Radical Candor: Fully Revised & Updated Edition

empathy can focus our emotions so intensely that we can’t reason as clearly as we ought.

Ruinous Empathy—you’re so fixated on not hurting a person’s feelings in the moment that you don’t tell them something they’d be better off knowing in the long run.

picture yourself walking along a mountainous trail. You come across a person being crushed by a boulder on their chest. The empathetic response would be to feel the same sense of crushing suffocation, thus rendering you helpless. The compassionate response would be to recognize that that person is in pain and to do everything within your power to remove the boulder and alleviate their suffering. Put another way, compassion is empathy plus action.”

If you think that you can [fulfill your responsibilities as a manager] without strong relationships, you are kidding yourself.

all teams need stability as well as growth to function properly; nothing works well if everyone is gunning for the next promotion.

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. At Google, I’d systematically undervalued the

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

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.

“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.”

at the very heart of being a good boss—at Apple, at Google, or anywhere else on earth—is a good relationship.

no matter how supportive the environment, bosses often feel alone. They feel ashamed that they’re not doing a good job, sure that everyone else is doing better, and thus unable or afraid to seek help.

Being a good boss is hard for everyone, no matter how successful

Being a good boss is hard for everyone, no matter how successful they appear on the outside.

“It’s called management, and it is your job!”

“This is not babysitting,” she said. “It’s called management, and it is your job!”

this emotional labor is not just part of the job; it’s the key to being a good boss.

“boss” evokes injustice, “manager” sounds bureaucratic, “leader” sounds self-aggrandizing.

management and leadership are like forehand and backhand. You have to be good at both to win.

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.

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?