I USUALLY FELT a little surge of pleasure as I stepped off the elevator into the cavernous former warehouse in the East Village we'd rented as the office of Juice Software, the start-up I'd cofounded in 2000. That day, I just felt stressed.
The engineers had worked nights and weekends on an early "beta" version of our product, which would be ready in a week. The sales team had gotten thirty big-name customers lined up for beta testing. If those customers were using our product, we'd be able to raise another round of funding. If not, we'd run out of money in six months.
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I'd gotten only a few steps into the office when a colleague suddenly ran up. He needed to talk right away. He had just learned that he might need a kidney transplant, and he was completely freaked out. After an hour and two cups of tea, he seemed calmer.
I left his desk drained, passing by our quality assurance manager. His child had better news: she'd just received the highest score in the entire state on a standardized math test. He wanted to talk about it. I felt emotional whiplash as I jumped from sympathy to celebration.
Every time I feel I have something more "important" to do than listen to people, I remember Leslie's words: "It is your job!" I've used Leslie's line on dozens of new managers who've come to me after a few weeks in their new role, moaning that they feel like "babysitters" or "shrinks."
We undervalue the "emotional labor" of being the boss. That term is usually reserved for people who work in the service or health industry: psychiatrists, nurses, doctors, waiters, flight attendants. But as I will show in the pages to come, this emotional labor is not just part of the job; it's the key to being a good boss.
There's often a funny preamble to the questions I get, because most people don't like the words for their role: "boss" evokes injustice, "manager" sounds bureaucratic, "leader" sounds self-aggrandizing. I prefer the word "boss" because the distinctions between leadership and management tend to define leaders as BSers who don't actually do anything and managers as petty executors. Also, there's a problematic hierarchical difference implied in the two words, as if leaders no longer have to manage when they achieve a certain level of success, and brand-new managers don't have to lead. Richard Tedlow's biography of Andy Grove, Intel's lengendary CEO, asserts that management and leadership are like forehand and backhand. You have to be good at both to win. I hope by the end of this book you'll have a more positive association with all three words: boss, manager, leader.
Having dispensed with semantics, the next question is often very basic: what do bosses/managers/leaders do? Go to meetings? Send emails? Tell people what to do? Dream up strategies and expect other people to execute them? It's tempting to suspect them of doing a whole lot of nothing.
Ultimately, though, bosses are responsible for results. They achieve these results not by doing all the work themselves but by guiding the people on their teams. Bosses guide a team to achieve results.
Building a cohesive team means figuring out the right people for the right roles: hiring, firing, promoting. But once you've got the right people in the right jobs, how do you keep them motivated? Particularly in Silicon Valley, the questions sound like this: why does everyone always want the next job when they haven't even mastered the job they have yet? Why do millennials expect their career to come with instructions like a Lego set? Why do people leave the team as soon as they get up to speed? Why do the wheels keep coming off the bus? Why won't everyone just do their job and let me do mine?
BUT THE MOST important question, the question that goes to the heart of being a good boss, doesn't usually get asked. An exception was Ryan Smith, the CEO of Qualtrics. I'd just started coaching him, and his first question to me was, "I have just hired several new leaders on my team. How can I build a relationship with each of them quickly, so that I can trust them and they can trust me?" Very few people focus first on the central difficulty of management that Ryan hit on: establishing a trusting relationship with each person who reports directly to you. If you lead a big organization, you can't have a relationship with everyone; but you can really get to know the people who report directly to you. Many things get in the way, though: power dynamics first and foremost, but also fear of conflict, worry about the boundaries of what's appropriate or "professional," fear of losing credibility, time pressure.
Nevertheless, these relationships are core to your job. They determine whether you can fulfill your three responsibilities as a manager: 1) to create a culture of guidance (praise and criticism) that will keep everyone moving in the right direction; 2) to understand what motivates each person on your team well enough to avoid burnout or boredom and keep the team cohesive; and 3) to drive results collaboratively. If you think that you can do these things without strong relationships, you are kidding yourself. I'm not saying that unchecked power, control, or authority can't work. They work especially well in a baboon troop or a totalitarian regime. But if you're reading this book, that's not what you're shooting for.
There is a virtuous cycle between your responsibilities and your relationships. You strengthen your relationships by learning the best ways to get, give, and encourage guidance; by putting the right people in the right roles on your team; and by achieving results collectively that you couldn't dream of individually. Of course, there can be a vicious cycle between your responsibilities and your relationships, too. When you fail to give people the guidance they need to succeed in their work, or put people into roles they don't want or aren't well-suited for, or push people to achieve results they feel are unrealistic, you erode trust.
Defining those relationships is vital. They're deeply personal, and they're not like any other relationships in your life. But most of us are at a loss when we set about to build those relationships. Radical Candor, the fundamental concept of this book, can help guide you.
DEVELOPING TRUST IS not simply a matter of "do x, y, and z, and you have a good relationship." Like all human bonds, the connections between bosses and the people who report to them are unpredictable and not subject to absolute rules. But I have identified two dimensions that, when paired, will help you move in a positive direction.
The first dimension is about being more than "just professional." It's about giving a damn, sharing more than just your work self, and encouraging everyone who reports to you to do the same. It's not enough to care only about people's ability to perform a job. To have a good relationship, you have to be your whole self and care about each of the people who work for you as a human being. It's not just business; it is personal, and deeply personal. I call this dimension "Care Personally."
"Radical Candor" is what happens when you put "Care Personally" and "Challenge Directly" together. Radical Candor builds trust and opens the door for the kind of communication that helps you achieve the results you're aiming for. And it directly addresses the fears that people express to me when asking questions about the management dilemmas they face. It turns out that 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.
Why "radical"? I chose this word because so many of us are conditioned to avoid saying what we really think. This is partially adaptive social behavior; it helps us avoid conflict or embarrassment. But in a boss, that kind of avoidance is disastrous.
Why "candor"? The key to getting everyone used to being direct when challenging each other (and you!) is emphasizing that it's necessary to communicate clearly enough so that there's no room for interpretation, but also humbly. I chose "candor" instead of "honesty" because there's not much humility in believing that you know the truth. Implicit with candor is that you're simply offering your view of what's going on and that you expect people to offer theirs. If it turns out that in fact you're the one who got it wrong, you want to know. At least I hope you want to know!
The most surprising thing about Radical Candor may be that its results are often the opposite of what you fear. You fear people will become angry or vindictive; instead they are usually grateful for the chance to talk it through. And even when you do get that initial anger, resentment, or sullenness, those emotions prove to be fleeting when the person knows you really care. As the people who report to you become more Radically Candid with each other, you spend less time mediating. When Radical Candor is encouraged and supported by the boss, communication flows, resentments that have festered come to the surface and get resolved, and people begin to love not just their work but whom they work with and where they work. When people love their job, the whole team is more successful. The resulting happiness is the success beyond success.
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