Home > Work > Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
181 " didn’t come up with the plan—I asked them to. How would they parlay success into even more success, or how would they address an area of poor performance? "
― Kim Malone Scott , Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
182 " It’s worth keeping Jony Ive’s quote, “new ideas are fragile,” top of mind before a 1:1. This meeting should be a safe place for people to nurture new ideas before they are submitted to the rough-and-tumble of debate. Help them clarify both their thinking about these ideas and their understanding of the people to whom they need to communicate these ideas. The ideas may need to be described in one way for an engineer and another for a salesperson. Here are some questions that you can use to nurture new ideas by pushing people to be clearer: “What do you need to develop that idea further so that it’s ready to discuss with the broader team? How can I help?” “I think you’re on to something, but it’s still not clear to me. Can you try explaining it again?” “Let’s wrestle some more with it, OK?” “I understand what you mean, but I don’t think others will. How can you explain it so it will be easier for them to understand?” “I don’t think ‘so-and-so’ will understand this. Can you explain it again to make it clearer specifically for them?” “Is the problem really that they are too stupid to understand, or is it that you are not explaining it clearly enough? "
183 " Life is so much better when people are great at their work and love it. "
184 " You can draw a straight line from lack of guidance to a dysfunctional team that gets poor results. "
185 " 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. 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. "
186 " In order to be a good partner to the people on your team, and in order to keep the GSD wheel spinning efficiently, you need to stay connected to the actual work that is being done—not just by observing others executing but by executing yourself. If you become a conductor, you need to keep playing your instrument. "
187 " An effective staff meeting has three goals: it reviews how things have gone the previous week, allows people to share important updates, and forces the team to clarify the most important decisions and debates for the coming week. That’s it. It shouldn’t be the place to have debates or make decisions. "
188 " Here’s the agenda that I’ve found to be most effective: Learn: review key metrics (twenty minutes) Listen: put updates in a shared document (fifteen minutes) Clarify: identify key decisions & debates (thirty minutes) "
189 " The second dimension involves telling people when their work isn’t good enough "
190 " I’d always focused on the people most likely to be promoted. I assumed that was how it had to be at a growth company. Then a leader at Apple pointed out to me that all teams need stability as well as growth to function properly; nothing works well if everyone is gunning for the next promotion. She called the people on her team who got exceptional results but who were on a more gradual growth trajectory “rock stars” because they were like the Rock of Gibraltar on her team. These people loved their work and were world-class at it, but they didn’t want her job or to be Steve Jobs. They were happy where they were. The people who were on a steeper growth trajectory—the ones who’d go crazy if they were still doing the same job in a year—she called “superstars.” They were the source of growth on any team. She was explicit about needing a balance of both. "
191 " 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. It may be a bonus or a raise. Or, if they like public speaking, get them to present at your all-hands meetings or other big events. If they like teaching, get them to help new people learn their roles faster. Or if they are shy, make sure that you and others on the team thank them privately for the work they do. "
192 " I knew a person whose “launch and iterate” approach made him enormously successful at Google. Google’s culture was all about experimentation. When he got to Apple, which had a culture of perfecting and polishing ideas before launching them, he tried the same thing, and it killed his credibility. There was nothing wrong with the person or with Apple—it was just a bad fit. "
193 " try to repeat what the person said to make sure you’ve understood it, rather than defending yourself against the criticism that you’ve just heard. Listen to and clarify the criticism—but don’t debate it. Try saying, “So what I hear you saying is… "
194 " Learn: review key metrics (twenty minutes). What went well that week, and why? What went badly, and why? This will go best if you come up with a dashboard of key metrics to review. By “dashboard” I don’t mean some super sophisticated system set up by an IT department. I mean a spreadsheet with a few numbers on it. "
195 " An enormously successful newspaper executive recounted walking into his CEO’s office and seeing him leaning back in his chair just staring out at the sky. When he asked the CEO what he was daydreaming about, it turned out to be the idea that pivoted the company for the next decade. "
196 " 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. "
197 " 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. "
198 " Some people feel a quiet listener is not listening at all but instead setting a trap: waiting for others to say the wrong thing so they can pounce. "
199 " Listen: put updates in a shared document during a “study hall” (15 minutes). One of the most challenging aspects of managing a team is how to keep everyone abreast of what everyone else is doing so that they can flag areas of concern or overlap without wasting a great deal of time. Updates are different from key metrics. Updates include things that would never make it into the dashboard, like, “We need to change our goals for this project,” “I am thinking of doing a re-org, "
200 " Recognition In addition to top ratings, a great way to recognize people in a rock star phase is to designate them as “gurus,” or “go-to” experts. Often this means putting them in charge of teaching newer team members, if they show the aptitude for it. Bosses can be reluctant to use a top performer this way, wanting them to do the job rather than to teach others. However, this attitude prevents an organization from getting as much leverage out of experts as they otherwise would. "