《10到25岁》第四章(2)：导师心态典范斯特夫的成长故事

At R.A. Long High School in Longview, Washington, Stef Okamoto was the captain of the varsity volleyball team; she started on the softball team that played in the junior Olympics; and she graduated in the top 5 percent of her class. “I knew education was the only thing that was going to save me,” she said, “but not a single counselor said anything about college or guided me in any way.” When she told people at R.A. Long that she wanted to go to college, everyone—even her coaches —told her, “You’ll be back in Longview one day.” But Stef persevered.

在华盛顿州朗维尤的R.A.朗高中，斯特夫·奥卡莫托是校排球队队长；她还是参加了青少年奥运会的垒球队首发队员；并以班级前5%的成绩毕业。“我知道教育是唯一能拯救我的东西，”她说，“但没有任何一位辅导员提到过大学或给我任何指导。”当她在R.A.朗告诉别人她想上大学时，每个人——甚至她的教练——都告诉她，“你总有一天会回到朗维尤的。”但斯特夫坚持了下来。

She couldn’t afford tuition at the University of Washington (UW), which is in Seattle. She accepted an academic scholarship and a scholarship to play volleyball nearby at Lower Columbia College, a school from which very few students graduate. There, Stef earned her associate’s degree, the first postsecondary credential of anyone in her family.

她负担不起位于西雅图的华盛顿大学的学费。她接受了在附近的下哥伦比亚学院的一项学术奖学金和一项打排球的奖学金，这所学校很少有学生毕业。在那里，斯特夫获得了她的副学士学位，这是她家族中第一个高等教育文凭。

Stef next transferred to UW to pursue a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She lived with her aunt and uncle forty-five minutes away. She took two morning classes, and then drove an hour to a job behind the cash register at a local office- supply store, working until it closed. Then she drove back to campus to take night classes or volunteer in a research lab, finally getting home around midnight. The lab work fulfilled a requirement she needed to graduate with a bachelor’s in science.

接下来，斯特夫转学到华盛顿大学攻读心理学学士学位。她和她的叔叔阿姨住在45分钟车程外的地方。她上两节早课，然后开车一个小时到当地的一家办公用品店做收银员，工作到商店关门。然后她开车回校园上晚课或在研究实验室做志愿者，通常午夜才回家。实验室工作满足了她在科学领域获得学士学位所需的条件。

Stef’s first job wasn’t in science, however. She got a job at a Seattle-based company that published books on traveling and working internationally. When the company told her she had to move to Michigan or lose her job, she talked to a friend who worked at Microsoft. The friend said that Stef would be great at testing software. As a tester, her job would be to serve as a stand-in for thousands of users, to find the bugs before they did. Her experience publishing books that gave people instructions for navigating foreign countries made her unusually skilled at climbing inside other people’s minds and seeing through a novice’s eyes how they will make sense of something new and different. That prepared her for discovering how a beginner might try (and fail) to use a piece of poorly designed software.

然而，斯特夫的第一份工作并不是在科学领域。她在一家位于西雅图的公司找到了工作，该公司出版在国际上旅行和工作的相关书籍。后来公司告诉她必须搬到密歇根州，否则会失去工作，这时她和一位在微软工作的朋友谈了谈。这位朋友说斯特夫在测试软件方面会很出色。作为测试员，她的工作是为成千上万的用户充当替身，在他们之前找到漏洞。她曾出版书籍指导人们如何在外国浏览，这个经验使她特别擅长进入他人的思维，通过新手的眼光来看待新事物。这为她做好了准备，能够发现初学者可能如何尝试使用设计糟糕的软件（并失败）。

Stef taught herself what she needed to know. This was the 1990s, so she had to learn how the Internet worked from For Dummies books. She took night classes. Soon she landed a job at S T Labs, the vendor that Microsoft outsourced their software testing to. For four years, Stef tested the software that trained developers for the Microsoft Windows operating system. By 1999, she was leading that team. In 2000, Microsoft decided they wanted control over the testing and resulting publications. They hired the best people from S T Labs. That included Stef.

斯特夫自学了她需要知道的东西。那是20世纪90年代，所以她不得不通过《傻瓜书》来学习互联网的工作原理。她上夜校。很快，她在ST实验室找到了一份工作，微软将软件测试外包给了这家公司。四年来，斯特夫测试了用于培训微软Windows操作系统开发者的软件。到1999年，她已经在领导那个团队。2000年，微软决定要控制测试和结果报告，他们从ST实验室聘请了最优秀的人才。其中包括斯特夫。

When Stef joined Microsoft, CEO Steve Ballmer had created what many have described as a toxic corporate culture. Subsequent Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recounted in his book Hit Refresh that when he took over from Ballmer, employees had grown used to hearing “What a stupid question!” in meetings. There was a “fear of being ridiculed.” They were terrified of “not looking like the smartest in the room.” Nadella summed up the situation, and his own philosophy, by saying Microsoft had “a bunch of know-it-alls, when we really needed to be a bunch of learn-it-alls.”

当斯特夫加入微软时，CEO史蒂夫·鲍尔默创造的企业文化，被许多人描述为有毒。继任的微软CEO萨蒂亚·纳德拉在他的书《刷新》中回忆道，当他从鲍尔默手中接管时，员工们已经习惯了在会议上听到“多么愚蠢的问题！”；有一种“害怕被嘲笑”的氛围；他们害怕“在房间里看起来不像最聪明的人”。纳德拉总结了当时的状况和他的理念，他说微软有“一群自以为是的人，而我们真正需要的是一群愿意学习的人。”

Microsoft’s mindset under Ballmer could be encapsulated by two words: flipping tables. During the Ballmer era, on more than one occasion an executive literally flipped a table over and screamed at a young employee who made a mistake. “Flipping tables” became Microsoft’s shorthand for a toxic culture. “You had meetings where people would cry because you were made to feel that you would be pummeled. It was such an environment of fear,” a veteran manager told me. “Young people would get peppered with condescending questions from senior leadership,” I heard from another manager. “Did it happen once? No, it happened all the time.” This abusive culture stifled positive risk-taking, especially for young engineers just starting out, trying to make a name for themselves.

鲍尔默时代的微软，其心态可以用两个字来概括：翻桌。在鲍尔默时代，不止一次有高管真的掀翻桌子，对犯错的年轻员工大喊大叫。“翻桌”成了微软有毒文化的代名词。一位资深经理告诉我，“你会有这样的会议，人们会哭，因为你会觉得自己会被痛打。这是一个充满恐惧的环境。”我从另一位经理那里打听到，“年轻人在会议上会被资深领导层的居高临下的问题轰炸”。“这种情况发生过一次吗？不，这种情况一直发生。”这种虐待文化扼杀了积极的冒险精神，尤其是对于那些刚开始职业生涯、试图为自己赢得名声的年轻工程师。

Microsoft’s culture during the Ballmer era harmed the bottom line because it drove away young talent and led the retained talent to underperform. Microsoft began the millennium as the largest company in the world according to market capitalization. When Steve Ballmer took over from Bill Gates as CEO in 2000, he promptly ushered in a “lost decade,” during which Apple, Google, and others zipped by. In 2012, a single product from Apple—the iPhone—generated more revenue than all Microsoft’s products. The company was losing. Ballmer’s culture had alienated top engineers, who often went to Google, where they could be valued contributors on meaningful projects—not to mention enjoy free lunch, play volleyball, and ride scooters all day.

鲍尔默时代的微软文化损害了公司的底线，因为它赶走了年轻人才，而留下的人才表现不佳。微软在千禧年之初根据市值是全球最大的公司。当史蒂夫·鲍尔默在2000年从比尔·盖茨手中接管CEO职位时，他迅速迎来了一个“失落的十年”，在此期间，苹果、谷歌等公司迅速超越。到2012年，苹果的单一产品——iPhone——产生的收入超过了微软所有产品的总和。公司在败退。鲍尔默的文化疏远了顶尖工程师，他们经常去谷歌，在那里他们可以成为有价值的贡献者，服务于有意义的项目——更不用说享受免费午餐、打排球和整天骑滑板车了。

Stef hated the old, flipping-tables culture at Microsoft. “Young engineers and project managers were in total fear of presenting to leaders,” she told me. “Leaders would make you feel like an idiot if you weren’t perfectly buttoned up. Even in private, you couldn’t ask for feedback without them making you feel stupid. It was their way of upholding Ballmer’s ‘high expectations.’ Sometimes new employees would present and then you’d never see them again.” The employees who remained barely spoke up in meetings.

斯特夫讨厌微软旧的翻桌文化。“年轻的工程师和项目经理完全害怕向领导层演示，”她告诉我。“如果不完美无缺，领导会让你觉得自己像个白痴。即使在私下里，你也不能做到在寻求反馈的时候，不让他们弄得你觉得自己很愚蠢。这是他们维护鲍尔默‘高期望’的方式。有时新员工会演示，然后你就再也见不到他们了。”留下来的员工在会议上几乎不发言。

A major contributor to Ballmer’s enforcer-mindset culture was a performance management policy he implemented called stack ranking. In stack ranking, managers ranked each employee’s performance in one of three tiers: exceeded expectations, met expectations, or failed to meet expectations. Critically, the ranking was not calculated relative to any objective level of accomplishment, like shipping a new product or discovering a new algorithm. Ballmer’s policy forced a curve. For each stack of twenty to sixty employees, 10 percent or so had to be labeled low performers, even if they performed objectively better than employees ranked high in other stacks. Low performers got no bonuses, and if you earned low ranking twice, you lost your job. Rank and yank it was called.

鲍尔默的强制心态文化的一个重要贡献者是他实施的一项绩效管理政策，称为堆组排名。在堆组排名中，经理将每位员工的绩效分为三个等级之一：超出预期、达到预期或未达到预期。关键在于，排名不是相对于任何客观的成就水平来计算的，比如发布新产品或发现新算法。鲍尔默的政策强制了一个曲线。对于每个20到60名员工的堆组，大约有10%的人必须被标记为低绩效者，即使他们的表现客观上比其他堆组中的高绩效者更好。低绩效者得不到奖金，如果你两次获得低排名，你就会失去工作。这被称为排名和淘汰。

Stef despised stack ranking. Her team frequently overperformed compared to other teams, which meant her worst performers were usually better than top performers in other “stacks,” but they still had to be ranked compared to their own “stack.” She thought it was inefficient and cruel to fire competent people she had trained and supported just because of an artificial curve that unjustly rewarded people in mediocre stacks.

斯特夫鄙视堆组排名。她的团队经常比其他团队表现更好，这意味着她最差的绩效者通常也比其他堆组中的高绩效者更好，但他们仍然必须与自己的堆组进行比较。她认为，单凭一个人为的曲线，就不公正地奖励平庸堆组中的人，而解雇她培训和支持的合格人员，是低效和残忍的。

According to many young engineers, stack ranking wasn’t just unfair, it was dumb. It incentivized them to sabotage their teammates’ work. It “creates competition in the ranks, when people really want community,” one former Microsoft vice president told Vanity Fair. Stack ranking perpetuated the outdated, toxic culture at Microsoft.

根据许多年轻工程师的说法，堆组排名不仅不公平，而且很愚蠢。这激励他们破坏队友的工作。它“在队伍中制造竞争，而人们真正想要的是社区，”一位前微软副总裁告诉《名利场》。堆组排名延续了微软过时、有毒的文化。

How did Microsoft come to adopt this quintessential enforcer-mindset policy? Stack ranking comes from the mythology of the demanding leader. Picture the football coach who makes the slackers run laps, the high school principal who roams the hallways with a baseball bat to keep rowdy students in line, the professor who fails half the class to protect the prestige of theoretical chemistry, the technology executive who crushes everyone’s spirit for the sake of the perfect product, or the music instructor who isn’t satisfied until you’ve practiced so much that your hands are bleeding.

微软是如何采用这种典型的强制心态政策的？堆组排名来自严苛领导者的神话。想象一下，足球教练让懒散者跑圈，高中校长手持棒球棒在走廊巡逻以维持秩序，教授为了保护理论化学的声望而让一半的学生不及格，技术高管为了完美产品而打击每个人的精神，或者音乐教师在你练习到双手流血之前都不满意。

For Ballmer, the demanding leader of lore was Jack Welch, the larger-than-life CEO of General Electric in the 1980s and ’90s. Welch invented rank and yank. In his book Jack: Straight from the Gut, Welch explained his enforcer mindset. He made it his goal to “sort the A, B, and C players.” If Welch deemed you an A player, you deserved a bonus two to three times larger than B players. If he deemed you a C player, you deserved nothing. You should get fired. Welch was “heavy on yelling and short on empathy.”

对于鲍尔默来说，传说中的严苛领导者是20世纪80年代和90年代通用电气（GE）的传奇CEO杰克·韦尔奇。韦尔奇发明了排名和淘汰。在他的书《杰克：直言不讳》中，韦尔奇解释了他的强制心态。他的目标是“区分A、B和C类球员”。如果韦尔奇认为你是A类球员，你应得的奖金是B类球员的两到三倍。如果他认为你是C类球员，你什么也得不到。你应该被解雇。韦尔奇“大喊大叫，缺乏同理心”。

Early in Welch’s tenure, GE was bloated and bleeding money. They needed to trim the head count. Rank and yank might have made sense for a while. But Welch continued the harsh policy past when it was necessary. He maintained exacting standards but was blind to the need for support. He fired more than one hundred thousand employees during his twenty-plus-year tenure, shipping many of their jobs overseas and accelerating the destruction of the working-class economy that had created so much upward mobility in post-WWII America.

在韦尔奇任期的早期，GE机构臃肿，亏损严重。他们需要裁员。排名和淘汰可能一度是有意义的。但韦尔奇在不再必要时继续执行这一严厉政策。他维持了严格的标准，但对支持的需求视而不见。在他二十多年的任期内，他解雇了超过十万名员工，将许多工作岗位转移到海外，加速破坏了二战后美国的工人阶级经济，后者创造了大量的向上流动性。

In his book about Welch called The Man Who Broke Capitalism, New York Times journalist David Gelles noted that although rank and yank reduced costs and raised short-term stock prices, it proved a bad long-term policy. It pushed away talent and stifled innovation, just like Ballmer did later at Microsoft. (GE recently split into three smaller companies with collectively far lower value than its year- 2000 peak.) Nevertheless, copycats mostly paid attention to GE’s stock market run during the nineties. They concluded that Welch’s impossible standards and ruthless firings formed essential ingredients in his ascent to the top of the pyramid of American capitalism. Human-oriented supports did not play a part in Welch’s calculus, except for a tiny sliver of A performers.

在纽约时报记者大卫·杰尔斯关于韦尔奇的书《打破资本主义的人》中，他指出，尽管排名和淘汰降低了成本并提高了短期股价，但后来证实这是一项糟糕的长期政策。它赶走了人才，扼杀了创新，就像鲍尔默后来在微软所做的那样。（GE最近分裂成三家价值远低于2000年峰值的小公司。）然而，模仿者大多关注GE在90年代的股市表现。他们得出结论，韦尔奇的不可能标准和无情的解雇是他登上美国资本主义金字塔顶端的必要因素。在韦尔奇的算盘中，以人为中心的支持并没有发挥作用，除了对一小部分A类绩效者。

Rank and yank took on a mythological moneymaking status that persists to this day. Adam Neumann, former CEO of the disgraced startup WeWork and a disciple of Jack Welch, famously used rank and yank—firing about 10 percent of the company’s workforce after performance evaluations—even when they had had billions in cash flow surpluses. Neumann’s toxic work culture took part of the blame for WeWork’s spectacular implosion after its attempted IPO in 2019.

排名和淘汰获得了一种神话般的“能赚钱”地位，这种地位一直持续到今天。失宠的初创公司WeWork的前CEO亚当·诺伊曼是杰克·韦尔奇的信徒，他为人熟知，是因为排名和淘汰——在绩效评估后解雇了公司约10%的员工——即使他们有数十亿美元的现金流盈余。诺伊曼的有毒工作文化，是WeWork在2019年IPO尝试后，惊人崩溃的部分原因。

Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun used to lead GE’s aviation division under Jack Welch. In early 2023, following a downturn in the U.S. economy, Calhoun announced that Boeing would return to stack ranking. Managers were forced to tell roughly 10 percent of employees that they did not meet expectations, even if just a few months earlier they had been evaluated as having met expectations. But it was a false standard. “I’ve had to flat-out lie to staff members who were rated low and were not deserving of it,” a manager said. On a Facebook group for “Microsoft old- timers,” a sarcastic veteran of Ballmer’s Microsoft quipped, “I’m sure this will work out well for them.” A year later, Calhoun and his engineers were under fire when a Boeing plane’s escape door flew off while Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 was in the air. Calhoun stepped down as CEO soon after.

波音CEO戴夫·卡尔霍恩曾在杰克·韦尔奇手下领导GE的航空部门。2023年初，随着美国经济的衰退，卡尔霍恩宣布波音将回归堆组排名。经理们被迫告诉大约10%的员工，他们没有达到预期，即使就在几个月前他们还被评估为符合预期。但这是一个虚假的标准。“我不得不直接向不必获得低绩效却又被评为低绩效的员工撒谎，”一位经理说。在一个名为“微软老将”的Facebook群组中，一位鲍尔默时代微软的资深人士讽刺地说：“我敢肯定这对他们会有好处。”一年后，一架阿拉斯加航空1282航班的波音飞机的逃生门脱落，卡尔霍恩和他的工程师们受到猛烈抨击。卡尔霍恩不久后辞去了CEO职务。

When Ballmer took over as CEO of Microsoft, Welch’s influence and the myth of the demanding leader had never been stronger. Buoying that myth was a powerful and pervasive ideology that management theorist Douglas McGregor famously called Theory X in his essay titled “The Human Side of Enterprise.” Stef would spend her entire career fighting against Theory X. (McGregor chose the name Theory X simply because he wanted to avoid the debates that a more descriptive name would evoke.)

当鲍尔默接任微软首席执行官时，韦尔奇的影响和严苛领导者神话从未如此强大。支撑这一神话的是一种强大且普遍的意识形态，管理理论家道格拉斯·麦格雷戈在其名为“企业的人性面”的论文中将其称为X理论。斯特夫将用她整个职业生涯来对抗X理论。（麦格雷戈选择X理论这个名字，仅仅是因为他想避免更具描述性的名字所引发的争论。）

Theory X is the management version of the neurobiological-incompetence model (see chapter 1). Under Theory X, people (especially the young and immature) are assumed to be fundamentally lazy and selfish. Theory X says that people can be motivated only by the allure of gaining material rewards (e.g., money) or the threat of losing rewards (e.g., wage cuts or termination). Accordingly, the way to motivate people is to rank them so that they strive to climb to the top and get the best rewards. If they don’t respond to that system, then you should fire them. This approach exemplifies the enforcer mindset. Although Microsoft’s Ballmer-era rank-and-yank policy may sound barbaric today, it was simply the logical extension of a long-standing belief in Theory X among demanding leaders in industry.

X理论是神经生物学无能模型的管理学版本（见第1章）。在X理论下，人们（尤其是年轻人和不成熟的人）被认为从根本上来说是懒惰和自私的。X理论认为，人们只能通过获得物质奖励的诱惑或失去奖励的威胁来激励。因此，激励人们的方式是将他们排名，使他们努力爬到顶端并获得最好的奖励。如果他们对这个系统没有反应，那么你应该解雇他们。这种方法体现了强制心态。尽管微软鲍尔默时代的排名淘汰政策在今天听起来可能很野蛮，但它只是工业界严苛领导者长期信奉X理论的逻辑延展。

Theory X contributes to a self-perpetuating cycle that reinforces enforcer-mindset practices like stack ranking and table flipping. Stack ranking failed to motivate employees at Microsoft to do their best work throughout the Ballmer years. Managers ranked underperformers in lower tiers and eventually fired many of them. Those few people whom the system failed to crush were rewarded. Thinking themselves better and smarter than everyone else, they thought stack ranking had done its job—weeding out the slackers, rewarding the superstars. They didn’t realize they were wasting enormous amounts of talent by creating a motivational problem that didn’t have to exist.

X理论导致了一个自我延续的循环，强化了强制心态的做法，如堆组排名和翻桌。在鲍尔默时代的微软，堆组排名未能激励员工在工作时尽最大努力。经理们将表现不佳的员工排在较低层级，并最终解雇了他们中的许多人。那些系统未能压垮的少数人得到了奖励。他们认为自己比别人更好、更聪明，认为堆组排名已经完成了它的任务——淘汰懒散者，奖励超级明星。他们没有意识到，通过制造一个本不存在的激励问题，他们浪费了大量的才华。

It’s easy to imagine a similar dynamic playing out among parents. Think about a parent who subscribes to Theory X and notices their teenager refusing to do their math homework. If the parent believes that teenagers are lazy, then they’re more likely to use tools of control: threats of punishment for noncompliance (yelling, telling, blaming, shaming, grounding) or rewards for compliance (bribes, promises, relaxed curfews, lower expectations). These tactics don’t inspire the teen to work diligently and independently. Therefore, the parent will be left with even more evidence that young people are lazy, reinforcing Theory X in a recurring cycle that generates an ever-more entrenched enforcer dynamic.

很容易想象，在家庭养育中也会出现类似的动态。想想一个认同X理论的父母发现他们的青少年拒绝做数学作业。如果认为青少年是懒散的，那么他们更有可能使用控制工具：对不服从的惩罚威胁（大喊、告诉、责备、羞辱、禁足）或对服从的奖励（贿赂、承诺、放宽宵禁、降低期望）。这些策略并不能激励青少年勤奋独立地工作。因此，父母将会有更多证据证明年轻人是懒惰的，从而在循环中强化X理论，导致更加根深蒂固的强制者的互动模式。

This self-perpetuating enforcer-mindset culture running at Microsoft dominated when Stef was promoted to her first management position. Stef rejected Theory X. She instead believed in what McGregor’s 1957 essay called Theory Y.

当斯特夫首次被提升到管理职位时，这种在微软运行的自我延续的强制心态文化占据了主导地位。斯特夫拒绝了X理论。她反而相信麦格雷戈1957年论文中所称的Y理论。

According to Theory Y, people are not inherently selfish, lazy, and driven by material reward and punishment. Perhaps they can be made to look that way by poor management, but that is not their nature. Instead, they can be motivated by what the psychologist Dr. Abraham Maslow called higher-level needs: social connection, social status/prestige, or meaning/purpose. When motivated through such means, people can work proactively and independently without needing constant direction or supervision. This makes workers more productive and it makes managers’ lives easier because they don’t have to constantly surveil their employees.

根据Y理论，人的天性并非自私、懒惰，受到物质奖励和惩罚的驱使。也许通过糟糕的管理可以让人们变得看起来如此，但这不是他们的本性。相反，他们可以通过心理学家亚伯拉罕·马斯洛所称的高层次需求来激励：社交联系、社会地位/声望或意义/目的。通过这些手段激励时，人们可以积极主动地工作，而无需不断的指导和监督。这使得工人更加高效，也使得管理者的生活更轻松，因为他们不必不断监视员工。

McGregor’s Theory Y offers different explanations for poor performance and different ways to motivate high performance. Performance can suffer when people’s higher-level needs are threatened. Under Theory Y, therefore, a manager’s goal is to help people address their fundamental needs for respect, dignity, and meaningful reputations.

麦格雷戈的Y理论为表现不佳和激励高绩效提供了不同的解释。当人们的高层次需求受到威胁时，绩效可能会受到影响。因此，在Y理论下，管理者的目标是帮助人们满足他们对尊重、尊严和有意义声誉的基本需求。

Stef vowed to be a manager who had nothing in common with the Theory X- believing, stack-ranking, table-flipping enforcer-mindset managers that surrounded her at Microsoft. She decided to represent a sliver of humanity in an inhumane culture.

斯特夫发誓要成为一个这样的管理者：与周围那些相信X理论、堆组排名、翻桌的强制心态管理者毫无共同之处。她决定在一个不人道的文化中代表一丝人性。

Stef had pure intentions, but she struggled with execution. That caused serious problems for her direct reports. When she became a manager without much prior training, she rejected Theory X. She unfortunately also adopted a shallow understanding of Theory Y. That made Stef bring a protector mindset to work. She thought she needed to protect people’s egos and self-esteem. By rejecting Microsoft’s enforcer culture she ended up avoiding difficult conversations.

斯特夫意图纯粹，但在执行上遇到了困难。这给她的直接下属带来了严重问题。当她成为一个没有太多岗位培训的管理者时，她拒绝了X理论。不幸的是，她也采用了对Y理论的浅薄理解。这使得斯特夫带着保护心态去工作。她认为她需要保护人们的自我和自尊。通过拒绝微软的强制者文化，她最终避免了一些困难的对话。

One of her rookie mistakes was to treat her young direct reports like they were her buddies rather than her supervisees. She gave them high support but insufficient standards. In particular, she worried that the professional feedback she gave them might feel too personal, and the last thing she wanted to do was attack her young colleagues. Therefore, she withheld criticisms of their performance. However, stack ranking was alive and well, so when performance-evaluation time came around, the committee had to put some of her direct reports in the lowest-performing category. She had avoided having the hard conversations with them, and now it was too late to help them out. As a result, she had jeopardized the bonuses, career velocity, and even job stability of people she cared about deeply.

她新手时期的一个错误是，像对待朋友而不是她的被管理者那样对待她的年轻直接下属。她给了他们很高的支持，但标准不足。尤其是，她担心给他们的专业反馈可能会感觉太个人化，而她最不想做的就是攻击她年轻的同事。因此，她保留了对他们绩效的批评。然而，堆组排名依然存在，所以当绩效评估时间到来时，委员会不得不将她的一些直接下属排在最低绩效类别。她已经避免了与他们进行艰难的对话，现在帮助他们已经太晚了。结果，她危及了她深爱的人的奖金、职业发展速度甚至工作稳定性。

Another early mistake came from Stef’s way of helping her direct reports solve problems. During one-on-one meetings, her team members would sometimes complain about another manager or teammate. Stef’s naturally protective instincts drove her to confront the offender. That didn’t solve the problem; it made it worse. That was her protector mindset in action. Deep down, she harbored doubts about whether her reports could solve their own problems. She had to start respecting her employees’ competence. She changed her approach. When direct reports brought complaints to her, she began by asking them if they needed to vent, or if they wanted her to step in. If the latter, she made sure they were okay with how she planned to get involved.

另一个早期错误来自斯特夫帮助直接下属解决问题的方法。在一对一会议中，她的团队成员有时会抱怨另一个管理者或队友。斯特夫天生的保护本能驱使她去对抗冒犯者。那并没有解决问题；反而使问题变得更糟：那是她的保护心态在起作用。内心深处，她怀疑她的下属是否能自行解决问题。她必须开始尊重员工的能力。她改变了方法。当直接下属向她抱怨时，她首先问他们是否需要发泄，或者是否希望她介入。如果是后者，她确保他们对她计划的介入方式感到满意。

Stef, like many of us, had to learn to reinterpret Theory Y and see its more profound implications. She had to learn that you can simultaneously challenge people and address their needs for status, respect, and dignity. Mangers can do it by having a conversation that takes young people’s abilities seriously while also helping them access the resources they need.

斯特夫像我们许多人一样，必须学会重新解释Y理论并看到其更深刻的含义。她必须学会，你可以既挑战人们又满足他们对地位、尊重和尊严的需求。管理者可以通过认真对待他们能力的对话，同时帮助他们获取所需资源来实现这一点。

Eventually, Stef crafted performance-management conversations that I call collaborative troubleshooting. That’s a way of responding to mistakes or errors that makes people feel safe confronting and overcoming their limitations.

最终，斯特夫设计了我称之为协作排难的绩效管理对话。这是一种对过错或差错的回应方式，使人们在面对和克服他们的局限性时感到安全。

Consider an example of how Stef used collaborative troubleshooting via a performance evaluation she shared with me for someone in the lowest category of her stacked rank:

考虑一个斯特夫分享给我的例子，在绩效评估中使用协作排难，该评估针对的是她堆组排名中最低类别的人：

I want to give you a heads-up that we finished your performance review. Unfortunately, you were in the lowest category. I get it. It stinks. But I want to be clear with you. I don’t think that your performance in this cycle is a reflection of your trajectory. I know what you are capable of. Six months from now, I don’t want you to have a narrative that you’re a persistent low performer. I want you to control the narrative, to show that you’re a high performer. I have some ideas for what we can do over the next six months to get there. But I’d like to hear from you. What is your vision for how we can get you in a position to take on the right high-profile projects? How can we impress the right people so that you can recover your reputation for being someone with high career velocity? Once we figure that out, then we can make a plan for how to get there.

我想提前告诉你，我们已经完成了你的绩效评估。不幸的是，你在最低类别中。我明白，这很糟糕。但我想对你明确一点，我不认为你在这一周期的表现反映了你的整个生涯。我知道你能做什么。六个月后，我不想看到，你自己的叙事是，你是一个持续的低绩效者。我想让你掌控自己的叙事，展示你是一个高绩效者。我有一些想法，在接下来六个月，我们可以做什么来达到这个目标，但我想听听你的意见。关于我们如何能让你在合适的高知名度项目中寻求一席之地，你有什么看法？我们如何能给相关人员留下深刻印象，以便能恢复你有高职业发展速度的声誉？一旦弄清楚这一点，我们就可以制定一个如何完成目标的计划。

This is bread-and-butter mentoring. She’s collaborating to meet high standards while supporting personal growth.

这是典型的指导：她在协作，满足高标准，同时也支持个人成长。

Notice what Stef didn’t do. She didn’t chastise the low performer with an enforcer mindset. Nor did she say, You are a low performer because you had too much on your plate, so I’m going to lower expectations for you or do your job for you, with a protector mindset. She raised expectations. But then she offered meaningful support. She offered herself as a coconspirator, a collaborative troubleshooter. She’s not a judge of her employee’s overall worth as an employee.

注意斯特夫没有做什么。她没有用强制心态责备低绩效者。她也没有带着保护心态说，“你是一个低绩效者，因为你的工作量太大，所以我会降低对你的期望，或为你做本是你的工作”。她提高了期望。但随后她提供了有意义的支持。她将自己作为一个共同策划者，一个协作排难者。她不是一个评判员工整体价值的法官。

Stef’s experiences at Microsoft planted the seed for her growth into a successful manager. Other managers recognized how tough—fierce even—she could be, especially when it came to her direct reports’ growth. Young employees adored her. Dozens now say that they owe their successful career trajectories to her mentorship in their early to midtwenties. Stef’s LinkedIn page looks like a bulletin board of unsolicited love letters from former direct reports. Her direct reports maintained promotional velocity. For example, Salonee Shah, her former direct report, is now in a senior position setting management strategy for all of HR at Microsoft. (Since talking with Stef, I’ve tried out collaborative troubleshooting in my own parenting, as shown in box 4.1.)

斯特夫在微软的经历为她成长为一名成功的管理者播下了种子。其他管理者认识到她在直接下属成长方面可以多么强硬——甚至可以说是激烈。年轻员工崇拜她。现在有数十人说，自己的成功职业生涯归功于在他们二十岁出头时，她的指导。斯特夫的领英页面看起来像是一块贴满了前直接下属自发爱意信件的公告板。她的直接下属保持了晋升速度。例如，她的前直接下属萨洛尼·沙哈尔现在在微软的人力资源部门担任高级职位，制定管理策略。（在与斯特夫交谈后，我在育儿中尝试了协作排难，如盒子4.1所示。）

Box 4.1. Trying Out Collaborative Troubleshooting when Parenting

I gave Stef’s collaborative troubleshooting a try with my daughter. Scarlett had to prepare an eight-minute-long TED-like speech for her seventh-grade English class. Like many twelve-year-olds, she waited until two nights before it was due to start writing it. She was freaking out.

If I was an enforcer, I would have said, You made your bed, now lie in it. Her low score would be the price she had to pay for her procrastination. If I was a protector, I would have said, Okay, let me dictate it to you, and then you can edit it.

Instead, I channeled Stef’s mentor mindset. “Well, let’s talk through what you have in your outline so far. You do a first draft, then we’ll look at it. Then we’ll fix all the problems with it. If we do that once, it’ll be a lot better. And then you’ll know how to edit your own text in the future,” I told her. The problem stopped feeling so big. I saw Scarlett’s shoulders release. She took a deep breath. She grabbed her pencil. “Okay, let’s see how it goes after a first draft, and then we’ll fix it.”

It took a little bit more time out of my evening, but it was worth it. A few days later Scarlett crushed her presentation. She was proud. “That was the right kind of hard,” she told me. The mentor mindset strikes again!

盒子4.1. 在育儿中尝试协作排难

我尝试了斯特夫的协作排难方法来应对我的女儿。斯嘉丽必须为她的七年级英语课准备一个八分钟长的类似TED的演讲。像许多十二岁的孩子一样，她等到截止日期前两天才开始写。她快要崩溃了。

如果我是强制者，我会说，你自作自受，现在躺倒吧。她的低分将是她拖延的代价。如果我是保护者，我会说，好吧，让我口述给你，然后你可以编辑它。

相反，我采用了斯特夫的导师心态。“好吧，让我们谈谈你到目前为止大纲里有什么。你先写一稿，然后我们看看。然后我们会解决所有问题。如果我们这样做一次，它会好很多。而且你以后也会知道如何编辑自己的文本，”我告诉她。问题不再那么大了。我看到斯嘉丽的肩膀放松了。她深吸了一口气。她抓起了她的铅笔。“好吧，让我们看看第一稿之后怎么样，然后我们再修改。”

这让我晚上花了更多的时间，但这是值得的。几天后，斯嘉丽出色地完成了她的演讲。她很自豪。“这是正确的那种难，”她告诉我。导师心态再次奏效！

When Satya Nadella took over as CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he steered the culture away from Theory X to the authentic version of Theory Y. Nadella and his colleague Kathleen Hogan eliminated stack ranking and brought in a more humane system of performance evaluations called a Connect.

当萨提亚·纳德拉在2014年接任微软CEO时，他将公司文化从X理论转向了真正的Y理论。纳德拉和他的同事凯瑟琳·霍根取消了堆组排名，引入了一个更人性化的绩效评估系统，称为“连接”。

Stef wanted to help Nadella, Hogan, and their team undo the toxic Ballmer culture. She wanted to take Theory Y company wide. To do that, she would have to move to HR. She had no experience in HR, but that kind of thing had never stopped her before.

斯特夫想要帮助纳德拉、霍根及其团队消除鲍尔默的有毒文化。她希望将Y理论推广到全公司。为此，她必须转到人力资源部门。她没有人力资源方面的经验，但这类事情从未阻止过她。

Stef decided to make her own luck. She started an aspiring-manager forum to train the next generation of managers within her engineering group. The forum covered topics like Courage in critical conversations (something she herself struggled with initially), How to coach employees on their career development plan, or Growth mindset: Building a team that achieves tts true potential. The forum was wildly successful. It became the de facto route to management excellence at Microsoft’s top units.

斯特夫决定自己创造机会。她开设了一个有志经理论坛，培训工程团队中的下一代经理。论坛涵盖的主题包括“关键对话中的勇气”（这是她最初自己也挣扎的问题）、“如何指导员工制定职业发展计划”或“成长心态：打造一个发挥其真正潜力的团队”。该论坛非常成功，成为了微软顶级单位中的管理者迈向“卓越管理者”的事实途径。

Stef applied to transfer to HR and scale up her ideas and was rejected—until HR came to their senses and brought her over. Soon, Stef’s small but powerful team led all new employee onboarding and all manager training for the company’s global workforce of 190,000 people. Their framework had three parts: model, coach, and care. Stef was instrumental in making sure care was in the final framework.

斯特夫申请调到人力资源部门以扩充她的点子，但被拒绝了——直到人力资源部门清醒过来，将她招入。很快，斯特夫小而强大的团队领导了公司全球19万名新员工的入职培训和所有的经理培训。他们的框架有三个部分：“模范”、“指导”和“关怀”。斯特夫在确保关怀最终纳入框架中发挥了关键作用。

Accolades soon followed. By 2023, as a result of Nadella’s top-down cultural transformation and Stef’s bottom-up leadership, Microsoft was ranked as the best company to work for in the world by Statista and Time, with 95 percent of employees saying they were proud to work there—a far cry from Ballmer’s “lost decade.”

赞誉随之而来。到2023年，由于纳德拉自上而下的文化转型和斯特夫自下而上的领导，微软被Statista和《时代》杂志评为全球最佳工作公司，95%的员工表示他们为在那里工作而自豪——这与鲍尔默的“失落十年”相去甚远。

Soon after, the technology company ServiceNow took note of Stef’s accomplishments and aggressively recruited her away to a new opportunity. There, she could own the company’s manager-development and -evaluation strategy. At ServiceNow, Stef continues to thrive.

不久之后，科技公司ServiceNow注意到了斯特夫的成就，并积极招募她，给了她一个新的机会。在那里，她可以负责公司的经理发展和评估策略。在ServiceNow，斯特夫继续蓬勃发展。