Radical Candor

At some point, a team at Google decided that it would be good hygiene to have regular management fix-it weeks. (Later, another team did a similar thing but called it “bureaucracy busters.”) Here’s how it worked: a system was created where people could log annoying management issues. If, for example, it took too long to get expense reports approved, you could file a management “bug.” And you could do the same if performance reviews always seemed to take place at the worst possible time of year, or if the last employee survey took too long to fill out, or if the promotion system seemed unfair, and so on. The management bug tracking system was public, so people could vote to set priorities. Somebody was assigned the job of reading through them all and grouping duplicates. Then, during management fix-it week, managers would have bugs assigned to them. They’d cancel all regularly scheduled activities (or most of them) and focus on fixing the management issues that were most annoying to the organization.