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 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. ( )