Kim Scott (4)Reviews

Just Work: Get Sh*t Done, Fast & Fair by Kim Malone Scott is a fantastic read about learning how to deal with difficult people in workplaces. From harassment and bullying, to diversity and gender differences, this book reviews a lot of the difficult situations many people deal with in the workplace and gives suggestions on how to deal with them.

I know so many people that should honestly read this book. The amount of times I was grimacing at the situations Kim went through because I too have seen or been apart of many of them... Yeah, it hit home, hard. Kim wrote a spectacular novel that breaks down how situations should be dealt with, but unfortunately I think many people won't take the advice of this book. Those who are reading this book more than likely are already trying, but we all know a person or two who should take this book and treat it like law...

It's a very personal book but reads like a very professional, textbook that you'd find in business school. It is insightful and has some of the greatest breakdowns and explanations on how to deal with awkward or horrible workplace situations. It felt like an HR person with a heart of gold wrote it. The strategies in this book are super helpful, and I think everyone who reads this book will take away at least one strategy for eliminating workplace harassment, violence, or bullying. If anything, it might give you the confidence you need to stand up for yourself or others. Don't just be a bystander, do something.

Overall, Kim Malone Scott has created one spectacular resource that many readers should pick up. If you're looking for a book that will give you helpful hints and tips, grab this one! It's a fantastic non-fiction read and I highly recommend it.

Four out of five stars.

I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.

I enjoy reading about real life experiences, how they panned out and lessons learnt. This book contains a lot of great examples to learn from including senior Google and Apple experiences.

I loved this article when it came out in First Round, and read and shared it a bunch of times. So I was excited to see the book .... but the intro alone started giving me HIVES. It felt like a terrible remix of a song I used to love -- dialing up the aggression and nastiness, the Steve-Jobs-iness of "radical" candor, without hinting there might be ways to use candor that weren't simply to be an aggressor, to "win" a meeting. I am plowing along and hope it changes but right now I'm a bit weirded out.

A quote: Think about it— whether it's the gay man forced to weather anti-gay jokes or the conservative force to weather anti-conservative jokes, the result is the same— some part of them is negated, and they can't help feeling alienated, not free at work.

No, these situations are not the same, Kim Scott. One denies the humanity of a person. The other makes it more difficult to express an increasingly loathsome philosophy that more and more denies the humanity of vast swaths of our population.

Really good book for people who think they have to be an asshole to get ahead in management.

If you don't think that to begin with, then it's more motivational.

Must read for every manager

This book is a gust of fresh wind in the world of management books. While there are other books with great advices, some of them fail to deliver value by being written in really dull manner or diving too deep in theoretical stuff. In the meantime Radical Candor delivers carefully selected insights from nowadays top software companies where author was working. It is also very relatable: most of the key points have an example from author's career and I believe many managers can recognize themselves and sometimes and compare how they handled the situation and what they learned from that. All in all, it is a great start to become better manager.

I see this as a good consolidated reference for advice on how to create more just workspaces. Kim Scott strikes a good balance between speaking from her own experience while also acknowledging the limitations of her own experience. She doesn't pull in other individual voices as much as I might have liked. She does discuss challenges and experiences that go beyond her own. My main criticism of this book is that it felt a bit rushed. There were two key models, and it didn't quite feel like they were woven together. (More on the structures below.) That said, the book gathers together a bunch of advice that I have learned in a wide variety of contexts and puts them in one readable package, so it's a worthwhile read for those interested in creating more just workspaces where people are able to do their best work.

The heart of the book is the idea that a just workplace allows everyone to do their best work. This is better for everyone. It's better for the people traditionally harmed by workplace injustice because they do not have to deal with the personal and professional consequences of injustice. It's also better for the people who are not directly impacted by workplace injustice because they will have a workplace that is overall more effective, productive, higher trust, and more pleasant to work in.

The book has two main models for thinking about just work. The first is a matrix of types of workplace justice against different roles people can play in cultures or incidents of workplace injustice. The types of injustice discussed are bias, prejudice, bullying, harassment, discrimination, and physical violations. The book explores each of these from the perspectives of the people harmed, people doing harm, leaders, and upstanders (those who see the situation and ought to act as allies to the person harm). The bulk of the book explores, in a semi-structured manner, the matrix created from crossing the types of harm with the roles involved. It is something of a grab bag of ideas and techniques. There is a lot of good material. Much of it will likely be familiar if you've consumed other information in this space.

Kim Scott emphasizes that that people can — and often do — play more than one of these roles, sometimes even in the same situation. This can make figuring out an appropriate response more challenging. For example, Scott emphasizes throughout the book that the only obligation of the person harmed is to get themselves to safety. Anything beyond that is strictly optional. However, if the person harmed is also a leader, they also have an obligation to respond to incidents of workplace injustice. This can put leaders who are harmed in a challenging situation where they have to play both roles at once.

The second core model, which is highlighted on the cover of the book but really only discussed near the end, is a 2x2 which looks at workplace injustice through the lenses of two dynamics: Respecting Individuality vs Demanding Conformity and Collaboration vs Coercion. This distinction was really useful for me. The way they are defined in this book, conformity has to do with the belief that some difference — such as race or gender — should dictate the behavior of people. Conformity is about expectation. Coercion has to do with using various degrees of force to change people's behavior or hold them down. Coercion is about violence (not necessarily physical), whether that's violence in the present or raising the spectre of historical violence.

I think this distinction is incredibly useful. Both have negative consequences. However, the appropriate response differs depending on whether one is dealing with a culture of coercion, conformity, or both. Although it's not a focus of the book, I suspect that many discussions about racism, for example, go badly because when people are made aware of the ways that they create a culture of conformity, they feel like they are being told that they create a culture of coercion.

Using this model, the book discusses four different models of working and ways to respond to each: Brutally Ineffective workplaces are both coercive and demand conformity; these are the hardest cultures to fix. Cultures of Self-righteous Shaming are coercive even as they respect individuality; these cultures need to be shifted so that bullying is not a norm. Cultures of Oblivious Exclusion are collaborative yet demand conformity (often because they were historically homogeneous); these are the cultures where intentions are good but the numbers paint a clear picture of bias. In these cultures, it's important to make bias visible through bias interruption, quantification, and efforts to shift the overall experience and demographics of those in the minority.

The fourth quadrant, which is collaborative and respects individuality, is Just Work. In these environments people can be at their most effective because they are able to work without the constant frictions (or worse) which come from workplace injustice. Just Work environments are built on a simple and yet challenging-to-realize set of characteristics: kindness, trust, psychological safety feeling that it is safe to speak up, feeling that you'll be heard if you do speak up, curiosity, experimentation.

As I noted in the beginning, these two models are approached fairly separately. I think that is the main weakness of the book. It would have been much more powerful if the collaboration/coercion and respect individuality/conformity dynamics had been woven more effectively into the discussion of roles and harms. Still, it was a worthwhile read.

I loved this book! Radical Candor is so much more than just a single communication technique. It's a mindset which can be applied to all of management, and in this book, Kim Scott applies the idea to many different aspects of leadership.

Radical candor denies a false dichotomy that, I think, is applied by many people to communication, both in and out of work: that communication is either nice/respectful or it is honest/direct. You see this mindset, for example, when people act as if respecting others means that you have to censor yourself or that being honest means you don't have to be respectful. The radical candor perspective says that not only is this false dichotomy wrong, but that by falling into either of its extremes, you are doing harm.

Divide communication into four types, by the axes of caring personally about the person you're communicating with and challenging them directly. If you care personally but don't challenge directly — what some people assume is required to be nice — then you fall into the ruinous empathy quadrant. You save their feelings in the short term (maybe; people often know when they've failed), but in the long term you damage their growth, your relationship, and effective communication more generally. If you challenge directly but don't care personally — what some people assume is required to be honest — then you fall into the obnoxious aggression quadrant. You may be giving feedback that's valuable, but if it doesn't come along with caring, then it's not going to be heard. Many comments on internet fall into this category :-) You can also fail to either care personally or challenge directly. This quadrant, which Scott calls manipulative insecurity, has no advantages.

Radical candor is what you get when you both care personally and challenge directly. It's clear while also showing that the person giving the feedback understands the needs and context that prompted the context. You can help people achieve what they need to achieve more effectively than the obnoxiously aggressive feedback giver because your feedback won't just be honest; it will be more likely to be listened too and it will be less generic.

The bulk of the book applies this mindset to various leadership challenges: developing the people on a team, recognizing individual performance in individually meaningful ways, collaboration (including the great "Get Stuff Done" wheel[0]), establishing productive working relationships, how to give and get guidance, career conversations, and meeting structure[1]. There's tons of practical advice, well presented.

I'll need to read it more than once before I've really internalized and been able to apply all the tips though. :-)

[0] https://www.radicalcandor.com/our-approach/results/
[1] Including my new go to method for running those status update meetings that are necessary: spend 15 minutes silently updating and reading a shared notes document and then only talk about the status updates that people have questions on. You get higher quality notes and discussions.

Informative and plain-spoken primer on how to effectively lead people in a modern workplace, especially new media or technology companies.
If this book weren’t so focused on the tech sector and its unique demographics, it would be more useful to the average reader. For a company that is more age- and experience-diverse, some of the recommendations seem inapplicable. Also, at the tech companies the author has worked for, there seems to be endless time for meetings, plentiful paid time off, and a seemingly limitless pool of applicants from which to pick and choose the very best team members.
It’s hard to feel like the author knows - let alone can make sound recommendations about - the struggles of an auto body shop, school, restaurant: workplaces that are more representative of where most people work.
That deficiency aside, I appreciate what Scott has to say in this book, and she does so with humor and humility.

Excellent advice and tips in here. Very practical takeaways and helps you think through a lot of sides and facets of giving and receiving feedback

Worthwhile read, especially for managers

As a product of Silicon Valley, which has turned "failing up" into a science, Kim Scott is humble about being a good manager. Even here in the real world, odds are that half of our bosses will turn out below average. Her advice is simply to be straight with the people you work with. Naturally this is a business book, and her coaching philosophy is embedded in the golden quadrant of a chart so that executives take it seriously. Still, has the ring of truth. I've learned that if you tell people what you're doing and what you need to succeed, things tend to work out. A boss that doesn't have time for all that is headed for trouble.

Although I'm no longer managing people, I've heard enough people mention this book that I wanted to check it out. The focus is around communicating clearly with people and teams as the way to be the most effective. Opting for empathy over insincerity and candor over aggression. The goal is to actually CARE while challenging people directly.

(10) Gawd. I hate this genre. The only reasons I read such books are for work book clubs. This is another Sheryl Sandberg acolyte. These bougie tech executives that command huge salaries to manage our addiction to screens - or addiction to anything; addiction to consumerism. Gross. just makes me want to throw up in my mouth. The corporate structure is grotesque.

My work wanted us to read as a paradigm for the apprenticeship-type work and career guidance that is part of my job housed within an academic as opposed to a corporate power infrastructure (which is almost just as obscene, BTW) I thought the ideas were great - our ultra PC world in academics is not quite ready for this however. My ass would be fired so fast. . . It is a shame. The funniest thing I read was the fact that successful women are labelled as "abrasive" in performance reviews - now here I was, thinking that was just me. Sure enough, when I brought this up to some other successful women friends outside of my own field - Boy, did that word resonate. Honestly, people expect a female boss to be a cheerleader not a coach - and we are punished for speaking our mind. Sigh. Perhaps I am just 'obnoxiously aggressive' - another funny term.

Anyway, I thought there was some good information couched inside a disgusting self-help kind of repetitive framework that makes me gag. And the name-dropping - really? Is that necessary? .. not that any of the names mean anything to me, but it still smacked of obnoxious aggression. Oh well, good luck with this approach with millennials and Gen Z's - I hope these companies have a full complement of "wellness coaches" read: psychiatrists, working round the clock.

If you have not read business books from Silicon Valley, this is not the one to start with. It has content and some excellent implementation advice but it is hidden beneath buzzwords, name drops and (earned) boasting about personal achievements that you may not be used to/reject if this is the first you read.

Some great concepts and really gets you thinking about how to give (and get) honest feedback in a constructive way. Some of the suggestions at the end of the book will vary in usefulness based on your level (e.g. running an all hands isn't that useful to someone nearer the start of their journey).

I totally took my time with this book, which was a COVID blessing since the closed libraries extended the due date to beyond ample time. There is so much in this book that it was good to read it in short digestible sections and then sit with those sections for a while before moving to the next one. I suspect that not everyone can become a radically candid boss fully, that though the steps and processes are well laid out in the book, personality and circumstances will also play a large part. However, just having an interest in this book in the first place suggests one will be able to make much of it happen.
One criticism I have read of the book is all the name dropping. "At Goggle this...at Apple...." I believe you can see those anecdotes as name dropping, or as personal stories that hold credibility because they happened in famous and hugely successful companies. If they were all stories about CEOs and small businesses one has barely heard of, it would be harder to believe the methods can work. That said, there are still a lot of big businesses that do not have cultures like those found in Silicon Valley which may make it challenging to get buy in for this approach.
Either way, much of this book resonated with me. It is direct, punchy, practical and concise in ways that most business self-help books are not. There is no padding or needless repetition. Diagrams help rather than add gimmick. Sections are accurately titled and subtitled AND There is an index.
A how-to and reference useful now and in years to come.

Radical Candor was assigned reading for work. While I'm glad I read it, had it not been assigned, I'm not sure I ever would have otherwise. The book is too long, and there's a lot of name dropping. The personal anecdotes with Tim Cook, Larry Page, and Dick Costolo come off as heavy-handed. The message: be a real person. Be empathetic. Expect excellence. Provide real feedback. Don't be a jerk. End of book.

Except this one has a "Preface to the Revised Edition: Radical Candor on Radical Candor section. And an "Introduction" (why books need an in introduction with roman-numeraled pages, detracting from my integer-paged progress annoys me). And a "How to Use This Book" section. And a "Getting Started" section after the end of the book. And an "Afterword to the Revised Edition: Rolling Out Radical Candor." And a "Bonus Chapter: A Radically Candid Performance Review." I'm not kidding.

In addition to being the author of this book, Ms. Scottt is also the co-founder of the executive education firm Radical Candor. It would appear that she would like, a la Google, to pry "radical candor" into the business lexicon via blunt force trauma.

For years I’ve been referencing and sharing Kim Scott’s Fast Company article about Radical Candor, yet put off reading the book for years. I wish I had read it earlier! About halfway through I decided to stop underlining since I was underlining 80% of the book.
It’s the balance of caring personally to earn real trust that allows for a level of candidness that I think is hard for most workplaces to achieve. She has lots of good examples and data as well as very specific ways to implement½

I read this book based on a recommendation that stated that it is not just empty Silicon Valley chatter, and this recommendation was mostly proven right. While it was not able to completely loose the over-the-top style of all US self-improvement books ("Do this and your whole life will benefit from it! Your work will be better, your relationships will be improved, and your dog will like you more!") and contained a moderate amount of Silicon Valley name-dropping, I found it quite interesting and helpful. (And, in fairness, the name-dropping was mostly in the context of telling stories about the observed behaviour of other managers, so it was actually a useful part of the book).

I'm not a manager, but as a PhD student, I supervise a number of student theses each year, so I read this book with the intent of seeing which of the techniques may be transferrable to my situation. In my situation, establishing a good relationship with the "direct reports" (i.e., students) is both easier (we are almost the same age, and my supervision style is fairly informal and non-authoritarian to begin with) and harder (the students are only around for half a year).

I have taken a few of the tips about meetings and feedback style to heart, and it has actually already proven helpful with one of my students. On the other hand, many parts of the book were irrelevant to my situation (I don't write yearly performance reports, I grade a thesis) and in some cases, the hints were impossible to do (at a certain point, I am discouraged from working directly with the students to find a solution for their problems, as their problem-solving skills are what I am supposed to grade - so there's a fine balance between being helpful and being able to gauge their problem-solving skills).

In the end, I'm going to go with 4.5 stars (half a star deducted for the over-the-top style and a few other nitpicks), rounded up to five stars for the simple reason that the book describes the sort of boss I would want to have (and I would hope to be, if I ever end up being a boss / manager somewhere).

Really could have been covered in a brief article.

This is a pretty solid leadership/management book. The main premise is to "care personally and challenge directly". Lots of good advice on how to communicate with your team.

FYI there is also a podcast that covers the info in this book and I find it even more effective than the book.

There were a few things that bugged me about this book—the name dropping, the use of emoticons—but overall it was excellent. I'm kind of on the cusp of moving into management/leadership in my career, so the first half was extremely relevant and helpful. The second half focuses more on how to put the Radical Candor principles in place. I'd recommend this book to anybody, whether they're a boss or not.

I really struggled on how to rate this. There is a LOT of advice and the sheer volume of it makes the book impractical as it is difficult to imagine incorporating all the elements, as well as recalling them all. However for the concept of radical candour as depicted but the 4 quadrant graph it is worth 5 stars alone. To be fair there are many good ideas you can implement here - it has an excellent and eye-opening section on gender differences - but would be great if it were much shorter with more practical ideas on implimentation.

I like the message, but this could have been a blog post.