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December 11 - December 11, 2018
when people trust you and believe you care about them, they are much more likely to 1) accept and act on your praise and criticism; 2) tell you what they really think about what you are doing well and, more importantly, not doing so well; 3) engage in this same behavior with one another, meaning less pushing the rock up the hill again and again; 4) embrace their role on the team; and 5) focus on getting results.
“Only about five percent of people have a real vocation in life, and they confuse the hell out of the rest of us.”
role was to listen, to recognize the significance of what he heard, and to create working conditions that allowed everybody to find meaning in their own way.
bloviators
Managers often devote more time to those who are struggling than to those who are succeeding.
Of course, some people hate teaching and are terrible at it: this role should be an honor, not a requirement.
Keep them challenged (and figure out who’ll replace them when they move on)
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.
I believed that everyone can be exceptional somewhere and that it was my job to help them find that role.
Is it time to fire her? There’s no absolute answer to that question, but here are three questions to consider: have you given her Radically Candid guidance, do you understand the impact of Peggy’s performance on her colleagues, and have you sought advice from others?
the ultimate goal of Radical Candor is to achieve collaboratively what you could never achieve individually, and to do that, you need to care about the people you’re working with.
“I didn’t say Steve is always right. I said he always gets it right. Like anyone, he is wrong sometimes, but he insists, and not gently either, that people tell him when he’s wrong, so he always gets it right in the end.”
the relentless focus on challenging himself and those around him to “get it” right rather than to “be” right was part of what drove Apple’s breathtaking ability to execute so well.
If you allow any part of the process to drag out, working on your team will feel like paying a collaboration tax, not making a collaboration investment.
Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer, once said at an Apple University class that a manager’s most important role is to “give the quiet ones a voice.”
keep his facial expression and body language totally neutral.
“If I gave any reaction at all, people would often tell me what they thought I wanted to hear. I found that they were much more likely to say what they really thought—even if it wasn’t what I was hoping to hear—when I was careful not to show what I thought.”
If quiet listening involves being silent to give people room to talk, loud listening is about saying things intended to get a reaction out of them.
“strong opinions, weakly held.”
Loud listening—stating a point of view strongly—offers a quick way to expose opposing points of view or flaws in reasoning.
At Google, people constantly came to me with good ideas—more than I could handle, in fact—and it became overwhelming. So I organized an “ideas team” to consider them.
competitive advantage tends to come not from one great idea but the combination of hundreds of smaller ones.
“It is only by selection, by elimination, and by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.” —GEORGIA O’KEEFFE
I told my team at Google not to bring me problems; instead, I told them, bring me three solutions and a recommendation.
when companies help people develop new ideas by creating the space and time to clarify their thinking, innovation flourishes.
Pixar has a technique called “plussing.” Rather than saying, “No, that is a bad idea,” people must offer a solution to the problem they are pointing out.
a meeting between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the economist John Maynard Keynes. FDR was enormously busy, but he spent well over an hour with this academic. If FDR had understood Keynesian economics, some think the Great Depression might have ended sooner and enormous suffering could have been prevented. But at the end of the meeting, the president was not persuaded. My professor asked the question, “Whose fault was it? FDR’s for not understanding, or Keynes’s for not explaining it well?” This was one of those moments in
The next time you spend two hours helping somebody edit an email until it’s just two sentences, don’t feel you are wasting your time. You are getting to the essence of the idea, which allows the recipient to absorb it quickly and easily. And you are teaching an invaluable skill.
a boss’s job is often to keep the debate going rather than to resolve it with a decision.
The right thing to do would have been to set a “decide by” date, so everybody would know that they couldn’t lobby the project manager endlessly. If the debate seemed too rancorous, I could have asked him how I could help.
One of the hardest things about being a boss is balancing these responsibilities with the work you need to do personally in your area of expertise.
“Is there anything I could do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?”
Don’t do this. It’s essential that you prepare yourself for these scenarios in advance and commit to sticking with the conversation until you have a genuine response. One technique is to count to six before saying anything else, forcing them to endure the silence. The goal is not to be a bully but to insist on a candid discussion—to make it harder for the person to say nothing than to tell you what they’re thinking.
ENGINEERING ORGANIZATIONS OFTEN do the equivalent of spring cleaning. Everyone will stop working on new features for a week and fix bugs in the current product. Engineering teams are constantly tracking and evaluating bugs, so that they have a prioritized list to tackle when the so-called “fix-it” week comes around. A bug fix-it week is sort of the opposite of a Hack Week; instead of a chance to work on new and exciting ideas people usually don’t have time to get to, it’s a chance to fix old and annoying problems that have been bothering people for months.
management bug tracking system was public,
Write down what you actually said in the right-hand column. Write down what you thought in the left-hand column.
when you are mindful that your subjective experience is not objective truth, it can help you challenge others in a way that invites a reciprocal challenge.
Finding help is better than offering it yourself.
Adopting the mindset that guidance is a gift
impromptu guidance really, truly is something you can squeeze in between meetings in three minutes or less. If
The “fundamental attribution error” will harm the effectiveness of your guidance.
Say “that’s wrong” not “you’re wrong.”
Whether you use paper and stickers or the app, asking your team to gauge your guidance will help make Radically Candid guidance feel more natural.
Andy Grove had a mantra at Intel that we borrowed to describe leadership at Apple: Listen, Challenge, Commit.
Criticism is a gift, and you need to give it in equal measure to your male and female direct reports.
an anti-guidance trend that’s creating a perfect storm in higher education—
Kieran Snyder, cofounder of Textio, applied linguistic analysis to performance reviews, and she found that when women challenge directly—which they must do to be successful—they get penalized for being “abrasive.”
When gender bias accounts for just 5 percent of the difference in performance ratings, an organization that starts out with 58 percent of the entry-level positions filled by women winds up with only 29 percent of the leadership positions filled by women.1
The best way to lower the barriers that hierarchy puts between us is to admit that it exists and think of ways to make sure everyone feels they are on an equal footing at a human level despite the structure. To make sure everyone feels free to “speak truth to power.”
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.
