- Hi, I'm Kim Scott, and I'm the author of Radical Candor. It's a very simple idea. And if you can put it into practice, it will help you do the very best work of your life and build the best relationships of your career.

All I mean by radical candor is care personally and challenge directly at the same time. Why is that so complicated? To explain why, I'm going to offer you a radical candor framework, a two-by-two framework.

All of life's hardest problems really can be boiled down to a good two-by-two framework. Care personally, challenge directly. Let's take each dimension in turn-- first of all, care personally. This is what I think of as the give a damn dimension of radical candor.

And what happens here begins when we're about 18, 19, 20 years old. The problem begins then. We're right at that moment in our lives. We get our first job, but our egos are maximally fragile, and our personas are beginning to solidify. And right at that moment, someone comes along and says, be professional. And for an awful lot of us, we sort of translate that to mean to leave your emotions, leave your true identity, leave your humanity, leave everything that's best about you at home and show up at work like some kind of robot.

And you can't possibly care personally if you're showing up at work like some kind of robot. So what I encourage folks to do is to really be more than just professional, not be unprofessional, but really create the kind of environments in your workplaces where you can bring real human relationships. You can develop real human relationships at work.

However, love is not all you need. You also need the other dimension of radical candor. This is what I think of as the challenge directly dimension or the willingness to piss people off. And this is hard because from the moment we learn how to speak, starting when we're 18 months old, not 18 years old, our parents come along and they say to us some version of-- if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. And I would argue that now that you are working, it's your job to say it.

So this is hard. Radical candor is hard. It's hard because of this "be professional" training since we got our first job, since we were 18 years old. And it's hard because of this "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all" training that's been pounded into our head since we learned to speak at 18 months old, or however old we were.

One of the things that I've done to try to make it a little bit easier is to give a name to what happens when we fail on one dimension or another, which we all do multiple times a day. So sometimes we remember to challenge directly, but we forget to show that we care personally. And this I call obnoxious aggression.

In an early draft of Radical Candor, I called this the asshole quadrant, because it seemed-- I don't know-- more radically candid. But I stopped doing that for a very important reason. As soon as I did that, people would use this framework to start writing names in boxes. And I beg of you, don't use this framework that way. Think about radical candor like a compass that is going to help guide specific conversations that you're having with specific people to a better place.

Now, very often when we realize we've acted like a jerk and we've landed in the obnoxious aggression quadrant, rather than moving up on the care personally dimension, it is our instinct to go the wrong way on challenge directly. And the problem there is that then you wind up in the very worst place of all, manipulative insincerity. And this is where passive-aggressive behavior, political behavior, backstabbing behavior creeps in, the kind of stuff that makes work intolerable.

And it's kind of fun to tell stories about obnoxious aggression and manipulative insincerity, but the fact of the matter is-- because that's where the drama is. But the fact of the matter is the vast majority of us make the vast majority of our mistakes in this last quadrant, where we do remember to show that we care personally. It turns out most people are actually pretty nice. But we're so concerned about not hurting someone's feelings that we fail to tell them something they'd be better off knowing. And this is what I call ruinous empathy.

So one of the things that I want to do in the next couple of seconds is just offer you an order of operations. How can you begin to put these ideas into practice? Start by soliciting radical candor, especially soliciting criticism. Don't dish it out until you prove that you can take it. So you want to solicit first. Now you're in a better place to start giving radical candor.

And remember, radical candor is just as much about praise, even more about praise, than it is about criticism. You want to focus on the good stuff, but you don't want to ignore problems either. So that's giving radical candor.

Now, in order to make sure that these conversations are good, the next thing you need to do is to gauge it. If there were an objective measure of radical candor, I could just post on a blog post somewhere what the right words are. But there aren't necessarily right words.

What you need to do is understand how what you are saying lands for the other person. So radical candor gets measured not at the speaker's mouth but at the listener's ear. So if the person is upset, if they're angry, if they're sad, that's your cue to attend to the care personally dimension of radical candor, to understand the human need behind the upset.

But if the person just isn't hearing you, which actually, even though you fear the strong emotions, what usually happens is you work up your courage to say something, and then the person doesn't even hear you. When they don't hear you, that's your cue to move out on the challenge directly dimension of radical candor.

And last but not least, encourage it. All too often, one person who we know comes and starts talking to us badly about another person who's not in the room. And it's tempting to listen. It's tempting to think that you're being an empathetic colleague, an empathetic friend to listen. This is the one time when listening is not your friend. All you're doing is stirring the political pot. When that happens, the thing to do is to encourage that person to go talk to the person with whom they're having the problem, the conflict. So encourage radical candor.

Thank you so much for your time. Go forth and be radically candid.