Radical Candor

The most amazing thing about a culture is that once it’s strong, it’s self-replicating. Even though you’ve taken a number of conscious actions to impact it, you’ll know you’ve succeeded when it truly is no longer about you.

A team’s culture has an enormous impact on its results, and a leader’s personality has a huge impact on a team’s culture.

nothing is beneath your attention, then others will pay attention to details as well.

Here’s the agenda that I’ve found to be most effective:
■ Learn: review key metrics (twenty minutes)
■ Listen: put updates in a shared document (fifteen minutes)
■ Clarify: identify key decisions & debates (thirty minutes)

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.

THE ULTIMATE GOAL OF RADICAL Candor is to achieve results collaboratively that you could never achieve individually. You’ve created a culture of guidance. You’ve created an exemplary team that embodies the Radical Candor ethos of caring personally and challenging directly. As a result, the team is firing on all cylinders; and perhaps most importantly, it has developed a self-correcting quality whereby most problems are solved before you are even aware of them.

When you have to fire people, do it with humility. Remember, the reason you have to fire them is not that they suck. It’s not even that they suck at this job. It’s that this job—the job you gave them—sucks for them.

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, even if you are dying to hire somebody, allow yourself to be overruled by the other interviewers who feel strongly the person should not be hired.

Once you’ve identified performance issues, take the time to get advice from your boss, to calibrate with your peers (if appropriate), and to get help from HR. Don’t take the attitude that this is your decision alone.