Kim Scott

Kim Scott's contribution is a two-by-two grid that gave managers a vocabulary for something they were getting wrong in both directions at once.

Radical Candor, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, argues that useful feedback requires two things held together: caring personally and challenging directly. Drop the challenge and you get ruinous empathy, which is the most common failure in a friendly team and the reason people are surprised by a bad review after a year of pleasant conversations. Drop the care and you get obnoxious aggression. Drop both and you get manipulative insincerity, which is what a team does when it has given up on the manager entirely.

The naming is the reason it stuck. A team that has learned the grid can say what is going wrong in a review conversation without anyone having to accuse anyone of being unkind or weak, which is a change in the working relationship rather than a change in technique.

She led the AdSense, YouTube and DoubleClick online sales and operations teams at Google, then joined the faculty of Apple University, where she taught management. She has coached chief executives at Dropbox, Qualtrics and Twitter, and cofounded the company that now runs Radical Candor as a practice. Her second book, Just Work, addresses what happens when the problem is not feedback skill but bias, prejudice and bullying, and what a manager and a bystander can each actually do in the moment.

The material is delivered as a keynote and, more often, as a keynote plus a workshop, because the grid is a shared language and a language only works if the whole team has it. It suits leadership teams, manager cohorts and organizations whose engagement survey keeps reporting that people do not feel heard.