Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

Make sure that you are seeing each person on your team with fresh eyes every day. People evolve, and so your relationships must evolve with them. Care personally; don’t put people in boxes and leave them there.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

A good rule of thumb for any relationship is to leave three unimportant things unsaid each day.

When bosses are too invested in everyone getting along they also fail to encourage the people on their team to criticize one another other for fear of sowing discord. They create the kind of work environment where being "nice" is prioritized at the expense of critiquing and therefore improving actual performance.

The essence of leadership is not getting overwhelmed by circumstances.

The best way to keep superstars happy is to challenge them and make sure they are constantly learning.

Probably the most important thing you can do to build trust is to spend a little time alone with each of your direct reports on a regular basis.

You may be worried about earning their respect, and that’s natural. Unfortunately, though, being overly focused on respect can backfire because it’ll make you feel extra defensive when criticized. If, on the other hand, you can listen to the criticism and react well to it, both trust and respect will follow.

It’s brutally hard to tell people when they are screwing up. You don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings; that’s because you’re not a sadist. You don’t want that person or the rest of the team to think you’re a jerk. Plus, you’ve been told since you learned to talk, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Now all of a sudden it’s your job to say it. You’ve got to undo a lifetime of training. Management is hard.

Sometimes, the greatest gift you can give your team is to let them go home.

Jobs articulated this approach more gently in an interview with Terry Gross: “At Apple we hire people to tell us what to do, not the other way around.” And

At Apple, as at Google, a boss’s ability to achieve results had a lot more to do with listening and seeking to understand than it did with telling people what to do; more to do with debating than directing; more to do with pushing people to decide than with being the decider; more to do with persuading than with giving orders; more to do with learning than with knowing.

Here’s what I need to do to stay centered: sleep eight hours, exercise for forty-five minutes, and have both breakfast and dinner with my family. If I skip one or two of those things for a day or two, it’s OK. But that’s the routine. Also, every so often I need to read a novel (ideally one a week), go away for a romantic weekend with my husband (ideally four times a year), and take a two-week vacation with siblings and parents (once a year). If I can manage to do those things, I can usually stay centered no matter what storms are raging around me.

Randy Nelson, the dean of Pixar University and a faculty member at Apple University, captured this when he said of Steve Jobs, “He’s a lion. If he roars at you, you’d better roar back just as loudly—but only if you really are a lion, too. Otherwise he’ll eat you for lunch.

As you probably know, 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.

There’s no worse way to make a group of people feel excluded than to use language that pretends they are simply not in the room.

Listen, Challenge, Commit. 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.

Some professionals say you need to have a praise-to-criticism ratio of 3:1, 5:1, or even 7:1. Others advocate the “feedback sandwich”—opening and closing with praise, sticking some criticism in between. I think venture capitalist Ben Horowitz got it right when he called this approach the “shit sandwich.” Horowitz suggests that such a technique might work with less-experienced people, but I’ve found the average child sees through it just as clearly as an executive does.

feedback is personal for the person receiving it. Most of us pour more time and energy into our work than anything else in our lives. Work is a part of who we are, and so it is personal.

There's several reasons why it make sense to begin building a culture of radical candor by asking people to criticize you. First, it's the best way to show that you are aware you are often wrong and that you want to hear about it when you are. You want to be challenged. Second, you'll learn a lot. Few people scrutinize you as closely as do those that report to you. [...] Third, the more first hand experience you have with how it feels to receive criticism, the better idea you'll have of how your own guidance lands for others. Fourth, asking for criticism is a great way to build trust and strengthen your relationships.

The way you ask for criticism and react when you get it goes a long way toward building trust—or destroying it.

If you don’t teach that dog to sit, she’s going to die!” said the tall bearded man in blue jeans standing next to me. He pointed at the ground, bent down to get in Belvy’s face, and bellowed at her, “SIT!!” To my astonishment, Belvy sat. She didn’t just sit, she pounded her butt into the pavement, and looked up at the man wagging her tail.The man was in my face now. “See? It’s not mean, it’s clear.” The light changed, and the man strode across the street, leaving me with words to live by.

Ultimately, though, bosses are responsible for results. They achieve these results not by doing all the work themselves but by guiding the people on their teams. Bosses guide a team to achieve results. The questions I get asked next are clustered around each of these three areas of responsibility that managers do have: guidance, team-building, and results.

Georgia O’Keeffe said, “It is only by selection, by elimination, and by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.” Choosing what to select, what to eliminate, and what to emphasize depends not only on the idea but on the audience.

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. And their teams and their bosses are lucky to have them. Kick-ass bosses never judge people doing great work as having “capped out.” Instead, they treat them with the honor that they are due and retain the individuals who will keep their team stable, cohesive, and productive.

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.

They get measured at the listener’s ear, not at the speaker’s mouth.

Remember, Obnoxious Aggression is a behavior, not a personality trait. Nobody is a bona fide asshole all the time.

I do not believe there is any such thing as a “B-player” or a mediocre human being. Everyone can be excellent at something.

If you find you cannot be Radically Candid with your boss, I recommend that you consider finding a new job with a new boss.