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I sidestepped the difficult but necessary part of being a boss: telling people clearly and directly when their work wasn’t good enough.
“It’s called management, and it is your job!”
Guidance, team, and results: these are the responsibilities of any boss.
Your ability to build trusting, human connections with the people who report directly to you will determine the quality of everything that follows.
You have to accept that sometimes people on your team will be mad at you.
Radical Candor works only if the other person understands that your efforts at caring personally and challenging directly are delivered in good faith.
There are two dimensions to good guidance: care personally and challenge directly. As discussed in chapter one, when you do both at the same time, it’s Radical Candor.
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).
My advice is to start by explaining the idea and then asking people to be Radically Candid with you. Start by getting feedback, in other words, not by dishing it out. Then when you do start giving it, start with praise, not criticism. When you move on to criticism, make sure you understand where the perilous border between Radical Candor and Obnoxious Aggression is.
If a person is bold enough to criticize you, do not critique their criticism.
Wanting to combat the cultural taboos against criticizing management, Toyota’s leaders painted a big red square on the assembly line floor. New employees had to stand in it at the end of their first week, and they were not allowed to leave until they had criticized at least three things on the line. The
TO BE SUCCESSFUL at growth management, you need to find out what motivates each person on your team.
“Steep growth” is generally characterized by rapid change—learning new skills or deepening existing ones quickly. It’s not about becoming a manager—plenty of individual contributors remain on a steep growth trajectory their entire careers, and plenty of managers are on a gradual growth trajectory. Nor should steep growth be thought of as narrowly as “promotion.” It’s about having an increased impact over time.
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.
PART OF BUILDING a cohesive team is to create a culture that recognizes and rewards the rock stars.
When people become bosses just to “get ahead” rather than because they want to do what bosses do, they perform, at best, a perfunctory job and often become bosses from hell.
As the boss, you are the editor, not the author.
She expected us to come to our 1:1s with a list of problems she could help us resolve.
The GSD wheel will grind to a halt if you don’t understand intimately the “stuff” your team is trying to get done.
Conversation one: life story
The second conversation: dreams
Conversation three: eighteen-month plan
