Radical Candor: Fully Revised & Updated Edition

This set of questions around growth trajectory can help you discover what motivates each person much better than a set of questions around “potential” or “talent” could. And the insights it produces will help you avoid burning out the rock stars and boring the superstars. These questions will help remind you that trajectories change and that you shouldn’t put permanent labels on people. They will help you build stable teams that achieve astounding results.

You can also use it to remember to push everyone on a team toward excellent performance, as well as to figure out whom to hire, whom to fire, and when a person’s poor performance might just be the boss’s (your) fault.

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.

Rock stars are just as important to a team’s performance as superstars. Stability is just as important as growth. The right mix of each will change over time, but you’ll always need some of each.

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.

People in a superstar phase are bad at rock star roles, and people in a rock star phase will hate a superstar role.

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.

Insisting that people have passion for their job can place unnecessary pressure on both boss and employee.

your job is not to provide purpose but instead to get to know each of your direct reports well enough to understand how each one derives meaning from their work.

Sure, it’s a boss’s job to put the team’s work in context, and if you share why the work gives you meaning, that can help others find their own inspiration. But remember, it’s not all about you.

Some management bloviators will advise you simply to hire the right people and then leave them alone. Dick Costolo, Twitter’s CEO from 2010–2015, explained succinctly how crazy this advice is. “That’s like saying, to have a good marriage, marry the right person and then avoid spending any time with them.

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.

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. This is time-consuming because it requires that you know enough about the details of the person’s work to understand the nuances. It often requires you to help do the work, rather than just advising. It requires that you ask a lot of questions and challenge people—that you roll up your own sleeves.

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. Promotion often puts these people in roles they are not as well-suited for or don’t want. The key is to recognize their contribution in other ways.

If one person is doing much better work than others on the team, it seems obvious they should get a better rating and a higher bonus. But when ratings are primarily used to justify future promotions, rather than to recognize past performance, this doesn’t happen.

an unintended consequence is often that rock stars get lower ratings than they should. In fact, all of your top performers should get top ratings. When performance ratings have an impact on compensation, this is especially important.

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.

Life is so much better when people are great at their work and love it. The

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.

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.