Narrator: Imagine you’re a young analyst at a strategy meeting. The CEO, a powerful and respected figure, decides to tell a "funny" story. He recounts a business trip to Moscow where his Soviet partners, after a night at the Bolshoi Ballet, offered to procure a ballerina for him. As he tells it, the men in the room chuckle, admiring his worldliness. But you feel sick. The story isn't funny; it’s a casual anecdote about human trafficking. Yet, no one says a word. You stay silent, burying the disgust and confusion. This isn't just a hypothetical scenario; it was the reality for a young Kim Scott at the start of her career.

This moment, and many others like it, form the foundation of Scott's book, Just Work: How to Root Out Bias, Prejudice, and Bullying to Build a Fairer World. After achieving global recognition for her first book, Radical Candor, Scott realized that direct feedback, while powerful, didn't work equally well for everyone. Systemic injustices created barriers that she, as a white woman with privilege, hadn't fully appreciated. Just Work is her answer—a practical, unflinching guide to understanding the anatomy of workplace injustice and, more importantly, a blueprint for how every person in an organization can work to dismantle it.

Narrator: Before we can fix a problem, we must be able to name it. Scott argues that "workplace injustice" is too broad a term. To effectively address it, we must first dissect it into its three distinct root causes: bias, prejudice, and bullying. Confusing them leads to ineffective solutions.

First is bias, which Scott defines simply as “not meaning it.” Bias is an unconscious cognitive shortcut, a mental snap judgment that is often rooted in stereotypes. It’s the reason a hiring manager might feel a candidate from their alma mater is a "better fit" or why a male executive might interrupt a female colleague without even realizing it. Because it’s unintentional, the correct response isn't accusation but compassionate, clear feedback to create awareness.

Next is prejudice, which Scott defines as “meaning it.” This is when a person consciously holds a biased belief. It’s a deliberately held stereotype, like believing that women are not suited for leadership roles or that a person of a certain race is less intelligent. Here, the goal isn't to change the person's mind but to draw a firm boundary. The response must be to make it clear that while they can believe what they want, they cannot impose those beliefs on others in the workplace.

Finally, there is bullying, which is simply “being mean.” It is the intentional use of power to harm or humiliate someone. Unlike bias or prejudice, bullying isn't about beliefs; it’s about behavior. A bully’s goal is to dominate. Therefore, the only effective response is to create real, meaningful consequences for their actions. Awareness campaigns and conversations won't stop a bully; accountability will.

Narrator: Scott’s framework is not just theoretical; it was forged in the fire of her own experiences. Early in her career, she was a fierce believer in meritocracy and denied that sexism had ever held her back. The reality was that she was simply refusing to see it.

Shortly after the Bolshoi Ballet incident, Scott discovered she was being paid four times less than a male friend in a nearly identical role at another firm. When she brought this up with her direct boss, he dismissed her concern with a sexist remark, suggesting her friend must be sleeping with his boss. Undeterred, she went to the CEO, Robert—the same man from the ballet story. He initially seemed warm and receptive, but when she stated her case for a raise, his demeanor turned cold. He gaslighted her, twisting her words, questioning her judgment, and making her feel greedy and irrational for simply asking for fair market value. He used his own daughter's low salary as a bizarre justification, leaving Scott feeling confused, ashamed, and powerless. This incident was a stark lesson in how gender bias and prejudice manifest not just in paychecks, but in the psychological manipulation used to maintain the status quo.

Narrator: When bias, prejudice, and bullying are combined with a power imbalance, they metastasize into more severe forms of injustice: discrimination, harassment, and physical violations. Scott points to research showing that rude and uncivil behavior in the workplace is three times more likely to come from someone in a position of authority.

She references the work of Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, whose book The Power Paradox explains how power can corrupt. As people gain authority, they often lose the very qualities that helped them rise, such as empathy and collaboration. They begin to depersonalize those with less power and feel entitled to act on their worst impulses. This isn't because they are inherently bad people, but because unchecked power creates a psychological environment where such behavior is permissible.

This creates a dangerous dynamic in organizations. Leaders who operate without checks and balances are more likely to make biased decisions in hiring and promotions, engage in verbal harassment, and create a culture of fear. Scott argues that in the modern economy, this command-and-control style is not just immoral, it’s inefficient. As a McKinsey study cited in the book shows, companies with the least gender and ethnic diversity are 29% less likely to achieve above-average profitability.

Narrator: While individual acts of injustice are harmful, Scott’s ultimate focus is on the systems that allow them to flourish. Systemic injustice occurs when the dynamics of bias, prejudice, and bullying become embedded in an organization's structure—its hiring processes, promotion criteria, and reporting mechanisms.

A key principle here is that results matter more than intentions. A company may not have intentionally designed a discriminatory hiring process, but if that process consistently yields a homogeneous workforce, then it is an unjust system. A company may have an HR reporting system, but if that system is so intimidating or ineffective that no one uses it, it inadvertently protects perpetrators.

Scott identifies two dynamics that fuel these broken systems. The Conformity Dynamic pressures people to go along with the group, even when they know something is wrong—like the men who laughed at the CEO's inappropriate story. The Coercion Dynamic is when those with power force others to comply, creating a culture of silence and fear. Together, these dynamics build the architecture of an unjust workplace, where problems are not only ignored but become normalized.

Narrator: Just Work is ultimately a call to action, and Scott provides a clear model for how everyone can contribute. She argues that in any instance of injustice, people play one of four roles: the person harmed, the upstander (an observer who intervenes), the person who caused harm, and the leader.

The book provides specific, actionable advice for each role. For the person harmed, it offers scripts for responding to microaggressions. For the upstander, it provides strategies for supporting a colleague without taking over. For the person who caused harm, it outlines how to listen, apologize, and commit to doing better. And for leaders, it details how to build systems—like bias interrupters in hiring and clear consequences for bullying—that prevent injustice from taking root.

This framework moves the burden of fixing the problem away from the person who was harmed. It illustrates the shared responsibility of building a better workplace. A simple but powerful story in the book highlights this complexity: a male executive, John, hesitates to give a female colleague, Susan, critical feedback. Susan had named a marketing campaign "Rolling Thunder," unaware of its connection to a brutal Vietnam War bombing campaign. John knew this but stayed silent, afraid he would be accused of "mansplaining." His fear, while understandable, prevented him from helping his colleague and his company avoid a serious error. This story shows that creating a just workplace requires navigating complex fears and dynamics from all sides.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Just Work is that creating an equitable workplace is not about finding and punishing "bad people." It is about designing better systems and fostering a culture of shared responsibility. It requires us to move beyond the simple, and often unhelpful, question of intent and instead focus on the tangible results of our actions and systems. By learning to distinguish between bias, prejudice, and bullying, and by understanding our specific role in any given situation, we can move from being passive bystanders to active architects of a fairer world.

The book leaves us with a profound challenge. It asks us to look honestly at our own workplaces and ourselves, not to assign blame, but to accept responsibility. The most difficult idea may be that we are all, in some way, complicit in the systems we inhabit. The ultimate question Just Work poses is not "Are you a good person?" but rather, "Are you willing to do the work to build a just system?"