Should you be radically candid at work?

Kara Miller:

Welcome to Instigators of Change, a Khosla Ventures podcast, where we take a look at innovative ideas, the people who come up with them and those who invest in them. I'm Kara Miller. And this week managing people, whether it's in a lab, at your own startup or on a team, nestled inside an enormous company. Well, it's not easy.

Kim Scott:

A friend of mine said early on when I first moved to Silicon Valley, he said to me, management is neither taught nor valued in Silicon Valley. And I remember thinking, wow, that's pretty harsh. And I think that's beginning to change.

Kara Miller:

That's Kim Scott, who will talk today about what it's like being managed by Cheryl Sandberg, what you learn teaching managers at Apple to manage and how to screw up as a leader, which she will admit she did. And management, as you're going to hear is a specialized skill that impacts everything. If you don't know what you're doing as a leader, productivity's going to suffer, the people being managed will suffer, and you and your investors will suffer. So today on Instigators of Change, what it takes to tell people what they need to hear without being a jerk. About 20 years ago, Kim Scott was the CEO of a company that she helped found, Juice Software.

Kim Scott:

There was a moment at Juice that was one of the worst moments of my career. And it really has helped me more than anything else, this one moment be more radically candid when I'm reluctant to do it.

Kara Miller:

I should say that Scott would go on to write a book called Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. Her most recent book is called Just Work: How to Root Out Bias, Prejudice, and Bullying to build a Kick-ass Culture of Inclusivity. But anyway, back a couple of decades. So Scott has this small company and she hires this guy, Bob, which is not his real name. And he was charming and funny and people loved him. One time the company was doing a kind of a get to know you activity and Bob says, I know something that would work great. And it'll be fast, which the team really liked the sound of.

Kim Scott:

And he says, let's just go around the table and confess what candy our parents used when potty training us, really weird, but really fast. And weirder yet, we all remembered. My parents used Hershey kisses. And then for the next 10 months, every time there was a tense moment in a meeting, Bob would whip out just the right piece of candy for the right person at the right moment. So Bob brought a little levity to the office, kind of weird, but a little levity to the office. Everyone loved Bob.

Kara Miller:

But if you're waiting for the other shoe to drop, and I'm guessing you are, since this is after all a story of how things can go wrong. It turns out Bob wasn't doing great work. He wasn't even doing good work.

Kim Scott:

I would say something to him along the lines of, oh, Bob, you're so smart, 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. So let's pause for a moment here. Why did I say something so banal to Bob? I think part of the problem was truly what I call in the book, ruinous empathy. Where you care but you don't challenge. I really did like Bob and I really didn't want to hurt his feelings.

Kara Miller:

The problem was that things that go unsaid often snowball and the Bob situation snowballed for Kim Scott. But at the time she wasn't thinking about the long run, she was thinking about not hurting somebody who was really nice. She was thinking about not being perceived as a jerk by her colleagues. Scott argues now that you have to care about somebody enough to actually tell them the truth. But back then, the truth seemed kind of like the enemy.

Kim Scott:

And so this goes on for about 10 months where I'm sort of not really giving Bob the kind of critical feedback he needs. I'm not sort of making any kind of inquiries into what I could do or stop doing that would help him get stuff back on track. And eventually the inevitable happens. And I realize that if I don't fire Bob, I'm going to lose all my best performers because they're sick of it. They're not able to do their best work, right? Because they're having to spend so much of their time redoing his work. Their deliverables are late because his deliverables are late and they want to work in a place where they can do the best work of their lives. And so eventually I realized they're all going to quit if I don't fire Bob.

Kara Miller:

So she does it. She fires this guy because she just can't not fire him for one more day and it doesn't go well.

Kim Scott:

And when I finished explaining to him where things stood, he 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.

Kara Miller:

Scott says she realized she had failed herself, and Bob and her team and her investors, she hadn't been open or honest, she would later realize he was smoking pot three times a day. But even then, was he doing that because he was stressed by something that was going on at the company. She had no idea. She had never talked about any of it with him, but the problem was cultural.

Kim Scott:

I had failed to create the kind of environment in which everyone would tell Bob what was great about his work and working with him and when he was going off the rails and I was doing all this just trying to be nice. I thought I didn't want to hurt Bob's feelings.

Kara Miller:

Right, right.

Kim Scott:

And now I'm firing him. Not so nice after all. Right? And it was a horrible moment, but it was too late at that moment to save Bob, even Bob at this point, agreed he should go. His reputation on the team was 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's really why I wrote the book and why I'm here talking to you all. It's why I came up with this radical candor framework.

Kara Miller:

See, here's the thing, most people who become leaders because they're good at something else. They're good at software engineering or biochemistry or logistics. And all of a sudden they're expected to be good at this whole new thing.

Kim Scott:

A friend of mine said early on when I first moved to Silicon Valley, he said to me, management is neither taught nor valued in Silicon Valley. And I remember thinking, wow, that's pretty harsh. And I think that's beginning to change. And I think a big part of the reason why it's changing here is because we realize a bunch of different things. One is that the demand for talent is so intense and this is no longer just in Silicon Valley. I mean in a great resignation, it's true everywhere. The demand for talent is so intense and people are no longer willing to pay the tax.

And I think that so often when people just get thrown into the deep end of management, they're like congratulations, you're a manager now. And they get no training, no education. They have no idea what the job even entails. I think very often people who are not bad people, they fall back on this kind of idea that a boss is someone who bullies others, a boss is someone who tells people what to do and that doesn't work. Telling people what to do doesn't work. Bullying people does not work very well. And so I think it's really important that we begin to help people who become managers realize that management is a job and it's a job for which you'll be held accountable for doing well. It is not like a value judgment on who you are as a person or permission to go off and dominate others.

Kara Miller:

You know, if we go back to the story with Bob, I feel like people listening to that are going to think, wow, Bob, he really screwed up there. But it sounds like from the perspective of you, the manager, you really came away really sad from that experience feeling like you really screwed up.

Kim Scott:

Yeah.

Kara Miller:

And I wonder how much that affected you deeply. Because people think of the person who's fired. Wow. That person got brunt really badly. Obviously, he did to some degree, but it sounds like you were pretty hurt by that what happened.

Kim Scott:

Yeah. I mean, look, it was my job to help Bob do his best work and to make sure that everyone on the team could do their best work. And I totally failed to do that job. And if I had told Bob earlier, maybe one of two things would've happened, he would've realized he was screwing up and he would've stopped smoking pot in the bathroom three times a day and done better work.

He was capable of doing great work. He had done it before in his career. Or maybe it would've given him an opportunity to tell me that something terrible was happening in his life and he needed some support from me and from the team. And I would've given it to him if I had known what was going on, but by pretending that everything was okay, I wasn't giving him that opportunity. I mean, it's also possible, radical candor is not going to fix every problem. It's also possible that he would've brushed my feedback off, but then I would've at least dealt with this situation before I had frustrated the whole team and hurt our ability to get done what we needed to get done. I mean, in a startup's life, 10 months is an eternity. It's a difference between success and failure and I was putting us all on the path to failure.

Kara Miller:

Subsequent to this story, a few years in the future, you taught managers, lots of managers at Apple.

Kim Scott:

Yes.

Kara Miller:

I wonder what you hear from managers, because I think this is both helpful to managers, but anybody who's been managed by a manager also in some ways lives in fear of them or is intimidated by them sometimes. But I wonder the kinds of things that they tell you in confidence, like how they're really feeling about the situation.

Kim Scott:

Yeah. I mean, it's funny, I think that when we think about speaking truth to power about offering some radical candor to our boss, I think a lot of people find that there's risk in doing that. And there is, I don't want to pretend that there isn't, but one of the things that really struck me since the book came out is the number of managers who write to me who are just as afraid of their employees as their employees are afraid of them. And especially in this era when it's so hard to hire. And so I think that it's really important to remember that what will really kill your relationship is not a disagreement or not some critical feedback, what really is going to kill that relationship is an unspoken disagreement or unspoken critical feedback, because then it just piles up and it eventually goes critical and blows up like a dirty bomb all over your relationship.

And at the core of good management is a good relationship. It's a human relationship. It's not a friendship. It better not be a romance, but it is still a human relationship between boss and employee. And if you're not staying focused on that relationship, if you're trying to replace a relationship with command and control, it's not going to work out very well. You know, there's been a lot of effort to try to not have managers. Shortly before I got to Google, there was an experiment to have no managers or have a few people have so many direct reports that management was impossible and people really want a good manager. They just don't want a bad manager. And it was tricky writing Radical Candor because there's not a good word for it. Bosses kind of has negative connotations, managers has negative connotations, leaders has negative connotations. And I think we've got to begin to define the role in such a way that we're getting what we want out of it. And we're minimizing the odds that we're having these bad managers who people join good companies and lead bad managers.

Kara Miller:

Yep. Yep. So you obviously talked about an experience where you weren't as candid as you should have been and wanted to be. Contrast that experience with working for Sheryl Sandberg at Google. First of all, just talk about how did you end up working for her and what was your role?

Kim Scott:

Yes. So I mentioned Juice didn't succeed in the end. One of several failed startups where I worked before joining Google and I had gone to business school with Sheryl and I was getting close to taking a different job in New York. But because I had been at startups, I didn't really know what I should be asking for or looking at. And so I called Sheryl for advice and she was like, don't take the job, fly out to California. And I'm ashamed to admit this, but the main reason I took the job at Google is because they said I could bring my dog with me. So there you go.

Kara Miller:

Well, everybody has different motivations so that's okay.

Kim Scott:

Life is kind of random. So anyway, I was leading ad senses, YouTube and double click sales and operations at Google. And right at this moment when this story happened, I was just leading ad sense sales and operations.

Kara Miller:

And this is like 2004, 2005-ish?

Kim Scott:

2004. Yeah. Just before the IPO.

Kara Miller:

Okay.

Kim Scott:

And funny story, a venture capitalist who I really respected, gave me some advice about taking the job. They said your stock is already fully valued. Forget about making money. Just take this job because you want the job. It's funny to think back what it was like in 2004, it's a very different world. So anyway, I moved out from New York to California, which I really was reluctant to do. I loved living in Manhattan and I took this job. And shortly after I took the job, I had to give a presentation of the founders and the CEO.

Kara Miller:

Okay.

Kim Scott:

And I walked into the room and there in one corner of the room was Sergey Brin on an elliptical trainer wearing to shoes in a bright blue spandex unitard, not what I was really expecting or frankly wanting to see.

Kara Miller:

That's similar to a lot of meanings I've been to.

Kim Scott:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And this was very different from where I had worked in finance in New York previously or at a startup that served finance. So it was very different kind of world. And then in the other corner of the room was Eric Schmidt who was CEO at the time doing his email. And it was so intent on his computer. It was like his brain had been plugged into the machine. So probably just like you in such a situation, I felt a little bit nervous. How was I supposed to get these people's attention? And luckily for me, the absence business was on fire. And when I said, how many new customers we had added over the last couple of months, Eric almost fell off his chair. What did you say? This is incredible. Do you need more marketing dollars? Do you need more engineers? And so I'm feeling like the meeting's going all right. In fact, I now believe that I am a genius and I walk down of the room. I walk past Sheryl and I'm expecting a high five, a pat on the back.

And instead she says to me, why don't you walk back to my office with me? And I thought, oh wow, I have screwed something up. And I'm sure I'm about to hear about it. And she began the conversation not by telling me what had gone wrong, but by telling me what had gone right. Not in the sandwich sense of the word, but really seeming to mean what she said. But of course, all I wanted to hear about was what I had done wrong. Eventually she said to me, you said um a lot in there. Were you aware of it? And with this, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Because if that was all I had done wrong, who really cared, I had the tiger by the tail. And I said, yeah, I know, I made this brush off gesture with my hand.

I said, yeah, no, it's a verbal tick. It's no big deal really. And then she said, I know this great speech coach. I bet Google would pay for it. And once again, I made this brush off gesture with my hand. I said, I am busy. I don't have time for a speech coach. Didn't you hear about all those new customers? And then she stopped. She looked me right in the eye and she said, I can tell when you do that thing with your hand that I'm going to have to be a lot more direct with you. When you say um 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 that I sounded stupid, but it was the kindest thing that 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 really important, she would not have used those words with other people on her team who are perhaps a better listener than I was. But if she hadn't used just those words with me, I never would have gone to visit the speech coach. And I wouldn't have learned that she was not exaggerating. I literally said um every third word. And this was news to me because I had raised money for three different startups, a lot of money for three different startups, giving presentations. I thought I was pretty good at it. And it was almost like I suddenly realized I'd been walking through my whole career with a giant hun of spinach between my teeth. Nobody had the common courtesy to tell me it was there. And so this really got me to thinking why had no one told me, but also what was it about Sheryl's management style that made it so seemingly easy for her to tell me?

Kara Miller:

Yes I was going to ask you what made her confident enough? As long as it went over okay with you and you didn't feel like, wow, my manager hates me and she was able to get through to you, but in a way where you felt still cared about, it impresses me that she was able to do something that's kind of rough and that she had the confidence to do it actually.

Kim Scott:

Yes. Yeah. You know, and it's funny, as I was writing the book, I sent her a version of the story just to make sure that she remembered it the way that I did that she said, gosh, did I really say you sounded stupid? I'm so sorry. So it wasn't as easy for her in retrospect. And this is really an important point because I think when you give someone some feedback and they kind of brush you off, which is going to happen, if you hire people who are super confident, part of their confidence is that they aren't always as open to feedback as they might otherwise be.

You've got to be willing to move pretty far out on the challenge directly dimension. So let's think about what are the two things that gave Sheryl the confidence. One was that she knew that it was her job. She was reluctant to do it. She didn't love doing it, but she knew it was her job to move as far out on the challenge directly dimension that she needed to do to get through to people. And she also was one of those leaders who cared about everyone who she worked with, not just as employees, but as human beings. So for example, when I moved from New York to California to take the job, I was really lonely out here in California. I didn't know anyone out here and all my friends were back in New York and I was single. So I felt sort of isolated and she could tell that was how I felt.

And she introduced me to a book group. She knew I loved to read and to write. And she introduced me to a book group. I'm still friends with a number of those women to this day. So that was the kind of thing that she did, not just for me, but for everyone who worked directly with her, she couldn't of course do it for all 5,000 people in her organization. No matter how talented you are, relationships don't scale, right? But culture does scale. And when a leader treats their people with real care, it's much more likely that their direct reports are going to in turn treat their direct reports with real care. And that really does matter. Culture does scale. And I think it's really important to remember, so often people use radical candor like an excuse to act like a jerk.

So, for example, one of the things that'll happen sometimes when I'm working with a team is someone will charge into a conference room and they'll say in the spirit of radical candor, and then they proceed to act like an asshole. And that is not the spirit of radical candor, that is the spirit of obnoxious aggression. So it's really important not to confuse radical candor, which is about caring personally and challenging directly at the same time with something like radical transparency, which is a totally different thing.

Kara Miller:

Let's take a quick pause right here. I'm talking with Kim Scott, she's the author of Radical Candor and Just Work. When we come back, more about giving up power, sharing it sometimes how that can get you more. Right now, a quick word from KV.

Speaker:

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Kara Miller:

I'm Kara Miller talking with Kim Scott. And I just want to pick up right where we left off. You talk about meetings between the boss and the person they're managing. We were talking about Sheryl Sandberg being honest with you, and that's sort of going in one direction, but you really also talk about it going the other way. That you should be in a relationship where the person who's being managed can say to their manager here's what I don't get. Here's what I'm having trouble with. Here's the agenda I want for this meeting. So how do you get to the point where the person being managed is actually confident enough that you as a manager have created the environment where they can say those things? And I think you talked about Rose Larry Page at Google is doing that and people would be like I don't agree with you. How do you foster that for the people who are working for you because, frankly quite often, they're scared of you?

Kim Scott:

Yes. Yes. And even if scared and confident and courage, I mean, these are all such laid in terms. But it is very instinctive not to speak truth to power. And that doesn't mean that I'm a coward if it's my instinct not to speak truth to power, it just means that's a very basic human instinct. And so I think one of the things that I learned shortly after I joined Google, I got into an argument with Larry about an ad sense policy. And Matt Cutts agreed with me and we both disagreed with Larry. And so we went in together and Larry made his point, Matt made his point and they went back and forth. And pretty soon, Matt who I had really liked, it was exciting to work with someone like him started yelling at Larry.

You know, he really was screaming. And I had this, it was like a gut punch. I was like, oh no, this new person who I just met who I really like is going to get fired. And then I looked at Larry and Larry had this big grin on his face. And it was clear that he really was glad that Matt felt comfortable saying what he really thought in the most passionate animated kind of way. And that was really important. I saw that happen another time. There was going to be a redesign of the AdWords front end. And as AdWords is like 99%, at that point, probably 99.5% of Google's revenue. So it was important to get it right. And the team had one approach and Sergey Brin one of the other founders had a different approach and so he was advocating for his point of view and the team said no, here's why we don't like that direction that you're headed.

And here's why we're going to do it this way. And then Sergey said, well, let's do an experiment. You know, let's do a bake off. Maybe you could just put five or 10 engineers and see if my idea works, see what it looks like when you build it. And the team said, no, no, we're not going to do that. At one point, Sergey kind of banged his fist on the table and he said, if this were an ordinary company, you'd all be doing it my way. And so he was so conflicted you could see it in his face. On the one hand, he was so proud that he had built this company where people would push back on him. And on the other hand, at a human level he was frustrated. He wanted to do it his way.

Kara Miller:

His way, yeah.

Kim Scott:

Yeah. Yeah. But I think that was so much a part of what made early Google magical was that you had Eric saying, be loud. There was a lot of signals that were really pushing people that great ideas come from everywhere. It was very much an environment where people were encouraged to disagree transparently I think people have learned this by now, but remember this is back in 2004. At previous companies where I had worked, people had really abused the BCC in ways that created a lot of politics. And that never happened at Google. If you added someone to a thread, you would add them very clearly. You wouldn't forward somebody's thread to someone else and talk badly about them. There was a reasonable person principle, which meant we're going to disagree with one another and we're going to disagree openly.

And we're not going to have the meeting after the meeting, we don't have time or patience for that. And that was really important. And I think the thing to remember, and this is something that every leader listening can imitate, the thing to remember is that there's an order of operations to radical candor. And it all starts, especially if you're the leader, but no matter what your role is, it all starts with soliciting feedback. With making sure that you are doing what it takes and it's not about making the other person comfortable. It's about embracing the discomfort. People do not want to give you feedback. Unless you have children, if you have teenagers, those are the only people in your life who really genuinely want to give you feedback. Nobody else does. And so you want to make sure that you're doing everything you can if you have power to lay it down and to make sure that you're not just encouraging people to give you feedback, but that you're demanding that people give you feedback.

There was another story at Apple about this who was not maybe the best way of doing it, but it illustrates the point. Steve Jobs got into an argument with one of his direct reports about should we go this direction or that direction? And they went back and forth about five or six times. And eventually Steve Jobs direct report just gave up and said, well it's your company and we'll do it your way. And it emerged that Steve was wrong. And Steve charged into this guy's office and he was like, why do we do it this way? And the guy was like, well, because you said to do it this way. And Steve looked back at him and he said, and it was your job to convince me I was wrong and you failed. There you go.

Kara Miller:

Yeah.

Kim Scott:

So unless you have surrounded yourself with exceptionally confident people, that may not be the best way to go, but it does illustrate the point. Like you want to make sure that people know not only that they should feel comfortable because they won't feel comfortable, but that it is their job to overcome their discomfort in speaking up and that telling you when you're wrong is part of their job. Another story about a leader who did this well is Andy Grove. Andy Grove, when he was CEO of Intel, he was very well known for getting people to tell him what he really thought. People at Intel, it's not that they weren't afraid of Andy, but there was a culture of listen, challenge, commit. And I asked him, what's your secret? And he said at the end of every 101, I have with anyone I'm meeting with I'll listen, I'll let them get through all their agenda items.

And then as they're gathering their papers up about thinking the meetings over, I'll say there's one more thing. And then I'll tell the person this is the most important thing you can do to succeed at this company. And with me is tell me what I'm doing wrong. Tell me when I'm making a mistake. He said that snow always melts at the periphery and when you're a leader of a company, you're at the center, you have no idea what's going on at the periphery unless you proactively go out and ask and make sure that people are coming to you willing to give you bad news early. Bad news early is a really good mantra I think for leaders to help people realize that it's their job to tell them when they're screwing up. When the leader is screwing up, which is uncomfortable for most people.

And frankly, as a leader, if you're honest with yourself, you really don't want to hear it when you're screwing up. And so you've got to overcome your own reluctance. It's not about managing other people's discomfort. The first thing you got to do is manage yourself and get yourself to a place where you really do genuinely want to hear it. Because people can tell.

Kara Miller:

So I was going to ask you about that because I think like, for example, the Steve Jobs story underscores this tension, which is that you're saying like be open listen to what your direct reports have to say listen to what people are saying about what's going wrong and what could be done and that kind of thing. But the reason command and control existed or exists as a way of managing is because people want control. Whether they're a founder or they're a manager, they often think they know what's best. They know the direction things should go in and they'd like to tell you what that is. So how do you negotiate that tension within yourself?

Kim Scott:

Yeah. I mean, I think the first thing to do as a leader, especially if you're a founder is you've got to let go of that desire to control. I mean, when I started Juice, I really believed part of the reason why I started that company is that I believed if I were in charge, everything would be sweetness and light and human nature would change. And of course, it did not, and it was not sweetness and light. And in the next book I wrote, in Just Work, I talked about some really painful lessons I learned because I was making sure that I was in control. I was failing to create checks and balances.

And so one of the leaders in Silicon Valley who I really admire is Alan [inaudible 00:32:31]. And he came to me recently and he said, so when I'm the chair of the board, who's the check on my power? How do I make sure that people can tell me when I'm the problem? Because we all harm others sometimes, especially if we have a little bit of power. Dan Grunfeld at Stanford has written so wisely on the problems of power. And I think none of us believe that power is going to crop us. And frankly, you're a co-founder or a founder or a CEO of a startup, you feel like you're struggling for survival at every minute. You don't feel like you have much power. And it's so easy to forget that the people around you really do perceive that you have power. So one of the things that I really admired at Google was Shona Brown, who was the SVP of business operations.

She really took a look at Google as the product. Like, forget about search, forget about AdWords, but Google as the company. So you want to look at your company as a product, and surely as the products you're building and how can you design, how can you design the systems to optimize for collaboration and respect? Because if you have collaboration and respect, things are going to go better. If you're designing your systems for command and control, then that's going to hurt your company's ability to innovate. And so you want to make sure that you're not giving unilateral decision-making authority to anyone, to any manager, including yourself. So you don't get to decide ignoring everyone else's point of view who gets hired. Nobody can decide who gets fired unilaterally. Nobody can decide to pay a bonus unilaterally. Nobody can decide to promote someone unilaterally. I mean, another thing that is not always possible at a smaller company, but by the time I got to Google, I was, I don't know, maybe 1500 people.

And if you didn't like your boss, you could just leave the team without even discussing it with your boss. And that happened to me. Well, shortly after I got to Google, three of my five direct reports just left my team. And I learned a really important lesson then about how to make sure that I wasn't trying to tell people what to do. I was right, but it didn't matter that I was right. What mattered was, was I bringing people along? And so I think it's really important that if you have positional power or authority, that you figure out how to lay it down.

Because if the essence of good leadership is a relationship, one of the things that is more damaging to a good relationship than anything else is a power imbalance. And so you got to make sure that you are addressing that in terms of the systems at your company. I think one of the things that Google maybe got wrong was that they addressed it in terms of positional authority and decision-making, but they didn't address it in terms of pay. And there's a really good book that Safi Bahcall wrote about innovations, it's called Loonshots.

Kara Miller:

Yes, yes. I've talked about it.

Kim Scott:

Yeah. And one of his assertions is that some of the biggest step function, biggest innovations have happened at places where there's not a 10,000:1 gap between the person who gets paid the most and the person who gets paid the least. And when the pay gap is too big, people start to focus on getting promoted instead of getting the work done instead of innovation. And so you want to make sure that you're giving some real thought to that. It's very tricky to do that well in this kind of market where that pay gap is just enormous in the market. So I don't have all the answers of how to make that work, but it's something you need to wrestle with.

Kara Miller:

You have been obviously thinking about management, teaching about management for a long time now. And I wonder how you feel like maybe in the 20-ish years that you've been really thinking a lot about this topic, how you feel like things have shifted.

Kim Scott:

So I think there's a lot more recognition that command and control doesn't work and that management is really a set of behaviors. There's not a personality attribute that makes you a good or bad, it's a set of behaviors that you can learn how to do better. And so that makes me optimistic. I also think that if you write a book about feedback, you're going to get a lot of it. And here's some feedback that I got about Radical Candor. I was doing 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 the decade and is a person who I like and respect enormously. And one of two few black women CEOs in tech or frankly, in any other sector. And when I finished giving the presentation, she pulled me aside and she said, Kim, I'm really excited about Radical Candor.

Kim Scott:

It's going to help me build the kind of culture I want, 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 gentle compassionate criticism, she would get signed with the angry black woman stereotype. And I knew this was true. And as soon as she said it to me, I had four revelations at the same time about Radical Candor and what I wanted to do to address a gap in the book. The first was that I had failed to be the kind of colleague that I want to be, that I imagined myself to be, I had failed even to notice the extent to which she had to show up unfailingly, cheerful, and pleasant in every single meeting I had ever been in with her, even though believe me in that period of time, she had what to be pissed off about as we all do at work.

And I hadn't stepped in and been what I call in my next book, just work an up-stander. I had been a silent bystander had been kind of in denial about the kinds of things that were happening to her. 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 white woman in the workplace. I was pretending that a whole host of things were not happening that were in fact happening kind of hard for the author of a book called Radical Candor to admit, but I never wanted to think of myself as a victim. And so I'd pretended that things were not happening that were in fact happening. Now, the third thing I realized was that even less than wanting to think of myself as a victim, I want to think of myself as a perpetrator. So I had probably been most deeply in denial about the different ways that I had actually harmed others who I had worked with in the workplace, not intending to, but we all have our biases.

We all have our prejudices. We all especially when we're a leader given to bullying sometimes. And I just had not been aware, it wasn't just aware, I'd been in denial about the kinds of things that I had done. And then the fourth thing that I realized was that as a leader, I thought I had tried to, but I had failed to create the kinds of environments in which everyone could just work, just in the justice sense of the word and just get shit done sense of the word as well. And that is what prompted me to start writing my next book, Just Work. And I started this book in 2017, before me too, before the resurgence of black lives matter. And one of the things that really gives me optimism is that I defaulted to silence for so long in my career and colleagues of mine who are black, are Latino, also defaulted to silence because it was like this truism, like we don't talk about this stuff.

And you can't fix problems that you refuse to notice. And I think that now the new generation of employees that we have in the workplace, they are not going to remain silent. In fact, I was at Stanford giving a talk about Just Work last week and a bunch of the women in the class came up to me and they said in this other class we did this case study and there was a chair on the board who really was bullying the CFO of the company who was a woman. And one of the questions was what would you do in her shoes? And they said the professor encouraged them to default to silence and reminded them about all the risks of speaking up. And those risks are real, but they said we're not going to remain silent.

And it is true. I was taught in my generation to tip-toe through the tulips of this stuff. And this generation is not, they're going to speak up. And I think that is good for everyone. It would be good for that chair of the board who maybe didn't even realize what he was doing. It's good for the women, but it's also good for the men. I was talking to a man, a white man who was in a meeting and one other person was really bullying/harassing someone in a meeting. And he said, I didn't know what to say so I didn't say anything. And then that woke me up at 3:00 in the morning because now I feel slammed by this other person's bad behavior. And so I'm optimistic that even though it's painful to confront all these things, I'm optimistic that we're going to do it and we're going to create much better work environments.

Kara Miller:

I will ask a question for you, which is how do you see the pandemic as having changed things? Because I could make a case for, well, more people are living more balanced lives. They're not commuting in, that was a big stress. But on the other hand, we've seen mental health issues really skyrocket in the last couple of years. A lot is lost probably when you're on Zoom with somebody versus like actually in a room with them. I don't know. I wonder how you see the way that things have moved in the last couple of years.

Kim Scott:

Yeah. I think we'll spend the next 10 years figuring this out. So I don't pretend to have all the answers, but here are some observations. One thing that has happened is that having this timeout moment gave a lot of people the opportunity to reassess and has prompted the great resignation. And I think that is going to make all our companies stronger. As I said at the beginning, people are not willing to pay the asshole tax anymore, and that's going to push organizations to invest in teaching managers what the job is and how to do the job. And I think that's really important.

The other thing about this remote work, hybrid work and person work, there's a lot of research... Nick Bloom at Stanford did some good research that showed that people on average when they're not commuting and save two hours a day, and one of those hours goes to their personal lives and the other hour goes to work. And that is a big deal. That is a really big deal. That's the difference between getting enough sleep and not getting enough sleep or exercising and not exercising an hour a day is a big deal.

Kara Miller:

Right. Right, right.

Kim Scott:

So that is something to take into consideration. At the same time, there are a lot of people who are struggling, especially people early in their careers who hate being stuck alone in their houses or apartments. And so I think this is another area of flexibility and diversity that we're going to have to make room for. I think the other thing to think about is the costs and benefits of being together in person. In Radical Candor I talk a lot about you want to have these radical candor conversations in person. And now when I talk about it I say you want to have them synchronously. And sometimes because it is impossible to be together in person and other times, because it's undesirable. As I think about my personal experience throughout the pandemic, I realized a few things.

One is that, yes, it's easier to work with people in person than it is to work with them remotely. But it's more important for me to be in person with my husband and my children than it is for me to be in person with my work colleagues. And so I would say the remote work, it did impact our ability to get things done at work, but also, it created more benefits for my personal life than it did harm for my work life. And so I think we're just going to have to be more disciplined about figuring out what is the work that we can do synchronously versus asynchronously. And when we have to have a meeting, when we have to be synchronous, let's be very conscious of doing things like making sure we do a check in at the beginning of team meetings of 10 or less people.

And that is really important, that check in. And what I mean by that is you can do it however it works for your culture. Tell a funny story from the weekend. What shitty thing is going on for you right now? Like what are you coming into this room with? There's a lot of different ways to do the check in, but you want to do something more than just have superficial chit-chat. You want to give people not just the opportunity, but you want to really encourage people to let others know what's going on for them as they come into these meetings. And that's a good way to make sure that people are caring personally about one another, but it's also more efficient because often what'll happen, especially in these Zoom environments is someone comes in and they're kind of scowling and everybody thinks, oh Kim's mad at me or she thinks I'm doing bad work. And that's not at all the reason why I'm scowling, I'm scowling because I just got a puppy who pooped on the rug.

Kara Miller:

Yeah, yeah.

Kim Scott:

And so just giving me the chance to say that helps create the context that is often lacking when we're working remotely or in a hybrid kind of situation. The other thing to be aware of is when it's better to talk on video, when it's better to talk on the phone. Adam Grant has written a lot about how we often misinterpret each other's facial expressions and body language. And we do this in person, but we're even more likely to do it when we're just a tiny little screen on a computer. And so sometimes in acknowledgement of the fact that there may be more noise than signal in a video call, you might want to call someone and just have a phone conversation and listen to the words that they're using and the tone of voice that they're using. So that I think is something to keep in mind as well.

Kara Miller:

It's true. It's true. Just before I talk to you I had an excellent phone conversation with somebody and there are downsides to sitting in a chair all day and a lot zooming.

Kim Scott:

Yeah, yeah.

Kara Miller:

Exactly.

Kim Scott:

And frankly, this is also true for in-person meetings. I mean, in Radical Candor, I said, if you're going to have a conversation with someone and you're nervous about it, try taking a walk instead of sitting across from each other. So there's something about walking in the same direction, looking in the same direction, that is a metaphor that translates quite literally to the conversation.

Kara Miller:

Kim Scott is the author of the book's Radical Candor, and more recently Just Work. Kim, thank you so much. This was great.

Kim Scott:

Thank you.

Kara Miller:

And as always thanks to you for joining us. We will be back next week with a brand new show. And if you liked this show, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Instigators of Change is produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Kara Miller. Talk to you next week.