KIM SCOTT

>> Craig Gould: Kim Scott, thank you so much for joining me this week on the podcast. Kim, you’re the author of two landmark books on leadership culture, Radical Candor, and more recently, Radical Respect. You’re the co founder of the company Radical Candor, and you’ve coached leaders at household names like Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and others across the tech world. Earlier in your career, you taught at Apple University and led teams at Google for AdSense, YouTube, DoubleClick. And Kim, I, I have so many question from your books and your years of experience, but these conversations, I, I love to start these conversations with one common question, which is, Kim, what are your memories of your first job?

>> Kim Scott: So I don’t know if this really counts as a job, but I, I’ll, I’ll tell you my, I’ll tell you this memory. I was. My first job was to be my father’s bird dog. he had decided, he decided that, and it ties into Radical Candor, so bear with me. But he decided I was easier to train than a dog. And so I would go with him hunting doves. We would go to church on Sunday. We would sing this hymn. The angel that doth wound the dove darts not from those who watch and love. And then we would go out to these fields where we would blast the doves out of the sky. And me, and these were big rectangular fields, and there was a pickup truck driving around the field bringing the adults. Not me. I was still a child. beer and Jack Daniels. And so people were getting drunker and drunker. They’re standing across the field from each other shooting, you know. And occasionally a bird would fly down low and everybody would yell, low bird, low bird. Like, don’t shoot me. Remember, there’s people. And, and my father loved hunting. Not so much because he loved hunting, but he loved doing it with his father. And so I was with my father and my grandfather. And neither one of them were great shots. So they would, they would, they would hit these birds but not kill them. And it was my job to run out into the field and grab these birds and catch them. They were still alive. And then I had to play, pluck their head off quickly. and this is a, this is not the story you were expecting to hear.

>> Craig Gould: I’ve heard it all, Kim. And so this just, it’s just adding to the list. I love it.

>> Kim Scott: So that was. My first job, was, being my father’s bird dog. what was my impression of it? If you have to do something, if you have to cause pain, cause it quickly. Don’t draw. That was. My father would tease me because I would go out and I would feel so bad for these wounded doves that I would bring them back very gingerly and then, and my father had to point out, you’re not doing these birds any favors to not to do what has to be done quickly.

>> Craig Gould: You really did do an amazing job of drawing a line to your, your career’s work with radical candor. Which is, which is interesting. You know, when I read Radical Candor and then Radical Respect, I found that, you know, the one thing in common, you know, across both of those was this sort of what we’d call either maybe the price or the cost of inaction. Can can you talk about that cost of inaction and where were the, the original roots in you seeing that?

>> Kim Scott: Yeah, I think that, that the cost of, of inaction is really what I call ruinous empathy and radical candor. And that was kind of what I was experiencing. That’s what I was doing to these. I mean, you know, granted it would have been ideal if they hadn’t been shot in the first place, but, but, but now that they were in that situation, I was not being kind to those doves by prolonging their misery. And and that is what I call, but I had great empathy for the dove, you know, so that’s what I would call ruinous empathy. Empathy. I’ll tell you a more, less, less dramatic but but more work related story about ruinous empathy. I, I had hired this guy, we’ll call him Bob. And I really liked Bob a lot. He was smart, he was charming, he was funny. He would do stuff like we’re at a manager off site playing one of those endless get to know you games. I was CEO of M My. I was a, I was a first time CEO at this point of a software startup. We’re playing one of those endless get to know you games and everybody’s getting more and more stressed out. But nobody wants to be the jerk who says this is a waste of time. And Bob was the guy who had the courage to raise his hand and to say, I’ve got an idea. It’ll help us get to know each other and it’ll be really fast. Whatever his idea was, if it was really fast, that’s what we were going to do. Bob says, let’s go around the table and confess what candy our parents used when potty training us. Really weird, but really fast. Weirder yet, we all remembered Hershey kisses right here. And then for the next 10 months. Every time there was a tense moment in a meeting, Bob would pull out just the right piece of candy for the right person at the right moment. So Bob, brought a little levity to the office. It was just. Everybody kind of loved working with Bob. But there was just one problem with Bob. He was doing terrible work. Super creative, but riddled with sloppy mistakes. I was so puzzled. I learned much later that the problem was that he was smoking pot in the bathroom three times a day, which maybe explained all that candy that he had all the time. But I didn’t know any of that at the time. All I knew was that Bob was handing work into me and there was shame in his. And I would say something to him along the lines of, oh, Bob, you’re so awesome. We all love working with you. This is a great start. Maybe you can make it just a little bit better. Which, of course, he never did. And this went on. Well. Before I go, before I say what happened, let’s double click on that. Like, why did I say that? Part of it was truly what I call ruinous empathy. I really did like Bob a lot, and I really didn’t want to hurt his feelings. But if I’m honest with myself, there was also something more insidious going on, something that I call manipulative insincerity and radical candor. Because Bob was popular and Bob was also sensitive, There was part of me that was afraid that if I told Bob in no uncertain terms that his work wasn’t nearly good enough, that he would start to cry and then everybody would think I was a big, you know what? So the part of me that was worried about my reputation as a leader, that was the manipulative insincerity part driving me to say this, you know, oh, this is a great start. And the part of me that was genuinely worried about Bob and his feelings, that was the ruinous empathy part. This went on for 10 months, and eventually the inevitable happened. I realized that if I didn’t fire Bob, I was going to lose all my best performers. Because not only had I been unfair to Bob, not to tell him I’d been unfair to the whole team. And everybody was frustrated. Their deliverables were late because his deliverables were late. They weren’t able to spend as much time as they needed to on their work because they were having to spend so much time redoing Bob’s work. And, people were fed up. They were. And the people who were best at the job, they were going to quit because they wanted to work in a place where they could do their best work of their lives. I wanted them to do the best work of their lives. And yet I was making it impossible by not dealing with this Bob situation. So I sat down to have a conversation with Bob that I should have started, frankly, 10 months previously. And when I, when I was finished, he kind of pushed his chair back from the table, he looked me right in the eye and he said, why didn’t you tell me? And as that question was going around in my head with no good answer, he looked at me again and he said, why didn’t anyone tell me? I thought you all cared about me. And now I realize that by not giving Bob this feedback, thinking I was being so nice, he’s getting fired as a result of it. Not so nice after all. But it was too late actually, to save Bob. Even Bob agreed he should go. At this point, his reputation on the team was just shot. All I could do was make myself a very solemn promise that I would never make that mistake again and, and that I would do everything in my power to help other people avoid making that mistake. And that was really what prompted me to come up with the radical canner framework and write the book and talk to people, because these, I’m not the only one, unfortunately, who made that mistake. Every leader I’ve ever worked with has made that mistake multiple times.

>> Craig Gould: Well, I mean, you know, you, you get to that level and you’re managing people and people are looking to you and, you know, we’re still human. We, we still want to be liked. We still care about how people see us. And, you know, do they respect us? Do they, do they think I’m a nice person? And you know, for a lot of us, conflict isn’t number one on our favorite thing list. I mean, you know, a lot of.

>> Kim Scott: Us, I don’t know anybody. I mean, I’m sure there are people who love it, but I’m not one of them.

>> Craig Gould: When we’re prone to conflict avoidance, when we’re prone to wanting, people to, to like and admire us, it’s tough to convince ourselves that, you know, it’s in everyone’s best interest to have really tough conversations.

>> Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah. The thing about radical candor, I think most people want to want to do it. Radical candor is just what happens when you care personally and you challenge directly at the same time. If we go back to that Bob story, I was, when I was in ruinous empathy mode, I was caring, but not challenging. And when I was in manipulative insincerity mode. I was neither caring nor challenging. Think about it in terms of a two by two care personally on the vertical line, and challenge directly on the horizontal line. Radical caner is what happens in the upper right hand, the desirable upper right hand quadrant where you’re caring and challenging at the same time. And most people want to, want to do this. And most people also know that not saying the thing is not an act of kindness. But nobody wants to say the thing in the moment. and I think there, I mean there’s a million reasons why we don’t want to say it, but I think there’s two big ones. One is that we’ve been told since we were learned to speak, really, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. And now all of a sudden it’s your job to say it. That’s hard. and also because we’ve been told since we got our first job, be professional. And I think an awful lot of us translate that to mean leave your emotions, leave who you really are, leave, leave your humanity, leave everything that’s best and most real about you at home and show up at work like some kind of robot. And I think especially when people become leaders, they sort of fall into that misunderstanding. And those two things make it really hard to want to be radically candid in the moment. either to solicit it, to hear the criticism, or to give it.

>> Craig Gould: Well, you know, it seems like you have to invest in the relationship and demonstrate your sincere well being for these employees beforehand. You know, even, even if you were to try to do it in the moment, it could come across as trite. Right. I mean the, the whole compliment sandwich. Right? Yeah, you know, it can, it can feel non authentic. I think there’s a beautiful example in radical candor where you had given like your first presentation to the C suite at Google, and Sheryl Sandberg takes you aside afterward and has feedback for you, but she won’t give you that critical feedback until you kind of sit in her praise for you. Can you talk about that?

>> Kim Scott: Yeah, yeah. This was such an intense moment for me, but because I think probably like everyone listening, it’s a little nerve wracking to have to go in and present. You just start a new job and you’re presenting to the CEO and the founders of Google. And Google isn’t, wasn’t then what it is now, but it was still intense. It was not tiny. And I remember when she, when I was finished with the presentation, feeling like I had knocked it out of the park, you know, And I walked by her. I’m expecting a high five, a pat on the back, and instead she says, why don’t you walk back to my office with me? And she started, not by telling me what had gone wrong, but what had gone. Well, not in the feedback sandwich sense of the word, but really seeming to mean it. So she, she would, she said to me, when you offered both the pros and the cons of your recommendation, you earned credibility in there. Do more of that. And that was. I was glad she had told me that because I had walked out thinking maybe, you know, it was great that everything had gone, had gone so seemingly well, but maybe I hadn’t advocated strongly enough for my point of view. You know, we’re always wondering this. And so I was glad that she had told me that. But I could tell there was, there was something else. She, she wasn’t doing this in the feedback sandwich. You know, it wasn’t like, oh, Kim, I like your bookshelf. Your book kind of sucks, but cool sweater, you know, that. Which wasn’t going to make me feel any better. but, but she was, she was very specific, she was very sincere with her praise. And she used this, well, what I call now the core framework. So context in the meeting observation, when you offered both sides, both the pros and the cons of your recommendation, that was the observation, the result. You earned credibility. Explore next steps. Do more of that. So very simple, you know, you don’t want to just, if, if it’s something you would say to your dog, it’s not good praise. And she didn’t fall into that trap. She didn’t fall in the trap of using praise is nothing more than a criticism delivery platform. So she did a good job on the praise, but of course all I wanted to hear was a criticism. And eventually she said to me, you know, you said, I’m, in there a lot. I kind of brushed, who cares? You know, and then she said to.

>> Craig Gould: Me.

>> Kim Scott: I know this great speech coach. I bet Google would pay for it. Would you like an introduction? Once again, I made this brush off gesture with my hand and finally she said to me, when you say, every third word, it makes you sound stupid. Now she’s got my full attention. And some people might say it was mean of her to say I sounded stupid, but actually it was the kindest thing she could have done for me at that moment in my career. Because if she hadn’t used just those Words with me. And by the way, this is also an important point. She never would have used those words with other people on her team who were perhaps a better listener than I was. But she knew me well enough to know that if she didn’t use just those words with me, that I wouldn’t go visit the speech coach. And she also knew me well enough to know that it wasn’t going to crush me if she said this. I was confident, perhaps overconfident, which is why I didn’t hear it the first time when she said it more subtly. And so I think that’s a good example of why it’s really helpful to get to know people on your team well enough. However, I don’t think you have to wait to get to know them to be radically candid, because if you do, there’s this temptation, I think, that a lot of people have to say, oh, I’ll hang out in ruinous empathy and get to know someone, and then I’ll move over to radical candor. And that’s a mistake because then you build up not technical debt, but feedback debt. And then it can, then it can be even harder. it can feel like a shock to the system, like you’re changing the terms of your relationship. So I think you want to make sure that you begin your relationships in radical candor. That, that if someone, you know, if someone has spinach in their teeth and you’re having lunch with them for the very first time, you should tell them. Same thing with the, But she might have said it gently. She might not have taken that risk. To say it makes you sound stupid. If she hadn’t known me as well as she had. so I think the point is you want to start out in radical candor, but you want to start in kind of a gentle place. And it’s a good way to get to know people because then you can feel, figure out, are they sad, do they seem sad or mad. Then you need to move up on the care, personally dimension of radical candor. Are they brushing you off the way I did? Cheryl? Then you need to keep moving out on the challenge directly dimension. And she tried three times, and often you’ll have to try 10 times before you get through to people.

>> Craig Gould: Your background is amazing. Not only you’re coaching some of the most household names in Silicon Valley over the last dozen years, but you know, your time at Google and your ability to compare and contrast the culture, at Google versus the culture at Apple. And, you know, I’ve heard stories over the years I think we’ve all heard them about the toxic nature of some of Steve, Jobs feedback with people and how he managed the relationships of some of those that were reporting directly to him. And I found that, you know, the way you kind of pick that apart in radical candor, I don’t know if I was able to redeem all of it in my head, but I think I did get to a point where I kind of understood a little bit better. You know, he wasn’t using exactly the words that maybe you or I would use, but he had a specific thing in mind and he didn’t want to split hairs about it because he wanted to get to this one thing which was really kind of excellence.

>> Kim Scott: Yeah, yeah. Rather than talking about him, because I don’t know what was going on in his mind, but I’ll share a story about a time when I was kind of the asshole and, other people’s, and I’ll explain what was going on in my mind and why maybe something analogous was happening with Steve and his relationships at work. So, I was working at Google and we were localizing adsense, and on my team was one guy who had worked for me at a previous startup and several other people who were new to the team, who, who, or at least who were new to me. Our relationship was, was not as. Was not as deep as, as with this one guy, Jared. And Jared kept making a mistake about, was he, you know, was it Slovakia or Slovenia that, that, that he was talking about? He kept confusing the two. And I corrected him once I corrected him. And I had lived in the region, so I was acutely aware of the difference between, between Slovakia and Slovenia. Not that I’m this great educated person, but I had lived there, so I knew. And he did it a third time. And finally I burst out. I was like, jared, it’s Slovakia, not Slovenia, dumbass. And he thought that was funny because we had this relationship where, where he knew that I had enormous respect for him, that, I knew he was a genius, and, that, that I, was just teasing him that, you know, sort of giving each other shit was part of our relationship, and he thought it was funny. And I thought we had moved on, but several other people who were in the meeting thought, oh, my gosh, Kim is this big jerk. And so I think part of it is that different people have different ways of engaging with the people who they’re closest to. And you, know, I will, I will say this of Steve Jobs. When he was diagnosed with cancer, Tim Cook offered to Give him half his liver. And Steve refused the sacrifice. And I only know of one word to explain the behavior of those two people, and that’s love. and so I think that he did have. If you listen at his memorial service to the way that Jony, I’ve described him. If you listen to the way that, Jony, I’ve was chief design officer who worked for Steve for many years. if you listen to the way, that Scott Forstall, who built the iOS team, talked about Steve, these people, if you listen to Tim Cook, these people really loved working with Steve. They had real human relationships. Now, it may not have been a relationship that I would have, want to have, but they had their real human relationships. And there were certainly people, and Steve has talked about this in different videos where he said, you know, some people hate working with me. And I’m sure that’s true. I knew a few people who found it sort of exhausting. But the point is that there’s no objective measure for what’s radical candor. It gets measured not at the speaker’s mouth, but at the listener’s ear and the person. You know, it’s a two way thing, not the audience’s ear, but it’s a relation, it’s a relational thing. So I think that, I think that there, I mean, at least when I worked at Apple, I did these employee engagement surveys and they would ask people how they felt about the CEO. And people who worked at Apple not only admired Steve, but they loved, now not everybody, some people hated it. And he did some things that were really, terrible. I mean, you know, So I’m not saying he’s some kind of saint, but I’m saying in general I think that he cared about the people who he cared about and he challenged them extremely directly.

>> Craig Gould: Yeah, and I think there was, there was one line in your book where you were kind of describing how when he, when he would tell you as an employee, your work is shit, that wasn’t his way of saying that you are shit. It’s that your work is shit. Your work, your work needs to be better because you are better than this work. And what we need is better than what you’ve given me.

>> Kim Scott: Yeah, there’s a great video of him. There was this, documentary called Triumph of the Nerds and a bunch of the outtakes from the interviews were published later. I’ll send you the clip if I can find it, but the interviewer is asking Steve. You know, it’s my understanding that when you tell People, your work is shit. What you really mean is, I didn’t understand that. Could you say it again? And Steve kind of laughs and he’s like, no, that’s not what I meant. And then, and then the interviewer pushes him, like, explain yourself. Why would you say that to someone? And, And I won’t. I can’t remember exactly what he said. But the gist of it was that when you’re working with people who are super confident, you know, sometimes you have to push them pretty hard. Sometimes they’re brushing you off, kind of the way that I did to Cheryl in the, story, you’ll say something sort of gently like, you know, I think that could be better. And they’re like, ah, it’s perfect. You know, and they don’t hear you until you say something like, it makes you sound stupid or your work is. And then they hear you. And if in the context, And Steve goes on to explain that when you’re managing a team, it’s not only your relationship with that one person that matters, it’s also your relationship with the whole team. And it’s your job to hold this quality bar high and to make sure that everyone is delivering. Because if one, you know, if you do what I did with Bob, not only is that unfair to Bob, it’s unfair to the whole team, and it’s unfair to your investors. You’re not getting the kind of. And your customers not achieving what you could achieve in the world. And I, I think maybe cutting, too much slack here, but I think that’s what Steve meant when he said your work is shit. That’s what he was trying to get across.

>> Craig Gould: You hope that somebody could get to that role and still have, enough humility to be able to, you know, receive feedback from the folks around them. And like I was telling you earlier, I just recently had conversation with Marty Dubin, who, you know, is all about blind spots. You do these 360s, and people are surprised at what, you know, people are saying. Can you talk about the amount of humility that it takes for somebody in the C suite to be able to receive that same level of candor back to them?

>> Kim Scott: I believe that the way that you move forward as a leader is human relationships. And there are few things that are more damaging to a human relationship than a power imbalance. And so one of the first and most important things that leaders need to do is to figure out how to lay their power down. And I think one of the best ways to do that is to solicit feedback. Don’t dish it out before you prove you can take it. And, it’s hard to do that. And it’s hard for a bunch of different reasons. One is that even though you may not think of yourself as intimidating, your position is intimidating to people. And so flattery is going to come at you like a thick and dangerous fog. You’re going to be the last one to know when your business is failing if you don’t make it really easy for people to come. And not just easy, because it’s never going to be easy for them. You’ve got to make it hard for them not to come and tell you, when things are broken. here’s another story about Steve Jobs doing that. So there was, they were launching a feature, and somebody on his team wanted to do it one way and Steve wanted to do it another way. And this guy argued with Steve a few times, three or four times, said, I really don’t think we should do that. And Steve, you know, had strong opinions. And eventually, eventually it launched the way Steve, the guy gave up. He said, well, it’s his company. We’ll do it his way. And he was proven right, and Steve was proven wrong. And Steve came charging into this guy’s office, and he’s like, why didn’t you convince me? And he was like, we did it your way, Steve. And Steve said, and it was your job to convince me I was wrong, and you failed. So harsh. again, not the way that. I’m not saying this is the way to do it, but the point is that you need to realize that people are going to give up too easily, and that if you have a very strong position and you’re the leader, you need to switch roles. Steve later learned to switch roles with people. The team that built the ipod wanted to launch itunes on the Windows platform at a time when Apple only had 3% market share. So if iPod was going to succeed, they had to do this. And Steve thought the ipod was all about persuading people to switch to Mac. So he was like, why would I do that? And he argued and he argued and he argued, and he realized he was wearing the team down. So he switched roles. He would say, okay, I’m going to argue for doing it, and then you all are going to argue again. So it’s really. It was. He had learned that. That he tended to beat people down. And eventually that, you know, that we wouldn’t have. We wouldn’t have the phone, we wouldn’t have the iPad. We wouldn’t have so many things if, if Steve hadn’t allowed people to tell him he was wrong and to give him feedback, went that, that to argue with him. And, so he is not a guy who is known for laying his power down, but he did sometimes lay his power down. So you’ve really got to learn to do that. There’s, there’s excellent research by, Deb Grunfeld at Stanford about what power does. Power. Power makes it much harder for us to notice our own blind spots. And so you’ve really got to, if you have a little bit of authority, even though you don’t think you’re this powerful person, other people do. And you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to lay that power down.

>> Craig Gould: I guess as a leader, you really have to be intentional about soliciting it, right? I mean, the whole story that you told about, Toyota and putting the new hires in the red box, you.

>> Kim Scott: Know, it’s an orange box. I think everything is orange in my world.

>> Craig Gould: Right.

>> Kim Scott: It’s not enough, in other words, to just solicit feedback, because if all you do is you say, do you have any feedback for me? You’re wasting your breath. I can already tell you the answer. Oh, no, everything’s fine. Nobody wants to give you feedback, except if you have them. Teenage children, this is a service they offer for free. But, but nobody who works for you, unless, you’re hiring teenagers, wants to give you feedback. So you’ve got to not only solicit it and think about how you’re asking, you’ve got to be willing to embrace the discomfort. You’re putting someone in an incredibly awkward position when you ask them to give you their boss feedback. That’s why Toyota made the orange box. You weren’t allowed to leave until you had criticized three things you had noticed on, the line that week. And so it’s, you’ve got, you’ve got to embrace the discomfort. I mean, it maybe doesn’t have to be as extreme as putting people into a box, but you’ve got to embrace the discomfort. Simple tactic that I suggest to people is just close your mouth and count to six in your head. Like, almost nobody can endure six full seconds of silence. They’ll probably tell you something. the next step, of course, is to manage your own defensiveness, because even though you just solicited feedback, when you hear it, you’re likely to feel defensive. And because there’s some, there’s some, there’s something about being in a position of authority where we expect people to think we’re right all the time, think we’re more like, I don’t know what that is, but it’s wrong. And yet we all have it. we expect people to obey us when we have a position of authority. Somebody said, some president said being president of the United States is kind of like being the overseer of a cemetery. There’s a lot of people under you, but nobody’s listening. And I think that’s the kind of, that’s the kind of humility you need to bring to you. You may think that people are listening and agreeing with you all the time, but they are not. And when you do get a little bit of criticism, it’s essential that you manage your own defensiveness. So just try to ask a follow up question, make sure you understand. And then you’ve got to reward the candor. It’s never enough to say thank you for the feedback. Like that sounds like a giant brush off. If you agree with the feedback, fix the problem and be theatrical about it. If you disagree with the feedback, have a respectful explanation about why you disagree with the feedback and allow this person to poke holes in your logic.

>> Craig Gould: Your book Radical Respect goes into, big topics around culture, specifically bias, prejudice, bullying. What was it after that radical candor success that kind of pointed you in the direction of leaning into these topics. Because I mean, I guess this could be a real cultural blind spot. M. Because many of the things can really go unseen, right? Because they’re so, especially when we start talking about even just the specific semantics that we use to describe someone’s behavior can really have a waterfall effect over the course of years. Right?

>> Kim Scott: Yeah. one of the things, if I may, I’m going to use a, tactic that I suggest in Radical Respect, which is usually I have a purple flag on my desk but seems to be missing. But I suggest that you wave a purple flag if you notice biased language. And this is language that I used in an earlier draft of Radical Respect. I talked a lot about blind spots and seeing. And one of the people who is edited was helping me edit the book is blind. He did not point this out to me. But I also hired a bias buster to read the book and she pointed out to me that, that I was using language I was confusing, see, and notice I was using blind spot when I meant sort of things we were clueless about. And I, I understood what she meant and I really, I cared. I cared about it intellectually, but also cared about about Zach, who, who is blind and who was helping me edit the book. And so I really thought I had taken this on board and fixed it in the book. Right before I turned the book in to the publisher, I did a quick search and guess how many times I had used blind when I meant, you know, sort of clueless or see, when I meant didn’t notice or notice. Just take a wild guess. After I got the feedback and after.

>> Craig Gould: I thought after all that, let’s say 50 times, 99 times.

>> Kim Scott: Right. So, so, so I’m not trying to criticize you publicly, but I think it’s really important learn how to flag this stuff when we notice it, because if we don’t, we’re pattern makers as human beings, and if we don’t, sometimes we make good patterns, sometimes we don’t, we make bad patterns. And it’s like, you know, if you go the wrong way and then you turn the same wrong direction the next day, you’re going to do that every day. You know, you’re going to keep going the wrong way. So I think it’s, I think it’s really important that we, that we disrupt bias in a very public way. Now, why did I decide that that was important enough to. That this should be kind of a big part of the topic of my next book? the, the reason is that if we don’t respect people and if we don’t show them, I mean, even if we in our heart of hearts respect people, but we’re using language that is disrespectful in ways we’re not even aware of, then then we’re not going to care person, we’re not caring personally. And also, if we don’t respect people, we’re not going to challenge them directly. And I learned this, you know, if you write a book about feedback, you’re going to get a lot of it. And indeed I, I did. You want to hear it? So, because this was really helpful feedback, but it was very painful to hear. but it caused me to write Radical Respect. Shortly after Radical Candor came out, I was invited to give a talk at a tech company in San Francisco. And I was really excited to do it because the CEO of this company had been a colleague of mine for the better part of a decade, person I like and respect enormously. So I was really excited, ah, to get together with her again and meet her team and do the talk. I did the talk and she pulled me aside afterwards and she said, kim, I’m excited to roll out Radical Candor. I think it’s going to help me build the kind of innovative culture that I want. But I got to tell you, it’s much harder for me to roll it out than it is for you. I didn’t understand why, so I asked. And she said that as soon as she offered people even the most gentle, compassionate criticism, they would start to call her an angry black woman. And I knew this was true, and I knew how unfair it was, because she’s one of the most cheerful, reasonable people I ever worked with. And as soon as she said it to me, I had four different realizations at the same time. And these kind of became the organizing chapters of the next book. The first thing I realized was that I had not been the kind of colleague that I imagined myself to be, that I want to be. I had failed to take into account the toll it must take on her to have to show up unfailingly cheerful and pleasant in every meeting we had ever been in together, even though she had what to be pissed off about from time to time, as we all do at work. So I’d failed to notice what was going on for her. The second thing I realized was that not only had I failed to notice the kinds of disrespectful attitudes and behaviors that were tripping her up at work, I had also pretended like I never was on the receiving end of any disrespect, you know, and I’m a woman in tech. Believe me, there was some. There were some moments, and I think I did that. I think I went through my career pretending that things were not happening when they were, in fact, happening, in no small part because I didn’t want to think of myself or of her as victims. We were, you know, we were powerful women, and. And yet it’s no good, like, pretending that things aren’t happening that are happening now. So those are the first two realizations. I had failed to notice when things were happening to other people. I had failed to notice disrespectful attitudes and behaviors directed at me. The. The third thing I realized was that as little as I wanted to be a, victim, even less did I want to be the culprit. And so the thing that I was most deeply in denial about were the times when I was the one who had said or done the disrespectful thing. And then the fourth thing I realized was that all this denial was getting in the way of me being a good leader. I wanted to build teams where everybody could do the best work of their lives and the best relationships of their careers. And yet, if I was pretending that these disrespectful attitudes and behaviors were not happening on my teams, they weren’t going to be able to do their best work and to work well together and to enjoy working together. So I took a deep breath and I sat down and I wrote the next book, Radical Respect. And by respect, I mean not sort of something that one has to earn for a skill. I have to earn your respect for me as a writer by writing a good book. But that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is the unconditional regard that you and I owe each other for our shared humanity.

>> Craig Gould: I used to be a high school teacher when I first started teaching, you know, you’re told you need to have your classroom rules, right?

>> Kim Scott: Yeah.

>> Craig Gould: These are your do’s and your don’ts. And, what I found was I wound up having a really long list of don’ts, based on specific things that I didn’t think I had to say explicitly. Right?

>> Kim Scott: Yes.

>> Craig Gould: And my wife was also a teacher, and she’s like, you can’t. You can’t do that. You. Your. Your rules can’t be negative. You need to make it, you know, positive.

>> Kim Scott: Yeah.

>> Craig Gould: I’m like, okay. And, you know, I sat down and I, looked at everything, and I figured out that I could boil it all down to just respect. And then I started, you know, communicating that to the folks. Like, listen, there’s just one rule, and that’s respect. You know, you’re gonna respect me, you’re going to respect your peers, you’re going to respect the materials, you’re going to respect the process, you’re going to respect yourself. And then every time I had a problem, I could always redirect it back to, listen, you are not respecting XYZ because of what you’re doing here. And, it really became kind of a core thing. And in doing so, it’s two way, Right? I mean, you have to establish this mutual respect.

>> Kim Scott: Yeah. I have to be respectful of you as well as you have to be respectful of me. That’s vital. I love that. I think that when my kids were little, we had two rules in the house. Be safe and be respectful. and that’s it. Like, if you can do those two things, you can. You can be as mischievous, if you want, as you want. You can make a mess. As long as you clean the mess up. You don’t expect me to clean it up. You can make this giant. I, just you know, my phone shows me pictures of when the kids were little flashes up different ones. And there was. They made this giant spider’s web, like, around the whole house, and it was really cool. I’m like, I’m glad I let them do that. It was safe. And, and they cleaned it up. yeah. So I love the respect. and yet it’s hard. It’s hard. Like, I don’t think very many people wake up in the morning and think, oh, I want to be disrespectful today. So it’s hard to think about what. What are the things that get in the way of respect? you know, and. And I boiled it down to three things in radical respect, bias, prejudice, and bullying. and I think part of the problem is that sometimes we conflate these three things as though they’re the same thing, and then the problem seems monolithic and insoluble. So I offer some arguably superficial but super short definitions. Bias is not meaning it. Prejudice is meaning it. And bullying is being mean. and for me, that’s been helpful in the moment to figure out, okay, it’s this problem, not that problem. So I should do this.

>> Craig Gould: Not that, you know, some of those are a little bit easier to spot than others. Right. I mean, I think it’s a little easier to spot bullying because it’s just mean. But, you know, but like, the prejudice, that’s where we can really. We can miss it if we. If we aren’t really deliberate. Can you talk about that?

>> Kim Scott: so prejudice is. It’s a belief. Yeah, that’s why I say it’s meaning. It’s a belief usually incorporating some kind of unfair and inaccurate stereotype. And often people think that it’s not a prejudice, it’s a truth. Right. And, so what I say to leaders is, you’ve got to define for your organization where’s the line between one person’s freedom to believe whatever they want, but they can’t impose those beliefs on others? And so I’ll give you. I think it’s easiest in the abstract. We could go down a philosophical rabbit hole that would take us, you know, years. But, I’ll just tell you a story. It’s much faster. I had just returned to work after parental leave. So I’d been out for several months, and I was having all the feelings that one has going back to work after parental leave. New first. First kids. Twins. I, just had twins. And I was chit chatting with a guy before a meeting, and he said to me, my Wife doesn’t work because it’s better for the children. And this was like a gut punch for me at this particular moment.

>> Craig Gould: And.

>> Kim Scott: But I didn’t. I thought it was bias. I didn’t think he really meant it like it sounded. And so I. I tried to use an I statement. And I said, oh, I decided to show up at work today because I want to neglect my children. And I was expecting him m. To laugh and we would move on, but, no, that’s not what happened. He doubled down. He said, oh, no, Kim, it’s really bad that you decided to come back to work. And so now I know that this is a belief that he has, and he’s imposing it on me. And I respect, certainly, the choice to stay home with your children, but I also expect him to respect my choice to come back to work. And so I know it’s prejudice, and I know an I statement is not enough, because for him, this is a capital T truth. And so I need an IT statement. And an IT statement can invoke that line between his freedom to believe whatever he want, but he couldn’t impose that belief on me. And an ITS statement can appeal to a law. It can appeal to a company policy, or it can appeal to common sense. So I tried company policy first, and I said, it is an HR violation for you to tell me that I’m neglecting my kids by showing up at work. And that had the desired effect. He was like, oh, no. But I knew I needed to work with him, and I knew that reporting this to HR was not going to help us work better together. And so now I tried another IT statement that appealed to common sense. And I said, it’s my decision, together with my spouse, how we raise our children, just as it is your decision, together with your wife how you raise your children. And I could tell he. He was not. He still felt like it was his job to tell me that I was screwing up my children. And so I said, furthermore, I’m going to do another ED Statement that also appeals to common sense. It’s my guess that you don’t want to read my research any more than I want to read your research. And then he. To laugh. And he said, okay, like, And it was really important, I think, that I said, I mean, it was tempting to remain silent, in this. That, like, that was my. In fact, probably I did remain more. I. I’m. I’m. The way I’m telling the story is probably not exactly how it happened. I’m telling it in a way I Wish I had responded because it is so tempting when somebody says something like that to you, to just walk away, to just say, but if I had totally walked away and said nothing to him, several things would have happened. One, I would have begun to hate him and that would have made it hard for us to work together. Two, or maybe hate is a strong word, but I would have resented him. two, it would have hurt my career because he was responsible for deciding who got which clients. And if he thought I shouldn’t even show up at work, he definitely wasn’t thinking I should be taking work trips. And I wouldn’t have, I would have been, excluded from a whole range of. And three, it would have been bad for the team because I was really good at what I did. And, and him excluding me from working with these clients that were going to cause me to travel would have been bad for the business. So it would have been bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad for our relationship would have been bad for my career and it would have been bad for the team’s results. So that’s, those were the reasons to say something. But, but it, you know, it also made me mad that I had to.

>> Craig Gould: Say something, you know, that that was someone who was, you know, a peer maybe a little bit higher. But you know, you, you were able to be frank and kind of approach it head on. But like you were saying there, you did throw that, nuclear bomb of a word, HR in, into the conversation. Right? In the worst case scenarios, it’s really necessary. Can you talk about how when you find yourself in the worst case scenario, in terms of what you’re being subjected to, what, what are the, the, the things that you can do? To start, I had a co worker once who was, an African American gentleman who felt like there was a certain amount of bias and prejudice that he kind of dealt with every day. And I believe it. But he had, he had a JD and so he had a, file folder at his desk where he would just document and put away, document and put away. So he’s like, one day there will be a big conversation and I’m going to have it all. Can you talk about how to prepare to deal with the worst case scenario?

>> Kim Scott: I think that documenting is really important to do, even if you’re not necessarily ever going to sue the company or use that documentation in some kind of way. But first of all, use it for yourself. It’s so easy to feel gaslit in these situations, especially when stuff is happening to you day in and day out, day in and day out. And it’s tempting in those situations actually to simply pretend like it’s not happening or to be in denial. And that really can. Then you’ve internalized these negative stereotypes that are being directed at you all the time. And so documenting can really help you not get gaslit, not from the outside, and even worse, not to gaslight yourself. So I’m a big believer in documenting what is happening. I’m also a believer in building solidarity. There was somebody who I met who said, I get together with people once a month. We call it the spaghetti dinner. And it’s a whole bunch of different people who are underrepresented along different dimensions. And we just tell stories and drink wine and laugh about what happened. Like, not that laughter is going to solve everything, but that also can dispel gaslighting. So you want to, you want to find people who you can talk to. and also sometimes people you’ll say, oh, I think this was, a result of bias. And maybe somebody will tell you, no, actually you kind of screwed up in that case. So you want to know, like, sometimes the feedback is bias, and other times you want to find people who can help you separate the wheat from the chaff. because sometimes, well, anyway, we can talk more about that. And so you want to build solidarity. And you also want to make sure that you locate the exit nearest you, that, you know, what if you go and talk to someone directly and they fire you? You know what your exit options are? You know what your best alternative to a negotiated agreement is? Your batna is. And once you’ve done those things, you’ve dispelled gaslighting. So you go in with confidence, you’ve got your team behind you, you’ve built solidarity. And you know what would happen if you did get fired that will help you go and talk directly to the person. in a way that you’re creating space for that person to do the right thing, to realize, you know, shit, I should, I gotta knock that off. and that will happen sometimes if you create the space for it both in your own head and also, by having a direct conversation. Now, I don’t want to over promise, like, sometimes it’s going to blow up in your face. but this is sort of, these are the things you can do to speak truth to power without blowing up your career if you have the direct conversation with the person. I really think it’s important not to over delegate to hr. This is why I invoked hr. It was very important to me, that I knew that my company had my back, that I knew I was right in this. but I didn’t want to go report him to HR right off the bat. I wanted to talk to him first because if you. It’s, It’s. It’s very difficult if you. Once you’re invoking some third party, it’s going to be very difficult for you to work better together. You’re gonna. You’re gonna need to work better apart. sometimes HR is part. I, also want to say, create space for HR to be part of the solution. Sometimes they are part of the problem. I don’t want to be Pollyanna ish about this, but HR is supposed to represent the interests of you, that other person, and the company at the same time. It’s hard to do, but often HR gets it right. So they’re supposed to get that right. They’re supposed to be on your side as well as on his side, is what. You know, it’s, in, in theory, I think HR needs to be broken into three different orgs so that you can go to someone who is only on your side. But maybe that’s. I don’t know that there’s a whole other conversation to be had there.

>> Craig Gould: It’s a whole other book.

>> Kim Scott: Yeah, yeah, yeah, A whole other. so that’s. You can go to HR and then you can also talk to a lawyer. It, doesn’t mean you have to sue. And I think a lot of people feel like I can’t afford a lawyer. A lawyer will talk to you, and maybe they’ll take your case on and get part of a settlement if you decide to sue. But usually you can find multiple different lawyers who will talk to you about what happened, without charging you an hourly rate for. For it. There’s all kinds of great employment lawyers out there, and you can also write your story. A lot of people who I know who have been treated really unfairly at work have decided, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna sue because I’d rather tell the story. And if you sue, you wind up often getting muzzled, even though you’re not supposed to be. It’s supposed to be illegal. Somehow, somehow the law is still an ass and it’ll muzzle you.

>> Craig Gould: And then NDA in the works, right?

>> Kim Scott: Yeah, but you’re not supposed to use an NDA to silence people, but somehow it still is happening. I don’t, I don’t quite understand the law, around that, but I’m sure a lot of your listeners can explain it. So anyway, those are some things that you can do if, if you feel like, you know, you’re in this bad situation. I also think if you’re a leader, it’s important to remember that these are things people can do too. And this is a, this is one of the, the, the reasons to get this stuff right. Because all of this is a huge distraction. it’s a distraction for your employees, and it’s a distraction for you, and it’s a distraction for the whole organization. So just get it right in the first place.

>> Craig Gould: Well, one last question, Kim, and that is looking forward as work becomes more hybrid, asynchronous, AI mediated. How do you see Radical Candor and Radical Respect evolving? I mean, what new challenges are leaders going to face in building respectful, candid cultures in the way that the world is changing?

>> Kim Scott: Yeah, I think that we are. The whole point of my work is to help people learn how to put their phones away and have real human conversations or maybe use their phone to have a real humankind, but talk, listen. and in fact, at one point I built this app, and the app was supposed to make it easier to give people feedback. And I realized that if the point of Radical Candor is to have a real human conversation, being intermediated by this app was a value subtracting round trip. And we shut that company down and started this company that does talk, talks, and workshops. We also have built an AI that will help you chat. RadicalCander AI can’t, help myself. I’m here in Silicon Valley and it’s my feeling that AI is never going to replace, or if it does replace human relationships, we’re all in a world of trouble. So I would like to do everything in my power to prevent AI from replacing human relationships. We still need each other. We need these real human relationships, but we. I think one of the problems with Radical Candor and one of the reasons why people don’t do it more, the reason why I call it Radical is it’s so rare. The reason why people don’t do it more is that it feels scary. And there’s no way. There’s no good. There hasn’t until we built this AI bot, a good way to practice it. Nobody likes a role play. I mean, maybe actors are okay with role plays. I think I’ve met some, some improv actors. They like role plays, but none of the rest of us like role plays. And so we don’t practice doing this. And therefore, it’s like we’re all soccer players, but we’re never going to practice. We’re only, we’re only playing in the game. And so these, these conversations that you need to be having with people, these impromptu two minute radical candor, radical respect conversations. You, there’s no good way to practice them until AI now you can tell the, the chat radicalcanner AI what the situation is. It will play the role of the other person and then the, the radical candor bot will observe this interaction that you’re having, this role play that you’re having and it will give you some tips on, on how to do it differently and let you try again and it’ll let you describe the person because every person is different and I think that’s really important. It’s a way to practice this before you’re in the heat of the moment. And so that’s one small thing that I think will happen. I think that we are. It is really important to remember to have synchronous conversations and to listen to the words that people. And there’s interesting research coming out of University of Chicago actually that says that if, if I need to tell you something that maybe is hard for me to say, maybe it’s going to be hard for you to hear, I’m better off picking up the phone and calling you than I am scheduling a video call because we’re. There’s so much bias, speaking of bias that creeps into our interpretation of facial expressions and body language that there may be more noise than signal there. So you’re better off calling the person and listening to the words they are saying, saying. But it shouldn’t be a one way. It’s got to be a conversation. You’ve got to be able to go back and forth and to adjust to figure out ah, I said that in a way that made Craig mad. So I’m going to try to take a beat and remind Craig that I care about him and that I’m trying to be helpful. I’m not trying to like be dominant in this case. You know, I’m trying to get, I’m trying to be a partner. or Craig is just, just doesn’t seem to be hearing what I’m saying or so I need to say it again more clearly. I need to move out on the challenge directly dimension. And so it’s got to be a two way conversation. the phone is great if you’re in person, which is better. It’s actually better to take a walk than to sit face to face because there’s something psychologically healthy about walking in the same direction. And you’re more likely to listen to the words the person is saying than to get distracted by facial expressions and body language that you may be mistaken, misinterpreting.

>> Craig Gould: Well, that’s wonderful. And, Kim, I. I can’t thank you enough for your time today. big fan of your books, Big fan of your work. If folks wanted to keep track of you, the work that you’re doing that Radical Candor is doing, find access to, to the chat feature that you just mentioned, where. Where’s the best place to point people so that they can take advantage of all that you have to offer.

>> Kim Scott: RadicalCander.com will give you access to the books. You can buy the books. You can try the bot, you can join the community. You can. You can schedule a workshop. you can take the. The feedback loop, which is like a Radical Candor sitcom, that you can use, like a. Like an online course. You can do all. And you can. And you can. You can read our blog. You can listen to the podcast. You can hear the new things that we’re thinking about, there for. For both radical Keener and radical respect.

>> Craig Gould: Where can I get a nice orange sweater like yours?

>> Kim Scott: Oh, you know, I just. So I had these made especially for me, but I just today sent an email to the woman who designed these sweaters and made them, and I said, why don’t you. Why don’t you sell these to the public? So, if she is down with that, I’ll put you in touch with her.

>> Craig Gould: Awesome. Well, Kim, again, I really appreciate your time, and thank you so much for joining me today.

>> Kim Scott: Thank you so much. Take care.

>> Craig Gould: Thank you.