book highlights

Asshole assholes: They suck at work and everything else. These are the mean, jealous, insecure jerks who you’d avoid at a party, but who inevitably sit immediately next to you at the office. They cannot deliver, are deeply unproductive, so they do everything possible to deflect attention away from themselves. They will lie, craft gossip, and manipulate others to get people off their scent. The only good thing about these assholes is that they’re generally out the door pretty quickly—they can only deflect for so long before people start noticing that they bring zero value....

People will do almost anything to not feel pain, including causing pain and abusing power; Very few people can handle being held accountable without rationalizing, blaming, or shutting down; and Without understanding how our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors work together, it’s almost impossible to find our way back to ourselves and each other. When we don’t understand how our emotions shape our thoughts and decisions, we become disembodied from our own experiences and disconnected from each other....

It isn’t the changes themselves that the people in these cases resist. It’s the losses and endings that they have experienced and the transition that they are resisting. A large university reassigned one of its vice presidents to a far less important area than the one he had previously headed, and although no one called it a demotion, it was hard to see it as anything else. Everyone knew that he had been ineffective in his previous job, and his new job actually fit his talents far better, but he was deeply hurt by the move....

Organizational health lies in being able to work together. As a manager, our job is to try as much as we can to drive balance and clarity. A happy, driven team sees the wider purpose of their work and also feels empowered to execute tasks individually. “You can’t call yourself a leader by coming into a situation that is by nature uncertain, ambiguous—and create confusion. You have to create clarity where none exists....

Opportunity cost Staff engineers’ skills are usually in high demand. If you’re assigned to a single team, you may not be top of mind for solving a problem elsewhere in the org, or your manager may be unwilling to let you go. Losing empathy It’s easy to overfocus and forget that the rest of the world exists, or start thinking of other technology areas as trivial compared to your rich, nuanced domain....