Kim Scott
Co-Founder, Radical Candor · 1 appearance on the record.
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authorfounderexecutivehostacademic@kimballscott ↗LinkedIn ↗radicalcandor.com ↗
Kim Scott is best known for creating the Radical Candor management philosophy and authoring the bestselling business books Radical Candor and Radical Respect. Before founding her company, she led teams at Google, taught at Apple University, and coached CEOs at tech companies including Dropbox, Qualtrics, and Twitter.
21statements → 2claims → 0claims resolved → 3.76/5average certainty → 2.24/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 21said about them ↓
2 not checkable as stated how the 2 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
2 assertions · 1 opinion · 16 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 2 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Kim argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
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We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Kim Scott on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Kim Scott said on Lenny's Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Scott: Phone calls provide better feedback signal than video calls
“There's a lot of evidence coming out of University of Chicago and probably other places, but that's the article I've read it, that we, there's more noise than signal in facial expressions and body language, especially if somebody is just a little Square on a c…”
Scott: Isaacson's Musk biography pushes a false dichotomy about successful leadership
“There's this false dichotomy. In fact, the new biography of Elon Musk falls into this category. I like Walter Isaacson's work a lot, but he falls prey to this in his biography of Elon Musk, which is there's this notion that we have to choose between being a to…”
Scott: Likability bias makes it harder for women to challenge directly
“The sort of likability competence bias that a lot of women face pushed me, especially early in my career, in the wrong direction on challenge directly, and it made it much harder for me to, because often I would say something, and I would say it even more gent…”
Scott: Immediate two-minute feedback is more important than being on time
“But if you don't, if it's not possible, and often it was not possible for me in my career to sort of schedule my time that way, I just decided that these moments of management were more important than being on time to my next meeting. And so I was just late so…”
Scott: Ray Dalio's 400-page 'Principles' has only five pages on caring
“In fact, I did an analysis of Dalio's book, Principles, and there, it's like a, I don't know, three or 400 page book, and there were, I think, four or five pages about caring about people. It's, there's very low care, personally.”
Kim Scott: Radical Candor Is Measured at the Listener's Ear
“Radical candor gets measured not at, you know, not at the speaker's mouth, but at the listener's ear, and I think that Steve had built a team around him of people who didn't mind rather what other people would consider obnoxious aggression, but I think in the …”
Scott: Becoming a leader makes you significantly more prone to bullying
“When you become a leader, you're much more prone to bullying, even if you don't think of yourself as a bully”
Scott: 90% of leaders make 90% of their mistakes in ruinous empathy
“I would say 90% of us make 90% of our mistakes in that ruinous empathy bucket. It's by far and away the most common problem”
Scott: Relationships don't scale across organizations, but workplace culture does
“No matter how talented you are, relationships don't scale. But she did do those things for her direct reports and the people who she worked most closely with, all, all of us. And when a leader treats their team, the people who they interact with on a day to da…”
Kim Scott: Praise is more important than criticism in Radical Candor
“However, praise is even more important than criticism in terms of radical candor. Radical candor is not all about The boss giving the employee criticism. It should always start with soliciting feedback and it should include more praise and criticism.”
Scott: I fired a coaching client for giving feedback over Slack
“I once coached someone who kept giving feedback over Slack and I finally just quit coaching him. I was like, I, if you keep making this mistake, I'm not, I can't be your coach.”
Scott: Withholding critical feedback from underperformers causes top performers to quit
“If I didn't fire Bob, I was gonna lose all my best performers, because not only had it been unfair to Bob not to tell him, I also had been unfair to everyone on the team and they were frustrated. Their deliverables were late because his deliverables were late.…”
Scott: Focusing on caring for others helps leaders overcome people-pleasing
“One of the things that was helpful for me anyway, so you can tell me if it's helpful for you, what was realizing that my job was not to be liked. My job was to care about other people and to get out of my own head and to become others focused is what helped me…”
Scott: Managers must challenge directly and highlight mistake patterns against defensiveness
“Sometimes it's useful to show someone a pattern. All of the careless mistakes to, especially if someone is, is defense, is defensive, or if you think they're likely to be defensive. If you think they're likely to do to you what I did to my boss, I don't know. …”
Scott: People fear negative emotional reactions to feedback more than they occur
“I think we do fear someone else getting upset more often than they actually get upset. We have kind of a negative, negativity bias when it comes to part of the reason why we're reluctant to give feedback.”
Scott: Establishing radical candor requires soliciting criticism before giving it
“There's really an order of operations to radical candor, and if you begin with soliciting criticism, then you take the first and most important step to improving your relationship with that person enough that, that it becomes easier for you to give it as well …”
Scott: Praise works better than criticism to reinforce positive manager behaviors
“And if you want, if there are things that your boss Does that you appreciate and you want your boss to do more of those things? Praise is a better tool for that than criticism.”
Scott: Aggressive leaders improve when coached through enlightened self-interest
“Very often the leaders who are low on the care personally dimension, they do care about their results and they do care about their own careers. And so when you sort of explain this to them in terms of enlightened self-interest, they tend to get better at it.”
Scott: Obnoxious aggression is inefficient because people tune out the feedback
“Part of the problem with obnoxious aggression is that you harm other people, but it's also inefficient because when you act like that, people can't hear what you're saying, so you're wasting your breath, you know.”
Scott: Reading fiction is the best way for leaders to build compassion
“I believe that the more novels people read, the better, that's the, if people often ask me, like, what can I do to move up on the care personally dimension of radical candor? And read more novels. This is the best way I know of to build compassion for other pe…”
Scott: Structure direct report career conversations across three 45-minute sessions
“I think one of the really important things that all managers can do for their direct reports to show that they care is to have real meaningful career conversations where you talk about sort of their life story, sort of their past, whatever part of it they're c…”
The other half of the tape: Kim Scott's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 20 times in 7 episodes on Lenny's Podcast. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Lenny Rachitsky 9Melissa Tan 4Ada Chen Rekhi 4Kenneth Berger 2Noah Weiss 1
Statements about Kim Scott, by other people (1)
Tan: Kim Scott workshopped Radical Candor at Dropbox before publishing
“Interestingly enough, Kim Scott was at Dropbox for a short period of time. So when I joined Dropbox, she was actually on my interview panel and we overlapped for three months. And she actually workshopped that book with our team before, or before she published…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2026 4 mentions in 1 episode
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2024 2 mentions in 1 episode
2023 13 mentions in 4 episodes 3 per episode
- Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Head of Podcast Product)
- Building high-performing teams | Melissa Tan (Webflow, Dropbox, Canva)
- How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn)
- The 10 traits of great PMs, AI, and Slack’s approach to product | Noah Weiss (Slack, Google)
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Radical Candor: From theory to practice with author Kim Scott | Dec 10, 2023 | 1h 3m |