Jeremy Weisz 17:47
So it’d be less, you know, Kim, manipulative insincerity, if you actually said, You know what, if you were stating reasons of why, you know what? I looked into it and I see your position is x, y, z, and you actually did come to agreement and gave specific reasons for it would be, that be?
Kim Scott 18:06
Well, I think, yeah, I think, first of all, I don’t think I could have, I think what I should have said is, Larry, I’m sorry my email was obnoxious. I shouldn’t have sent an email, and I also shouldn’t have cc 30 people, so I should have acknowledged what I did wrong, and then what I would say is, but I still disagree with your policy. Maybe I’m wrong.I want to better understand why you think this is the right policy. That’s I think would have been a better, a better way to handle it.
Jeremy Weisz 18:39
You mentioned something I know you talk about in the book. You know, I’ve heard this talked about before, is kind of a feedback sandwich. And you kind of debunk that a little bit.
Kim Scott 18:51
Yeah, yeah. I think that it is really radical candor. There’s an order of operations, and always start with soliciting radical candor, and then the next step is to give praise, and you want to give more praise than criticism. So I don’t want to say that praise is unimportant. Praise is really important. But if you try to boil it down to a ratio, and you say, give, you know, twice as much praise as you do criticism, and then you wind up often saying insincere things like, Oh, Kim, you know, I like your bookshelves, your books kind of suck, but those are cool glasses like that doesn’t make me feel any better, right? And people see through that. So you want to make sure that both your praise and your criticism are radically candid. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that praise is how you show you care personally, and criticism is how you challenge directly, because you’ll wind up getting ruinously empathetic praise and obnoxiously aggressive criticism. If you do that, both praise and criticism are equally important. And again, your job, especially if you’re. A leader. But no matter who you are, your job is to paint a picture of what’s possible, and praise is a better tool for that than criticism.
Jeremy Weisz 20:08
I want to kind of complete the cycle here. We have radical candor, obnoxious aggression, manipulative insincerity. And then you know the biggest mistake you say people make is ruinous empathy, yeah, and I know this happened with your startup, and it may be tough for people. Are there some examples that you can give so people can practice, like, building up the muscle of like, you know, telling people it’s something, I mean, for me, it’s like, confrontation can be difficult, and, sometimes I don’t know how it’s gonna be received. So how do you recommend people building the muscle of giving people direct feedback? I guess.
Kim Scott 20:48
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the most important things you can do, especially if you find yourself falling into ruinous empathy a lot, is to think about a time when you didn’t say the thing to the person, just trying to be nice, and then the results were really bad for that other person. So for example, at one point, here’s my story. And every time I’m tempted not to say the thing, I think about quote, unquote, Bob. That’s not really his name, but anyway, I had hired this person. We’ll call him Bob, and I liked Bob a lot. He was smart, he was charming, he was funny. He would do stuff like we were at a manager off site, and we were playing one of those endless get to know you games, and Bob was the person who had the courage to raise his hand and to say, I can tell everybody’s getting really stressed out. Wants to get back to work. 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 fast, we were down with it. So Bob says, let’s just go around the table and confess what candy our parents used when potty training. 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 was quirky, but he brought a little levity to the office.
One problem with Bob. He was doing terrible work. His work was riddled with sloppy mistakes. And I was so puzzled, because he had this incredible resume, this great history of accomplishments, I couldn’t understand what was going on. I learned much later that the problem was that Bob was smoking pot in the bathroom three times a day, which may be explained all that candy that he had at all times. But I didn’t know any of that at the time, all I knew was that Bob was handing stuff to me, and there was shame in his eyes. And what I would say, what would I say instead of saying what I should have said, instead of being radically candid, I would say something along the lines of, Oh, Bob, this is a great start. You are so awesome. We all love working with you. Maybe you can make it just a little bit better. That, of course, never worked. He never did make it a little bit better. So let’s pause for a moment and think about why was I saying something so useless to Bob?
Part of it was truly ruinous empathy. I really did like him, and I really was loath to hurt his feelings. But if I’m honest with myself, there was something more insidious going on. There was some manipulative insincerity going on because Bob was popular and Bob was also sensitive. And there was part of me that was afraid that if I told Bob, in no uncertain terms, his work wasn’t really good enough, he would get upset, he might even 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, the part of me that was worried about Bob’s feelings, that was the ruinous empathy part. And often these two things, this is not like me, see and McKinsey speak mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive, these things blur together.
And so this is going on. It’s been going on for 10 months. And eventually the inevitable happens. And I realized that if I don’t fire Bob, I am gonna lose all my best performers on the team, and so I sit down because not only have I been unfair to Bob, not to tell him, I’ve been unfair to everyone on the team. Their deliverables are late because his deliverables are late. They are not able to spend as much time as they need to on their work, because they’re having to spend so much time redoing Bob’s work, and if I don’t get rid of Bob, they’re gonna quit. So I sat down with Bob to have a conversation that I should have begun, frankly, 10 months previously, and when I finished explaining to him where things stood, 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 the feedback that he needed, thinking I was being nice. I’m having to fire him as a result of it. Not so nice, after all. But it was too late to save Bob, even Bob, at this point, agreed that he should go because his reputation on the team was just shot. All I could do in the moment was make myself a very solemn promise that I would never make that mistake again, and that I would do everything in my power to help other people avoid making that mistake, because it is so painful for all of us. It was painful for me. It was much worse for Bob. It was bad for the whole team, and it was bad for our investors because we weren’t getting stuff done.
Jeremy Weisz 26:29
Yeah, and in a couple parts of the book, thanks for sharing that you know, that you talk about too, which is kind of like a spinach in the teeth example, where, like, would you let your friend, or would you want someone to tell you you know? Because after reading your book, I see someone at the table, and they have, like, a big chunk of something before I’m really, Uh, they’ll figure it out. And now I’m like, Hey, you have something in your teeth, right? And you also talk. You could hear, there’s a body odor example in the book, where people that you know, you have to read the book for that one. But there’s a lot of great stories and great examples. One thing, Kim, that I, one of my favorite parts of the book, that I took back and implemented, was going to the team and saying, What should I start doing, and what should I stop doing so I can be better? And what was interesting about that exercise is, um, I don’t know, you know, people want to be nice, right? And so I really have to dig a little bit. And one of the things I find, and I get like it, I don’t know if it’s an uncomfortable laugh out of people, but I’m like, Listen, I’m definitely not perfect, right? And so then they uncomfortably laugh, like, Yeah, that’s true, Jeremy, but like, I’m still trying to get the team to have radical candor with me, and sometimes it’s not easy. I know you’ve had people say, Hey, I did this with my boss and I got fired. And well, maybe you should have a different boss. But I did get some interesting answers. So thank you. I encourage people to check that part out, and that was very helpful for me. And I think I have to build that muscle with the team too.
Kim Scott 28:10
Yeah, I think that when, especially when you’re a leader, but no matter what your role is in the situation, it’s the same, up, down and sideways, there’s an order of operations to radical candor, and it should always begin with soliciting feedback, because you want to know what the other person thinks. And if you get good at soliciting feedback, you know you get this superpower of knowing what other people think. And not only do you need a good question, you also need to learn how to embrace the discomfort after you ask your question, because no matter how good your question is, the other person, as you said, is going to feel uncomfortable. And the simple tactic here is, close your mouth and count to six.
That was six. It’s a long time, yeah. And you said, yeah, just as I hit six like the other person is going to jump in at six seconds. So they may not tell you the most profound thing, but they’ll say something in all likelihood. And so your next step is to manage your own tendency to be defensive. Even though you just solicited feedback, you’re probably going to feel defensive when you get it, and that’s okay, extend yourself a little grace. It doesn’t mean you’re shut down to feedback or less immortal. It just means that you’re human, and your humanity is all part of this. So you want to try to learn how to ask some follow up questions to manage your own and defensiveness, and last but not least, you want to reward the candor. So if you agree with the feedback, fix the problem. If you disagree with the feedback, don’t just say thank you for the feedback, because that sounds like FU actually. You want to make sure that you are taking the time to think about what’s the 1 or 2% or 10%, they said something you could agree with. So give voice to that, just to show that you were listening, and then offer a respectful explanation of why you disagree if you disagree, I think it’s so important. And if you can, you know you want to listen, challenge commit, and especially if you’re the leader, the more often you can commit to their you know, if you have Russ Laraway always used to say to his direct reports, if all if we have data, let’s do what the data says. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with yours. So commit to doing things the way your direct reports recommend, unless you have some information that you are certain that you’re right about, which certain that you’re right is something we should very rarely be.
Jeremy Weisz 30:45
So check out Radical Candor. I want to talk about Radical Respect and like with the way I see it, Kim, like you could just have rode the Radical Candor wave and just kept doing radical candor. So I’m curious, Kim, what made you decide to write Radical Respect?
Kim Scott 31:03
So if you write a book about feedback, you’re going to get a lot of it. And indeed, I did. And hands down, the best feedback that I got about Radical Candor is what prompted me to write Radical
Respect. I was giving a tech talk, a Radical Candor talk at a tech company in San Francisco, and the CEO of that company is a person who I like and respect enormously, and one of too few black women CEOs in tech, or, frankly, in any other sector. And when I finished giving the Radical Candor talk, she pulled me aside 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 need. But I got to tell you, it’s much harder for me to roll it out than it is for you. And she went on to explain to me that as soon as she would offer anyone, even the most compassionate, gentle criticism, they would call her an angry black woman, and I knew this was true, and I knew how unfair it was and how disrespectful it was, and so that’s what made me really take a step back and say, Okay, if we’re going to care personally and challenge directly, we need to respect each other. Because if you don’t respect someone, you’re not going to challenge them, and you’re not going to care about them. And by respect, the word respect has two very different definitions, confusingly. One is something that one has to earn. I have to earn your respect as a leader, as a writer, whatever, by doing the thing. That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is the unconditional regard that we owe each other for who we are, what we bring to the table, for our backgrounds, our emotions, etc. And so what are the conditions for creating a radically respectful environment so that radical candor is possible? Because radical respect is really the prequel to radical candor. And I think in order to create radical respect, you want to make sure that you are optimizing for a collaboration, rather than coercion, that you’re creating hierarchy, I think, is inevitable and necessary. But you want to create a collaborative hierarchy, not a dominant hierarchy where people feel coerced. So that’s one dimension of radical respect.
The other is you want to honor everyone’s individuality. And it’s interesting to think about why doesn’t this happen? Because sometimes, you know, we do wind up demanding conformity at work, but it’s, it’s, I mean, sometimes it’s intentional, but it’s rarely intentional. Like I’ve never met anyone who says what I really want to do is create a dystopic 1984 style, everybody’s marching in lockstep, kind of wearing the same clothes, kind of work environment. We know that we need to honor everyone’s individuality, and we expect that our own individuality will be honored. And when we can do this, you know, we get a kind of environment where the strength of the team is the individual and the strength of the individual is the team. You get the best of both worlds. That’s the idea behind it, good two by two framework. But so, why doesn’t this happen? You know, I think that’s the question,
Jeremy Weisz 34:38
Yeah. So talk about, you know, what leaders can do.
Kim Scott 34:41
Yeah, yeah. So I think it is important to really understand what happens that moves us in the wrong direction, that moves us away from individuality, towards demand and conformity, and what moves us towards coercion, away from collaboration. And there’s a million things, of course, but I’m going to boil it down to the big three: bias, prejudice and bullying. And so one of the things that we can do as leaders is to begin to understand what gets in the way and what the difference between bias, prejudice and bullying is. Because we often conflate bias, prejudice and bullying, as though they are the same thing, but actually they are three very different things. So I want to offer you some super simple definitions about bias, prejudice and bullying. Bias, I’m talking about unconscious bias, really. Not meaning it, is my definition for bias, whereas prejudice I’m going to define as meaning it. Prejudice is a very consciously held belief, usually incorporating some kind of inaccurate and unfair stereotype. And bullying is not about a belief conscious or unconscious, it’s just being mean.
And so once we begin to separate these things out, we can begin to have a better idea about what we can do as leaders to prevent these things from destroying respect on our team. You want some thoughts? Because I think one of the problems is, and you can teach this to your team as as a leader, one of the problems is that there’s, and I want you to think about like, when was the last time you were in a meeting or in a conversation with someone and they said or did something that was so cringe worthy, it sort of made your heart stop almost, but you didn’t know what to say. You know, like, within last 24 hours, probably, and this is a real problem when we don’t say anything in those moments, whether we’re the leader or the upstander or whether it’s directed at us, because it means that we’re, you know, we’re not helping someone we care about, we’re not helping our team work better together. It’s going to hurt our results, but it also is going to hurt us like it wakes you up at three in the morning, and you suffer almost like a moral injury if you don’t say anything. So what can you say when you don’t know what to say? If you think it’s bias, use an “I” statement. If you think it’s prejudice, use an “it” statement. If you think it’s bullying, use a “you” statement.
So here’s what I mean by that. Let’s start with bias. One of my favorite stories about bias is a friend of mine was going, she was at a very small company, and they were meeting with a big company. So she and two colleagues went to this company, and they were shown into a conference room with big, long, you know, 30 person table. She had the expertise that was going to win her team the deal. So she sat in the center of the table, and her two colleagues, who happened to be men, sat to her left when the other side came in, the first person sat across from the guy to her left, the next person sat across from the guy to his left, and everybody else filed on down the table, leaving her dangling by herself. Often how bias shows up. She began talking, and when the other side had questions, they didn’t direct them at her. They directed them at her two colleagues, who were men. It happened once, it happened twice. You’re nodding. You’ve seen this happen, right? And it happened a third time. And finally, one of her colleagues stood up and he said, I think we should switch seats. That was all he had to do as both an upstander and a leader to totally change the dynamic in the room. And why did he do that? He did it for several different reasons. There’s a practical consideration. He did it because he just wanted to win the deal, and he knew if he couldn’t get them listening to her that they wouldn’t win the deal. There’s also an emotional component. It bothered him to see her, who he respected, get ignored and so he wanted to do the right thing by her, but it wasn’t that he thought there’s a third thing, which is sort of efficiency. It wasn’t that he thought she couldn’t speak up for herself, but he realized it was easier for him to speak up and easier for them to hear it from him than it would have been to hear it from her, that they were ignoring her. And then I think there’s this fourth kind of self preservation. He didn’t want to wake up at three in the morning thinking, why didn’t I say the thing you know which happened, I think, to all of us. And so that was why he used the I statement. An I statement, he was sort of holding up a mirror. It invites the other person in to understand things from your perspective. You could also say, I don’t think you meant that the way it sounded. I don’t think you’re intending to ignore her, whatever. So that’s an example of an “I” statement.
But if it’s prejudice, holding up a mirror is not going to work, because the other person is going to look in that mirror and they’re going to like what they see, they’re going to grin. They’re going to be like, yeah, Aren’t I good looking? And so if it’s prejudice, you need an “it” statement. An “it” statement draws a very clear boundary between one person’s freedom to believe whatever they want, but they can’t impose that belief on others. So an “it” statement can appeal to a law, it can appeal to a company policy, or it can appeal to common sense. You want a story about –
Jeremy Weisz 40:47
Definitely.
Kim Scott 40:49
Alright, so this happens –
Jeremy Weisz 40:51
It’s like you know Kim, what’s interesting about this? There’s like, seedlings of this in Radical Candor, because you do talk about gender bias, you also do talk about where you go to, and were debating of giving a talk to a company where you didn’t agree necessarily with the value. So, there are these seedlings I could see in Radical Candor.
Kim Scott 41:11
Yeah, absolutely, I was thinking about this. But, I mean, it’s interesting, I was also sort of in denial about having experienced these problems. I think in part, because I didn’t want to think of myself as a victim. But I was even deeper in denial about the times when I was the one who had been the culprit, who had been disrespectful. And as a leader, I was like, Oh, if I’m in charge, there will be no bias, prejudice and bullying on my team.
Yeah, for the prejudice story and the “it” statement, how to use an “it” statement? I think that I had just returned from parental leave, and so I’d been out for about five months. I just had twins, and I was chit chatting with a guy before a meeting, and he said to me, Oh, my wife doesn’t work because it’s better for the children. And of course, at that moment in time, that felt kind of like a gut punch to me, but I didn’t think he really meant it. I thought it was unconscious bias speaking. So I said to him, Oh, I decided to come to work today because I want to neglect my children. And I was expecting them to laugh. Yes, I was expecting them to have a reaction. He would laugh and apologize and we would move on. But no, that’s not what happened. He doubled down. He said, Oh, no, Kim, it is really bad for your children that you are working and yes, oof, so now I know it’s not unconscious bias, it’s a very consciously held prejudice that he has. And so my “I” statement was not going to work, so I used an “it” statement, and I said it is a violation of company policy for you to tell me that I am neglecting my children to show up at work today, and that had the desired effect. He kind of backed off, and I said to him, Look, I’m not going to make a thing of this with HR. I’m not going to over delegate this conversation to HR. But now I’m going to use a second “it” statement appealing to common sense, rather than to the company policy, and I said, it is my decision together with my partner, how we raise our children, just as it is your decision together with your wife, how you raise your children. And that, you know, he kind of was grokking that a little bit, but he still seemed a little uncertain, and I knew that I was going to have to work with him. So I tried. I took a third crack at this, and I said, it’s my guess that you don’t want to read my research any more than I want to read your research. And that very clearly, like you can think what you want, I can think what I want. We don’t even have to read each other’s research. We just have to work together. And there’s a whole host of things that you don’t have to agree on in order to work well together. So that’s one thought. I mean, if you really want to go deeper in terms of prejudice, I think it’s a good idea to have the conversation if you want to have a deeper relationship. But you do not have to discuss, you just have to say, you stay here, I stay there.
But if it’s bullying, telling someone where that boundary is is not going to work, because the person is going to kick past that boundary. So if it’s bullying, that’s where you want a “you” statement. And I learned that from my daughter. She was in third grade, and she was getting bullied at school, and I was making a mistake that I think a lot of parents make, and I was telling her to use an “I” statement, I feel sad, tell this child I feel sad when you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And she banged her fist on the table, and she said, Mom, they are trying to make me feel sad. Why would I tell them they were succeeding? And I’m like, That is a really good point. And so in the case of bullying. You want a “you” statement, you can’t talk to me like that, or what’s going on for you here, or even just a you non sequitur. Where’d you get that shirt? And the point here is that when you’re using a you statement, you’re not accepting whatever it is that this person is dishing out at you. You’re kind of pushing back, and you’re asking them to answer your questions. So I think that is helpful, and that’s something as a leader, that you can teach your team.
You can also teach your team to disrupt bias in the moment. You can create a space for conversation about prejudice, to make it clear to your team, where it’s easy for me to sit here and say, there’s a line between one person’s freedom to believe whatever they want, but they can’t impose it. That line gets drawn differently in different organizations, and it’s your job as a leader to make it clear where it is on your team. And last but not least, in the case of bullying, you want to create consequences, sort of conversational consequences, compensation consequences, and also really career consequences for bullying. And then you want to make sure that you are taking the time to design your management, especially if you’re a senior leader, to design your management systems to prevent power from making things go from bad to worse. If you don’t design your management systems to create some checks and balances on power, then you wind up getting discrimination, harassment and physical violations.
Jeremy Weisz 47:01
Yeah, I love this too, Kim, because it’s applicable to life situations. You know, obviously this isn’t just leadership or business, but what you’re talking about on these concepts can be like you’ve mentioned with your daughter, because these are real situations. I have two daughters, and I don’t know, daughters can be, or girls can be cruel. And I grew up, you know, you know, boys just kind of hit each other and with girls, like verbally, it’s yeah, it’s like a psychological warfare more so I have found, in my experience, than with boys but this is a really applicable life situation.
Kim Scott 47:37
Yeah, and I think no matter what, whether you have, no matter what gender your children are or, you know, whether they’re they don’t choose a gender, you want to make sure that you’re equating sort of verbal violence with physical violence. Because sometimes, you know, I have twins, as I mentioned, and as they got older, I would find one of them would antagonize verbally the other until one hit the other and I was tempted to punish the one who hit the other and let the other one off the hook. And it was important to recognize both the verbal harassment, as well as physical harassment of each other. I think that’s an important point.
Jeremy Weisz 48:29
So Kim, I know you have to go in a few, so my last question, first of all, I want to point people to check out RadicalCandor.com. You can see the book Radical Candor and Radical Respect. And also, obviously RadicalRespectBook.com. My last question is, just, how do people typically engage with you? What kind of services do you offer? I know, obviously they can get the book. What else, how else can people work with you?
Kim Scott 48:53
Sure. Well, we have a podcast, a Radical Candorpodcast and a Radical Respect podcast. And if people have management questions or challenges, write them in, and we’ll often offer advice on the podcast free of charge. We also do talks and workshops at companies and for teams all over the world. Actually, we have a bunch of camera coaches as well as I do keynotes and we’re building a community for folks. We’re building also a fake Kim Scott, an AI version of me, because, you know, I don’t scale, and people often want to ask me questions, but fake Kim Scott will scale and, and you can criticize fake Kim Scott and make fake Kim Scott better, and you will never offend me by this. One of the great opportunities of AI is that it’s easier to give it feedback than to give a human being feedback, and it gets better. It works. And so. So we also built this great course called the Feedback Loop. We partnered with Second City, so you can check that out. That’s an easy way for you to teach Radical Candor to your team.
Jeremy Weisz 50:10
I love it. Everyone. Check out radicalcandor.com, and radicalrespectbook.com, and we’ll see everyone next time. Kim, thank you so much.
Kim Scott 50:18
Thank you. Really enjoyed the conversation.