bring out some of your worst instincts— so it may not just be a matter of unfair perception! (Location 2369)
being overly focused on respect can backfire because it’ll make you feel extra defensive when criticized. If, on the other hand, you can listen to the criticism and react well to it, both trust and respect will follow. (Location 2373)
You are the exception to the “criticize in private” rule of thumb. (Location 2375)
Once I figured out who on my team was most comfortable criticizing me, I would ask that person to do it in front of others at a staff meeting or an all-hands meeting. (Location 2380)
When you encourage people to criticize you publicly, you get the chance to show your team that you really, genuinely want the criticism. You also set an ideal for the team as a whole: everyone should embrace criticism that helps us do our jobs better. (Location 2382)
If you have more than sixty or so people working for you and you make them wait till they can get a private moment with you to share some criticism, you’ll probably never hear it. Airing it in public has another benefit as well: it saves you from having to hear the same thing over and over. (Location 2385)
Too many managers fear that public challenge will undermine their authority. It’s natural to want to repress dissent, but a good reaction to public criticism can be the very thing that establishes your credibility as a strong leader, and will help you build a culture of guidance. (Location 2387)
“Is there anything I could do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?” (Location 2392)
One technique is to count to six before saying anything else, forcing them to endure the silence. The goal is not to be a bully but to insist on a candid discussion— to make it harder for the person to say nothing than to tell you what they’re thinking. (Location 2399)
If counting to six doesn’t do the trick, ask the question again. And again if necessary. (Location 2402)
Another way to embrace the discomfort is to point out when people’s body language is at odds with what they’re saying. (Location 2408)
“Then why are you folding your arms and hunching down in your seat? Come on, tell me what you’re really thinking!” (Location 2411)
You’ve finally gotten the other person to offer some criticism. Once again, you have to manage your response. Whatever you do, don’t start criticizing the criticism. (Location 2413)
try to repeat what the person said to make sure you’ve understood it, rather than defending yourself against the criticism that you’ve just heard. (Location 2415)
Manage your feelings rather than letting them manage you. Remind yourself going in that no matter how unfair the criticism, your first job is to listen with the intent to understand, not to defend yourself. (Location 2420)
Once you’ve asked your question and embraced the discomfort and understood the criticism, you have to follow up by showing that you really did welcome it. You have to reward the candor if you want to get more of it. If you agree with the criticism, make a change as soon as possible. If the necessary change will take time, do something visible to show you’re trying. (Location 2422)
Instead, first, find something in the criticism you can agree with, to signal that you’re open to criticism. Then, check for understanding— repeat what you heard back to the person to make sure you got it. Then, let them know you want to think about what they said, and schedule a time to talk about it again. It’s essential that you do get back to it. (Location 2434)
If you can’t make a change, giving the employee a thoughtful, respectful explanation of why not, is the best reward you can offer for their Radical Candor. (Location 2436)
Sometimes they may even spot flaws in your reasoning that causes you to reconsider. Or the reward for their candor might have to be a full explanation of why you disagree, an openness which invites them to poke some more at your logic, and a clear idea of when it’s time to stop arguing and commit. (Location 2438)
How many times each week do the people reporting to you criticize you? How often do they praise you? If it’s all praise and no criticism, beware! You’re having smoke blown up your rear end. (Location 2441)
Explain why you don’t want them to be ruinously empathetic or manipulatively insincere with you. Tell them you’d welcome Radical Candor, but you’d prefer Obnoxious Aggression to silence. (Location 2443)
Candor Gauge we built to help with this. (www.radicalcandor.com/). (Location 2446)
Make it not just safe but natural to criticize you (Location 2447)
He put an orange box with a slit on the top in a high-traffic area so that people could drop questions or feedback into it. At his all-hands meeting he’d reach into the box and answer off the cuff. (Location 2454)
ENGINEERING ORGANIZATIONS OFTEN do the equivalent of spring cleaning. Everyone will stop working on new features for a week and fix bugs in the current product. (Location 2464)
A bug fix-it week is sort of the opposite of a Hack Week; instead of a chance to work on new and exciting ideas people usually don’t have time to get to, it’s a chance to fix old and annoying problems that have been bothering people for months. (Location 2466)
a team at Google decided that it would be good hygiene to have regular management fix-it weeks. (Location 2471)
system was created where people could log annoying management issues. If, for example, it took too long to get expense reports approved, you could file a management “bug.” And you could do the same if performance reviews always seemed to take place at the worst possible time of year, or if the last employee survey took too long to fill out, or if the promotion system seemed unfair, and so on. (Location 2472)
The management bug tracking system was public, so people could vote to set priorities. Somebody was assigned the job of reading through them all and grouping duplicates. Then, during management fix-it week, managers would have bugs assigned to them. (Location 2475)
If you don’t have the courage to give Radically Candid guidance, the people who report to you won’t believe you really want to get it from them, so you won’t hear about it when your team thinks you’re veering off course. (Location 2480)
I start with being humble because it’s absolutely essential when delivering both praise and criticism. We’re all naturally defensive when first criticized, but if you deliver criticism humbly, it breaks down the natural resistance to what you’re saying. Being humble is just as important when delivering praise. (Location 2484)
describe three things when giving feedback: 1) the situation you saw, 2) the behavior (i.e., what the person did, either good or bad), and 3) the impact you observed. (Location 2493)
Situation, behavior, and impact applies to praise as well as to criticism. Praise can feel just as arrogant as criticism. (Location 2499)
The point is not just to say whatever is in your left-hand column; it’s to have the humility to question what you’re thinking—“ Is Sally really hoarding information, or did she just forget to tell me?” “Is Sam really unreliable, or did I just not define the requirements clearly enough?” (Location 2509)
His book Conscious Business includes a chapter titled “Ontological Humility,” which reminds us not to confuse objective reality with our subjective experience. (Location 2513)
The idea is that when you are mindful that your subjective experience is not objective truth, it can help you challenge others in a way that invites a reciprocal challenge. (Location 2516)
“I’m going to describe a problem I see; I may be wrong, and if I am I hope you’ll tell me; if I’m not I hope my bringing it up will help you fix it.” (Location 2525)
Show, don’t tell. It’s the best advice I’ve ever gotten for story-telling, but it also applies to guidance. (Location 2526)
The more clearly you show exactly what is good or bad, the more helpful your guidance will be. Often you’ll be tempted not to describe the details because they are so painful. You want to spare the person the pain and yourself the awkwardness of uttering the words out loud. But retreating to abstractions is a prime example of Ruinous Empathy. (Location 2527)
By explicitly describing what was good or what was bad, you are helping a person do more of what’s good and less of what’s bad— and (Location 2536)
Finding help is better than offering it yourself. (Location 2538)
Guidance is a gift, not a whip or a carrot. It took me a long time to learn that sometimes the only help I had to offer was the conversation itself. Adopting the mindset that guidance is a gift will ensure that your guidance is helpful even when you can’t offer actual assistance, solutions, or an introduction to someone who can help. (Location 2542)
Giving guidance as quickly and as informally as possible is an essential part of Radical Candor, but it takes discipline— both because of our natural inclination to delay/ avoid confrontation and because our days are busy enough as it is. (Location 2547)
Delay at your peril! If you wait too long to give guidance, everything about it gets harder. You know how it is when you kick things down the road— you notice a problem and note that you need to deal with it, but you don’t take the time to write it down. Then it occurs to you, and you need to sit and remember what precisely the problem was. (Location 2549)
Putting criticism off is simply daunting and exhausting. It’s much more effective and less burdensome to just say it right away! (Location 2555)
if either you or the other person is hungry, angry, or tired, or for some other reason not in a good frame of mind, it’s better to wait. However, this is the exception not the rule, and too often we use the exception as an excuse not to do what we know we should do. (Location 2557)
there is a difference between saying it right away and nitpicking. If it’s not important, don’t say it right away or at all. (Location 2559)
Say it in 2– 3 minutes between meetings. Just saying it right away in a minute or two, three at most, will take less time than scheduling (Location 2560)
impromptu guidance really, truly is something you can squeeze in between meetings in three minutes or less. (Location 2567)
keep slack time in your calendar, either by not scheduling back-to-back meetings or by having twenty-five- and fifty-minute meetings with hard stops, not thirty- and sixty-minute meetings. (Location 2576)
You’d never let the fact that you go to the dentist for a cleaning a couple times a year prevent you from brushing your teeth every day. Don’t use performance reviews as an excuse not to give impromptu in-person feedback. (Location 2583)
Unspoken criticism explodes like a dirty bomb. Just as in your personal life, remaining silent at work for too long about something that angers or frustrates you makes it more likely that you will eventually blow up in a way that makes you look irrational, harms your relationship, or both. (Location 2587)
Avoid black holes. Be sure to let people know immediately how their work is being received. If you ask somebody to do work to help you prepare for a meeting or a presentation where that person won’t be present, be sure to let them know the reaction to their work. If you don’t, the person who did the work feels as if their efforts have gone into a black hole. It is important to pass on both praise and criticism for the contributions they made. (Location 2590)
the clarity of your guidance gets measured at the other person’s ear, not at your mouth. That’s why it’s best to deliver guidance in person. You won’t really know if the other person understood what you were saying if you can’t see the reaction. (Location 2596)
the quality of your guidance will improve if you’re present for these feelings. If somebody is upset, this gives you an opportunity to show compassion— to go up on the “care personally” dimension of the Radical Candor framework. The emotional response of the other person will help you better understand how your message landed, and to adjust. (Location 2602)
giving guidance in person means waiting more than a few days, then optimize for immediacy unless what you’re talking about is a big deal. (Location 2609)
video call, if you have high-speed internet access, is second best. If the connection is spotty, use phone for voice and video as a bonus, muting your computer. Phone is third best. Email and text should be avoided if at all possible. (Location 2612)
For praise on small things, I found that a quick Reply All email worked pretty well. This kind of praise takes only a moment, and it shows that you are noticing and appreciating what’s going on around you. (Location 2620)
Being in a remote office is hard. If you are in a remote office, or if you are managing people in remote offices, it’s really important to have quick, frequent interactions. (Location 2624)
A good rule of thumb for guidance is praise in public, criticize in private. (Location 2630)
disagreements, and debates are different from criticism. It’s vital to be able to correct somebody’s work, to make a factual observation, or to have a debate in public. (Location 2634)
Adapt to an individual’s preferences. While the majority of people do like to be praised in public, for some any kind of public mention is cruel and unusual punishment. (Location 2641)
because I want to embarrass Jane, but to make sure all of you learn from what she did, I’m going to tell you what she just accomplished, and how she did it.” (Location 2648)
There is a big difference between caring personally and personalizing when giving praise and criticism. Caring personally is good. Personalizing is bad. (Location 2651)
Making a fundamental attribution error is using perceived personality attributes—“ You’re stupid, lazy, greedy, hypocritical, an asshole,” etc.— to explain someone else’s behavior rather than considering one’s own behavior and/ or the situational factors that were probably the real cause of the other person’s behavior. It’s a problem because 1) it’s generally inaccurate and 2) it renders an otherwise solvable problem really hard to fix since changing core personality attributes is so very difficult (Location 2656)
He stopped saying, “You’re wrong,” and instead learned to say, “I think that’s wrong.” “I think” was humbler, and saying “that” instead of “you” didn’t personalize. People started to be more receptive to his criticism. (Location 2670)
When an argument is about an issue, keep it about the issue. Personalizing unnecessarily will only make the issue harder to resolve. (Location 2674)
take it personally,” you are in effect negating those feelings. It’s like saying, “Don’t be sad,” or “Don’t be mad.” Part of your job as a boss (and as a human being) is to acknowledge and deal with emotional responses, not to dismiss or avoid them. (Location 2678)
One of the most effective ways to become more Radically Candid is to explain the framework to your team and then ask them to gauge your guidance each week. (Location 2695)
Ask people to put stickers in the quadrant they feel best describes your most recent interactions. If somebody feels you were unnecessarily harsh, they should put a criticism sticker in the Obnoxious Aggression quadrant. If they feel you pulled your punches, they’ll put a criticism sticker in the Ruinous Empathy quadrant. (Location 2697)
most bosses fear being jerks but employees fear their bosses are not shooting straight. (Location 2713)
if you ask them to do this but they don’t, or if they submit ratings anonymously in the app, you’ve got a good signal that they don’t trust you to react well. You’ll need to start proving to your team that you won’t punish them if they criticize you. You need to go back and work on soliciting Radically Candid guidance. (Location 2715)
Listen to how they feel about the guidance you’re giving them. Help them understand that when you’re challenging them it’s because you care about not just their professional growth but them as human beings. (Location 2742)
How can you practice safe Radical Candor with your boss? Do you have to get permission to start trying it? Not surprisingly, since I believe that unilateral authority doesn’t work, I’d say no. Take the initiative on your own. Once you start rolling out Radical Candor with your team and seeing good results, explain what you’re doing and why to your boss. (Location 2752)
you can approach Radical Candor with your boss in much the same way you did with your team. Start by asking for guidance before you give it. You want to make sure you understand the other person’s perspective before you start dishing out praise or criticism, no matter who the person is— your boss, your employee, your peer, or anyone else in your life. When you get the guidance, don’t offer a critique of the criticism, and don’t accept bland praise; focus on rewarding the candor if you get it and on embracing the discomfort if you don’t. (Location 2755)
it be helpful if I told you what I thought of X?” If your boss says no, or that’s not your job, let it drop and polish up your résumé! If your boss says yes, start with something pretty small and benign and see how they react. If they react well and reward the candor, keep going. (Location 2762)
When offering guidance to your boss, use the same tips above: be helpful, humble, do it immediately and in person, praise in public (if it doesn’t look like kissing up), criticize in private, and don’t personalize. (Location 2766)
One of the most difficult things about being a middle manager— and, since most CEO’s report to a Board of Directors, pretty much all managers are middle managers— is that you often wind up responsible for executing decisions that you disagree with. (Location 2768)
If you are able to tell your boss that you disagree with a decision, then at least you can have conversations that will allow you to better understand the rationale behind it. And once you understand the rationale more deeply, you can explain it to your team— even if you don’t agree with it. When they ask, “Why are we doing this, it makes no sense to us, didn’t you argue?” you can reply, “I understand your perspective. Yes, I did have an opportunity to argue. Here’s what I said. And here is what I learned about why we are doing what we are doing.” If they insist on knowing whether you agree, you can tell them in all honesty that your boss listened to your point of view, that you were given an opportunity to challenge the decisions, and that now it’s time to commit to a different course of action than the one you were arguing for. (Location 2772)
Listen, Challenge, Commit. A strong leader has the humility to listen, the confidence to challenge, and the wisdom to know when to quit arguing and to get on board. (Location 2778)
Most men are trained from birth to be “gentler” with women than with men. Sometimes this can be very bad for the women who work for them. (Location 2785)
If you find you have this reluctance, don’t beat yourself up. Just remember, if you’re a boss, it’s your job to manage your fear of tears and not pull your punches when criticizing women. Criticism is a gift, and you need to give it in equal measure to your male and female direct reports. (Location 2791)
the more competent a woman is, the less her colleagues tend to like her. (Location 2826)
applied linguistic analysis to performance reviews, and she found that when women challenge directly— which they must do to be successful— they get penalized for being “abrasive.” (Location 2838)
When gender bias accounts for just 5 percent of the difference in performance ratings, an organization that starts out with 58 percent of the entry-level positions filled by women winds up with only 29 percent of the leadership positions filled by women. (Location 2854)
Let’s imagine that she takes the “abrasive” feedback to heart and quits challenging her reports directly. She adjusts her behavior so that she’s more likeable but less effective at work. Instead of being Radically Candid, which gets her unjustly accused of being obnoxiously aggressive, her feedback tends to be ruinously empathetic or manipulatively insincere. This makes her less effective as a leader. So now, in addition to gender bias, there are real performance issues to contend with. (Location 2862)
If you’re a man and worried that you might be pulling your punches with female employees because you’re wary of gender politics or afraid she’ll cry, it can be helpful to become aware of how the woman feels about your guidance; just ask her. (Location 2877)
if you’re a woman and worried that your male boss is hesitant to criticize your work, it can be helpful to make him aware that you want more feedback. (Location 2883)
pause. Count to six in your head. Embrace the discomfort. Do whatever it takes to drag a candid assessment out of your male colleagues or boss. (Location 2886)
Switch genders. If the woman were a man who did the exact same thing, would the criticism “you’re too aggressive” turn into “you really know how to get things done”? (Location 2892)
a formal performance review with a rating sometimes clarifies in a way that impromptu feedback does not. (Location 2944)
Imagine you’ve told one of your direct reports that his negativity is hurting his ability to work well cross-functionally. He may hear you, but he may not understand how much that matters until he gets a low performance rating. (Location 2945)
No surprises. There should never be any surprises in a formal performance review, and if you’ve been diligent about offering regular impromptu guidance, you’ll lower the odds of this happening considerably. (Location 2949)
if your company doesn’t require a 360 process so that you learn what other people think of your direct report’s performance, you can still do a sanity check. One manager I know does this by simply asking each person on the team to give their peers a √ −, √, √ +. Most people get a √, and if they do that’s the end of the conversation. If one person gives a peer a √ − or a √ +, he asks a couple more questions. This takes about five minutes out of everyone’s 1: 1 time twice a year, right before performance reviews, and offers him a great sanity check to make sure he’s being fair and seeing a broader perspective. (Location 2952)
Asking each of my direct reports to give me a performance review before I gave them one was helpful. The main advantage here was that it made the review feel more like a two-way conversation and less like an arrogant one-way judgment. (Location 2959)
Writing is painstaking and time-consuming, and so a lot of companies don’t require written performance reviews. But it’s happened to me dozens of times that writing things down changes the review. I think I know what I want to say during a review, and then when I start to write it down, I realize that the situation is much more nuanced, upon reflection. Taking the time to articulate your thinking on paper beforehand can spare you the awkwardness of having to backpedal in the middle of a review, or after you’ve delivered it. (Location 2962)
Sometimes the heat gets turned up pretty high during a performance review and there’s the temptation to retreat into Ruinous Empathy. If I’ve explicitly made note of an important criticism beforehand, I’m already one step closer to Radical Candor. (Location 2967)
Some people are much better able to have a productive conversation if they already know the substance of the review. Generally, these are the people who really like to prepare, who hate surprises. Send it the night before to those people. Others tend to read too much into what you write, so it’s better to be there when they read it so you can clarify. (Location 2973)
Schedule at least fifty minutes in person, and don’t do reviews back-to-back. (Location 2981)
Spend half the time looking back (diagnosis), half the time looking forward (plan). (Location 2986)
In the conversation, however, I tried not to spend more than about half of the time talking about the past, because it was more important to start engaging people on the future. I didn’t come up with the plan— I asked them to. (Location 2987)
Focusing on the future discourages people who did well from resting on their laurels and prevents people who did badly from wallowing in despair. Focusing on what each person plans to do differently as a result of the review is also a great way to check for understanding— I (Location 2989)
Schedule regular check-ins to assess how the plan is working. Once I’d helped the person whose performance I was reviewing to come up with a plan, it was important to make it real by planning regular check-ins and marking them in my calendar. (Location 2993)
Deliver the rating/ compensation news after the performance review. (Location 2996)
It can therefore be helpful to separate the two, and to deliver rating/ compensation information after the conversation. I found that when I announced the rating at the beginning, all too often the person tuned out everything else I said. (Location 2999)
Many companies separate “development conversations” from “rating conversations” by a quarter or more. This is fine, as long as the “development conversations” don’t substitute for regular impromptu guidance, which should be happening on a weekly cadence. (Location 3002)
ONE OF THE most important ways to create an environment in which Radical Candor trumps political BS is to never let one person on your team talk to you about another behind their back. (Location 3006)
insist that they talk directly to each other, without you. Hopefully, they’ll work it out. But if they can’t, offer to have a three-way conversation, ideally in person but at worst on the phone. (Location 3008)
When you have the conversation, help them come up with a solution they can both understand and live with. (Location 3009)
involved two stuffed animals: a whale and a monkey. At every all-hands meeting, he invited people to nominate each other to win the “Killer Whale” for a week. The idea was to get people from the team to stand up and talk about some extraordinary work they’d seen somebody else do. The winner of the whale the previous week decided who deserved the whale this week. Next, people nominated themselves for “Whoops the Monkey.” If anyone screwed up that week, they could stand up, tell the story, get automatic forgiveness, and help prevent somebody else from making the same mistake. (Location 3021)
What if, instead of suing doctors who made honest mistakes we gave them immunity, collected and shared the information, and came up with ways to help other doctors avoid making the same mistakes? If we made it safer for doctors to give each other guidance, and to learn from each other’s mistakes, the impact could be enormous. (Location 3043)
Another good way to get people talking to each other is to explain the Radical Candor framework to your team. (Location 3046)
“skip level meetings.” In these meetings, which need to happen only once a year to be effective, you will meet with the people who work for your direct reports, without your direct reports in the room, and ask what they could do or stop doing to be better bosses. (Location 3050)
The best way to lower the barriers that hierarchy puts between us is to admit that it exists and think of ways to make sure everyone feels they are on an equal footing at a human level despite the structure. To make sure everyone feels free to “speak truth to power.” (Location 3054)
that most people are very reluctant to criticize their boss. Plus, managers, especially new managers, will consciously or unconsciously seek to repress criticism rather than to encourage it. (Location 3057)
You have to be really careful with skip level meetings. They can turn into gripe sessions, and it must be clear that you aren’t automatically presuming that the boss, your direct report, is guilty, or that you’re unwilling to hear any criticism of your direct report. The intent of these sessions is to be supportive of the managers who report to you, not to undermine them. And part of being supportive is knowing when they are screwing up, and helping them address the situation. (Location 3059)
Explain it. Show it. Explain it again. Explain to each of your direct reports that you have two goals: 1) to help each of them become better bosses and 2) to make sure people on their team feel comfortable giving them feedback directly. (Location 3065)
Never have a skip level meeting without prior consent of your direct report. Instead, ask the managers who report to you to explain the whole thing to their teams beforehand. (Location 3068)
It’s vital that everyone understands that the meeting with you is in support of, not an attack on, their boss. Then, when you begin the meeting, reiterate that the goal of the meeting is to help the boss get better. (Location 3069)
never have skip level meetings for some of the people who work for you but not others. It must be clear that this is a routine process undertaken for anyone who has direct reports. If you have skip level meetings only when there are problems on a team, then they will become a punishment rather than a welcome tool to help people develop their management skills. (Location 3073)
everything of import will be shared with their boss, but not who said it. (Location 3077)
Project the notes you take during the meeting, and let people know that you will share them with the manager. (Location 3079)
It is important to take the notes yourself, rather than asking somebody else to do it. First, it shows you are listening and engaged. Second, it’s a great way to learn when you misunderstand something. (Location 3081)
The first of these meetings is often incredibly awkward. You’ll have to work hard to earn the trust of everyone in the room. Generally, it’s easiest to start with praise to get people talking, “What is your manager doing well?” Then, “What could your manager be doing better?” Then, “What really sucks?” (Location 3083)
When there are about eight minutes left in the meeting, ask everyone to look at the notes, reminding them that you’ll be sharing the document with their boss momentarily. (Location 3090)
This has a way of focusing the conversation and making people feel accountable for their suggestions. The immediacy— you’re going to share this with the person you were talking about eight minutes from now!— makes the conversation feel less like it is happening behind the person’s back. (Location 3091)
Ensure that your directs make and communicate changes. Once your direct reports have read the notes you’ve gathered, work with each to come up with one or two specific things they can immediately change. It mustn’t be something big and vague like, “Improve my relationships.” Much better if it’s something smaller but more tangible like, “I will disagree in person, not over email.” (Location 3097)
Encourage each of your direct reports to send an email out to their teams explaining what they have learned and what they are going to do differently as a result, and to cc you on the note. (Location 3099)
The more visible the change, the better. Review these changes in a follow-up to the skip level meeting, and encourage the team to tell you whether or not they made a difference. If people feel that no changes were made, or that the meeting didn’t make a difference, treat this very seriously. (Location 3102)
Have these meetings once a year for each of your direct reports. The biggest problem with skip level meetings is that when they start going well, everybody wants them all the time, and you can get skip level proliferation. (Location 3105)
Remind people that personality transplants are not available. (Location 3121)
Be careful not to judge or defend the manager about whom you are soliciting feedback. If it feels as though you are fishing for reasons to punish the boss in question, either people will clam up or a gripe session will ensue. Make it clear that your role is not to judge but to pass along the feedback. If you encounter a really big problem, promise to look into it more deeply. (Location 3123)
the importance of getting to know each person who reports to you well enough that you can put the right people in the right roles, avoiding both boredom and burn-out. (Location 3139)
you want a balance, so that you have both people who push for change and those who offer stability. And to understand what motivates the different people you work with, you need to have Radically Candid relationships with each. (Location 3142)
You’ll get the biggest bang for your buck spending time with the people who are doing the best work, but you still need to figure out how to manage everybody else. (Location 3145)
all people have their own growth trajectories, and it’s a mistake to push everyone to be either a “superstar” or a “rock star.” You need to balance growth and stability. (Location 3149)
it’s important to have career conversations in which you get to know each of your direct reports better, learn what their aspirations are, and plan how to help them achieve those dreams. (Location 3150)
He knew his first step was to show them that the company cared about them. But of course it’s bosses who give a damn— companies can’t care personally any more than governments or any other institution can. (Location 3162)
“You need a long-term vision and an eighteen-month plan,” she advised. (Location 3168)
By the end of the conversation, he understood much better what motivated Sarah at work. He then wrote down each of her motivators (e.g., “financial independence,” “environmentalism,” “hard work,” “leadership”) and explained how the stories she’d told him about her life had led him to choose these words. This was an important check for understanding. (Location 3187)
he’d ask people about their past before moving on to their future. (Location 3192)
he asked Sarah what skills she thought were most important to achieve each dream. Finally, he asked Sarah what skills she felt she had the most competence in. (Location 3194)
While making the plan, it also became evident that Sarah could get the management experience faster by staying at Google than by leaving. (Location 3202)
The work she was doing, which had seemed so separate from what she really wanted out of life, now made a lot more sense to her. (Location 3204)
for having career conversations, Russ held an off-site and taught his managers how to talk to their direct reports not just about their career goals or how to get promoted but also about their life stories and dreams. He taught every manager on his team to have a succession of three forty-five-minute conversations with each direct report over the course of three to six weeks. (Location 3206)
Conversation one: life story (Location 3211)
The first conversation is designed to learn what motivates each person who reports directly to you. Russ suggested a simple opening to these conversations. “Starting with kindergarten, tell me about your life.” (Location 3211)
he advised each manager to focus on changes that people had made and to understand why they’d made those choices. (Location 3213)
“You dropped out of graduate school after two years to work on Wall Street— please tell me more about that decision.” (Location 3214)
you’re not looking for definitive answers; you’re just trying to get to know people a little better and understand what they care about. (Location 3221)
It seemed like a boundary violation to ask people about their lives outside of work. Russ explained two things. One, most people are happy to have this conversation, as long as it takes place in an environment of trust and respect. (Location 3222)
there may be times when you touch on something that is too personal. If a person signals discomfort at a question, you have to respect that. (Location 3225)
When you understand what motivates a person and why, you’re much better able to understand their dreams. (Location 3243)
The second conversation: dreams (Location 3245)
The second conversation moves from understanding what motivates people to understanding the person’s dreams— what they want to achieve at the apex of their career, how they imagine life at its best to feel. (Location 3245)
Giving space for people to talk about dreams allows bosses to help people find opportunities that can move them in the direction of those dreams. This makes work more satisfying and more meaningful and ultimately improves retention. (Location 3257)
“What do you want the pinnacle of your career to look like?” (Location 3261)
Russ suggests encouraging people to come up with three to five different dreams for the future. This allows employees to include the dream they think you want to hear as well as those that are far closer to their hearts. (Location 3262)
Ask each direct report to create a document with three to five columns; title each with the names of the dreams they described in the last conversation. Then, list the skills needed as rows. Show how important each skill is to each dream, and what their level of competency is in that skill. Generally, it will become very obvious what new skills the person needs to acquire. Now, your job as the boss is to help them think about how they can acquire those skills: what are the projects you can put them on, whom can you introduce them to, what are the options for education? (Location 3264)
The final part of Russ’s second conversation involves making sure that the person’s dreams are aligned with the values they have expressed. (Location 3268)
For example, “If ‘hard work’ is a core value, why is one of your dreams to retire early?” Inquiring about the dreams people describe is an important way to push for candid, meaningful conversations. (Location 3269)
Conversation three: eighteen-month plan (Location 3277)
Russ taught managers to get people to begin asking themselves the following questions: “What do I need to learn in order to move in the direction of my dreams? How should I prioritize the things I need to learn? Whom can I learn from?” How can I change my role to learn it? (Location 3277)
Once people were clear on what they wanted to learn next, it was much easier for managers to identify opportunities at work that would help them develop skills in the next six to eighteen months that would take them in the direction of at least one of their dreams. (Location 3279)
make a list of how the person’s role can change to help them learn the skills needed to achieve each dream; whom they can learn from; and classes they could take or books they could read. Then, next to each item, note who does what by when— and make sure you have some action items. (Location 3282)
Thoreau said it best in Walden: “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary … If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” (Location 3286)
It’s scary to move confidently in the direction of one’s dreams. Part of your responsibility as the boss is to help people find the courage to do just that. If you do it well, there are few more rewarding jobs. (Location 3290)
GROWTH MANAGEMENT Figure out who needs what types of opportunities, and how you’re going to provide them (Location 3298)
Once a year, you need to put together a growth-management plan for each person on your team. Take a look across your whole team and make sure that you understand how each individual’s aspirations and growth trajectory is lining up with the collective needs of the team. Then, unless everyone on your team is both where they want and where they need to be, you’re going to have to have some pretty challenging conversations. (Location 3303)
The first step is to identify your rock stars and superstars. Write their names in the correct boxes. Next, identify the people on your team who are doing good, but not exceptional, work. This will probably be the majority of people. Then, identify the people who are performing poorly but whom you believe should do much better, either because they are demonstrating signs that they can improve or because their skills and ambitions suggest improvement is possible. Finally— and this is usually the hardest part— identify the people who are not doing good work and not getting any better. (Location 3307)
Then, (Location 3312)
Find someone who is familiar with the work of the people on your team but not as emotionally attached as you are— your boss, a peer, an HR person. If they would put your people in different boxes, make sure you understand why, even if you disagree. Especially if you disagree. (Location 3313)
come up with a three- to five-bullet-point growth plan for each person. Make sure that you have projects or opportunities that will stretch the superstars. Make sure that you’re giving the rock stars what they need to be productive. (Location 3316)
Think of ways to push people who are doing good work to do exceptional work. What kind of new projects or education or help can you offer them? For the people who are doing bad work but show signs of improving: have you put these people in the wrong roles? Are expectations clear? Do they need additional training? (Location 3318)
And that brings us to the people who are doing bad work and not getting any better. At some point, you have to initiate the process of firing these people— most bosses understandably wait too long for this. If you’re at a big company, you’ll probably need to talk to HR about a formal Performance Improvement Plan. (Location 3320)
If you are regularly thinking about personal growth, as you should be, you shouldn’t need to spend more than five to fifteen minutes per direct report jotting down growth plans. This should feel more like a disciplined sanity check than an arduous process. It’s a way to make sure you have the whole team’s growth trajectory in your head. (Location 3325)
If a lot of your peers are also doing growth-management plans, it’s a good idea to compare notes. When you’re part of a broader team, it’s important to have a shared understanding of what exceptional work is, what good work is, and what bad work is. (Location 3329)
These are hard conversations, but worthwhile because they encourage more consistency among managers. Making sure that all managers are treating the different types of high performers similarly is important to making sure everyone feels the system is fair. It will also give your team the opportunity to be explicit about what they feel the right ratio of people on a steep versus gradual growth trajectory ought to be. (Location 3335)
Because you care so much about your direct reports, you tend to see the best in them. This is a good thing, but it can turn into a form of unconscious bias on a really big team. (Location 3339)
If you’re the leader of a team of five hundred people, you’ll naturally tend to think most highly of your direct reports. And these direct reports think most highly of their direct reports. So if you’re not careful, a disproportionate percentage of the people considered rock stars or superstars will be the most senior people in a hierarchy, even though that kind of grade inflation may not reflect reality. (Location 3340)
Too often, the people who have the most senior roles are given the highest ratings when in fact they are surfing on the productivity of the people working for them. (Location 3344)
one would expect there to be the same distribution of excellent performance throughout, as well as a higher ratio of more senior people on a gradual growth trajectory and a higher ratio of more junior people on a steep growth trajectory. (Location 3345)
In practice, most management teams respond in the reverse manner— a greater percentage of senior rather than junior people get put in the superstar box. If this happens, ask some hard questions and make sure there’s an identifiable, justifiable reason for it. (Location 3347)
All hiring is flawed and subjective, and these drawbacks cannot be fixed; they can only be managed. (Location 3356)
Job description: define team “fit” as rigorously as you define “skills” to minimize bias. (Location 3359)
The hiring person— not a recruiter!— should write the job description, basing it on the role, the skills required for the role, and the team “fit” criteria. Defining team fit can be hard, which makes it tempting to leave out. Try to describe your culture in three to four words. It could be “detail-oriented,” “quirky,” and “blunt.” Or maybe it’s “big picture,” “straightlaced,” and “polite.” (Location 3360)
if you take the time to define the growth trajectory required for the role, it can help the interviewers avoid one kind of hiring bias: hiring people who share your ambitions, which may not be desirable for the role. (Location 3364)
Interviewing takes time, filling out interview feedback reports takes time, and so it’s important to be very selective about who gets invited to interview. (Location 3367)
An example of a good prescreen is a skills assessment: ask potential candidates to do a project or solve a problem related to the job they’re applying for. This will weed out a number of candidates who look good on paper but can’t actually do the work. It will also give candidates who’d be great at the job but look bad on paper the opportunity to interview. (Location 3369)
Use the same interview committee for multiple candidates, to allow for meaningful comparisons. (Location 3378)
don’t make unilateral hiring decisions. Because interviewing is so subjective and prone to bias, you’ll improve your odds of making good decisions by getting multiple perspectives. However, this means you need to be consistent and thoughtful about who interviews with whom. (Location 3379)
Four people is about the right size for an interview committee. Ideally, the interviewing committee is diverse. (Location 3382)
It’s also helpful if at least one of the interviewers is on another team. This prevents “desperation hiring.” When there’s a “hole” on a team, people become so eager to fill the position that they ignore warning signals. Somebody who isn’t feeling the pain of the hole on the team as acutely is more likely to point out these danger signs. (Location 3384)
Casual interviews reveal more about team fit than formal ones. (Location 3387)
interviewing is a learning-by-doing skill. (Location 3388)
Another good practice is to have people intentionally create more casual moments— take candidates to lunch, walk them to the car. Ask the receptionist and schedulers if they had any reaction to the candidate. In unguarded moments, candidates will do or say revealing things. An important part of my team’s culture was Bob Sutton’s “No Assholes” rule. (Location 3390)
Write down your interview feedback; doing that is as clarifying for you as it is for the rest of the committee, and it will result in better hiring decisions. Write down your thoughts on each of the skills, if you’re interviewing for skills, as well as for each of the team fit criteria identified. (Location 3397)
schedule an hour, interview for forty-five minutes, and write for fifteen. This arrangement will force you to have a more focused interview and to make a better recommendation about whom to hire. (Location 3405)
In-person debrief/ decision: if you’re not dying to hire the person, don’t make an offer. (Location 3407)
The best advice I ever got for hiring somebody is this: if you’re not dying to hire somebody, don’t make an offer. And, even if you are dying to hire somebody, allow yourself to be overruled by the other interviewers who feel strongly the person should not be hired. In general, a bias toward no is useful when hiring. (Location 3408)
Once three to four candidates have been interviewed for a role, the hiring committee should meet to discuss each one. These in-person conversations take real discipline to schedule, but if you believe that it makes sense to have multiple people interview each candidate, then talking about your assessments face to face is the fastest and soundest way to make a good decision. (Location 3410)
Making all feedback visible to all interviewers after they’ve submitted theirs will help these hiring-committee meetings go more quickly, but it will require more prep from each person. (Location 3413)
A good way to ensure that everyone is on the same page is to schedule a one-hour meeting with a fifteen-minute “study hall” time at the beginning so everyone can read everyone else’s feedback. (Location 3414)
SOME COMPANIES DON’T invest much time in the hiring process, on the theory that it’s easy to fire people. This is a big mistake. Firing people is not easy, either emotionally or legally. (Location 3419)
Firing people is hard, and it ought to be hard. But if you do three things, you can make it far, far easier on the person you are firing— as well as on yourself and your team. (Location 3428)
Virtually all managers I’ve ever worked with have been far too slow to admit when somebody on their team is starting to underperform. They don’t admit it to themselves, let alone to their bosses or to HR. (Location 3431)
There are four very good reasons to push yourself to identify underperformance early. One, to be fair to the person who’s failing. If you identify a problem early, you give the person time to address it. You also reduce the shock if they can’t or won’t address it and you wind up having to fire the person. Two, to be fair to your company. If you identify and address problems early enough, you dramatically reduce the risk of getting sued or the chance that you’ll have to keep them on the payroll for months of painful legal documentation. Three, to be fair to yourself. When you give somebody a good rating one quarter and fire them the next, word gets around, and it undermines trust with everyone else. Not to mention that you risk being sued by the fired employee. Although it is time-consuming and unpleasant to address performance problems, it takes a lot more time and is far more unpleasant to deal with a lawsuit. Four, and most importantly, you want to address underperformance early to be fair to the people who are performing really well. (Location 3437)
Once you’ve identified performance issues, take the time to get advice from your boss, to calibrate with your peers (if appropriate), and to get help from HR. Don’t take the attitude that this is your decision alone. (Location 3446)
Many people get lost in their own heads around this highly charged issue; your boss and your peers can help you think more clearly. Good HR people can not only help you think more clearly but also make sure you do it in a way that won’t get you or the company sued. (Location 3448)
I’ve seen dozens of cases where a manager has been advised how to write a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP). They are told to make it fair but not too easy, to make sure that it really addresses the performance issue. The managers hear the “fair” part but ignore the “not too easy” part. The person passes the PIP without addressing the core issue, and the performance problem drags on for another three or six months. (Location 3452)
You have a relationship with the person you’re about to fire. You still give a damn about this person. Think hard about how to do it in a way that will make it easiest on them— even if it makes it harder on you, or if you have to take some risks. (Location 3459)
When you have to fire people, do it with humility. Remember, the reason you have to fire them is not that they suck. It’s not even that they suck at this job. It’s that this job— the job you gave them— sucks for them. (Location 3467)
usually email people about a month after I’ve fired them to check in. I try to keep my ear to the ground about jobs they might be well-suited for. But even if I don’t have anything to offer, I will reach out. (Location 3469)
when a few managers get together to make sure their promotions are fair, the politics can get ugly very quickly. Disagreements can become overly personalized, silent disagreement can become toxic, and bizarre backroom bartering occurs—“ I’ll support your undeserving person if you’ll support mine.” (Location 3478)
promotion committees, which were assembled off-site for one day twice a year. They debated the promotions of other people’s direct reports, not their own, based on a packet of relatively objective information about each person’s accomplishments. (Location 3482)
Google’s system is perfect. It tends to reward people who do the most visible projects rather than those who make important breakthroughs behind the scenes. And recommendations from some people go further than they ought to. (Location 3487)
Prepare. Ask everyone on your team to send in a list of people they are planning to promote, together with a justification. If you have an HR partner, ask that person to organize all names and justifications by level and pull together a presentation that makes the information easy to grasp and absorb. (Location 3493)
Get enough sleep the day before, exercise that morning, and eat a good breakfast. You are going to need to be calm and, if possible, funny that day. (Location 3500)
If neither your company nor your boss seem concerned with making sure that promotions are fair, you can always propose to your peers that you get together and calibrate. If they won’t, you can still look at the people you’re planning to promote, look at other people who are at the company, and do a sanity check. (Location 3504)
Announcing promotions breeds unhealthy competition for the wrong things: documentation of status rather than development of skill. (Location 3511)
But when there are big public celebrations of promotions, the costs in terms of the organization’s focus on hierarchy often outweigh the benefits of publicly recognizing those being promoted. (Location 3514)
What about public praise? Yes, by all means, praise in public. But think carefully about what you are praising. Praise the things you want more of: high-quality work, mind-boggling innovation, amazing efficiency, selfless teamwork, and so on. Do you really want such a focus on promotions? If not, then don’t make such a big deal of them. (Location 3519)
The importance of the simplest things, like thank-yous, are most often forgotten by bosses— even good bosses. A thank-you goes beyond praise. Praise expresses admiration for great work. A thank-you expresses personal gratitude. In the case of a thank-you, you are explaining not just why the work matters, but why it matters to you. (Location 3524)
Another great way to highlight how great people are at a job is to acknowledge them as gurus in their area of expertise. You might acknowledge their mastery by putting the person in charge of teaching others the skill. (Location 3529)
one of the most common complaints from people who do excellent work and are on a gradual growth trajectory is that they feel invisible. (Location 3534)
THERE ARE FEW pleasures greater than being part of a team where everyone loves their job and loves working together. You can build a team like that if you have career conversations with each of the people on your team, create growth-management plans for each person who works for you once a year, hire the right people, fire the appropriate people, promote the right people, and reward the people who are doing great work but who shouldn’t be promoted, and offer yourself as a partner to your direct reports. It’s absolutely within your power to build a team that looks forward to coming to work every day. Together you will accomplish things that you could never do individually, while each of you individually takes a step in the direction of your dreams. (Location 3570)
Your role will to be to encourage that process of listening, clarifying, debating, deciding, persuading, and executing to the point that it’s almost as if your team shares one mind when it comes to completing projects, and then learning from their results. (Location 3586)
“Don’t start by bossing people. They’ll just hate you. Start by listening to them.” (Location 3589)
One of your most important responsibilities to keep everything moving smoothly is to decide who needs to communicate with whom and how frequently. (Location 3590)
The purpose of a 1: 1 meeting is to listen and clarify— to understand what direction each person working for you wants to head in, and what is blocking them. (Location 3607)
found that when I quit thinking of them as meetings and began treating them as if I were having lunch or coffee with somebody I was eager to get to know better, they ended up yielding much better conversations. (Location 3618)
1: 1s should be a natural bottleneck that determines how many direct reports a boss can have. I like to meet with each person who works directly for me for fifty minutes a week. But I can’t bear more than about five hours of 1: 1 time in my calendar. Listening is hard work, and I don’t have an endless capacity for it every day. (Location 3626)
recommend that managers use the 1: 1 time to have “career conversations” (see chapter seven) and, if relevant, to do formal performance reviews. (Location 3634)
no matter what fires erupt in your day, do not cancel your 1: 1s. (Location 3641)
When your direct reports own and set the agenda for their 1: 1s, they’re more productive, because they allow you to listen to what matters to them. (Location 3643)
Whether you want a structured agenda or you prefer a more free-flowing meeting, the agenda itself should be directed by your direct report, not you. (Location 3647)
Encourage new ideas in the 1: 1. It’s worth keeping Jony Ive’s quote, “new ideas are fragile,” top of mind before a 1: 1. This meeting should be a safe place for people to nurture new ideas before they are submitted to the rough-and-tumble of debate. (Location 3671)
Here are some questions that you can use to nurture new ideas by pushing people to be clearer: “What do you need to develop that idea further so that it’s ready to discuss with the broader team? How can I help?” “I think you’re on to something, but it’s still not clear to me. Can you try explaining it again?” “Let’s wrestle some more with it, OK?” “I understand what you mean, but I don’t think others will. How can you explain it so it will be easier for them to understand?” (Location 3675)
1s are valuable meetings for your direct reports to share their thinking with you and to decide what direction to proceed with their work. (Location 3686)
If they never criticize you, you’re not good enough at getting guidance from your team. (Location 3695)
No agenda. If they consistently come with no topics to discuss, it might mean that they are overwhelmed, that they don’t understand the purpose of the meeting, or that they don’t consider it useful. Be direct but polite: “This is your time, but you don’t seem to come with much to talk about. Can you tell me why?” (Location 3697)
Although bloated staff meetings can be a drain on people’s time and energy, the opposite is also true; a well-run meeting can save you time by alerting you to problems, sharing updates efficiently, and getting you all on the same page about what the week’s shared priorities are. (Location 3704)
An effective staff meeting has three goals: it reviews how things have gone the previous week, allows people to share important updates, and forces the team to clarify the most important decisions and debates for the coming week. That’s it. It shouldn’t be the place to have debates or make decisions. (Location 3706)
agenda that I’ve found to be most effective: ■ Learn: review key metrics (twenty minutes) ■ Listen: put updates in a shared document (fifteen minutes) ■ Clarify: identify key decisions & debates (thirty minutes) (Location 3710)
put updates in a shared document during a “study hall” (15 minutes). One of the most challenging aspects of managing a team is how to keep everyone abreast of what everyone else is doing so that they can flag areas of concern or overlap without wasting a great deal of time. (Location 3721)
“We need to change our goals for this project,” “I am thinking of doing a re-org,” “I’m starting to think I need to fire so-and-so,” or “I have to have surgery next month and will be out for three weeks.” (Location 3724)
Almost everybody hates long meetings, so some go the other direction and set up a public document where everyone jots down the key things they did last week and what they plan to do next week. Google did this and called these updates “snippets.” (Location 3726)
is easy to use and avoids interminable staff meetings; after all, it just takes a few minutes to write your own snippets and a few minutes more to read everyone else’s. (Location 3728)
I found that although I was all for avoiding an endless staff meeting, I was also one of those people who find it disproportionately burdensome to take the five minutes to input my snippets. For a while, I forced myself to do it anyway, but when I realized I wasn’t alone, I decided to find a different solution. (Location 3730)
Have everybody take five to seven minutes to write down the three to five things that they or their team did that week that others need to know about, and five to seven minutes to read everybody else’s updates. Don’t allow side conversations— require that follow-up questions be handled after the meeting. This simple rule will save enormous amounts of wasted time in your staff meeting. (Location 3734)
What are the one or two most important decisions and the single most important debate your team needs to take on that week? If your team is fewer than twenty or so people, you can probably just list them and decide/ debate in an ad hoc way. (Location 3744)
YOU’VE JUST READ about adding 1: 1 meetings and a staff meeting to your calendar. You’ll probably have to attend some “big debate” and “big decision” meetings. (Location 3755)
My advice is that you schedule in some think time, and hold that think time sacred. Let people know that they cannot ever schedule over it. (Location 3767)
“BIG DEBATE” MEETINGS are reserved for debate, but not decisions, on major issues facing the team. They serve three purposes: (Location 3771)
At least part of the friction and frustration in a lot of meetings results from the fact that half the room thinks they are there to make a decision, the other half to debate. The would-be deciders are furious that the debaters don’t seem to be driving toward an answer. (Location 3772)
To avoid this, teams sometimes rush into a decision before they have really thought it through or gotten sufficient input. Putting a topic like that on the debate agenda forces a team to keep wrestling with it, digging up needed information, getting expert input, or just thinking more deeply. (Location 3778)
Debate should occur constantly on a well-functioning team. (Location 3781)
Having regular debates— arguments, even— also lowers tension because it prevents explosive fights. The principle of “self-organizing criticality”— a lot of little corrections create stability but one huge correction creates catastrophe— applies to human relationships as much as it does to markets. (Location 3784)
Make it clear that everyone must check egos at the door of this meeting. The goal of debate is to work together to come up with the best answer. There should be no “winners” or “losers.” A good norm is to ask participants to switch roles halfway through each debate. This makes sure that people are listening to each other, and helps them keep focused on coming up with the best answer and letting go of egos/ positions. The sole product of the debate should be a careful summary of the facts and issues that emerged, a clearer definition of the choices going forward, and a recommendation to keep debating or to move on to a decision. (Location 3792)
“BIG DECISION” MEETINGS typically but not always follow a big debate meeting. They serve two important roles. The first is obvious: to make important decisions. The second, though, is subtler. It can be hard to figure out when to stop debating and start deciding. (Location 3798)
The product of “big decision” meetings is a careful summary of the meeting distributed to all relevant parties. It’s important that the decisions are final, otherwise they’ll always be appealed and will really be debates, not decisions. (Location 3806)
It’s shocking how fast the decisions that some people make start to seem mysterious or even nefarious to people who weren’t close to the process. If your team is one hundred or more people, a regular all-hands meeting can really help to get broad buy-in on the decisions being made— and also to learn about dissent. (Location 3815)
presentations to persuade people that the company is making good decisions and headed in the right direction, and Q& As conducted so leaders can hear dissent and address it head-on. (Location 3819)
When handled well, the answers the leaders give to the questions, which are often quite challenging, are usually more persuasive than the presentations. (Location 3821)
The presentations typically focus on one or two initiatives that are especially exciting and important. They are meant to inform everyone of broader priorities, and to get their buy-in. The presentations are generally done by the team working on the initiative. This practice at Google was important; it built the “persuade” muscle throughout the company. (Location 3826)
Q& A is usually handled by the CEO/ founders and allows them to learn what people really think, and so it generally falls to them to answer these often unpleasant, challenging, or awkward questions. The way that these questions get answered is enormously important to persuading a lot of people at once that the right decisions are being made the right way. (Location 3830)
Being ruthless about making sure your team has time to execute is one of the most important things you can do as a boss. (Location 3841)
blocked off think-time in calendar; I also found it necessary to block off time in my calendar to be alone and execute. (Location 3849)
To Do, In Progress, and Done. You can quickly see who’s the bottleneck. It’s a great way to drive personal accountability but also for everyone on a team to see who needs help and to give it to them. (Location 3856)
When it’s clear to everyone where the bottlenecks are, resources flow to the places where they are most needed, without intervention from management. (Location 3860)
measuring activities and visualizing workflows is important is that when a business is doing really well, it’s hard to tell from the results who’s along for the ride and who’s actually making things happen. Similarly, when the economy is tanking due to factors beyond anyone’s control, if you just measure results it’s hard to know who’s doing a great job bailing out your boat and who’s simply panicking or making the situation worse. (Location 3863)
Measuring activities will also create more respect between teams. It’s always surprising how quick one team is to assume that another team sits around doing nothing, and how much resentment builds up over this. When you can see from a Kanban board what people are doing, respect tends to flow pretty naturally. (Location 3876)
LISTENING TO THE people who report directly to you is relatively straightforward, even if it requires time and discipline. But if you are a manager of managers, listening “deep” in your organization is much harder. You can’t listen to everybody. You can’t have 1: 1s with hundreds or thousands of people. (Location 3886)
Notice the things you don’t notice when you’re buried in work at your desk or racing, head down, from one meeting to the next. Ask people who catch your attention— ideally, people you haven’t talked to in a while— what they’re working on. Find some small problems and treat them like “the universe through a grain of sand.” Awareness of these small problems can be useful in several ways. (Location 3894)
Too often a boss is the last to know when something is going wrong. The reason is generally not because people are intentionally hiding problems, but because they only want to bring the important things to your attention. But a problem may be more important than they realize. (Location 3898)
being aware of small problems and maybe even rolling up your sleeves and fixing them yourself is the best way to kill the “it’s not my job” or, worse, the “that’s beneath me” mentality on your team. (Location 3900)
when you show that you care about the small things that contribute to customer happiness or the quality of life on your team, suddenly everybody cares more about them, and some of the big things start working better, too. (Location 3902)
create a culture at Twitter in which people would fix small processes and annoyances rather than just complaining about them. (Location 3904)
“CULTURE EATS STRATEGY for lunch.” 1 A team’s culture has an enormous impact on its results, and a leader’s personality has a huge impact on a team’s culture. Who you are as a human being impacts your team’s culture enormously. (Location 3911)
worried the company’s culture reflected his own personality too much. (Location 3915)
The culture of the team often reflected me, but not always in the way I would have chosen. (Location 3917)
People are listening. Like it or not, you’re under the microscope (Location 3925)
When you become the boss, you are under the microscope. People do listen to you in an intense way you never experienced before (Location 3926)
becoming a boss is like getting arrested. Everything you say or do can and will be used against you. (Location 3927)
Given the level of scrutiny you’re under as the boss, it’s important to clarify what you’re saying— even when you think you’re not saying anything. (Location 3943)
“ask for forgiveness not permission” culture in which people felt free to challenge the rules, this worked. (Location 3947)
Don’t let things that pervert your culture “just happen” (Location 3950)
When you pay attention to seemingly small details, it can have a big impact on persuading people that your culture is worth understanding and adapting to. (Location 3963)
It’s surprising how a small action from you can impact your team’s culture, even after you’re no longer around. (Location 3971)
Shit happens. When you’re the boss and shit happens, it’s your responsibility to learn from it and make a change. If you don’t, you create a culture that doesn’t learn from its mistakes. (Location 3980)
The most amazing thing about a culture is that once it’s strong, it’s self-replicating. Even though you’ve taken a number of conscious actions to impact it, you’ll know you’ve succeeded when it truly is no longer about you. (Location 3986)

Pelayo Arbués

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Radical Candor Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

Radical Candor Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

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AI Enhanced Knowledge Management

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The Rise of the Dataset Engineer

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10 Ways to Go From Unhealthy to Healthy Ad-Hoc Request Cycles

Pelayo Arbués

Explorer

Radical Candor Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

Radical Candor Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity §

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Highlights §

Graph View

Table of Contents

Recent Notes

AI Enhanced Knowledge Management

Sucessful Model

The Rise of the Dataset Engineer

Now Reading

10 Ways to Go From Unhealthy to Healthy Ad-Hoc Request Cycles

Radical Candor Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

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