Radical Candor: Fully Revised & Updated Edition

All hiring is flawed and subjective, and these drawbacks cannot be fixed; they can only be managed.

Casual interviews reveal more about team fit than formal ones.

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.

if you’re not dying to hire somebody, don’t make an offer.

At companies where it’s too easy to fire people, bad/unfair firing decisions get made, with the result that even people who are great at their jobs start to get spooked. When people feel that kind of fear, they start to avoid taking risks. They learn less, they grow less, they innovate less, they become less than they could be. This is the opposite of personal growth management.

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. Tolerating bad work is unfair to the people who are doing excellent work.

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. You don’t want to fire a person out of anger, and you don’t want to fail to fire a person out of denial.

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.

Take a deep breath and a big step back. 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.

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.

You don’t do people any favors by promoting them when the rest of the team feels they don’t really deserve it.

Take a moment to say thank-you.

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.

“Don’t start by bossing people. They’ll just hate you. Start by listening to them.” One of your most important responsibilities

“Don’t start by bossing people. They’ll just hate you. Start by listening to them.”