Radical Candor: Fully Revised & Updated Edition

Why do millennials expect their career to come with instructions like a Lego set?

Sometimes things move too slowly: the people who work for me would debate forever if I let them.

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.

understand what motivates each person on your team well enough to avoid burnout or boredom and keep the team cohesive;

Your relationships with your direct reports affect the relationships they have with their direct reports, and your team’s culture.

Delivering hard feedback, making hard calls about who does what on a team, and holding a high bar for results—isn’t that obviously the job of any manager? But most people struggle with doing these things.

challenging people is often the best way to show them that you care when you’re the boss. This

“Radical Candor” is what happens when you put “Care Personally” and “Challenge Directly” together.

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.

questions about the management dilemmas they face. It turns

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.

Why “radical”? I chose this word because so many of us are conditioned to avoid saying what we really think. This is partially adaptive social behavior; it helps us avoid conflict or embarrassment. But in a boss, that kind of avoidance is disastrous.

Very few people focus first on the central difficulty of management that Ryan hit on: establishing a trusting relationship with each person who reports directly to you.

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

difficult but necessary part of being a boss: telling people clearly and directly when their work wasn’t good enough.

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.

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.

failing to confront the problem, I’d removed the incentive for him to try harder and lulled him into thinking he’d be fine.

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.

when people are not sure if the quality of what they are doing is appreciated, the results began to suffer, and so did morale.