Radical Candor: Fully Revised & Updated Edition

PART OF BUILDING a cohesive team is to create a culture that recognizes and rewards the rock stars.

David noticed when things were broken and rolled up his sleeves to fix them, even if they weren’t in his job description. I asked him what job he’d had that he enjoyed. He’d loved all his jobs.

Keep them challenged (and figure out who’ll replace them when they move on)

The best way to keep superstars happy is to challenge them and make sure they are constantly learning. Give them new opportunities, even when it is sometimes more work than seems feasible for one person to do. Figure out what the next job for them will be. Build an intellectual partnership with them. Find them mentors from outside your team or organization—people who have even more to offer than you do. But make sure you don’t get too dependent on them;

Allowing transfers is important because it prevents bosses from blackballing employees who want to move on, and allows for the fact that sometimes two people just don’t work that well together.

When management is the only path to higher compensation, the quality of management suffers, and the lives of the people who work for these reluctant managers become miserable.

Everyone can be excellent at something.

Everyone can be excellent at something. That’s very different from saying anyone can be good at anything—definitely not true.

lots of people never find work they are truly excellent at because they stay in the wrong job so long that any change would require a step or two backward.

Assuming that people who are not thriving are therefore “mediocre” and can’t do any better is both unjust and unkind.

treating these people fairly requires that you know them well enough to understand why they aren’t thriving; if they are simply going through a rough period, it’s better to give them the time and space to recover than to push for more than they have to give just then.

One of the least popular things I did with my teams at Google was to insist that people who had not done exceptional work for more than two years be given an opportunity to work on a project that would let them shine. If their work still continued to be mediocre, we began encouraging these people to look for jobs elsewhere. This policy was hard to enforce and created a lot of stress. It was the managers who minded it the most, because it forced them to have a lot of challenging conversations and to push those who reported to them really hard. Of course, it was also difficult for people who’d been doing OK for a couple of years to get pushed out of their comfort zone.

It was time to help them find a job where they could shine and time for us to start looking to replace them with somebody who could shine on our team. For some people, that meant leaving Google to do something more in line with their dreams—like becoming a teacher or landscape architect, or opening a tea shop. In other cases, people went on to do similar work but at smaller companies where they could be more of a jack-of-all-trades. Sometimes, people just needed to be thrown out of the nest to spread their wings. In all cases, the people wound up much happier, even though making a change was hard.

In many ways, your job as the boss is to set and uphold a quality bar. That can feel harsh in the short term, but in the long run the only thing that is meaner is lowering the bar.

WHEN SOMEBODY IS performing poorly and, having received clear communication about the nature of the problem, is showing no signs of improvement, you must fire that person. How you do it goes a long way to defining your long-term success as a boss, because it sends a clear signal to everyone on your team whether or not you truly care about people for more than what they can do for you on the job.

Have you given Radically Candid guidance? Have you demonstrated to Peggy that you care personally about her work and her life, and have you been crystal clear when you have challenged her to improve? Has your praise been substantive and specific about what she has done right, rather than simply a salve to her ego? Have you been humble as well as direct in your criticism, offering to help her find solutions rather than attacking her as a person? And have you done these things on multiple occasions over the course of time? If the answer is yes and you have not seen improvement, or have seen only flickers of improvement, it’s time.

Sometimes you may think you’ve been clear when you haven’t been. Getting an outside perspective can help you make sure you’re being fair.

It will get better. But of course it won’t get better all by itself. So stop and ask yourself: how, exactly, will it get better? What are you going to do differently? What will the person in question do differently? How might circumstances change? Even if things have gotten a little better, have they improved enough? If you don’t have a pretty precise answer to those questions, it probably won’t get better.

Somebody is better than nobody. Another common reason why bosses are reluctant to fire a poor performer is that they don’t want a “hole” on the team. If you fire “Jeffrey,” who will do the work he was doing? How long will it take you to find a replacement? The fact is that poor performers often create as much extra work for others as they accomplish themselves, because they leave parts of their job undone or do other parts sloppily or behave unprofessionally in ways that others must compensate for. Steve Jobs put it succinctly, if harshly, when he said, “It’s better to have a hole than an asshole.”

Part of getting a good job is leaving a bad one, or one that’s bad for you.