Radical Candor: From theory to practice with author Kim Scott

If you say, "Do you have any feedback for me?" You're wasting your breath. The other person's gonna say, "Oh, no, everything's fine." The question that I like to ask is, "What could I do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?" Do not write down my question, 'cause if you sound like Kim Scott and not like yourself, then other people are not gonna believe you on the answer. It needs to sound authentic to you. And if everybody can write down their question, who they're gonna ask it of, and then pop it into their calendar right now, this will be one of the most productive podcasts in all of podcast land.

(instrumental music) Today, my guest is Kim Scott. Kim is the author of Radical Candor, which is the single most referenced book on this podcast. The book has sold over one million copies, has been translated into 23 languages. It was such an honor to have Kim on the podcast. Prior to this book, Kim was a CO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and many other tech companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University. Before that, she led AdSense, YouTube, and DoubleClick teams at Google. Prior to that, Kim managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo, and started a diamond cutting factory in Moscow. She's also working on a new book that you can pre-order now, called Radical Respect. In our conversation, we get very practical and very tactical about practicing radical candor. Kim briefly describes the core idea, shares language and phrases and words you can use to get better at practicing radical candor. She shares tips for people-pleasers, like myself. Also, a lot of very concrete advice for how to get feedback. Also, what to do if your culture is on the ruinous empathy side of the spectrum, or even worse, obnoxious aggression, and so much more. I guarantee listening to this episode will make you a better leader and a better employee. With that, I bring you Kim Scott after a short word from our one featured sponsor for this episode. You fell in love with building products for a reason, but sometimes the day-to-day reality is a little different than you imagined. Instead of dreaming up big ideas, talking to customers and crafting a strategy, you're drowning in spreadsheets and roadmap updates and you're spending your days basically putting out fires. A better way is possible. Introducing Jira Product Discovery, the new prioritization and road mapping tool built for product teams by Atlassian. With Jira Product Discovery, you can gather all your product ideas and insights in one place and prioritize confidently, finally replacing those endless spreadsheets. Create and share custom product roadmaps with any stakeholder in seconds, and it's all built on Jira, where your engineering teams are already working, so true collaboration is finally possible. Great products are built by great teams, not just engineers. Sales, support, leadership, even Greg from finance. Anyone that you want can contribute ideas, feedback and insights in Jira Product Discovery for free. No catch. And it's only $10 a month for you. Say goodbye to your spreadsheets and the never-ending alignment efforts. The old way of doing product management is over. Rediscover what's possible with Jira Product Discovery. Try it for free at atlassian.com/lenny. That's atlassian.com/lenny. Kim, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.