5min chapter

The ONE Thing cover image

318. Why‌ ‌Radical‌ ‌Candor‌ ‌Fuels‌ ‌Productive‌ ‌Accountability‌

The ONE Thing

CHAPTER

How to Root Out Bias, Prejudice, Billing to Build a Kickas Culture of Inclusion

Kim Scott is best selling author of radical candor and her brand new book, just work. She talks about how to root out bias, prejudice, billing to build a kickas culture of inclusivity. Kim scott: The vast majority of us make the vast majority of our mistakes. Despite everything you see on social mediums, most people are actually pretty good at showing that we care personally.

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Speaker 2
And that's our goal, to help you better invest your time. With that, let's get into this conversation with best selling author of radical candor and her brand new book, just work, how to root out bias, prejudice, billing to build a kickas culture of inclusivity. Kim scott, jim, i'm excited to have this conversation to day. Excited
Speaker 1
to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 2
Before we dive into your books, give us a little background on your professional career before becoming an author.
Speaker 1
So my, my whole management career was one giant ploy to subsidize my writing habit. And it worked. So i, ah, yes. I started my career actually working in moscow. I started a diamond cutting factory. And and worked in private equityd in russia in in the early well, was the stidied union when i first got there. And then ii went to business school. I spent a year at the federal communication commission. I was definitely the only person in my business school class to go to work for the federal government. And then i did a couple of failed start ups, then i got a job at gogle. That worked o a lot better. Better. At gogle, i led ad sens you to tan double click on line tails and ap operations. And then i woke up one morning and i realized that the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning is the act of creating a great team and watching that team thrive. And it was not cost per click, although that was going very well at gogleah, but i didn't really care about it. And so i was looking for a job that would allow me to focus on that. And i wound up going to apple to design a work with a great team to design and teach a class called managing an apple. And i realized that managing at apple looks pretty much like managing anywhere else. There's human beings at every company. And and i wound up writing radical candor and becoming a c eo coach. So that's my career in a nutshell. What
Speaker 2
does candor mean to you?
Speaker 1
Candor, to me, is very different than truth. There's an object objective measure to what is true and what is not true. Candor, to me, is, here's what i here's how i understand a situation. I'm also curious to know how you understand the situation, so we can work better to make the situation better. So that's, that's why i called it radical candor. And why radical? That's a whole other question, which you can ask or not ask, gelist either. So radical candor is really about caring personally and challenge directly at the same time. It's about love and truth at the same time. If you really want to abstract up. And it's very rare that we get both at the same time. And yet it's also very fundamental to our ability to collaborate to create successful teams and that's why i called it radically radical, because it's rare. There was, you know, if you write a book about feedback, you're going to get a lot of it. And some of the feedback i got was that a lot of s were using the phrase radical candor as an excuse to act like a jerk. And that is not the spirit of radical candor. That is the, if you think about caring and challenging at the same time, that's radical candor. Sometimes we we challenge, but we don't care, and that's obnoxious aggression. So when people act like a jerk, it's obnoxious aggression, not radical candor. And one of the many problems with obnoxious on the main problem is obviously that it harms other people. But one of the other problems with obnoxious aggression is it i all too often, when we realize that we have been obnoxious, instead of going the right way on the care, personally, domention radical candor, we go the wrong way on challenge directly. Oh, it doesn't matter. It's no big deal. And we wind up in the worst place of all, manipulative insincerity. And this is where sort of passive aggressive behavior, back sabbing behavior all the kinds of things, passive, aggressive, all the kinds of things that make work toxic creep in. And it's fun to tell stories about obnoxious aggression and manipulative insincerity, and we can talk a lot about that. But thea the matter is, in my experience, the vast majority of us make the vast majority of our mistakes when we do remember to show that we care personally. Despite everything you see on social medium, most people are actually pretty nice people. So we do remember to show that we care personally, but we fail to challenge directly because we don't want to hurt some one's feelings. And that's what i call ruin sympathy. So i think it's really important with radical candour to distinguish between the different ways we can, we can mess up on on one dimension or another orb and
Speaker 2
this is where i think it's is so alligned to the one thing.

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