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

Bosses at Google can’t simply promote people on their teams at their own discretion. In engineering, managers can encourage or discourage a person from pursuing another job, and they can lobby for the person or not, but people nominate themselves for promotion, and a committee makes the decision. Once a “promotion packet” consisting of a list of ac

three things when giving feedback: 1) the situation you saw, 2) the behavior (i.e., what the person did, either good or bad), and 3) the impact you observed.

Criticism is a gift, and you need to give it in equal measure to your male and female direct reports.

“strong opinions, weakly held.”

In order to distinguish between the two, you must let go of your judgments and your own ambitions, forget for a while what you need from people, and focus on getting to know each person as a human…

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If I say a person is “content,” what is your reaction? Do you admire that person? Would you like to be more that way yourself? Or do you assume…

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The second dimension involves telling people when their work isn’t good enough—and when it is; when they are not going to get that new role they wanted, or when you’re going to hire a new boss “over” them; when the results don’t justify further investment in what they’re working on. Delivering hard feedback, making hard calls about who does what on

That’s why Colin Powell said leadership is sometimes about being willing to piss people off. When you are overly worried about how people will perceive you, you’re less willing to say what needs to be said. Like Jony, you may feel it’s because you care about the team, but really, in those all-too-human moments you may care too much about how they f

From the moment you learned to speak, you started to challenge those around you. Then you were told some version of “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Well, now it’s your job to say it. And if you are a boss or a person in a position of some authority, it’s not just your job. It’s your moral obligation. Just say it

Gradual growth is characterized by stability. People on a gradual growth trajectory, who perform well, have generally mastered their work and are making incremental rather than sudden, dramatic improvements. Some roles may be better suited to a rock star because they require steadiness, accumulated knowledge, and an attention to detail that someone