Radical Candor

Use THE RADICAL CANDOR Framework like a compass to guide individual conversations to a better place. Please do NOT use it as a personality test to judge yourself or others. Don’t write names in boxes. We all fall into each quadrant multiple times a day.

That is what happens in Ruinous Empathy—you’re so fixated on not hurting a person’s feelings in the moment that you don’t tell them something they’d be better off knowing in the long run.

They determine whether you can fulfill your three responsibilities as a manager: 1) to create a culture of guidance (praise and criticism) that will keep everyone moving in the right direction; 2) to understand what motivates each person on your team well enough to avoid burnout or boredom and keep the team cohesive; and 3) to drive results collaboratively. If you think that you can do these things without strong relationships, you are kidding yourself.

Sheryl laughed. “When you do that thing with your hand, I feel like you’re ignoring what I’m telling you. I can see I am going to have to be really, really direct to get through to you. You are one of the smartest people I know, but saying ‘um’ so much makes you sound stupid.” Now that got my attention.

There are two dimensions to good guidance: care personally and challenge directly.

It’s also useful to be clear about what happens when you fail in one dimension (Ruinous Empathy), the other (Obnoxious Aggression), or both (Manipulative Insincerity).

Another essential thing I stress with my clients: it’s vital to remember that very important lesson from the “um” story—don’t personalize.

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

What’s the best way to manage rock stars, the people whom you can count on to deliver great results year after year? You need to recognize them to keep them happy. For too many bosses, “recognition” means “promotion.” But in most cases, this is a big mistake. Promotion often puts these people in roles they are not as well-suited for

The best way to keep superstars happy is to challenge them and make sure they are constantly learning. Give them new opportunities, even when it is sometimes more work than seems feasible for one person to do. Figure out what the next job for them will be. Build an intellectual partnership with them. Find them mentors from outside your team or organization—people who have even more to offer than you do. But make sure you don’t get too dependent on them; ask them to teach others on the team to do their job, because they won’t stay in their existing role for long. I often thought of these people as shooting stars—my team and I were lucky to have them in our orbit for a little while, but trying to hold them there was futile.

Below are four common “lies” managers tell themselves to avoid firing somebody:

You have to first lay the groundwork for collaboration. When run effectively, the GSD wheel will enable your team to achieve more collectively than anyone could ever dream of achieving individually—to burst the bounds of your brain.

The keys are 1) have a simple system for employees to use to generate ideas and voice complaints, 2) make sure that at least some of the issues raised are quickly addressed, and 3) regularly offer explanations as to why the other issues aren’t being addressed. This system should not merely empower anyone to point out things that could be better but also enable others to help fix those things or make changes.

Russ Laraway explained that I was doing this all wrong when I told my team at Google not to bring me problems; instead, I told them, bring me three solutions and a recommendation. “But then you’re not helping people innovate,” Russ explained. “You’re asking them to make decisions before they’ve had time to think things through. When do they get to just talk, brainstorm with you?” I realized Russ was right; I was abdicating an important part of my job by insisting on the “three solutions and a recommendation” approach.

Less dramatic than these kinds of formalized meetings and programs are your weekly 1:1s. (See Chapter Eight for specific suggestions on making 1:1s more productive.) These meetings should be a safe place for your direct reports to come and talk to you about new ideas. In this context, you shouldn’t judge the ideas but rather help your direct reports clarify their thinking. This is a form of “plussing.” You can point out problems but with the aim of figuring a way around those problems, not killing ideas.

Make sure that individual egos and self-interest don’t get in the way of an objective quest for the best answer.* Nothing is a bigger time-sucker or blocker to getting it right than ego.

Another way to help people search for the best answer instead of seeking ego validation is to make them switch roles. If a person has been arguing for A, ask them to start arguing for B. If a debate is likely to go on for some time, warn people in advance that you’re going to ask them to switch roles. When people know that they will be asked to argue another person’s point, they will naturally listen more attentively.

One of the reasons that people find debate stressful or annoying is that often half the room expects a decision at the end of the meeting and the other half wants to keep arguing in a follow-up meeting. One way to avoid this tension is to separate debate meetings and decision meetings.

Managerial authority played out in virtually all of its procedures. Managers couldn’t just hire people—they had to put candidates through a rigorous interview process that then sent “interview packets” all the way up to Larry Page to approve or disapprove. Promotions were decided not by the managers but by a committee of peers. Performance ratings were influenced by 360-degree feedback on each employee, not just the manager’s subjective opinion, and then calibrated across teams to make sure standards were similarly upheld across teams. That made it pretty hard to play favorites or hold people back unfairly. And so on.

That’s why it’s crucial to remind people that an important part of Radically Candid relationships is opening yourself to the possibility of connecting with people who have different worldviews or whose lives involve behavior that you don’t understand or that may even conflict with a core belief of yours. It’s possible to care personally about a person who disagrees with your views on abortion or guns or God. The fastest path to artificial relationships at work, and to the gravitational pull of organizational mediocrity, is to insist that everyone have the same worldview before building relationships with them. A radically candid relationship starts with the basic respect and common decency that every human being owes each other, regardless of worldview. Once again, the work is the bond everybody on a team does share, and the most productive way to strengthen that bond is by learning how to work together in ways that benefit everyone involved.

“Interesting fact: to be most effective at optimizing the flow of the chemicals oxytocin and serotonin—which boost mood and promote bonding—hold a hug for at least six seconds.”

You don’t want to take your bad days out on your team, but nor can you hide the fact you’re not at your best. The best you can do is to own up to how you feel and what’s going on in the rest of your life, so others don’t feel your mood is their fault.

Walk, don’t sit. When planning a difficult conversation, try taking a walk instead of sitting and talking. When you’re walking, the emotions are less on display and less likely to start resonating in a destructive way. Also, walking and looking in the same direction often feels more collaborative than sitting across a table and staring each other down.

But when you are the boss, that rule doesn’t apply to you. When you encourage people to criticize you publicly, you get the chance to show your team that you really, genuinely want the criticism. You also set an ideal for the team as a whole: everyone should embrace criticism that helps us do our jobs better. The bigger the team, the more leverage you get out of reacting well to criticism in public.

Too many managers fear that public challenge will undermine their authority. It’s natural to want to repress dissent, but a good reaction to public criticism can be the very thing that establishes your credibility as a strong leader, and will help you build a culture of guidance.

When you’re the boss, it’s awkward to ask your direct reports to tell you frankly what they think of your performance—even more awkward for them than it is for you. To help, I adopted a go-to question that Fred Kofman, author of Conscious Business and my coach at Google, suggested. “What could I do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?”

You have to manage your response. Whatever you do, don’t start criticizing the criticism. Don’t start telling the other person they weren’t Radically Candid! Instead, try to repeat what the person said to make sure you’ve understood it, rather than defending yourself against the criticism that you’ve just heard. Listen to and clarify the criticism—but don’t debate it. Try saying, “So what I hear you saying is …”

How many times each week do the people reporting to you criticize you? How often do they praise you? If it’s all praise and no criticism, beware! You’re having smoke blown up your rear end. You need to work harder to get them to criticize you. Try teaching the people on your team about the idea of Radical Candor. Explain why you don’t want them to be ruinously empathetic or manipulatively insincere with you. Tell them you’d welcome Radical Candor, but you’d prefer Obnoxious Aggression to silence.

A system was created where people could log annoying management issues. If, for example, it took too long to get expense reports approved, you could file a management “bug.” And you could do the same if performance reviews always seemed to take place at the worst possible time of year, or if the last employee survey took too long to fill out, or if the promotion system seemed unfair, and so on. The management bug tracking system was public, so people could vote to set priorities. Somebody was assigned the job of reading through them all and grouping duplicates. Then, during management fix-it week, managers would have bugs assigned to them. They’d cancel all regularly scheduled activities (or most of them) and focus on fixing the management issues that were most annoying to the organization.

This simple technique reminds you to describe three things when giving feedback: 1) the situation you saw, 2) the behavior (i.e., what the person did, either good or bad), and 3) the impact you observed. This helps you avoid making judgments about the person’s intelligence, common sense, innate goodness, or other personal attributes. When you pass blanket judgments, your guidance sounds arrogant.

Caring personally is good. Personalizing is bad.

He stopped saying, “You’re wrong,” and instead learned to say, “I think that’s wrong.” “I think” was humbler, and saying “that” instead of “you” didn’t personalize. People started to be more receptive to his criticism.

Most of us pour more time and energy into our work than anything else in our lives. Work is a part of who we are, and so it is personal. Thus when you try to soften the blow by saying, “Don’t take it personally,” you are in effect negating those feelings.

Here is my advice for delivering a performance review well.

The rationale for skip level meetings is that most people are very reluctant to criticize their boss. Plus, managers, especially new managers, will consciously or unconsciously seek to repress criticism rather than to encourage it. Finding out when this is happening and stamping it out will preserve a culture of Radical Candor and prevent a whole world of misery for the people who work for such a manager.

I’ve worked with dozens of people who’ve become managers of managers for the first time, and these skip level meetings were always a source of great interest and anxiety. Here are some of the questions people have asked me most often.

To understand a person’s growth trajectory, it’s important to have career conversations in which you get to know each of your direct reports better, learn what their aspirations are, and plan how to help them achieve those dreams.

Conversation one: life story The first conversation is designed to learn what motivates each person who reports directly to you. Russ suggested a simple opening to these conversations. “Starting with kindergarten, tell me about your life.” Then, he advised each manager to focus on changes that people had made and to understand why they’d made those choices. Values often get revealed in moments of change.

Remember, you’re not looking for definitive answers; you’re just trying to get to know people a little better and understand what they care about.

The second conversation: dreams The second conversation moves from understanding what motivates people to understanding the person’s dreams—what they want to achieve at the apex of their career, how they imagine life at its best to feel. Russ chose the word “dreams” very consciously. Bosses usually ask about “long-term goals” or “career aspirations” or “five-year plans,” but each of these phrases, when used by a boss, tends to elicit a certain type of answer: a “professional,” and not entirely human, answer.

The final part of Russ’s second conversation involves making sure that the person’s dreams are aligned with the values they have expressed. For example, “If ‘hard work’ is a core value, why is one of your dreams to retire early?”

Conversation three: eighteen-month plan Last, Russ taught managers to get people to begin asking themselves the following questions: “What do I need to learn in order to move in the direction of my dreams? How should I prioritize the things I need to learn? Whom can I learn from?” How can I change my role to learn it? Once people were clear on what they wanted to learn next, it was much easier for managers to identify opportunities at work that would help them develop skills in the next six to eighteen months that would take them in the direction of at least one of their dreams. This translation of current work to future dreams was far more inspiring for people than “Here’s how you climb the next rung on the ladder.”

Write growth plans Next, come up with a three- to five-bullet-point growth plan for each person. Make sure that you have projects or opportunities that will stretch the superstars. Make sure that you’re giving the rock stars what they need to be productive. Think of ways to push people who are doing good work to do exceptional work. What kind of new projects or education or help can you offer them? For the people who are doing bad work but show signs of improving: have you put these people in the wrong roles? Are expectations clear? Do they need additional training?

Love stories, so my whole interview technique is just to ask people to “give me the oral version of your résumé.”

Another good practice is to have people intentionally create more casual moments—take candidates to lunch, walk them to the car.

Here’s a tip: schedule an hour, interview for forty-five minutes, and write for fifteen. This arrangement will force you to have a more focused interview and to make a better recommendation about whom to hire.

The best advice I ever got for hiring somebody is this: if you’re not dying to hire somebody, don’t make an offer. And,

There are four very good reasons to push yourself to identify underperformance early. One, to be fair to the person who’s failing. If you identify a problem early, you give the person time to address it. You also reduce the shock if they can’t or won’t address it and you wind up having to fire the person. Two, to be fair to your company. If you identify and address problems early enough, you dramatically reduce the risk of getting sued or the chance that you’ll have to keep them on the payroll for months of painful legal documentation. Three, to be fair to yourself. When you give somebody a good rating one quarter and fire them the next, word gets around, and it undermines trust with everyone else. Not to mention that you risk being sued by the fired employee. Although it is time-consuming and unpleasant to address performance problems, it takes a lot more time and is far more unpleasant to deal with a lawsuit. Four, and most importantly, you want to address underperformance early to be fair to the people who are performing really well. Tolerating bad work is unfair to the people who are doing excellent work.

Usually email people about a month after I’ve fired them to check in. I try to keep my ear to the ground about jobs they might be well-suited for. But even if I don’t have anything to offer, I will reach out. Often, I’m the last person they want to hear from, and so if I don’t hear back I don’t push it, and I don’t blame them. But sometimes the person is happy to take a walk, share a meal, or just have a quick exchange.

Announcing promotions breeds unhealthy competition for the wrong things: documentation of status rather than development of skill. Most promotions come with increased salary, responsibility, and, in some companies, equity. That is a lot of external validation. Presumably, the people getting promoted have been praised in public for the work they’ve done along the path to getting the promotion. But when there are big public celebrations of promotions, the costs in terms of the organization’s focus on hierarchy often outweigh the benefits of publicly recognizing those being promoted. What about making roles clear and transparent? If a promotion includes a change of role, then announce it. But not every change of role signifies a promotion, and not every promotion signifies a change of role. Focus on the work the person is doing, not the status they’ve achieved in the company for doing it.

One of the best ways to keep the people on your team engaged is by partnering actively with them.

The purpose of a 1:1 meeting is to listen and clarify—to understand what direction each person working for you wants to head in, and what is blocking them.

I found that when I quit thinking of them as meetings and began treating them as if I were having lunch or coffee with somebody I was eager to get to know better, they ended up yielding much better conversations.

Here are some questions that you can use to nurture new ideas by pushing people to be clearer:

They are also valuable meetings for you, because these meetings are where you’ll get your first early warning signs that you are failing as a boss. Here are some sure signals:

Learn: review key metrics (twenty minutes). What went well that week, and why? What went badly, and why? This will go best if you come up with a dashboard of key metrics to review.

Listen: put updates in a shared document during a “study hall” (15 minutes). One of the most challenging aspects of managing a team is how to keep everyone abreast of what everyone else is doing so that they can flag areas of concern or overlap without wasting a great deal of time. Updates are different from key metrics. Updates include things that would never make it into the dashboard, like, “We need to change our goals for this project,” “I am thinking of doing a re-org,” “I’m starting to think I need to fire so-and-so,” or “I have to have surgery next month and will be out for three weeks.”

An extremely successful—and busy—CEO I know fought this by blocking two hours of think time on his calendar every day. He wouldn’t move it for anyone.

“BIG DEBATE” MEETINGS are reserved for debate, but not decisions, on major issues facing the team. They serve three purposes:

They foster a larger culture of debate. Debate should occur constantly on a well-functioning team. Having these meetings regularly and seeking topics for them can help build the muscle and tolerance for discussion and dissension.

Make it clear that everyone must check egos at the door of this meeting. The goal of debate is to work together to come up with the best answer. There should be no “winners” or “losers.” A good norm is to ask participants to switch roles halfway through each debate. This makes sure that people are listening to each other, and helps them keep focused on coming up with the best answer and letting go of egos/positions.

PROVE YOU CAN TAKE IT BEFORE YOU START DISHING IT OUT

They found that the five key dynamics for successful teams included: Psychological Safety, Dependability, Structure & Clarity, Meaning, and Impact.

Here are some attributes of good go-to questions:

Here are a few great questions from workshop participants. You’ll see that tone varies a lot person to person.

Receiving criticism can trigger the fight, flight, or freeze response in us even if we have asked for it. Unjust criticism is hard, but fair criticism, particularly when it touches on something we already don’t like in ourselves, is also hard. Figure out what helps you to process what you hear without giving in to a defensive response: a breathing exercise can help; so can taking a long sip from a bottle of water. Most of all, practice with others.

When you’re leading a team, criticism is like your brake and praise is like your accelerator. If you want to go somewhere, you’ve got to use your accelerator more than your brake. If you never use your brake you crash and never get anywhere. And you’ll feel safer pressing your accelerator if you know your brakes work.

ONE MISTAKE THAT people often make is to draw attention to consequences for noncompliance with the feedback before they’ve given the person an opportunity to disagree with it. Many go too quickly to “your job is at risk if you don’t fix this.” That might be true, but if the person disagrees with the feedback, that feels like an unfair consequence.

Before answering this question, I want to be really clear on one point: The biannual or annual review is performance management, which is different from developmental feedback!

Why is it so important to keep development and performance management separate? The ratings and rewards or penalties associated with performance management trigger a threat response that makes it really hard for people to take in any kind of development suggestions.

So if you are trying to create a culture of Radical Candor, it’s important to explain the difference between development conversations (impromptu chats that happen weekly) and a performance review (the formal annual or biannual process that tells people where they stand). You want to maximize the chances that development conversations are purely about helping each person to improve, and to allow the performance management process to focus on making compensation and promotion decisions more transparent.

But first I want to outline some steps for beginning the process of revamping your performance management system, if you decide that is necessary:

Remember: arbitrariness is the enemy, fairness is the goal. The whole point of performance reviews is to demonstrate to employees that you are committed to maintaining a fair system for compensating their work, and that doing so is an integral part of achieving the company’s mission.

As noted, every company has different needs for its performance reviews. This means I can’t design a one-size-fits-all performance review, much as I might like to. What I can do is take you through the key considerations that you and your team will want to keep in mind, and reflect a bit on how Radical Candor can inform your thinking.

Here are four common categories expressed as “generic terms” so they’ll be broadly applicable:

Never doing performance reviews is a bad idea. However, doing them every quarter heavily taxes managers, and doesn’t give employees much time to show improvement from the last rating cycle. So, my recommendation: do it twice a year. One can be lightweight, oral, and just between the manager and employee; the other should be written and include a light 360-degree component.