This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube video titled "Building a Culture of Kindness" (created 2022-04-27). The excerpt is a single speaker describing organizational culture practices: hiring for kindness using behavioral questions that probe empathy and accountability; creating a pre-reading list (including the "Radical Candor" piece) to set feedback norms; a practical example of reducing gendered language—team members substituting "guys" and a Slack bot that suggests alternatives like "folks" or "y'all"; and encouraging public discussion of mistakes without blame to promote openness and collective problem-solving. The speaker references team members and concrete examples but the excerpt is a monologue rather than a multi-speaker dialogue.
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We score for kindness in the hiring process. And practically, what does that look like? You can't just be like, ah, she looks kind 'cause she's got soft features or whatever. You say, okay, tell me about something that didn't go well. And do they empathize with the other people in that project? Or do they say, I really did my best ever and then product screwed it up. Well, maybe product did screw it up, but do you have a sense of why that happened? Are you thoughtful about it or are you just sort of blaming folks? And so you can start to do that. And I think it brings this culture of people just sort of looking out for each other. And one other thing we do that I really love is starting with, I think our first employee, we created a list of pre-readings. And a bunch of them were our favorite readings at grad school, but there's something called Radical Candor. There's a whole book, it became a book, but it was also a 9-page article or 8-page article about how to give feedback. And so we really set the tone before you get here and then you show up and And people have really carried it forward. This week, this past week, we have been, as a team, working on addressing everyone as guys less. Team is way more than 50% female. But I think colloquially, a lot of us will say, hey guys, as sort of a meaning of hey all. And someone on our team said, hey, it feels very gendered. It feels sort of like male norming, whatever. Try not to do it. And so we said, great, we'll try not to do it. And we all made a bunch of efforts. And then someone on our support team basically made this Slack bot. So when you say, "Hey guys," or something similar in Slack, it says, "Oh, did you mean folks? Oh, did you mean y'all? Oh, did you mean people?" And whenever you say, it'll just randomly generate an alternative. This is an amazing thing. This is like very small, very sort of like lovingly supportive way to help everyone get better and not like, it doesn't say, "Don't say guys," 'cause whatever. Everybody's trying their best. And so I think that's it. And then I think also, We talk about things that we did wrong. We talk about mistakes that we made. We try to do it publicly. We try to be super clear in what's gone well and what's gone poorly without blaming ourselves or blaming the person. And that creates this really open environment where we're solving a problem together as opposed to trying to stake credit.
