Radical candor is a straightforward, deeply human way of managing the people who work for you and supporting them through personal and professional problems. There are two vital components to radical candor: “caring personally” and “challenging directly.”
Caring personally means caring about who employees are on a human level, beyond their work output. This requires getting to know each team member’s motivations and ambitions, as well as learning about their “whole selves”—their lives and interests outside of work that may affect their needs at work. Showing that you personally care about your employees naturally builds trusting relationships. When an employee feels that you have her best interests in mind, she’s more likely to engage with your feedback, trust your decisions, and be honest with you—and in turn, you’ll feel that you can trust and be honest with her.
Challenging directly pushes you to have tough conversations with your employees, such as in giving criticism or discussing subpar performance. These important conversations give your employee the opportunity to improve, help you avoid more problems and tough conversations down the line, and contribute to trust-building—being direct and pushing your employee to their full potential demonstrates that you care about them.
Bringing radically candid leadership to your workplace directly enhances four vital components to building an effective team:
When you build trusting relationships with your team and let them bring their whole selves to work, you can better understand their needs and make sure their work is meaningful to them, which naturally motivates great results. These trusting relationships can’t be forced—rather, they’re developed through repeated demonstrations of practicing self-care, giving your team autonomy, and respecting boundaries.
Self-care helps you lay the foundations of trusting relationships, in two ways. First, if you’re overwhelmed and stressed, problems feel insurmountable or may cause you to snap at someone who doesn’t deserve it. Second, it’s difficult to care about other people if you’re wrapped up in your own problems. Without personal care, you can’t build radically candid relationships.
Find a self-care method that makes you feel like your best self, such as meditation or spending time with your family. Try putting it into your calendar, as you would with a meeting.
Giving your team autonomy naturally bolsters your relationships. When employees feel that you’re using power and control to force them to do their best, they become resentful and disengaged. On the other hand, when they feel a sense of agency and autonomy, they choose to bring their best selves to their work, which leads to better collaboration and results.
Think of areas where you could let go of control. For example, stop asking for constant updates on team members’ projects. Instead, ask them to plan update meetings and to try problem solving themselves before asking for help.
Respecting boundaries is important to meaningful relationship-building—when you care personally about your relationships, you make an effort to learn about your employees’ whole selves, while being conscious of their limits. You’ll have to navigate what “boundaries” look like for each person—everyone reacts differently to the idea of sharing their personal lives with their boss.
You can encourage sharing by staying open to different perspectives and values, engaging with emotions instead of ignoring them, and responding to limits—for example, if an employee seems uncomfortable discussing her family, drop the issue quickly and move on.
The second component of radically candid leadership is improving your guidance. Giving radically candid guidance means calling on both personal care and direct challenge when delivering criticism and praise. Without a healthy balance of these two principles, you risk giving guidance that doesn’t solve problems, creates distrust, or allows poor work. An imbalance can manifest in three guidance types: “obnoxious aggression,” “manipulative insincerity,” or “ruinous empathy.”
Obnoxious aggression happens when you challenge directly without caring personally. Praise is usually characterized by empty, unspecific compliments, such as a generic “nice work.” Criticism is arrogant and personal—for example, “You’re lazy, so I can’t trust you on this project.”
Manipulative insincerity happens when you don’t care about your employees, but do care how they perceive you—you avoid guidance that could cause them to feel negatively about you. Praise is usually in the form of a false apology that dodges disagreement. For example, you might say, “Sorry for disagreeing with your decision. You’re probably right anyway,” instead of explaining your side of an argument. Criticism, stemming from a fear of negative perceptions, is usually too nice and dishonest. Imagine an employee gives a presentation with typos throughout—you don’t want to seem like a stickler, so you say the presentation was fine.
Ruinous empathy happens when you care very much about your employees, to the point of being afraid to hurt them with challenges or criticism. Praise is unspecific and superficial—your employee gives a confusing presentation, and you tell them their presentation went perfectly. Criticism, if there is any, is insincere or far too nice—everyone needed clarification at the end of the confusing presentation, but instead of addressing the issue, you say, “That presentation went perfectly! There were so many questions at the end, and you fielded them well.”
Guidance from a place of radical candor involves both praise and criticism that are given sincerely. Radically candid praise is specific, and you’re attuned to how your praise is landing with your recipient. For example, you might say, “That presentation went well—I could tell you spent quite some time clarifying your ideas. Great job fielding Greg’s question about the timeline. I think you persuaded everyone to your vision.”
Radically candid criticism is also specific, and is given when things go poorly and when they go well. In praising your employee’s presentation, you might say, “Great presentation. You got a lot of people on board. However, the marketing team seemed less convinced. You should follow up with them, with their interests at the forefront of discussion.”
Radically candid guidance can be off-putting if your team isn’t used to sincere criticism and praise. Building a culture where radical candor is the norm has two parts: asking for radically candid guidance and modeling an appropriate response, and giving radically candid guidance.
In asking for guidance from your team, focus on engaging properly with criticism—seeing you take criticism well builds your team’s trust and respect, and demonstrates the productive outcome that radically candid guidance can have. There are five steps to effectively engaging with criticism and having productive conversations.
Once your employees gain confidence in using radical candor, you can start giving them guidance as well. Radically candid guidance is based on six concepts:
A radically candid culture is built on the continued use of caring personally and challenging directly. As the boss, you can maintain caring relationships with your team members by giving them consistent guidance and having regular check-in meetings with them.
Furthermore, you can ensure that your employees act with radical candor toward one another by insisting that they resolve conflicts together, instead of coming to you. You can also set up environments that encourage them to discuss their successes and failures openly. For example, in your weekly staff meeting, have employees nominate one another for an MVP award to recognize good work and highlight positive behaviors. Have them nominate themselves for a “whoops” award to take accountability for mistakes and provide everyone with a learning opportunity.
The third component of radically candid leadership is effectively managing the growth of your employees. In learning about your team members, you learn more about their goals, their motivations, and the growth trajectory they’re on—this helps you support them in ways that keep them engaged with their work and satisfied with their team. There are five performance and growth trajectory combinations you’ll come across:
High performance with gradual growth: These team members are your “rock stars,” the solid forces who keep things running smoothly. They aren’t looking for significant growth—perhaps because they’re happy with their current position, or other things in their lives are taking their time and energy. Support these team members by recognizing their efforts and thanking them, and by remembering that they deserve stellar performance reviews as much as those who are on rapid growth trajectories and gunning for a promotion.
High performance with rapid growth: These team members are your “superstars,” who want to move up in the ranks and are prepared to dedicate the necessary time and energy to doing so. They’re the results-driven people carrying your team to the next level. Support these team members by keeping them challenged with projects and new responsibilities, and by preparing them to continue moving up in their careers.
Low performance with expected rapid growth: These team members, based on their past track record of high performance, should be excelling and taking on new projects, but are instead falling behind. Support these team members by first considering your management. Perhaps you’ve put this person in a role that doesn’t align with their skills, such as a people person on a numbers-crunching project. Be sure that they’ve received adequate training and clear guidelines. Then, consider them. If they seem to be having problems outside work, give them space to recover. If they’re a poor cultural fit with your organization, it’s best to let them go, rather than keep them in an environment that they’ll always be at odds with.
Mediocre: These team members consistently do okay, but not great, work. It’s crucial to your entire team that you figure out what the path forward should be for a mediocre employee—otherwise, your high-performers will become resentful as they continually pick up her slack. Radically candid conversations will reveal the best way to support her—either let her go so that she can thrive elsewhere, or give her space to get back on track towards high performance on her terms.
Low performance with no growth: When someone is not performing well, and isn’t showing any signs of future improvement, it’s probably best to fire them—doing so allows them to find a different job they’ll thrive in, and your team won’t have the burden of picking up their slack.
To build meaning into the work of your team members and figure out what growth trajectory they should be on, you need to discuss their goals—this should take place in three parts:
When you take time to fully understand who each of your team members are and what their growth looks like, you build a team where everyone feels valued, promotions feel fair, and work feels meaningful—naturally leading to higher motivation and better results.
The fourth goal of a radically candid workplace is building a highly collaborative atmosphere and a team that works together to accomplish much more than you could individually. There are seven steps to effective collaboration: listening, clarifying, debating, deciding, persuading, executing, and learning.
When listening to team members’ ideas, you’ll usually resort to one of two types of listening: quiet listening, which allows space in the conversation for the other person to speak their mind, and loud listening, which involves putting a strong challenge on the table for discussion. Neither listening style is better than the other, and you don’t need to change your style when you become a boss. However, you do need to stay attuned to how your employees receive your listening style—if they’re uncomfortable with a strong challenge, try giving them space to speak. If they find long silences unbearable, try putting forward a strong opinion for debate.
Teach your team members how to listen to each other—make sure everyone has a chance to speak in meetings, or have direct conversations with those you want to speak more or less. Idea-sharing among team members is important because they see small points for improvement that high-level managers often overlook, and can dedicate time to them. When small, innovative ideas are given the attention they deserve, they become big ideas. This inspires other team members to come forward with ideas, furthering the innovative cycle.
Schedule one-on-one meetings with team members to help refine their ideas for the next steps of collaboration. This is vital—unclear, half-baked ideas are likely to be dismissed or rejected when presented to others. Clarification has two main parts: letting your team member bounce ideas off you, and helping them know their audience. When your employee is bouncing an idea off you, don’t be afraid to point out logical flaws—this sparks brainstorming that reveals creative solutions that neither of you would have discovered on your own. Then, refine the idea until it’s impossible for any audience to misunderstand. Offer guidance about who they’ll be presenting to, and which details should be omitted or emphasized to best capture the audience.
Keep your debates focused on debate only, not a decision—this reduces the friction between those who want to make a decision ASAP and those who want to continue discussing an issue, and ensures that ideas are explored deeply enough.
Some ideas for building a respectful and healthy debate culture include: redirecting the conversation when it becomes clear that someone’s arguing to “win” instead of to make a good decision, stopping the meeting if it’s going on too long and wearing people out, or asking team members to argue the opposing side of the argument in the second half of the debate.
Meetings dedicated solely to decisions are important because they signal that it’s time to stop discussing and start deciding. The decision-makers should be those who are close to the facts surrounding a situation, and thus have the best possible information to make a decision. Good bosses make sure that these people are given the clearance to make as many decisions as possible, instead of creating decision-making processes that favor senior positions or higher management.
The outcome of this meeting should be a meeting summary that’s sent out to relevant team members to explain the decision, and a decision that can’t be appealed or debated further.
Once a decision has been reached, call an all-hands meeting to persuade everyone to the idea—this is important, because it makes sure that no one feels left in the dark. These meetings should have two parts: a presentation and a Q&A session.
Throughout these two parts, there should be a focus on listening and responding to the audience’s feelings about the decision; proving the credibility of those who will execute on the decision by talking about their past achievements and commitment to the team; and explaining the logic of the decision, from the very first idea all the way to the all-hands meeting.
As the boss, you probably won’t be doing much idea-executing yourself—your job is to clear the path for your team members to execute as efficiently as possible. There are a few ways to accomplish this:
It’s crucial to examine your results and note the ways that the collaborative process could have gone more smoothly or been improved. Learning from errors or failure is how growth and improvement happens. In this process, people may accuse you of lacking integrity if you change your mind about a decision that was made. You can work against this by clearly communicating what new information caused you to change your mind.
When you commit yourself to caring personally about your team members and challenging them directly, you become a great boss. You build strong relationships with your team members, create a culture of sincere and helpful guidance, and put together growth plans that make sense and have personal motivations built in. With this kind of support, your team members will consistently bring their best selves to their work and their collaboration, delivering results that you’d never be able to accomplish alone.
As a boss, your main job is dealing with the personal and professional problems of the people that report to you. While this may feel irrelevant to your work, it’s important to realize that relationship maintenance is a boss’s work. Kim Scott, through professional experience as a leader of high-profile teams at Google and Apple University, has found that relationship maintenance should be a top priority when you move into a leadership position.
However, relationship maintenance can be difficult because you need to walk a fine line between being too friendly and nice and being too harsh and managerial—many bosses struggle with figuring out the best way to keep this balance. This is where radical candor can give you clear-cut guidelines.
Management based in radical candor is straightforward and humanizing, guided by two main principles: “caring personally” and “challenging directly.” With these two principles to guide your management style, you can accomplish the overarching goal of radical candor: creating a team that accomplishes more than you could possibly accomplish yourself.
Caring personally means caring about people for more than just the work they put out. You have to care about them on a personal level. This involves getting to know more about them as a person—their interests, motivations, and ambitions—and learning more about their “whole selves”—who they are outside of work, and understanding how their personal life might affect their needs at work.
Showing that you care personally about your employees naturally builds their trust in you. This has far-reaching effects—when your reports trust you and feel that you have their best interests in mind, they’re more honest with you, more receptive to your feedback, and more trusting of your decisions. Likewise, you’ll find that you can be more honest with them and more trusting of their decisions.
Challenging directly means having tough, necessary conversations with your reports—such as conversations in which you need to give criticism or disagree with decisions they’ve made. These conversations might feel too difficult to take on, especially if you haven’t yet gotten the chance to build a caring, trusting relationship with the person—but you have to let the challenge directly principle push you into these discussions, for several important reasons.
First, these conversations offer an opportunity for the feedback recipient to improve themselves and avoid more problems and difficult conversations down the line. Second, just by being direct, you show that you do care about them and their improvement, enough to push through the discomfort of a tough conversation. This demonstration of care naturally contributes to your efforts to build a trusting relationship with them.
On the other hand, if you were to act outside the principles of radical candor, avoiding the conversation, your employee would continue falling short—and they’d probably know it. Continually reassuring them that everything is “fine” reveals that you won’t be honest with them when necessary, which destroys the potential for a trusting relationship
Before you can start practicing radical candor in your workplace, you need to have a clear idea of what behaviors are not aligned with radical candor—this is important to think about, because concepts can be easily manipulated in practice.
Bringing radically candid leadership to your workplace enhances four vital components to building a motivated team and achieving great results:
We've reorganized the book’s chapter order for coherency. As a reference, here's how the summary chapters correspond to those of the book:
Before getting into the methods of practicing radical candor, it’s helpful to figure out how you’re already on track, how you can improve, and what your goals are.
How have you recently demonstrated the “caring personally” aspect of radical candor? (For example, you remembered your employee’s anniversary or celebrated an employee’s personal accomplishment.)
How have you recently demonstrated the “challenging directly” aspect of radical candor? (For example, you spoke to an employee honestly about her slipping performance, or challenged a colleague’s budget cut proposal.)
In what ways do you think you could improve in “caring personally” and “challenging directly”? (For example, asking team members more about themselves, or being more straightforward with feedback.)
What are you hoping to accomplish by practicing radical candor in your workplace? (For example, you’d like to see more satisfied team members, or spark a boost in productivity.)
One of the first steps toward creating a radically candid workplace is showing your team members that you personally care about them, which naturally builds trusting relationships. This practice might feel a little “soft” for the workplace, but it’s not a waste—when you build trusting relationships with your team and let them bring their whole selves to work, you give shape and meaning to the work you do together. This motivates and engages your employees, driving them to accomplish much more than you could as a closed-off, disconnected team.
This step will take a good deal of time and effort on your part—solid relationships can’t be forced. Rather, they’re developed slowly through repeated, meaningful demonstrations of practicing self-care, giving your team autonomy, and respecting boundaries. First, we’ll explore how practicing self-care can help you show up to work in a way that opens up opportunities for relationship-building. Then, we’ll discuss building trust by giving your team autonomy, and by respecting their boundaries when asking them to share about themselves.
Self-care is vitally important to creating opportunities for building trusting relationships, because it allows you to bring your best self to work. This is important for several reasons. First, it’s very difficult to correctly deal with tough situations when you’re not at your best. As a leader, your job is to avoid becoming overwhelmed by the situations you’re faced with—however, if you’re stressed at work and stressed at home, your problems will exacerbate one another. Tough work situations become insurmountable, or you may snap at someone who doesn’t deserve it. Second, it’s hard to care personally about other people when you’re caught up in your own issues—and personal care is crucial to radically candid relationships.
There are three ways that you can maintain your self-care: integrating your work and life, finding and practicing your self-care method, and scheduling self-care time.
Don’t think of your two lives separately, as a work-life balance. This implies that energy that’s put into your work is sapped from your life, and vice versa. Instead, think more in terms of integrating the two—you bring your whole self to work, and your whole self goes home at the end of the day. For example, if staying centered requires that you spend 30 minutes meditating every morning, this isn’t time that’s “taken away” from your focus on work. It allows you to bring a more grounded self to work. Likewise, if you feel excited and energized about a work project, feel free to talk about it at home and share your vision with your spouse.
Integrating your work life and personal life ensures that they enrich one another, instead of working against each other for your attention and time.
It’s important to find your own self-care method—what is helpful and meaningful for one of your colleagues may do nothing at all for you. Self-care can look like mediation or exercise, or can be grounded in spending time with your spouse, getting drinks with friends, or going on vacation with your family.
Whatever your self-care method is, it should be prioritized when you’re faced with tough situations—but you need to check in and make sure it’s not your highest priority. For example, if you’re tasked with laying off several members of your team, it’s okay to have a weekend getaway for some space to think. It’s not okay to abandon work commitments for a last-minute 4-day weekend, or to distract yourself from the task by shopping around for flights and hotels while you’re on the clock.
If you don’t have a way to step back and center yourself, it’s all too easy to get caught up in stress and chaos. On the other hand, if you have a solid self-care practice in place, you should be able to deal adequately with tough situations.
Self-care doesn’t feel as urgent or important as your bigger work tasks, so it’s likely to get bumped to the bottom of your priority list. To avoid this, schedule self-care time into your day like you would schedule anything else for work, and show up for it. For example, if you always blow off exercising in the morning, put it into your calendar and commit to it as you would with any other scheduled meeting.
Once you’re taking care of yourself, you’re ready to effectively care about your team and work on the next two steps of relationship-building: granting your team autonomy, and respecting their boundaries when learning about them.
Giving your team autonomy at work leads to better results and more accomplishments, because a sense of agency—not power and control—builds trusting relationships. When employees feel that they have a trusting relationship with you, they’ll bring their best selves to their work, naturally collaborate better, and are more engaged with their work. This is because a relationship encourages them to bring out their best selves, and ensures that they can trust your decisions, and you theirs. On the contrary, if they feel that their best selves are being forced out, or feel like replaceable parts of a machine, they’ll do the bare minimum.
When loosening the reins of authority, it’s important that your balance between control and freedom still offers your team a sense of structure—too little structure can cause systems to break down, and can allow people to use selfish interests to rise to positions of self-made power. These balances—between freedom and control, and between structure and disorganization—won’t come easily. It’s helpful to keep in mind that you’re not giving up all control—you’re giving up control selectively, in a way that makes sense for everyone.
Put some research and thought into what duties or responsibilities make sense to give up. For example, promotions at Google aren’t based on managerial decisions or recommendations. Any employee who wants a promotion can put together their own “promotion packet” that highlights the reasons they deserve promotion, such as accomplishments, recommendations, and so on. The promotion is then considered and approved or denied by a team. This eliminates the possibility of one person having full control over another’s path, and also eliminates the ability of someone to act without the interests of the whole team in mind.
The second part of building effective relationships with your team members is respecting their boundaries. Respecting boundaries is not a one-size-fits-all practice. As a leader, you’ll have to navigate what “boundaries” look like for each person on your team—everyone will react differently to the idea of bringing their whole selves to work and sharing aspects of their personal lives with you. The good news is, this gets easier over time, as your relationships strengthen and you understand your employee’s needs more deeply.
It’s challenging to simultaneously get to know your employees and understand their integrated work-life selves, while respecting the boundaries they may set around their personal information—there are 6 guidelines that can help you navigate the process:
Trust-building is a long, slow process of repeatedly asking questions about your employee and showing that you are trustworthy by engaging with their responses. You can’t rush it by immediately asking deeply personal questions, which will likely scare them off. On the other hand, you can’t sit back and wait for trust to just happen—as the leader, you have to take the first step of asking questions.
The best way to get into the trust-building process is to regularly spend one-on-one time with your employees. Let them decide the topic of discussion so they can talk about whatever they need to talk about, and take responsibility for asking the questions.
Many organizations tout the benefits of sharing values among team members, thinking that doing so will help colleagues better understand and communicate with one another, and act with integrity. However, this might not be the best way to build relationships, for several reasons:
You don’t need to ask about or share values with your employees—but you do need to know what your personal values are, and depend on them to help you show up to conversations and tough work in a way that aligns with who you are.
(Shortform note: Read our summary of Dare to Lead to learn more about how your values can help you show up to tough conversations with integrity.)
If your team members share their values or experiences with you, your job as a leader is to stay open to their perspective. This practice of basic respect is at the center of strong work relationships. Your “personal care” has to extend to everyone, even those who come from a different background, have a different perspective of the world, or have beliefs you don’t understand. If you mandate that people have beliefs or values similar to yours, or that they hide their conflicting beliefs and values before you’re interested in building a relationship with them, your work relationships will be weak, artificial, and void of trust.
Beyond accepting the diverse perspectives of your employees, you can further strengthen your relationships by making a perceptible effort to create a workplace that honors their diverse perspectives. This might look like organizing a workshop on discussing race in the workplace, or a review of exclusive language in your organization's written materials.
Physical touch is often considered inappropriate in the workplace, but sometimes it can go a long way toward strengthening your relationships by showing that you care personally. If one of your employees experiences a death in the family, or announces that they’re having a baby, a professionally distant handshake won’t demonstrate that you care about them. A hug, on the other hand, certainly would.
However, when it comes to physical touch, you have to be attuned to your employees’ needs—ask them what they prefer. Don’t make an assumption they might be uncomfortable with. Some of your employees will be comfortable with hugging and gladly accept it, but others will prefer not to be hugged. It’s important to find another way to include these employees in expressions of care, such as a reassuring shoulder squeeze, or a note left on their desk. It’s okay to ask what will work for them.
If you create a work culture where everyone is expected to bring their whole selves to work, it’s important to be attuned to the emotions your whole self brings to work. This is important when you’re carrying negative emotions, because emotions spread easily, especially when you’re the boss and everyone is tuned in to how you’re feeling.
You have to find a way to keep your emotions from getting in everyone’s way, without suppressing or trying to ignore them, which could cause them to manifest in a way that's not in your control and chips away at trust—such as snapping at someone for asking for your help. Be candid about what’s going on, and assure your team that they’re not to blame for your bad mood. You could say something like, “I’m exhausted because I stayed up all night with a sick kid, so I’m really irritable today. I’m trying my best not to snap at anyone, but if I do, please know it’s nothing against you or your work.”
When you’re building relationships with your team—especially when asking your team to bring their whole selves to work, and when challenging directly alongside caring personally—you’ll inevitably be exposed to others’ emotions. The most important rule in these situations is: don’t try to control, manipulate, or prevent others’ emotions. Instead, your focus should be on engaging with their emotions and reacting with empathy. There are seven methods that can help you react to others’ emotions with empathy, rather than with defensive or controlling behavior:
(Shortform note: To learn more about how to identify and manage emotions effectively, read our summaries of Emotional Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence 2.0.)
Successful Relationship-Building at Social Events
While outside-work social events are good ways to open up to your colleagues, learn about one another, and show them that you care about them, they’re not always the best choice. When thinking of planning a social event, keep two things in mind: optional events can feel like a mandatory burden, and you should be very careful around booze.
Optional Events Can Feel Like a Mandatory Burden
When social events are organized by management, people can feel forced into taking part in them—this chips away at the “autonomy” that you’re trying to demonstrate in the organization. When organizing an event, remember to read the room. Ask yourself if you might be pressuring your employees into a situation that they’re not comfortable with, either implicitly or explicitly. You might feel that a non-mandatory event doesn’t feel like a burden, but keep in mind that employees feel a great deal of social pressure when it comes to events their boss is putting on—they’ll attend out of fear of missing out on an opportunity to show you their commitment.
Sometimes, the best thing you can do for your team—and what shows them that you’re really paying attention to their needs—is not scheduling an event at all, instead letting them go home. For example, setting up a fun outing to help everyone relax at the end of a 70-hour week is well-intended, but most of your employees would prefer to go home and rest.
Be Careful Around Booze
While adding drinks to your social event is a surefire way to loosen people up and get to know one another, you need to be very careful when it comes to booze. There are so many problems that can come from overindulgence, especially in a work context—such as saying things that can’t be taken back, embarrassing loss of control, or aggression.
In this way, booze can actually serve to destroy relationships, rather than build and strengthen them. If you do choose to have alcohol at an event, make sure that everyone’s consumption is kept under control, either by bartenders or limited supply.
Overall, consider that the workday might be a much more valuable time to get to know one another. After all, you and your employees spend most of your time together at work, so it makes sense to get to know each other within that context. Additionally, people should be spending their time after work with their other priorities and their self-care, not holding themselves in the work mindset that naturally comes along with socializing with colleagues.
Coming up with a method of self-care is vitally important to making sure you’re able to bring your best self to work and build strong relationships with your team members.
What is an activity that you’ve recently been turning to when things get stressful? (Such as meditation, time with your family, or reading books.)
How can you create a regular self-care practice out of this activity? (For example, you can meditate for 30 minutes every morning before work, or commit to having dinner with your family 5 times per week.)
What reminders can you create for yourself, to ensure that you’re staying committed to your self-care practice? (For example, setting an alarm for meditation time, or putting family dinner into your work calendar.)
Giving your employees a sense of autonomy is a good step toward building a trusting relationship with them.
Describe one of your practices that might unnecessarily hold control over your team members. (For example, you hold constant “update meetings” during projects, or build project teams without input from those affected.)
How can you transfer ownership of this responsibility to your team members? (For example, team members schedule their own update meetings and set the agenda, or team members create their own project teams.)
The second step toward creating a radically candid culture is improving the type of guidance you’re giving. As a boss, your guidance can fall into one of four quadrants along the axes of caring personally and challenging directly: “obnoxious aggression,” “manipulative insincerity,” “ruinous empathy,” and radical candor.
| Not Challenging Directly | Challenging Directly | |
| Caring Personally | Ruinous Empathy | Radical Candor |
| Not Caring Personally | Manipulative Insincerity | Obnoxious Aggression |
We’ll first discuss the first three types and how too much or too little caring and challenging can drive bad feedback, and then look at how radically candid feedback effectively balances both of these components.
Obnoxious aggression happens when you challenge directly without caring personally. Bosses who fall into the obnoxious aggression quadrant give feedback that is based in humiliating and holding power over people. Obnoxious aggression isn’t necessarily good, but if you’re going to be in any quadrant outside radical candor, this is the one to be in—if you’re challenging people, at least you are making an attempt to help them improve, and the rest of your team won’t have to pick up their slack.
Praise from a place of obnoxious aggression is usually characterized by empty compliments and regurgitated information—it’s clear that there’s no care behind your words. If your employee tells you about her weekend, but you don’t really care what she did, you might respond with a generic, “Wow, sounds cool.”
Criticism from a place of obnoxious aggression is usually arrogant, personal, and meant to be humiliating. Often, the criticizer makes assumptions about the recipient. For example, if your employee sends a messy proposal to the team, you might hit Reply All to say, “This proposal is a mess. I can’t believe how many typos you missed. I know some of your work can be subpar, but this is something else.”
Manipulative insincerity happens when you don’t care about your employees, but do care about how they perceive you, so you avoid challenges and disagreements, which might make them feel negatively about you. There’s no real guidance in an environment led by manipulative insincerity, because there’s never any honest, actionable feedback given.
Praise from a place of manipulative insincerity is usually in the form of a false apology, made just to avoid uncomfortable conversations. If your employee confronts you, saying, “You said my proposal isn’t clarified enough for the debate. That really bothered me,” manipulative insincerity will push you to duck out of the discomfort of disagreement. Instead of explaining your perspective, you might say, “Well, you know the project best and if you think it’s ready, I agree. Sorry for doubting you.”
Criticism from a place of manipulative insincerity is often too nice and dishonest, stemming from your fear of how you’ll be perceived if you challenge your employee or give negative feedback. Instead of honestly telling an employee her proposal is weak, you might say, “Maybe this proposal needs to be refined a bit, but of course, you know the project better than I do, so you can make that call. Overall it looks really great!”
Ruinous empathy happens when you care very much about your employees, to the point that you’re too afraid to challenge them at all. This fear drives you to focus on being polite and letting everyone avoid uncomfortable situations, rather than giving and soliciting sincere feedback.
Praise from a place of ruinous empathy is not specific, and only scratches the surface of the situation. If your employee gives a presentation that went well, you might encourage them with a simple, “Great presentation today! It went absolutely perfectly.” You don’t name particular points that went especially well for them.
Criticism from a place of ruinous empathy, if there is any, is insincere or far too nice—it often doesn’t sound like criticism at all. Imagine your employee’s presentation didn’t go well. It was confusing and left everyone with a number of questions at the end. Instead of addressing the problem, you might gloss over it by saying, “Great presentation! There were so many questions at the end, but you fielded them well.”
Radical candor’s components of caring personally and challenging directly are essential to giving good, sincere feedback—which naturally contributes to trusting relationships with your reports. Radically candid guidance usually includes both praise and criticism together in order to demonstrate that you care enough to want to boost your employee’s confidence, and that you care enough to show them the ways they can be better.
Praise from a place of radical candor is very specific to the recipient—when you’re acting with radical candor, you should be attuned to how your praise is landing with your recipient and be prepared to change it if it’s not quite right. For example, imagine that you have an obvious dislike for dogs and say to your employee, “I think it’s really cool that you foster dogs.” Your praise will feel insincere and forced. Instead, try praise such as, “I admire how much work you put into training your foster dogs and matching them to the right homes. You’re so driven at work as well, so it’s not surprising.”
Criticism from a place of radical candor is always sincere, and is given both when things go poorly and when things go well. For example, Sheryl Sandberg once gave Scott radically candid feedback about her speaking style at Facebook. After a stellar presentation, she pulled Scott aside to talk. She started with praise for Scott’s persuasion skills, and then noted that Scott used the word “um” too much. She frankly explained that overuse of “um” was undermining Scott’s credibility, and set her up with a speech therapist to address the issue.
It’s important to note that no one acts with radical candor 100% of the time—you’ll likely fluctuate between guidance styles several times just in the span of one day. But, you should keep tabs on your guidance style and know if you’re acting out of line with radical candor more often than not. Here’s a thought exercise that can help you consider which guidance style you fall under most of the time: think honestly about what your reaction would be if you saw a colleague with their fly down.
In the next chapter, we’ll discuss how you can get your team used to the idea of radical candor, and then make sure that most of the guidance you give is radically candid.
Think about how you usually give guidance to your employees to figure out where you should ramp up your efforts in caring personally or challenging directly.
Think of a recent situation where you had to give one of your team members praise or criticism (or both). Describe what you said to them.
What aspects of your praise or feedback do you think were radically candid? Keep in mind that radically candid praise and criticism is sincere and specific.
What aspects of your praise or criticism do you think weren’t radically candid? Explain how the praise or criticism might have been obnoxiously aggressive, manipulatively insincere, or ruinously empathetic.
Try reframing your non-radically candid praise or criticism so that it’s more sincere and specific. Describe what you should have said instead.
It’s likely that you can’t jump straight into giving radically candid feedback—sincere criticism and praise can be off-putting if you’ve built a culture that relies on too-nice, dishonest feedback. You can get your team used to the concept of radical candor by first asking for radically candid guidance and modeling an appropriate response. Once you’ve built up trust in this way, you can move on to giving radically candid feedback.
When you become a boss, you’ll likely find that people are more distrusting of your intent, or you may find that your new authority brings out a new side of you. Subsequently, your team won’t begin trusting you until you’re actively working on reasons that they should. At this stage, many bosses get caught up in trying to earn their team’s respect, but if you’re too interested in respect, you’re likely to feel defensive and reactive when you’re criticized. Instead, focus on learning how to accept criticism—seeing you react well to criticism will naturally build your team’s trust and their respect.
You can jumpstart this trust-building process by asking your team to provide you with radically candid guidance and responding in a trustworthy manner. There are five steps to effectively soliciting and responding to criticism and pushing your conversations in a productive direction.
Criticism of your employees should always happen in private, but as the boss, you need to be willing to be publicly criticized. This accomplishes several goals. First, you demonstrate to your team that there’s value in criticism, and that its intent is to make everyone better at their jobs—not to be hurtful. Second, responding well to criticism establishes you as a strong leader who isn’t afraid to make mistakes and is open to learning. And third, public criticism allows you to get everyone’s feedback as efficiently as possible—if you have a big team, you’d miss out on hearing many of your employees’ voices because it’s impossible to schedule everyone for a meeting. Furthermore, you’ll save time by hearing each criticism once, instead of over and over again across multiple meetings.
Your employees will likely be hesitant to jump into this conversation, so you should find a team member who seems comfortable giving you feedback. Ask them to offer some criticism or disagreement at the next staff meeting. They might be uncomfortable with the request, but don’t back down on it—explain why it’s important to you to get feedback that everyone can see.
It’s often uncomfortable for employees to criticize their boss, so keep a close eye on the balance of praise and criticism you’re receiving in public feedback sessions. If you find you’re getting mostly praise, directly ask for criticism. Asking questions can provide a jumping-off point for coming up with issues that need addressing, and helps cut through the discomfort of offering criticism. Helpful questions include, “How can I better support you?” or, “What is something I’m doing that you find frustrating?”
Even with a prompt, your employees may still be hesitant to offer criticism. Don’t let their discomfort make you uncomfortable enough to wrap up the conversation quickly, or take their silence to mean there are no problems. Hesitation and silence don’t indicate an absence of issues—they indicate that you’ll have to keep pushing to get sincere feedback from your employees. There are several ways to accomplish this:
Don’t be a bully about pushing for answers, however. If your employees really can’t think of any criticism, ask them to think about it and schedule a follow-up meeting to discuss. It’s vitally important that you stick to this follow-up meeting, so your employees understand that you truly care about getting their feedback.
When someone offers you criticism, it’s crucial that you respond in a way that shows that their criticism is welcome and well-received—this is where trust is built. Don’t tell them how their criticism is wrong or not radically candid. Doing so will make them hesitant to share feedback again. Instead, try to listen for valuable parts of the criticism that you can act on or respond to. Additionally, be careful not to become angry or defensive in response to what they’re saying. Instead, listen with the intent to clarify and fully understand the criticism. You can do this by repeating what’s been said and checking that your interpretation is correct.
Consciously managing your response is especially important if you’re the type of person who’s uncomfortable with criticism and isn’t used to welcoming it—if you’re not in control of your response, you’re likely to become defensive and destroy trust instead of demonstrating the value of criticism.
Showing your gratitude for criticism encourages people to keep giving it. The best way to show gratitude for criticism is responding with demonstrated change. If it’s a change that can be done right away, do so. If it’s a change that can’t be accomplished right away, make a perceptible effort toward the change. Imagine that you’re told that you tend to use a condescending tone when employees are talking about setbacks or obstacles they bump into. This isn’t a problem you can correct overnight—you often don’t even realize you’re doing it. You ask your employees to help you correct this behavior over the long term by simply saying “tone” as soon as they hear you being condescending.
It’s important to express gratitude for criticism even when you think it’s unfair, or don’t agree. Arguing with or dismissing criticism you disagree with will only serve to undermine the trust you’re trying to build, so instead focus on ways to work through it. First, find something in the criticism that you can agree with—this demonstrates your openness to guidance and that you’re not shutting down completely. Then, make sure you fully understand what the other person is expressing—repeat the criticism back to make sure you’re both on the same page. Finally, tell them you’d like to think about it and get back to them. In your follow-up, explain clearly why you disagree, or why making a change won’t be possible—the other person might end up agreeing with you, seeing a hole in your logic you hadn’t considered, or they’ll stand by their comments. In any case, they’ll see that you took the time to engage with their criticism instead of writing it off.
Once you get the ball rolling and your employees are gaining confidence in giving you guidance, you need to start giving them guidance in return. This exchange sets the tone for your workplace—a culture where people can freely challenge and be challenged, and understand that it comes from a place of personal care and the desire to make everyone’s work better.
Again, if your employees are not well-versed in receiving sincere criticism and praise, radical candor might seem daunting. Here are some guiding principles you should focus on to help you commit to radical candor and to best set up your employees for sincere feedback.
Humility is important to giving both criticism and praise. Criticism without humility can make people feel defensive, and praise without humility can sound insincere or arrogant. There are three concepts that humble guidance should rely on: precise framing of your feedback, an effective filter, and separation of reality and experience.
Precise framing of your feedback: When you’re giving feedback, frame it around three things—the situation, the person’s behavior, and the outcome. This helps you avoid arrogant generalizations about the person, both in criticism and praise. Criticism, instead of, “You’re bad at time management,” should sound more like, “I asked you yesterday to get a proposal together for the new client (situation). You chose to work on less urgent projects until one hour before the deadline today, and threw together a proposal riddled with typos (behavior). It’s likely that we’ve lost that client’s trust (outcome).” Instead of generic praise such as, “You’re doing great,” try, “At this morning’s meeting (situation), I noticed that you took charge in making sure that everyone got a chance to share suggestions (behavior). I love that your encouragement makes your team so open to sharing ideas (outcome).”
An effective filter: After feedback that didn’t go well, write down what was actually said in the conversation and what you were thinking during the conversation. Examine your two lists to figure out where the conversation went wrong—was there a point where you started saying what you were thinking, without a filter?
For example, you might find that while talking to one of your reports about her time management, you were thinking that she’s not committed enough to her work. You see that after you had this thought, your conversation became accusatory and you spent the rest of the time questioning her commitment, instead of coming up with solutions together.
Separation of reality and experience: Remember that your experience or subjective observation of a situation is not necessarily the objective truth—this will help you invite challenge as much as you hand it out. For example, your subjective observation might tell you that your report has time management issues. You suggest this to her, and invite her response. This gives her the opportunity to tell you about her reality—she’s involved in another project that’s disorganized and therefore taking up a huge amount of her time.
Don’t get bogged down with the idea that in order to be helpful, you need to hold your employee’s hand through their work. Radically candid feedback does the heavy lifting by clarifying what the problem is, so your employee can find the solution more quickly—this is accomplished through three helpful actions:
Feedback is most effective when it comes immediately on the heels of a situation that merits attention. Saving up feedback for meetings is unhelpful, for several reasons. First, you risk forgetting exactly what you wanted to talk about, or the specifics of a situation—your employee will become frustrated when you give criticism, but can’t think of any examples to illustrate your point. Second, when you wait to give feedback, you’ll often find that problems are too far in the past to be fixed, or successes are too far in the past to be built on. Your job is to offer constant feedback, and your big meetings—such as yearly performance reviews or one-on-one time—should just be formalized echoes of your regular work.
Immediate feedback is especially important when it comes to criticism. Putting off criticism—and subsequently, worrying about it—is mentally exhausting. Additionally, if you hold onto things that anger or frustrate you about an employee for too long, you risk suddenly losing your temper with them, diminishing your credibility and destroying the trust you’ve built.
Consistent feedback also lets the people working for you understand and contextualize how their work is being received or used. Without the context that comes with praise or criticism, people feel that their work goes unnoticed or unappreciated and become disengaged and bored with their work. If their work is being used by someone other than you, try to include them in the meetings or events where their work will be presented, so they can experience the reactions in real time.
To ensure that your feedback is as immediate as possible, always try to deliver it in the few minutes between meetings or following a presentation. This saves you both time, as there’s no long meeting to schedule, and the feedback is more effective because you both have the specific points of praise or criticism fresh in your memory. Make sure your schedule allows for post-meeting feedback by stopping meetings 5 minutes before schedule, or by scheduling meetings a minimum of 15 minutes apart. Good feedback doesn’t need to take a long time—the best feedback is consistent and specific.
There are two situations in which you should second-guess the need for immediacy. First, if you or the other person is angry, tired, or hungry (in short, cranky), wait and deliver criticism when you’re both in a better mindset. Second, if your criticism isn’t important or feels nitpicky, don’t say it right away. Take some time to consider if it even needs to be said at all.
It’s best to deliver your feedback in person—you can see how your feedback is being received by the other person, and you avoid misunderstandings that can come from the nuances of written communication. Many bosses like to deliver criticism by email because it lets them avoid negative emotional reactions, but being present for negative emotions helps you demonstrate radical candor. If your employee is upset, you can lean toward caring personally to help them. If they’re not taking you seriously, you can lean toward challenging directly to show them that your feedback should be important to them.
Sometimes, the importance of speaking in-person will directly conflict with immediacy, such as when your employee is in another city. In these cases, prioritize immediacy over in-person delivery unless you’re talking about something very important such as promoting or firing someone. When choosing immediacy over in-person delivery, your mode of communication matters. Video chat is your best option, followed by a phone call. Emails or texts should be avoided at all costs unless absolutely necessary—written communication tends to be misinterpreted at a much higher rate than vocal.
As a general rule of thumb, you should always default to giving praise in public and criticism in private—public praise tends to be more meaningful for the recipient and demonstrates what your team should do more of. On the other hand, public criticism tends to trigger defensiveness.
When giving praise, pay attention to what kind of attention your employees appreciate. Some of them will love public acknowledgment of their accomplishments, and others will find it unbearably embarrassing. Figure out what kind of praise will make them feel best. Keep in mind that this practice will become easier over time, as you practice “caring personally” and get to know your employees better.
When it comes to criticism, make sure your team understands the difference between criticism and debate and disagreements, which are important parts of decision-making and discussion. For example, saying “I disagree with this idea” is fair game for a public conversation. On the other hand, “You’ve been handing in a lot of reports full of typos lately, and I’m starting to question your commitment to this project. Can you explain what’s going on?” needs to be privately discussed.
Think before you Reply All: when it comes to praise, replying all to give a quick shoutout is a simple, unembarrassing way to give praise and show recognition for efforts. However, never reply all with criticism—even if there’s an error in something sent out, contact the sender directly and ask them to send out the correction.
When giving criticism, make sure that you are criticizing the problem or the idea, rather than the person. Attributing a character trait to someone as an explanation for their behavior doesn’t get to the root of the problem. “You’re careless” doesn’t specify areas to improve. On the other hand, “There are too many typos in your reports” illustrates a clear problem that can have solutions. If your criticism starts with “you’re,” rethink it.
In a similar vein, when in a disagreement, be careful that you’re arguing against the idea, not the person. Saying, “You’re wrong” will usually prompt a defensive reaction, while “I think this is wrong” will usually prompt a discussion.
It’s likely that you’ll eventually come across an issue that is very personal—even in these cases, don’t personalize the criticism. Instead, find an external problem/issue to criticize. For example, Scott once had an employee with very bad body odor, to the point that it actually started to diminish her credibility. Instead of saying, “You have bad body odor” to her employee, Scott talked about the American obsession with hygiene and personal smell and suggested that this employee would be better received by colleagues if she worked within the American status quo. Instead of becoming defensive, her employee was receptive and took care of the issue quickly.
Remember that your commitment to radical candor may change depending on pressures at work, or things taking your energy at home. It’s important to check in regularly to make sure that you’re acting in line with radical candor, and that what you think is caring personally and challenging directly is landing the right way with your recipients.
One effective way to keep tabs on how your feedback is landing is to ask your employees and colleagues to rate your feedback. This can easily be done by putting up a paper, split into the four guidance types, near your office and having your employees mark where they thought your feedback landed over the course of the week. Keeping a visual tracker like this accomplishes several goals. First, it highlights which factors of your guidance need work, and in what direction. For example, if your criticism is too ruinously empathetic, you know you need to work on being more sincere and direct when challenging. If your praise is too manipulatively insincere, you know you need to give more specific praise, or back it up with a challenge.
Second, it exposes your team to the principles of radical candor and guidance types, which helps them better understand your objectives and develops a shared language for talking about praise and criticism. Finally, if your team doesn’t add to the visual tracker, but submits complaints anonymously via another platform, you get an idea of how your team thinks you’ll react to criticism. This tells you if you need to dedicate more time to demonstrating a genuine interest in receiving feedback.
Making sure your employees learn how to effectively give guidance to one another—even when you’re not there to mediate—is essential to building a radically candid workplace. There are two spaces where it might be especially helpful to teach radical candor: conflict resolutions and public acknowledgment of accomplishments and mistakes.
Guidance can feel especially difficult when it goes across group boundaries—this difficulty comes both in giving and receiving guidance. For example, sometimes men are afraid to criticize women because they think women will become emotional. Or, a woman is labeled “abrasive” for challenging one of her colleagues. Your team needs to navigate these issues because radical candor should be practiced with all people on your team equally. Here are some suggestions for getting around common situations:
Acting with radical candor will take some extra time and effort on your part. Reflecting on how it feels to receive poor guidance can help you stay committed to the extra work of being a good boss.
Think of a situation when a boss gave you guidance in a way that didn’t demonstrate radically candid behavior. (For example, she waited several weeks to criticize a project, or made her criticism personal.) Describe the situation, and your boss’s feedback.
Describe how your boss’s feedback made you feel. (For example, frustrated because a problem was too far in the past to fix, or defensive because your boss was attacking you instead of the problem.)
How could your boss have improved their feedback?
How do you think the problem would have been solved differently if your boss was focused on giving radically candid guidance?
If you’re working on caring personally about your team members, you’ll naturally learn more about their goals and the growth trajectory they’re on. This information supports you in the third component of a radically candid culture—effectively managing your team members’ ambitions and growth in order to build a more productive and satisfied team.
Your employees will likely fall into one of five performance and growth trajectory combinations:
“Superstars” are team members who like their work and are very good at it, and who are on a very rapid growth trajectory. They’re looking to move up in the ranks and are prepared to dedicate the necessary time and energy to doing so. These results-driven people are often coming up with innovative ideas, carrying your team to the next level.
The most important step in supporting your superstars is making sure they’re consistently challenged so they don’t feel bored or get stuck. There are three ways you can meaningfully push your superstars to continue growing: keep them challenged, don’t get in their way, and don’t assume they want to manage.
Keep them challenged: To prevent boredom, superstars need to be learning constantly. Be on the lookout for new projects they can take on, or find a mentor from outside your team that can help them more than you can. Bear in mind that they’ll most likely outgrow your team, so don’t become too dependent on them—be ready to replace them. You can create a challenge for them by asking them to help you with this—they can teach or train those who are meant to take over once they’ve moved on.
Don’t get in their way: Recognize that your job is to encourage your superstars to grow beyond your team, or help them get hired to a place where they can thrive. All too many managers squash their superstars’ ambitions and growth because they want to keep the great work and willing attitude for themselves and their team. Stifling your employee in this way will cause resentment, lack of motivation, and subsequently, poor work. Likewise, many managers fail to recognize when they have a potential superstar on their hands who just doesn’t do great work on their team. There are other places this person can thrive—make sure you’re not holding them back from pursuing better opportunities by insisting that they just try harder in their current position. Help them look for opportunities where they can do great work.
Don’t assume they want to manage: Thinking that growth naturally leads to management is a common mistake, because in many organizations there’s a real emphasis put on “leadership potential.” This emphasis on leadership is unfair on several levels. It’s unfair for the superstar because it naturally caps their growth. If they’re full of potential, but not leadership potential, there’s only so far they can advance in the organization. They may have untapped growth that can continue to massively benefit the organization or their field, but they’re held back because they don’t want to be anyone’s boss. It’s also unfair to the teams of unwilling managers. When someone’s a boss just because that was the only advancement available, they’ll either do a mediocre job out of disinterest, or a downright bad job out of resentment. Bad management limits both the growth of the employee who could thrive outside a management position, and the growth of team members who could thrive under good management.
Google gets around this particular problem with their “individual contributor” career path, which is even more prestigious than many management positions and is designed to honor the ambitions of superstars who don’t want to be anyone’s boss. In this position, superstars can continue growing and learning on their own terms—they have no overhead supervision and have the freedom to work on projects as they see fit.
Rock stars are team members who like their work and are very good at it, but have chosen not to follow a rapid growth trajectory. They might be happy where they are, or have other things going on in their lives outside work that they want to dedicate time and energy to. These reliable team members are the people who keep things running smoothly from day to day.
The most important step in supporting your rock stars is making sure you’re not ignoring them or their work. There are two ways you can meaningfully support your rock stars: make sure you’re giving them fair reviews, and give them regular recognition for their efforts.
Give them fair reviews: Many organizations’ review processes focus too heavily on leadership or promotion potential. If you focus too heavily on these factors, your rock stars will often be overlooked when it comes to performance reviews—especially if your organization sets a quota on how many stellar reviews you can give out. Your rock stars deserve a few places among these stellar reviews, even if they’re not gunning for a promotion. You should make sure there’s an even mix of rock stars and superstars at the top of your reviews, to ensure that not all your praise is being reserved for those on a rapid growth trajectory.
Give them regular recognition: Your rock stars deserve recognition and respect for the role they have in keeping things running smoothly in your organization. There are a few ways you can meaningfully recognize your rock stars:
It’s crucial to realize that promotions are almost never the type of recognition a rock star wants. Don’t put rock stars up for promotion without having an honest discussion with them about what they want. Otherwise, you risk promoting someone beyond their competence—which a superstar might take as an interesting challenge, but will overwhelm a rock star—or promoting someone who’s competent but has no desire for the new position. While this risk might feel like the right decision for you, it can cost you a valuable employee. Scott witnessed a fellow manager make this mistake: one of his employees had carefully planned out his career so that by the time he had a child, he’d have a solid, well-paying job that he’d mastered. He would have plenty of time and mental energy to focus on his child, because he was so comfortable with his work. However, his manager had other plans and promoted him. The employee, who wanted to stay in his rock star position, declined the promotion and was told that declining wasn’t an option—so, he quit.
When someone has a track record of low performance, and isn’t showing any signs of improvement, you most likely need to fire them. Before doing so, there are three questions to ask yourself:
You might be faced with an employee who, based on their past track record of high performance, should be excelling and taking on new projects, but is instead falling behind or slacking. There are four likely reasons for this: 1) they’re in the wrong role, 2) they’re having a bumpy entry into their new role, 3) they’re having problems at home, or 4) it’s a poor cultural fit.
They’re in the wrong role: Their low performance may be a reflection of your decision to put them in the wrong role. Keep in mind that your employee likely won’t tell you if this is the problem—blaming your boss for your own performance is uncomfortable and feels like an attempt to refuse accountability. You should ask yourself: Are their attributes aligned with this role’s required skill set? Would they do better elsewhere?
For example, you have an employee who’s a wonderful leader and gets great results, so you put her on a tough project. To your surprise, her results are very poor, and she seems completely unmotivated. After considering her attributes, you realize that she’s a great leader because she’s wonderful at working with people, but this particular project requires hours behind closed doors, crunching numbers. You transfer her to a new project where she manages people, and she excels in the new role.
They’re having a bumpy entry into their new role: There are a few reasons your employee might be having a hard time finding their place in a new role. First, they may not have had adequate training. Ask yourself if your expectations are clear, and if their training covered everything they need to know. You might find you need to invest a bit more time into giving more effective training. Second, they may be overloaded with work. Make sure you’re not giving them too much to handle right out of the gate—it’s easy for bosses to lose sight of an employee’s “newness” and give them a workload that only someone with years of experience could accomplish quickly.
They’re having problems at home: Naturally, your employees will occasionally have to deal with personal problems that will affect their work performance. If you’re aware of something happening in your employee’s home life, let her have time and space to recover from the issue on her own. Show that you care by not pushing for high performance until she’s ready—this leads to an effective recovery, instead of a buildup of stress and resentment.
It’s a poor cultural fit: Sometimes an employee is a great fit for the role, but not your work culture. This is an incredibly difficult gap to close. In this case, it’s usually best that the employee leave the organization—otherwise, they will be held back in a culture or among colleagues that they’re always at odds with.
Sometimes, you’ll have an employee who is simply average—they regularly hand in work that’s good but not great, and don’t show much evidence of growth. There are several reasons an employee can get stuck in mediocrity. Sometimes, they’re uninterested in changing—either they fear taking a step back in order to restart on a new path, they feel pressure to keep their position, or they’re in their position solely for the money and power. Other times, the boss doesn’t want to go through the effort of the firing process. Many bosses hesitate on this process because they think it will be too hard to find and train a new person, or the discomfort of the conversation and the employee’s negative feelings is too daunting.
A good boss treats a mediocre employee fairly—this means knowing her well enough to decide if you should let her go or give her space. Letting your employee go is the fair choice when she’s clearly stuck in a position she’s not suited for or thriving in. It’s unfair to assume that mediocrity is just the best she can do. While the process of firing takes time and effort, and feels like the “mean” thing to do, it’s selfish and cruel to stifle an employee’s potential by keeping her onboard just so you can avoid effort and discomfort. Giving your employee space is the fair choice when she needs to recover from a personal event. A boss who cares personally about her employees understands what’s going on in their lives and how it may cause their work to fall short, and knows to avoid pushing for better performance in a moment when their employee can’t handle it.
Growth Management Mistakes to Avoid
Bosses often make a couple mistakes when thinking of how to manage their employees. First, they think of their employees in terms of their “potential”—this automatically ranks superstars above rock stars, even though they’re equally important. It’s helpful to reframe how you think. Instead of focusing on potential, consider your employees’ past performance, growth, and willingness or interest in continuing their growth. This line of thinking gives you the best idea of whose work is consistently valuable, and what type of growth trajectory each of your employees is on.
Second, many bosses think that pushing all employees into a rapid growth trajectory will lead to better results. However, the best results are delivered when you see and honor the motivations of each of your employees. Your rock stars shouldn’t be forced into doing work or taking on roles that come with a work or stress level they’ll find overwhelming. Keeping them on a gradual growth trajectory contributes to great results because it prevents burnout. Your superstars, on the other hand, can and should be put on a rapid growth trajectory—this contributes to great results by preventing boredom and frustration.
While it’s important to manage all of your employees, you’ll want to focus most of your time on supporting your rock stars and superstars. Otherwise, you end up wasting time trying to take “okay” to “good” when you could be focusing your efforts on taking “good” to “great.” When you have a strong team and you can trust that all your employees are doing great work, then you can trust that they’ll work together in a way that drives great results.
These labels are not permanent—growth trajectories and goals change constantly, based on work or life events that dictate the amount of work someone can take on. Someone who was once a high performer may reach a point where they’re no longer invested in the work and become a low performer, or one of your superstars may have a situation in their home life that slows their growth for the time being. For example, Scott—usually in a superstar role—found herself needing extra time to readjust after the birth of her twins. She asked to be placed in a rock star role for several years, allowing her to spend more time with her family. When she was ready, she jumped back onto her superstar trajectory.
Because circumstances are constantly changing, it’s important that you frequently check in with your employees to learn about what’s going on in their lives, talk about their ambitions, and ensure that their growth trajectory suits them. In the next chapter, we’ll discuss how to have these conversations and put all your team members on the right track.
Knowing what best motivates your team members and honoring their ambitions is key to satisfied employees who do great work.
Think of a superstar on your team—someone who always delivers great results, and is on a steep growth trajectory. What have you done to keep this person challenged?
What responsibilities or learning opportunities can you offer your superstar (for example, training the person who will replace them, or introducing them to a mentor)?
Think of a rock star on your team—someone who always delivers great results, but who is not interested in a steep growth trajectory. How can you recognize their steady efforts without adding unwelcome pressure or stress?
If you have someone on your team who’s struggling, you have to help uncover the source of their problems and help them find the way forward.
Think of someone on your team who should be a superstar, but isn’t performing well. Describe this person—the type of projects they work on, when they started, and how you know they should be excelling.
What are some of the obstacles that could be getting in the way of doing great work? (For example, you’ve given them too many projects right away, they have personal matters holding them back, or their training wasn’t thorough.)
As their boss, what can you do to help “unstick” them and allow them to thrive? (For example, fill in training and knowledge gaps, transfer them to a different team with projects better suited to their skills, or give them space to sort out a personal matter.)
Understanding growth trajectories is a good first step to honoring the needs of your employees—the next step is learning about their dreams and goals, and helping them recognize how their work can contribute to those dreams.
To accomplish this, have honest conversations with all of your direct reports—regardless of performance—about who they are, what their goals are, and how you can help them reach those goals. There are three conversations vital to effective growth management: the life story conversation, the dreams conversation, and the planning conversation
The life story conversation is essential to getting to know your employees—if you want to care personally about them, you need to know them personally. Ask your employees about their life story, focusing on changes they made and why these choices were made—it’s often here that you’ll discover their values. For example, if your employee says, “I dropped out of grad school because I was tired of talking about theory and not using any of the skills I was learning in a tangible way,” you learn that one of her values is seeing tangible results of her work. These conversations also lend context to abstract values that can easily be misunderstood. While a focus on “financial independence” might make you think an employee is materialistic, knowing his life story might reveal that his mother was often absent because she was working two jobs to make ends meet, and he doesn’t want the same experience for his children.
Approach this conversation with respect and care—while most people will be comfortable with it, you might have someone who is significantly uncomfortable with the questions. In this case, drop the matter and move on quickly.
Ultimately, this first conversation should reveal what’s truly important to your employee, which helps contextualize your next conversation, in which you’ll talk about their dreams and figure out what skills and opportunities will be most useful to them.
The dreams conversation helps you understand what your employees ultimately want out of their careers and their lives, and as their boss, how you can help them get there. This makes their work more meaningful and rewarding and they’re assured that you truly care about them as people.
It’s important to frame this conversation around dreams. Calling them “long-term goals” or “plans” usually invites professional, not personal answers that are often catered to what the employee thinks their boss wants to hear. It’s possible that their dreams will be work-related, such as, “I want to retire at 50,” but this reframe often pushes people to name their non-work goals such as, “I want to own a dude ranch in Colorado.”
In preparation for your next conversation, task them with figuring out the necessary skills to reach their dream. Then, they should consider the importance of each skill, and their competence. This step reveals where they need more experience and skills development, and gets you thinking about how you’ll help them achieve that. Think about networking you could help them with, or new projects that you could put them on.
The last conversation, the planning conversation, is where you help your employee come up with a solid plan for achieving their dreams. This conversation shouldn’t be focused on telling your employees how to move up in your organization. Rather, it should be focused on finding ways to make their current work clearly translate to preparation for their dreams.
List the ways their work can change to better support the direction they’d like to move in—such as working with mentors, taking on new projects to develop skills, or taking classes. Then, come up with action items for each idea listed, and a deadline. This provides tangible steps toward building their dream, and demonstrates how their current work is important to getting there.
Alongside talking to your team members about their dreams and coming up with action plans, you should check in once a year on their professional performance and growth trajectory. This tells you if their needs are being met, how their work affects the team, and what their plan should look like moving forward.
There are three parts to this exercise:
Hiring, Firing, and Promoting
As a boss, you’ll be heavily involved in making major decisions about the growth of your team and its members such as hiring onto your team, firing low performers, and promoting your reports into new roles. It’s essential to approach these decisions with radical candor to achieve positive outcomes.
Above all, hire with the needs of the entire team in mind. Do you have too many superstars, and not enough rock stars? Do you need a dose of innovation from a superstar? When you’re hiring, keep in mind that hiring is a subjective process—subjectivity can’t be fully eliminated, but there are a few ways that it can be managed.
Define your team’s culture. Come up with 3-4 words that describe your team’s culture, such as ambitious, straightforward, polite, blunt, big-picture, and so on. Interview specifically for that fit—this reduces personal bias in cases where you don’t love the person, but they’d be a great fit for your team. You could also include the growth trajectory you’d ideally like the person to have, so you interview toward that, rather than interviewing with your own goals and trajectory in mind.
Prescreen candidates blindly. To make sure you’re not unconsciously biased against certain applicants, set up a prescreening system where candidates can show you the work they’re capable of before you see who they are. For example, you could ask candidates to perform a task relevant to the work they’d be doing for you. This eliminates people who have a nice résumé but can’t back it up, and it gives opportunity to people with a mediocre résumé but great skill set.
(Shortform note: Read our summary of Blink to find out more about how unconscious bias affects hiring decisions, and how to get around it.)
Create a hiring committee. Having multiple perspectives on a candidate ensures that you’re not letting your bias get in the way of a good hiring decision. A good hiring committee has about four people, and it should be diverse. It might be off-putting for a woman to be interviewed by all men, or a person of color to be interviewed by an all-white committee. Additionally, at least one person should be from a different team than the one being hired onto. This prevents the committee from being tempted to make a decision just to fill an empty role on the team as quickly as possible.
You should have just one committee, which speaks to all candidates. It’s not helpful if one committee liked Candidate A, and a different committee liked Candidate B—they have no common point to make comparisons from.
Take casual moments into account. People are likely to reveal who they really are outside of the interview room. Take them out for lunch and observe how they talk to the waiter, or ask your receptionist for their opinion on the candidate.
Write down your thoughts. Write down your impressions immediately after the interview—this allows you to later recall the specifics of your discussion, or small signals that they would or wouldn’t be a good fit for your team. Your hiring committee can make better decisions when they rely on true impressions, not recalled impressions.
Make the decision together. Bring your hiring committee together to discuss candidates. Share everyone’s feedback about each candidate at the beginning of the meeting, and debate until you come to a mutual decision. If you, as the boss, put forth a preferred choice and no one objects, that should be your choice.
As with hiring, there will likely be a time in your career that you’re tasked with letting an employee go. This shouldn’t be an easy process, but neither should it be impossible. If your organization fires people easily, it’s likely that bad firing decisions are being made—which carries the risk of causing anxiety among your team members, who worry that they’re next. This will create a culture of fear, where people don’t try new ideas or take risks because a failure might get them booted. If your organization never fires anyone, it’s likely that there are underperformers dragging their whole team down—which carries the risk of high performers quitting out of frustration.
There are three ways that you can ensure that your firing process is as radically candid as possible: don’t delay, ask for peer opinions, and demonstrate that you care personally.
Don’t delay. Too many bosses put off firing conversations to avoid the risk of discomfort and negative emotions. Sometimes, they put it off long enough to talk themselves out of the decision. Common excuses to put off firing include:
Ask for peer opinions. It’s easy to get lost in the emotions of firing someone—perhaps you’re acting unfairly out of anger, or acting too lenient out of fear. As noted in Chapter 5, before deciding to fire someone, you should ask a neutral third party if they think your decision is fair. If they agree with your decision, ask for help from peers, your boss, or HR to help you with your documentation so that your reasons for firing your employee are as clear as possible.
Demonstrate that you care personally. The trusting relationship you’ve built with this person shouldn’t disappear during the firing process. There are several ways to make it a more dignified process for them.
The most important guideline when it comes to promotion is that you must be sure that your promotions are fair—the best way to avoid unfairness or favoritism in promotions is to give up the power of being the only person making the decision. However, when you get your peers together to discuss promotions and align them with one another, things can take a negative or competitive turn—there are several ways you can keep promotion discussions productive.
Prepare for your meeting. Everyone on your team should send in a list of the employees they’re planning to promote and a justification for each. Read through their justifications, and come prepared with an opinion on each person listed.
Keep an eye on time management. Go through your junior positions first, as they should be the least time-consuming decisions, and then work up to your senior positions. Don’t let the debates go on too long, or you risk decisions being made out of boredom or frustration. If the choice seems obvious to you, call the decision yourself. Otherwise, ask that the discussion on that person be continued outside the meeting and revisited, then move on.
Plan to clear the air. You can only promote so many people, and everyone believes their candidate is the most deserving. Subsequently, these discussions can be difficult, emotionally-charged, and competitive. Plan an activity for the group after the meeting to calm down, such as taking a walk together to grab coffees, or a fun class like axe-throwing.
Having conversations that demonstrate how your team members’ work translates into building their dreams is key to keeping motivation high—practice within the context of your own dreams.
Think about your dreams. Keep in mind these don’t need to be related to your work. (For example, you might dream of owning a dude ranch in Colorado, or of early retirement.) Describe one of your dreams.
Make a list of the skills you think you’ll need to achieve this dream, and your competence in each skill.
Come up with 3-4 action items that build toward your dream, and set a deadline for each. (For example, shortlist farm management courses by the end of the month, or have x amount in savings by June.)
The fourth goal of a radically candid workplace is building a highly collaborative atmosphere and a team that works together to accomplish much more than you could individually. The principle of caring personally is especially important to a collaborative atmosphere, for several reasons. First, it allows you to invite an exchange of perspectives—that is, incorporating another’s way of thinking or doing things into your own way of thinking or doing things. Second, caring interrupts the self-interested mindset of focusing only on results.
Charging ahead toward decisions and results—without caring about the people you work with—can cause a breakdown in your team. For example, at Google, Scott tried to change team structures and responsibilities drastically, without letting her team in on her decision-making process. While her ideas were good, the team fell apart. Because she’d acted alone, her team felt confused or personally targeted by her changes, and some people chose to ignore the proposed workflow. Some people, angry that she’d acted alone in such a drastic decision, even quit her team.
Accomplishments don’t come from diving into a problem alone, telling people what to do, and focusing only on results. They come from approaching problems and solutions collaboratively, setting your power aside, and focusing on your team members.
Collaboration is a long process that should, at some point, involve every member of your team who will be affected by the outcome. There are seven steps to effective collaboration: listening, clarifying, debating, deciding, persuading, executing, and learning. While you want to move your team through the steps quickly, so that collaboration feels like a worthwhile task instead of a burdensome chore, don’t skimp on or skip over any of the steps. The success of each step builds on the success of the one before.
Your job as a leader is to listen to every person on your team, with the goal of amplifying their voice. You’ll usually resort to one of two types of listening: quiet listening and loud listening. It’s likely that you’ve already adopted one of these listening styles over your lifetime. You don’t need to change your listening style when you become a boss, but you do need to learn how to use your particular listening style effectively, and be in tune with how others receive it.
Quiet listening means inserting silence in your conversations in order to create space for the other person to speak. The advantage of this type of listening is that people are more likely to say what they’re really thinking—rather than what they think you want to hear—when they’re expected to fill silence and don’t have to deal with a highly reactive conversation partner.
Executed improperly, however, quiet listening comes with a number of disadvantages. People may waste their time trying to guess what you want, or present their own ideas as yours in meetings or conversations. They can get away with this easily if you’re not very vocal about your own ideas, in favor of keeping the floor open for others. Creating silence in conversations can also make people very uncomfortable and stress them out, or can make them feel that you’re trying to use discomfort to trick them into speaking, which undermines the productivity of the conversation.
To be an effective quiet listener, focus on building conversations that make everyone feel comfortable. The first way to do this is to model the behavior you want to see—if you want people to put forth their unpopular opinions, you need to put your unpopular opinion on the table first. You could say something like, “I think that our system to respond to customer support inquiries is outdated and slowing us down. What do you think?” If you want people to challenge you, you have to open the floor to them and make the invitation to challenge clear. For example, you might say, “Please come to our meeting with some ideas on how my system for handling customer support inquiries could be improved.”
Create space for meaningful discussion, but don’t spend too much time on silence—it shouldn’t take up your whole conversation. Too much silence seems like you’re not engaging with what’s being said.
Loud listening depends on saying things that will make the people you are speaking to react or push back—this usually happens when you put forth a firm opinion and ask for a response to it. The advantage of this method is that no one wastes time trying to figure out what you're thinking—it’s quite clear. It also quickly gets to the root of opposing points of view and holes in logic.
However, it’s important to understand that many people you talk to won’t have the type of confidence they need to challenge you, especially if you are their boss. Improperly executed loud listening scares people into agreeing with you and backing down, which isn’t a productive outcome for anyone. You can encourage the confidence to challenge by stating your idea clearly, and then—as with effective quiet listening—explicitly asking that the other person challenges your idea. This might look like, “I want to revamp our customer support templates, but the way I want to go about it might be unnecessarily time-consuming and overall, not a great idea. I want you to tell me where my logic isn’t making sense, so we can discuss.”
Neither listening style is better or more managerial. Keep the listening style you’ve developed over the years, but refine it so that it best serves your purposes and your team. Caring personally and truly knowing your team members is helpful here—you can see how your listening style is perceived by the people around you, and can make necessary adjustments to make sure everyone is comfortable enough to challenge one another.
Your team members should also be taught how to effectively listen to each other. This has several advantages. First, it takes the burden off you to be the “designated listener.” When there are more effective listeners on your team, more ideas and suggestions can be heard. Second, team members see the small points for improvement that high-level managers often overlook, and are more receptive to suggestions for improvement when they’re not prioritizing around high-level matters. When small ideas—the type of ideas that spur innovation and creation—are given the space and time they deserve, other team members are inspired to come forward with their own ideas/suggestions, furthering the innovative cycle.
Start by demonstrating good listening in a highly visible, basic way—in meetings, work on modeling behaviors that give everyone a voice. These behaviors might include:
Ideas that aren’t totally clear or well thought-out are likely to be dismissed or rejected when presented to others—your job as a boss is to help your team members clarify their ideas for an audience. Your commitment to caring personally is helpful here, because your clarification suggestions will be most effective when you know who your team member is as a person and understand who she’ll be presenting her ideas to. Clarification has two main parts: letting your team member bounce ideas off you, and helping your team member know her audience.
Let Team Members Bounce Ideas Off You
As a boss, your job in the clarification step is helping your team member work out her ideas’ kinks in a nonjudgmental space before she presents them in much harsher arenas. The best way to work through ideas is a brainstorming session—this meeting should help you cut out bad, time-wasting ideas and choose and refine good ideas.
Commit to challenging directly at this stage. Much of the time, good ideas are in serious need of work. Pointing out an idea’s flaws isn’t mean—it points you toward solutions for the problems, and a bit of refinement now will keep the idea from being killed off at a later stage. Before going into these meetings, don’t be tempted to try to save time by asking your team member to think through the problems and solutions on her own ahead of time. Creative problem-solving happens in the back and forth of discussions.
It’s crucial to teach your team members that when they’re presenting an idea, it’s their responsibility to make sure everyone understands—not the other way around. The first way to approach this responsibility is pushing your team member to continue clarifying until they’re left with the core essence of their idea—something that would be impossible for someone to misunderstand.
Then, help them think of who their audience is and how the audience might receive their ideas. For example, your graphic designers and your backend engineers aren’t going to care about the same things—you want to help them cater their ideas specifically to the people they’re presenting to. They should ask themselves:
Debate is an essential step in getting good results. When ideas can be discussed and improved, it leads to better decision-making and easier persuasion of the people who are going to execute or be affected by the decision. Some bosses think it’s better to make decisions on behalf of their team—it’s quicker and avoids the friction that often comes with debate—but not allowing team members to debate and talk through decisions creates distrust and feelings of being “left out,” which will make it harder to persuade people to future decisions.
As the boss, you don’t need to be in every debate. However, you do need to foster a healthy debate culture among your team. Healthy debate culture doesn’t imply debates where there’s no real friction or big ideas to wrestle with. It means that debate is structured in such a way that it makes sense, is respectful, and doesn’t take too much emotional energy out of your team. There are six ways that you can help create a healthy debate culture.
Method #1: Make sure ego isn’t getting in the way of good ideas. Often, conversation around finding the best answer gets derailed by people’s egos and the need to be right or “win.” If you sense that people are starting to focus on winning instead of finding an answer, your job is to remind everyone of the goal, and redirect the conversation in a productive direction. There are several ways to save an ego-driven conversation.
First, set up clear rules before debates, such as no interruptions, or no giving criticism without adding an idea. Then, be quick to stop anyone who claims an idea as “theirs” instead of involving the whole team, or uses the opinions of absent people to bolster their opinion—such as in saying, “We don’t think that’s the right direction for this project.” Finally, have team members switch their position on an issue halfway through the debate—knowing that they’ll have to argue against themselves makes people put aside their egos and listen more.
Method #2: Establish the expectation of disagreement. Good debate doesn’t happen when everyone around the table is in agreement—make it clear that you expect someone to consider the issue from a different perspective. If simply asking your team to disagree won’t work, you can use a prop to represent the expectation of disagreement. When there isn’t enough debate happening, hand over the prop (and the duty to disagree) to a team member.
Method #3: Know when to take a break. Your debate may reach a point where everyone is too tired—physically, mentally, or emotionally—to productively contribute. It’s unlikely that pushing your team past this point will result in a good outcome. Team members might start bickering instead of debating, or a decision will be made just to end the meeting.
It’s your job to know your team members well enough to see when they are approaching this point, make the call to stop the debate, and decide when to pick it back up.
Method #4: Know your audience. Recognize that you might have team members who don’t like debate—they might be anxious about speaking up, or find the practice too aggressive or direct. If you know your team members well enough, you’ll be able to see when they’re not comfortable with the debate atmosphere, and you can jump in to help them.
Ease debate discomfort by making the goals and expectations of the debate clear from the beginning, which diminishes anxiety about how things will go or how it will end, and use your ground rules, such as no criticism without contribution, to show that it’s a safe space for speaking up.
Method #5: Set a deadline for your decision. Everyone needs to have the same expectations for when a decision will be reached—otherwise, there will be tension between those who want to think for a bit before making a decision and those who want to make a decision at the end of the meeting. Mark a decision deadline for each of your debate topics, so everyone is aware from the beginning when decisions are expected to happen.
Method #6: Don’t make a decision just to end the debate. When a debate’s been dragging on for a long time, it’s tempting to make a decision just so that it will end—as the leader, you’re the one who will be expected or pressured to pull the trigger on this decision. Remember that your job is to support your team members by taking breaks, setting new rules, or redirecting conversation so they can see their debates through to the end. Don’t take agency away from them by making a quick decision.
When it comes time to make a decision, make sure the right people are the decision-makers. Keep in mind that the most senior people—and you, as the boss—are often considered decision-makers, but they’re not necessarily the people with the best information. Furthermore, know that the people who demand to make decisions shouldn’t be decision-makers. They tend to think they’re always right, and the refusal to consider any other perspectives or information leads to poor decision-making.
Your decision-makers should be those who are close to the facts surrounding a situation, and thus have the best possible information to make a decision. Good bosses make sure that these people are given the clearance to make as many decisions as possible, instead of creating decision-making processes that favor senior people or higher management.
As the boss, you’re mostly overseeing decisions on a higher level and don’t need to be actively involved in decision-making meetings. However, it’s important to occasionally jump into the details of a small decision-making process that piques your interest. This accomplishes several goals:
It might feel pointless to put effort into persuading people to go along with a decision once you’ve already made it, but it’s critical that everyone who will be helping you execute the decision is persuaded of its value—skipping this step leaves key people feeling unimportant and disconnected. There are three steps to effective persuasion: listen to your audience’s feelings about the decision, prove the credibility of the person making the decision, and explain the logic behind the decision.
Listen to your audience’s feelings. You might have an emotional connection to your decision, but that’s not what’s important—persuasion requires thinking of how you can connect your audience’s emotions to the same problem.
Prove the decider’s credibility. There are several components to credibility. First, you need to know exactly what you’re talking about, and back up your knowledge with demonstrated good results and decisions. The second component is practicing humility. Humility involves talking about the accomplishments and vision of “us” or “we” rather than “me” or “I.” Instead of trying to persuade people with, “I’ve built a team that gets stellar results, and my projects have always been successful,” you might try, “We get stellar results—look at our track record of successful ad campaigns.”
Explain your logic. Logic can be tricky to explain to others—because you’ve been part of the decision-making process from the beginning, the logic seems clear to you. However, it’s important to do so, because someone who’s looking at your idea for the first time may spot holes in your logic that you’re not aware of. Walk your audience through your idea, from beginning to end—explain how you came up with it and detail the entire process leading up to the moment you stood up in front of them. Either your audience will point out the holes in the logic—at which point you need to take the idea through clarifying, debating, and deciding again before coming back—or they will see there are no holes in the logic and be persuaded.
Your job as a boss is to get your team through the steps of collaboration as efficiently as possible, so they have time to execute on their ideas. You can accomplish this by keeping things efficient and scheduling execution time.
While much of your contribution to collaborative work should be in the form of meetings and clearing the path for your employees, you shouldn’t stop all execution duties when you become a boss. It’s important to flex your own execution muscles from time to time. When you’re too separated from your team’s work or what it looks like to execute decisions in your organization, you won’t know how to adequately clarify their ideas or prepare them for debate or persuasion meetings. Stay connected by doing some of the work yourself.
It’s crucial to examine results and note the ways that the collaborative process could have gone more smoothly or been improved, because this is where growth happens. It’s fairly common sense that you learn equally valuable lessons from your successes and your failures—but denial is a much more frequent reaction to failure than learning is. There are two reasons for this: expectations of consistency and burnout.
After you realize you’ve made a bad decision and have learned from it, you may find that people’s expectations of consistency drive them to blame your changing opinion on a lack of integrity. You can work against this by clearly communicating what new information caused you to change your mind
Burnout and being worn down by issues in your work or personal life also makes failure difficult to learn from. It takes much less effort to move on quickly from the failure without looking at it too closely. You can work against this by remembering to practice your self-care method, which should help keep you centered in stressful situations. For example, Dick Costolo, the CEO of Twitter, practiced self-care by focusing on family time. He often turned down incredible opportunities and invitations to have dinner with his family almost every night. This commitment to his self-care helped him make tough decisions and stay calm even in the face of incredible backlash.
The seven steps of collaboration can be time-consuming, and it’s tempting to skip some of the steps. Reflecting on past negative experiences that stemmed from a lack of collaboration will remind you of the importance of working together.
Think of an experience where you, as the boss, made a decision on behalf of your entire team that turned out negatively. (For example, you decided to change working hours to better work with clients in New York, or split a team of multitaskers up into dedicated task forces.) Describe your decision.
Describe the outcome of making the decision without discussion. (For example, team members regularly came in late because their schedules didn’t work with the new hours, or team members left for other departments that would let them continue multitasking.)
What problems do you think you would have been made aware of, if you’d made this decision collaboratively with your team?
What creative solutions to these problems could you have come up with if you’d worked through them collaboratively with your team?
If you’ve built a radically candid team that can listen to one another’s ideas, work toward common goals in debate, and make good decisions, your main job during the collaborative process should be maintaining effective communication. There are three areas in which focusing on communication is vital: the meetings that happen throughout the collaborative process, the learning and shared information around execution, and the messages you’re sending about culture.
There are six types of meetings that should happen over the course of the collaborative decision-making process: one-on-one meetings, your staff meetings, reflection, debates, decisions, and all-hands meetings.
In one-on-one meetings with employees, you should demonstrate personal care by getting to know them better, figure out what’s going well and what’s not, and help clarify their ideas. For these meetings, your employee should set the agenda, so they have the opportunity to discuss what’s really important to them.
There are several ways to help guide these conversations in a productive direction:
These meetings create vital conversations—both for getting to know your employee and for refining ideas for the next steps of collaboration—so do not think of them as low-priority and reschedulable.
A well-run weekly staff meeting can get everyone up to speed on shared priorities. This meeting should have three goals: review the previous week’s work, share updates, and outline what needs to be done in the coming week.
Among all your work, you need to be sure that there’s time to clarify your own thoughts and reflect on how you can help your team members. Schedule time for reflection into your calendar (a few hours a week, at least) and be firm that nothing can be scheduled during that time. Your team members should do the same.
Debate meetings are for debate only, not decisions. Keeping your debate and decision meetings separate reduces the friction between those who want to get to a decision ASAP and those who want to continue talking about an issue. Again, anyone should be able to attend these meetings if they want to. The only people required to be in these meetings are those identified during your staff meeting.
The outcome of a debate meeting should be a full understanding of the issue at hand, clarification on what needs to happen moving forward, and a consensus on if more debate is needed or if it’s time to make a decision
A dedicated decision meeting is important because it signals clearly that it’s time to stop debating and start deciding. As with debate meetings, decision meetings should be open to anyone who wishes to attend—but the decision-makers in these meetings should only be those who are closest to the facts and thus have the information to make the best possible decision.
The outcome of a decision meeting should be a meeting summary that’s sent out to relevant people to explain the decision, and a decision that can’t be appealed or debated. A decision that can be easily taken back or changed is meaningless. Remember that you aren’t the decision-maker in these meetings. If you have a very strong opinion about the subject, you can attend the meeting and give your input, or declare veto power—but this should be used sparingly.
The purpose of the all-hands meeting is to persuade the people outside your team that the right decision was made—if you make decisions without sharing, people tend to think you’ve done something sneaky or exclusive. These meetings aren’t important for a small team where everyone is usually well informed about changes and decisions, but they are important for very large teams with more than 100 people. All-hands meetings should have two parts: a presentation and a Q&A session.
The presentations are usually done by the decision-makers and should include one or two reasons this decision is important or exciting, as the goal is to get everyone informed and on board. The follow-up Q&A session should usually be led by higher-ups such as the CEO or team leaders. Their role is to learn what their employees are really thinking or concerned about, and to answer challenging questions in a persuasive manner.
There are several steps you can take to ensure that your team is sharing information throughout the execution of their ideas, and to keep your lines of communication open so you can continue to learn about your organization at all levels.
The collaborative process requires a lot of meetings, and it’s important to take some time off from them—when you have too many meetings, there’s no time to execute on the decisions that have been made. Schedule dedicated time for execution into your calendar every week, and ask your team members to do the same. Commit yourself to this calendar event as you would any other meeting.
When working toward a goal together, it’s important that teammates are able to visualize their own workflows within the larger context of the team’s. Making workflows visible to everyone accomplishes three main goals.
Visible workflows allow your team to easily identify issues, delays, and other problems early. They can fix these issues on their own, before they get so large that management needs to step in.
Visible workflows reveal who’s putting in the work to get good results, and who is coasting on the success of their team. This information is equally important when things are going well, and you want to know who deserves the most recognition, and when things are going poorly, and you want to know who you can rely on to get the team out of a sticky situation. Additionally, this information naturally leads to promotions, stellar performance reviews, and recognition where they’re really deserved.
Visible workflows illustrate what activities or work are creating success and where focus or priorities should be shifted. For example, the Google AdSense team hired salespeople to make cold calls to large websites. However, before the sales team could get underway with cold calling, orders from smaller sites started pouring in. Since the orders were easier to deal with than calls, the sales team started focusing almost exclusively on them. There was a lot of money coming in, but it wasn’t because the sales team was successful—after all, they were only processing orders, not selling. Once the AdSense team started measuring activities and realized that their salespeople were almost exclusively doing work they weren’t hired for, they were able to redirect them back to making cold calls and added a support team for processing orders. As a result, the sales team could use their skills to land much bigger sites and bring in significantly more revenue, and AdSense could continue benefiting from the smaller orders.
An easy workflow visualization system you can set up is the Kanban system. It involves putting up a board with three columns—to do, in progress, and completed. Assign each of your team members a different color and give them sticky notes in that color. Team members will write their tasks on their sticky notes and move them between columns as they work through their tasks.
As the boss, you’re naturally busy—with meetings, travel, your own work, giving guidance, and so on—and it’s not possible to squeeze in meetings with everyone in your organization. Nevertheless, it’s important that you get to know people at all levels of your organization and keep tabs on what’s happening. Do this by scheduling time to simply walk around, and make an effort to accomplish three things during your walk:
Throughout this process remember that though you might not be the one making decisions and executing on them, you as the boss have incredible influence on your workplace’s culture—which has incredible influence on your team’s results. For example, Ben Silbermann, the CEO of Pinterest, is very introverted and hates conflict. He found that his personality inadvertently created a workplace culture that was largely introverted and shied away from debates.
One of the most important things you can do for your work culture is keep an eye on how you might be influencing it—and radical candor can help you accomplish this. If you’re regularly asking for guidance from your employees and colleagues, and have built trusting relationships so their feedback is sincere, they will make your influence (good and bad) clear to you.
Besides depending on guidance from your employees and colleagues, be self-aware. Understand that your words carry a lot of weight—what feels like a minor suggestion to you could be taken as a direct challenge. Make sure your employees understand that they can trust you to challenge them directly when need be—they don’t need to read into your offhand comments or suggestions. Be aware that your actions carry weight too. If you are acting out of line with your organization’s values, your team members will take it as a signal that they can act the same way. Make sure your behaviors always align with the culture you’re trying to create. This is especially important when it comes to making mistakes. Always own your mistakes and find a way to fix them—build accountability into your work culture.
Given all your other work, it will be tempting to push small, seemingly unimportant decisions off onto someone else, usually HR. However, doing so allows HR to dictate your culture, without regard for your principles of caring personally and challenging directly. Take the time to decide if there will be alcohol at that staff holiday party, or what to do when a team member accidentally pushes a colleague to tears with jokes.
Finally, put some thought into building an office environment that demonstrates care for its employees though small details—such as putting the coffee that you know your employees like in the breakroom, or giving your team a selection of desk chairs to choose from.
When you commit yourself to caring personally about your team members and challenging them directly, you become a great boss. You build strong relationships with your team members, create a culture of sincere and helpful guidance, put together growth plans that make sense and have personal motivations built in. With this kind of support, your team members will consistently bring their best selves to their work and their collaboration, delivering results that you’d never be able to accomplish alone.
As the boss, it’s important to recognize how you may be unconsciously influencing the culture you’re attempting to build.
Think about a recent behavior of yours that was not aligned with radical candor (such as interrupting an employee, or ignoring a colleague who was clearly upset). Describe the behavior.
What message do you think your behavior sent to your team? (For example, the message that interrupting and not listening is okay, or that they should avoid the discomfort of negative emotions.)
How can you recommit yourself to the culture you’re trying to build, and demonstrate correct behavior to your team members? (For example, at your next staff meeting you say, “I apologize for interrupting last week. That wasn’t a good example of the respectful listening I expect to see. Please feel free to call me out if I do it again.”)