Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean

by Kim Malone Scott

Acknowledge the limitations of ratings, and make sure people see them as a communication tool, not an absolute judgement.

It takes a bit of work to identify the key performance drivers, but doing so brings profound benefits.

you need to describe what teamwork means for an entry-level employee versus a manager, a director, a VP, and so on.

A job ladder shouldn’t be written like a false promise you can’t keep: if you do these things, you’ll get promoted.

Human nature suggests that when we don’t make them with an intentional process, we tend to reward people because we “like” them or based on some recent experience or bias. Doing ratings and explaining their impact on these decisions will force managers to both think through and communicate the decisions more clearly and explicitly.

Don’t forget to focus on people’s strengths when thinking through the consequences of a performance review. Rather than trying to push someone to improve in an area where they are OK for Now, focus on giving them more work they are Great at. Give people work that plays to their strengths, rather than killing their spirit by pushing them to do more things they are not great at doing.

nobody whose work is rated OK for Now should be promoted. A condition for promotion should be a majority of Great ratings consistently over time.

people rarely do their best work with handcuffs on. And if they can afford to, they’ll often walk away from a frustrating or demeaning situation, no matter how lucrative. So taking the time to listen to people is just as important as compensating them well.

There was one VP I knew who found it too difficult to identify actual low performers, so he assigned the lowest ratings Russian-roulette style. He was transparent with his team about it, and thought he was being very clever—he never had to have hard conversations with employees on his team about why they were getting low ratings or with his boss about why he didn’t hit the curve. He was a lazy, unfair leader. These kinds of stories convinced me a forced curve is a bad idea.

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.