Radical Candor: Fully Revised & Updated Edition

He stopped saying, “You’re wrong,” and instead learned to say, “I think that’s wrong.”

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.

Obnoxious Aggression leads to more success than Ruinous Empathy but is also extremely unpleasant.

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.

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.

doing.” If they insist on knowing whether you agree, you can tell them

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Focusing on the future discourages people who did well from resting on their laurels and prevents people who did badly from wallowing in despair.

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.

People who want a promotion never feel they’re getting one fast enough; people who don’t want one feel lame for being insufficiently ambitious when you ask them about career aspirations.

Helping people clarify values and dreams and then aligning them as closely as possible with their current work will invariably make your team stronger.

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.

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.

Next, 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. 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?

Next, 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. 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? 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.

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.