Kim Scott - The Principles of Radical Candor (Part 1)

Buckle up for some radical candor from Kim Scott herself!  We had so much great content that we are delivering this discussion in two parts.  Kim's significant experience and practical perspective offer all managers a clear way to avoid The Bosshole® Zone.  Check out her books and her website and dig into her transformative work.

Click HERE for Kim's book Just Work
Click HERE for Kim's book Radical Candor
Click HERE for Kim's article with Dr. Amy Edmondson
Click HERE for Kim's website
Click HERE for Kim's LinkedIn page

Other related episodes:

• Sara and John - What Management is NOT
• Sara and John - The True Impact of  a Bosshole®

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Transcript

0:00:05 - John
Can you believe it's Tuesday already? Well, hey, everybody, it's John Broer here and we are going to kick off an amazing two-part series with Kim Scott. Let's get to it. The Bosshole Chronicles are brought to you by Real Good Ventures, a talent optimization firm helping organizations diagnose their most critical people and execution issues with world-class analytics. Make sure to check out all the resources in the show notes and be sure to follow us and share your feedback. Enjoy today's episode. Welcome everybody out there in the Bosshole Transformation Nation. This is your co-host, john Broer. Welcome you to this episode. So glad to have you here and I'm equally glad to have my remarkable partner and friend and co-host, Sara Best. Sara, how are you today? 

0:00:58 - Sara
Hello John, I'm doing great. I'm excited, as always, to meet another pretty fantastic subject matter expert and to share this time with you, because I think the world needs to hear what amazing people are doing and writing and speaking. So we want to highlight that today. 

0:01:15 - John
Absolutely, and this is again in. 2023 is starting out to be a remarkable year for the Bosshole Chronicles, because you will hear the intersection of these subject matter experts that we have had since the beginning of the year, since January, and I'm so excited to learn more about our guest today. So, Sara, I'm going to pitch it right over to you. Let us know who we're talking to today. 

0:01:38 - Sara
I will, John, and it is. It's a happy co-inkiedink, if you will, that our dots are connecting and actually I've known of her work. I'm going to introduce you all to Kim Scott, who is a fabulous author and speaker. I'll tell you more about her in a minute, but first, kim, let me welcome you to the podcast. Hello and thank you for being here. 

0:01:58 - Kim Scott
Thank you so much. 

0:01:59 - Sara
I love what you all are doing and I think our missions are very aligned, I would agree, and, as we were talking before we hit record today, it's just so very, very clear that we wish to make the influence and the impact of managers much more positive, and that it's not managers are meant to be bad people or they set out to cause harm or be Bossholes. It's that sometimes they need tools and they need education, and we're going to talk a little bit about how you've created some opportunity to sharing some techniques to do that. But, Kim, before we dive in, let me just share with our audience a little bit about your background. If I can Sure, you're the author Most recently in March, of 21,. 

The author of your new book called Just Work how to Root Out Bias, prejudice, prejudice and Bullying to Build a Kick-Ass Culture of Inclusivity and Radical Candor. We'll definitely be digging in on that. I think that the upshot of that is it's kind of like a playbook for being a kick-ass boss versus a Bosshole. Radical Candor is yes, yeah, and so you also have been the CEO, a coach, a coach CEO's at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter. 

0:03:11 - Kim Scott
Not the current Twitter. I'm going to just interject, okay, thank you. 

0:03:15 - Sara
The previous Twitter. Other tech companies multiple other tech companies. You've lived and worked all over the world. You're a member of the faculty at Apple. You are a member or are you currently a member? 

0:03:26 - Kim Scott
I was. I worked at Apple University, which is Apple's executive ed group. 

0:03:31 - Sara
You worked at AdSense or for YouTube, Doubleclick and even along with teams at Google. Prior to that, you managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo and started a diamond cutting factory in Moscow. 

0:03:44 - Kim Scott
Is that right? Yes, that is right, that is right that is resonating very strangely these days. 

0:03:50 - Sara
I bet, and you also have a family. You live on the West Coast and you have the previous book, too, that we'll also talk about. You mentioned Radical Candor. Can we start talking first about Radical Candor, kim? Can we dig in there? Sure, absolutely. I think that the forward there become a great boss through straightforward, deeply human lessons. These are techniques that are founded on two guiding principles, and the principles really struck me between the eyes the first time I read your book. Caring personally and challenging directly, I just want to say that Radical Candor is a phrase that's thrown out often. People maybe haven't read the book, or they have, but the how-to is very elusive. What prompted you to put pen to paper and provide this guidebook for managers? Tell us about that. 

0:04:41 - Kim Scott
Yeah, I mean. Our mission at Radical Candor is to rid the world of bad bosses, and it's my belief that most bosses are not actually bad people, but they've had no training. There was a saying when I first got to Silicon Valley that management is neither taught nor valued and that was a recipe for bad management, and I think that there's a bunch of problems. 

Part of it is that you learn how to be a salesperson or you learn how to be an engineer, you learn how to be a lawyer, and there's actually not a coherent curriculum that teaches you how to be a manager, and so that's part of the problem. The other part of the problem is that managers are often given too much power right, and so power corrupts and a little you know, absolute power crops absolutely, and a little power crops a lot is kind of how it goes, and so I think probably I started thinking about Radical Candor when I was I had started a software company and I walked into the office and opened up my computer and 10 people had emailed me the same article about people would help. People would rather have a boss who's an asshole but really competent than one who's really nice but incompetent, and I thought are they sending me this because they think I'm incompetent or because they think I'm an asshole? And surely? 

those are not my two choices, and that was. You know, I didn't learn anything about management at business school, but I did learn about the two by two framework and that was sort of how I started thinking myself out of this. And so radical candor is about caring personally and challenging directly at the same time. And when you can do both at the same time, that's radical candor. But all of us fail on one of these dimensions or another. So when you, when you, challenge directly but you fail to show that you care personally, that I call obnoxious aggression and actually in earlier versions of the book, in drafts of the book, I called that asshole or boss or whatever. But I stopped doing that. And I stopped doing it for a really important reason because I want people to use this two by two not as another Myers-Briggs personality test right. 

Don't start writing names and boxes, but rather to avoid making mistakes, because these are mistakes that all of us, whether we're the boss or not- make all the time. 

So that's obnoxious aggression. Now, obnoxious aggression is problematic because it hurts people. It's also problematic because it's inefficient. When you act like a jerk, the other person goes into fight or flight mode and they literally can't hear what you're saying, so you're wasting your breath. And it's also problematic for a more subtle reason. I don't know about you all, but when I realized that I've acted like a jerk which I do I try not to, but I do it's not my instinct to go the right way on care personally. Instead, it's my instinct to go the wrong way. On challenge directly oh, it doesn't matter, it's no big deal, but it does matter and it is a big deal, that's why I just said it. And then I wind up in the worst place of all manipulative insincerity. 

So, if obnoxious aggression is front-stabbing, manipulative insincerity is back-stabbing, and those are the kind of behaviors that make a workplace most toxic. 

Like if we talk about what goes wrong about work, we're probably talking about manipulative insincerity or obnoxious aggression, because that's where the drama is. But in my experience and I'd be curious to hear about what you all think the vast majority of people make the vast majority of mistakes in this other quadrant, where they do remember to show that they care personally, but they're so worried about not hurting someone's feelings that they fail to tell them something they'd be better off knowing in the long run. And that's what I call ruinous empathy. And so that's radical care, what it is and what it isn't in a nutshell. And sometimes people you know, if you write a book about feedback, you're going to get a lot of it, and sometimes people will tell me that people that someone will charge into a conference room and say, in the spirit of radical candor, and then they'll proceed to act like a garden variety jerk, and that is not the spirit of radical, that's the spirit of obnoxious aggression. 

0:08:55 - John
So I just want to make that clear so. 

I don't want you to get mad at me, kim, and I know you have the quadrants. The quadrants are not intended to put people into. However, I couldn't read them and really get into your, your lessons, without thinking of people. You know, I thought, oh, that this person was was definitely demonstrating manipulative, manipulative insincerity. However we talk about, we talk about trying to help managers and supervisors stay out of the boss whole zone and to me, radical candor that is that is staying out of the Bosshole® zone and the other three to some degree. That is the Bosshole® zone and nobody is born to be a Bosshole®. We like we always emphasize that. 

But sometimes circumstances too much power, too many direct reports, no training they end up there and they don't even realize it. But I love that. You've given it a framework that people can reflect on and go oh, my gosh, am I doing that? And, kim, you've given people and everybody go to the show notes because all of this information will be in there. You've given them a great way to reflect and think about how am I showing up with these folks? And it's so practical. 

0:10:07 - Kim Scott
Yeah, I really. You know, I have to give. There was a guy who worked for me at Google, daniel Rubin, and he helped me edit the book and he's a lot younger than I am and he was full of radical candor for me and he kept telling me I don't know what to do. This makes sense, but I don't know what to do. So, to the extent that there are practical tips, we owe Daniel we all owe Daniel Rubin a great shout out of thanks. 

0:10:37 - John
Oh, that's great. 

0:10:38 - Sara
Well, and Kim, you mentioned the software company you started. I was reading about something that may have happened as a precursor to you starting your software company. You had a bosshole encounter. You write about it in your book. Do you want to? Can you share a little bit about that experience? 

0:10:59 - John
Without any direct names, of course. 

0:11:01 - Kim Scott
Yeah, yeah. Well, because actually there's lots. I'll tell you there's lots more to the story than I've ever been before in the book. But so I was working for this guy who was really belittling. In fact, sometimes that kind of behavior it shows up in your body. I actually shrank half an inch, literally. I went to the doctor. She couldn't believe it. She said well, you've got to quit this job. But anyway, he said something incredibly rude about me in an email to someone else and somehow there was a BCC situation and I wound up seeing the email and I went and I confronted him about it and he said oh, just don't worry, you're pretty little head about it. And then later on he said I feel like you don't respect me. And he said I don't feel like you respect me in my superiority. Basically, it was really bad. That was a terrible situation. 

0:12:04 - Sara
But I think it spurred the mission and just confirmed your passion for creating a workplace where people can love each other, certainly, but also at least care, at least show common human decisions. 

0:12:19 - Kim Scott
In fact, in this moment where there have been so many layoffs it was a layoff that that manager conducted horribly that made me realize how important good management is and how damaging bad management can be. It was really it was, and that was kind of the moment where I realized that management was not. It was actually interesting and it mattered. 

0:12:43 - John
And we will be right back. 

0:12:49 - Announcer
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0:13:57 - John
OK, let's get back to the program. Well, kim, you can look back on this now and you said there's a lot more to this story. Clearly you have recovered or you've moved on. However, I don't think this should be lost. We've had boss people come on and share their boss whole stories. There is real misery. I mean there is harm being done to people emotionally, physically, psychologically and just because of people that don't understand that they're just acting like bossholes or they have no knowledge of how to be better at what they're doing. 

0:14:34 - Kim Scott
Yeah Now and the sort of more. To the story part was I bumped into him like 10 years later and I was really I'm laughing at it. It's a funny story now. 

It was not funny at the time I mean when you're shrinking half and I'm only five feet tall, I did not have an inch to give you know when the way that you're being treated is making itself manifest in your body and I've talked to people who get insomnia they break out in hives. I mean it really is, is true harm there's. There's also evidence that shows that people are more likely to have heart attacks, probably not in their 20s, as I was at the time, but later. So it's a serious thing. But I bumped into him 10 years later and we had a drink and I realized, like in my mind, he was the devil. You know I had, I had and then I realized he wasn't he. You know, he was even younger than I was at the time when he was running this company. He had no idea what he was doing and nobody to teach him, and and he had too much power. It's a bad combo isn't it yes? 

it is Ignorance and power are not good Not good. 

0:15:49 - Sara
Well, and that's an example. There are others. You lived through other, more egregious violations, if you will, that weren't just about you know, your spirit or your reputation. They were about your livelihood, your womanhood. All of that. You write about that in just work. I think that's where I'd love to go next how we can recognize, attack and eliminate workplace injustice. So, at the end of the day, we really are talking about inequality, injustice, ignorance. It could be a cover for all of that in some cases, but what? What moved you in this direction? 

0:16:29 - Kim Scott
to be even more specific about what we have to shift in the workplace yeah, well, as I said before, when you write a book about feedback, you get a lot of it, oh, yeah, and indeed I did. 

And by far the most valuable feedback I got was when I was giving a radical candor talk at a tech company in San Francisco and the CEO of that company had been a colleague of mine for the better part of a decade, a person who I like and respect enormously and one of two few black women CEOs in tech. 

And when I finished giving the presentation she pulled me aside and she said, kim, I'm excited to roll out radical candor, but I got to tell you it's much harder for me than it is for you. And she went on to explain to me that as soon as she would offer anyone, even the most gentle, compassionate criticism, she would get slimed with the angry black woman stereotype. And I knew this was true. And it made me have four realizations at the same time. The first was that I had not been the kind of colleague that I imagined myself to be, that I want to be. I hadn't even noticed the extent to which she had to show up unfailingly cheerful and pleasant at every meeting we were ever in together, even though she had what to be ticked off about, as we all do at work. 

The second thing I realized was that I had also been in denial about the kinds of things that were happening to me as a woman in the workplace, and I think, in part because I never wanted to think of myself as a victim, but even less than wanting to think of myself as a victim that I want to think of myself as a perpetrator. And so I had been even deeper in denial about the ways in which I had caused harm. I hadn't intended to, but I had exhibited sort of the bias, prejudice and bullying that had caused people to slime my colleague with that stereotype. And then the fourth thing I realized was that as a leader, I had failed to do what I needed to do to prevent these things from happening on my watch, as almost all leaders do, actually. And I thought that it was that was kind of the moment when I decided to write radical I mean just work Because I needed to come to grips with these things that I had been sort of I had gone through so much in my career, kind of blah, blah, blah blah, pretending that things weren't happening. And I want to acknowledge that in some respects that was useful, Because I think there were some things that had happened that were so painful and upsetting that I couldn't come to grips with them. 

I'm not saying denial is like a great way of coping, but I also want to offer some compassion for people who are sometimes in denial about the things that are happening to them. So when you're the person harmed, you get to choose your response. But if you're the Upstander, you need to intervene. You don't get to be in denial. And if you're the leader, you definitely don't get to be in denial. 

0:19:35 - Sara
That's right and an Upstander, and that whole idea jumped out to me when I read the book. I have a big sticky note over here. 

0:19:42 - Announcer
Oh, thank you, that was my neck. 

0:19:43 - Sara
What a great segue. I wanted to ask you how do people become Upstanders? Give us some practical advice about joining in in a way to be part of the solution, in a way that doesn't mean we have to change who we are or what we do. Give us your take on the Upstander. 

0:20:03 - Kim Scott
Yeah, I think you probably do have to change some things, but you want to become your best self, not your worst self. I'll put it that way. 

And so I think that, in order to be an Upstander, first of all remember what you're doing is you're intervening when something's going wrong. You're not going in to be the incredible Hulk or the hero yes so you're not an Avenger and you're also not standing up for someone who's weaker than you. You're not casting other people in the role of damsel in distress or you're not giving into the white savior complex or something like that. So what can you do when you want to sort of create a better workplace? I think one of the problems is that we often conflate bias, prejudice and bullying as though they're the same thing, and they're actually three very different things and we need three very different responses. So I'm going to offer you some, if I may, some really simple definitions. 

Overly simple but useful in the moment you like simple. 

0:21:07 - John
Simple is good. Yes, simple, yes simple is good. 

0:21:09 - Kim Scott
There's more to it and I'm not saying ignore all the more to it, but let's sort of disambiguate, no-transcript. Bias is not meaning it. It's usually unconscious you don't really mean what you're saying, whereas prejudice is meaning it. It's a very consciously held belief and bullying. There's no belief, conscious or unconscious, going on, you're just being mean. So not meaning it is bias. Meaning it is prejudice. Being mean is bullying, and Thinking about how to respond differently to each is useful. So let's start with bias. 

One of my favorite stories comes from Aileen Lee, who started cowboy BC. She said she was going into a meeting with two colleagues who were men and they sat down at a big, long conference table and the other side started filing in and the first person sat across from the guy to Aileen's left. The next person came in and sat across from the guy to his left and then everybody else filed on down the table, leaving Aileen dangling by herself. So how many times is that how bias shows up just in? Who decides to sit across from whom? 

Right and but Aileen was Undeterred. She knew she had the expertise that was gonna win her team the deal. So she started talking and when the other side had questions, they didn't direct them at Aileen, they directed them at her two colleagues who were men another common way that bias shows up. It happened once, it happened twice, it happened a third time and finally her colleagues stood up and he said I think Aileen and I should switch seats. That was all he had to do Totally changed the dynamic in the room because all of a sudden everybody else realized what they were doing. 

Yeah they felt a little embarrassed, but they changed it. You know I would. And yeah, that's what. That's what an I statement does. It kind of Holds a mirror up to the other side to understand, to understand things the way that you do. It sort of calls people in. Yes, if it's prejudice, holding a mirror up is not gonna work because the person's gonna grin in the mirror, they're gonna like what they see. You know, that's the way they want it. So if it's prejudice, you need an it statement and then it statement can appeal to the law, it can appeal to HR policy or it can appeal to common sense. 

So an example of that colleague of mine was in a hiring meeting and everyone who had interviewed, all the colleagues agreed that. I mean all the candidates agreed that the most qualified Person for the role was a black woman who would warn her hair out, naturally. And the hiring manager said, oh well, we can't extend her an offer. And my colleagues said, well, why not? And the hiring manager and this is that like a very well-known, well respected company, and recently, not in the 1960s and the hiring manager said, well, I'm not gonna put that hair in front of the business. And, believe me, no, where in the in the job requirements was there anything about hair? This was a financial services room, and so what was an it statement that could be, used. 

It is illegal not to hire someone because of their hair, which it was in that state thanks to the Crown Act. Or she could have appealed to an HR policy. It is an HR violation not to hire someone because of their hair. Or if she had lived in a place where she didn't or worked in a place where she didn't have the law or the HR policy in place, she could have said it is ridiculous not to hire the most qualified kid because of their hair. 

0:24:44 - John
Because of the hair right, yeah, yeah. 

0:24:46 - Kim Scott
So an it statement sort of makes it clear where the line is between one person's freedom to believe whatever they want, but they can't impose that belief on other people. 

0:24:55 - Sara
Oh, that sounds perfect. 

0:24:56 - Kim Scott
Yes, yeah, that's easier said than done. I tell this anecdote but I had to think a long time to find it, so we'll talk in a minute about what leaders can do to make sure that this that Upstanders stand up more often. Now, in the case of bullying, you want a use statement. You don't want an I statement, Because an I statement sort of invites someone in to understand things from your perspective, and that's not what you want to do in the case of a bully. My daughter taught me this when she was in third grade. She was getting bullied and I was encouraging her to say about this kid, oh 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 succeeded? That's a really good point. 

0:25:44 - John
It is. 

0:25:44 - Kim Scott
Wow. And so we talked about saying why are you doing this or what's going on for you here Sometimes, actually, I learned this from and there's a New York Times article about a dominatrix who taught people this trick. Just change the subject, ask a question about them Where'd you get that shirt? That all of a sudden puts you in an active stance. You're no longer in the submissive role when you're asking a question to someone. Where'd you get that shirt? So try a you question or a you statement, a you response. 

If you think it's bullying, there's a great organization that came up with the 5Ds for Upstanders. So how can you stand up to bullying or bias or prejudice? Sometimes it's a direct response the I, the you statement but other times you might feel like you will get. There will be repercussions for you and I wrote this book in part in honor of Upstanders. I don't want to put Upstanders in harm's way. Some people have written in and said I upstood and I got fired. So I want to acknowledge the power dynamics. 

But there are other things you can do to intervene that aren't direct. You can delegate, you can ask someone else to intervene. You can also delay. You can check in with the person later and see if they're OK. You can document what happened. That can often you don't want to like post it on social media because the person who owns that documentation is the person who was harmed, not you. But that can be really, really helpful. Or you can just distract. There's a New York Times article about someone on the subway. A man was following a woman and she was afraid of him clearly and things were starting to get physical and he just threw his potato chips all over the place and it created a distraction and allowed her to get away. He didn't want to fight this guy, but he also didn't want to do nothing. So the 5Ds, I think, give people different ways to think about intervening when they notice bias, prejudice or bullying. 

0:28:00 - John
Kim, you said something that I think is really helpful and a huge takeaway for our listeners, our managers and supervisors out there. Leaders have to be I don't know if it's an oversensitivity they just need to be aware and listening and cognizant of bias, prejudice or bullying that may be taking place within the team. And when you talk about leaders especially, they really need to be mindful of what's happening in the workplace, correct? 

0:28:29 - Kim Scott
Yes, they need to be mindful, but that's not enough. They also need to put systems in place that are going to make it more likely that people intervene. 

0:28:43 - John
How about that for an amazing part one of our interview with Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor in Just Work. Make sure you check out the show notes and all of the links provided and make sure you absolutely tune in next Tuesday for part two of our discussion with Kim Scott. Thanks for joining us. See you next week.