Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

At Apple, as at Google, a boss’s ability to achieve results had a lot more to do with listening and seeking to understand than it did with telling people what to do; more to do with debating than directing; more to do with pushing people to decide than with being the decider; more to do with persuading than with giving orders; more to do with learn... See more

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell once remarked that being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.* You have to accept that sometimes people on your team will be mad at you. In fact, if nobody is ever mad at you, you probably aren’t challenging your team enough. The key, as in any relationship, is how you handle the anger. When what yo

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What I Wish Someone Had Told Me

1. Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started.


2. Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are how things get finished. Long-term orientation is in short supply; try not to worry about what people think in the short t

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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

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