Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

by Charles Duhigg

For some, this atmosphere was exhilarating. “All that anxiety you normally feel trying to figure out what your manager thinks, and what their manager thinks, and wondering what’s actually going on, that’s all gone,” one employee told me. For others, the radical candor could feel cruel. “It gave people permission to be savage,” another employee, Parker Sanchez, said. “Some days I’d cry for an hour.” One advantage of this culture, though, was that it made it easy to discuss nearly anything. “Nothing is off the table,” a high-ranking executive told me. “You think your boss is making a mistake? Tell them. You don’t like how someone runs meetings? Say it. You’re more likely to get promoted than punished.” Employees would regularly send Hastings emails critiquing his strategies or what he had said during meetings, or they would openly criticize him on internal message boards, “and Reed would publicly thank them,” said the executive. “I’ve never worked in a culture like this before. It’s amazing.”