Kim Scott - The Principles of Radical Candor (Part 2)

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®

Have a BOSSHOLE STORY of your own?  Click HERE to inquire about being on the podcast!

HERE ARE MORE RESOURCES FROM REAL GOOD VENTURES:

Never miss a good opportunity to learn from a bad boss...

Click HERE to get your very own Reference Profile.  We use The Predictive Index as our analytics platform so you know it's validated and reliable.  Your Reference Profile informs you of your needs, behaviors, and the nuances of what we call your Behavioral DNA.  It also explains your work style, your strengths, and even the common traps in which you may find yourself.  It's a great tool to share with friends, family, and co-workers.

Follow us on Twitter HERE and make sure to share with your network!

Provide your feedback HERE, please!  We love to hear from our listeners and welcome your thoughts and ideas about how to improve the podcast and even suggest topics and ideas for future episodes.

Visit us at www.realgoodventures.com.  We are a Talent Optimization consultancy specializing in people and business execution analytics.  Real Good Ventures was founded by Sara Best and John Broer who are both Certified Talent Optimization Consultants with over 50 years of combined consulting and organizational performance experience.  Sara is also certified in EQi 2.0.  RGV is also a Certified Partner of Line-of-Sight, a powerful organizational health and execution platform.  RGV is known for its work in leadership development, executive coaching, and what we call organizational rebuild where we bring all our tools together to diagnose an organization's present state and how to grow toward a stronger future state.

Transcript

0:00:01 - John
Hey everybody out there in the Bosshole Transformation Nation. This is John Broer from Real Good Ventures, and welcome to part two of our discussion with Kim Scott. If you listen to part one, I can assure you you will be equally pleased with the great information and content that Kim provides in part two. She provides great insight about not just leadership, but becoming an Upstander in your organization. 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, that intervention. 

That's where I wanted to go really quick because our listeners know and we talked about this before we hit record Kim wrote a co-authored an article with Dr Amy Edmanson, which is awesome, so we're going to put that in the show notes as well. As our listeners know, Dr. Edmanson was the pioneer in psychological safety but the freedom of interpersonal fear from standing up or questioning or challenging or identifying mistakes. The reason I'm just bringing this up because it just resonates with me is I had a colleague I mean he was known for his sarcasm. And sarcasm is just mean. I mean I don't care, it's just mean-spirited. 

And he would make sarcastic remarks to another colleague of ours in front of clients and I took him aside and I said you cannot. So I used a you statement and I said you cannot do that. I said do you have any idea how that diminishes this person's credibility in front of everybody else? When you belittle this person with sarcasm, he goes oh come on, I'm just goofing around. I said no, no, that is a line you cannot cross. So I mean the you statement around bullying and that sort of scenario I think can be very powerful when you have that psychological safety to and just the temerity and, in all practicality, the humanness to stand up and say you can't do that. 

0:02:24 - Kim Scott
Yeah, yeah, and I think there's a really important nuance here, you know, because if the leader does not create consequences for bullying, if the Upstander says you can't do that, the bully can say, oh yes, I can, and in fact I'm getting rewarded for it. And so that's why I think that it is incumbent upon leaders to create three different kinds of consequences for bullying. 

0:02:50 - John
Okay. 

0:02:51 - Kim Scott
The first is just conversational consequences. Leaders need to learn how to shut bullying down in the moment. They need to de-platform the bullies, yes, yes, and there's a bunch of different ways we can talk about that. But you need to figure out what you can do in the moment, including saying you've talked a lot here, I want to hear from everyone else, or you cannot talk to your colleagues that way. So leaders need to do that in the moment, every time. But that's not enough, because the problem with bullying is that it works actually. That's why children bully each other. It's like a basic. It happens all the time. So the second thing you need to do is you need to create compensation consequences. 

You do not want to give high ratings and bonuses to people who bully, and I worked at a tech company where there was some bullying happening and what they did about it was. They said you're going to get a performance rating on three dimensions your results, your teamwork and your innovation and if the 360 revealed bad teamwork, especially bullying, then you got a low rating there. That would be your rating. You didn't get an average. If you bullied, you were getting a low rating, and I think that's really important and I was thinking about it. I was taking a look at the grading policies at a school and X was the exam, y was the midterm and 15% was how you treated your classmates. So I'm like you're basically telling people it's not that important how you treat your class. If you bully, you get an F like full stop. That's what. So compensation and, last but not least, career consequences. It's incumbent upon a manager, first of all, not to promote people who engage in bullying. 

0:04:52 - Sara
And also eventually. 

0:04:53 - Kim Scott
You want to give them feedback. You want to give them. Often people are inadvertent bullies. They don't realize what they're doing. So you want to give them feedback. You want to give them an opportunity to change your behavior. But if they don't change their behavior, then you've got to fire them, in the immortal words of Steve Jobs. We can talk about that in a moment. But it's better to have a hold than an asshole, and it's definitely better to have a hold than a boss hold. There comes a moment in every team's growth when the assholes begin to win, and that's a moment when the culture begins to lose and eventually results follow. 

The problem is that the feedback loop there is kind of slow In the short term. Often the bullying gets results. 

0:05:44 - Sara
I think about the more obvious and egregious violations bullying outright evident to other people. But there are also much more subtle ways that people use the phrases excluding, underestimating and underutilizing our talent. People get overlooked and, in my mind, as important as leaders addressing head on the bullying it's becoming aware of how unaware we are of that. Can you talk about that for a minute? 

0:06:18 - Kim Scott
Yeah, yeah, absolutely so. We just talked about sort of bias, prejudice and bullying, but that's not where the problems stop, unfortunately, when you layer power on top of bias, prejudice and bullying, you get discrimination, harassment and physical violations. And it is incumbent upon managers to sort of put checks and balances on their management systems and also to quantify their biases, so that unconscious bias does not become what I call unconscious discrimination. So I'll tell you a story about how this plays out. I was working, I was coaching a leader, and he didn't have any women on his team. 

He never had promoted a woman to work directly for him and, to his credit, he figured there was a problem with the promotion process, not with the women at the company. But he knew that, probably since there were no women on the promotion committee, that the people who were on the committee just weren't noticing what was happening. So he invited me to come in. He didn't just invite me to come in, he paid me to come in and observe the promotion process. And so they were talking about two leaders, both of whom had great reputations, had built great teams, had achieved exceptional results one a man, one a woman. And they were talking about the man and they're talking about how he's a great leader, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 

And then they start talking about the woman and somebody says she's like a real mother hen. And I'm like, all right, Back the train up, Stop right there. Who are you going to promote, the great leader or the mother hen? And they're like oh Kim, it's no big deal. We didn't mean it like that. I'm like I don't care how you meant it, Like this is going to have an impact and, to their credit, they stopped using that language and that helped her get promoted. So I think, in fact, Textio the company Textio now will flag bias in your 360 performance reviews and in your promotion material. 

0:08:28 - Sara
So I really recommend. 

0:08:31 - Kim Scott
I mean, you can hire me if you want to pay me enough, but I don't scale. I'm one person and also I have my own set of biases, like. I think using a tool like Textio is a great way to use technology to begin to proactively look for bias in written reviews either of candidates in your hiring process or in your 360 process or in your performance process. 

0:09:02 - John
Forgive me, but I envision you in that meeting sitting off to the side with a little buzzer. 

0:09:10 - Sara
And like when they said that go eee. 

0:09:14 - John
Ok, I'm stepping in now. Sorry I'll edit that out, but I thought that was kind of funny. Go ahead, Sara. 

0:09:19 - Kim Scott
No, don't edit it out. It is not how it was. But if I needed a buzzer or a gong or something, we might be onto something here it would have been helpful. The bias buzzer? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, the bias gong, except that that's not really inviting people in. 

0:09:33 - John
I know, I know. 

0:09:34 - Kim Scott
It isn't. 

0:09:35 - Sara
isn't it Like you're out cancel? Like yeah, not that. 

0:09:38 - Kim Scott
Yeah, and that's that's. I mean that, that word, I mean I think the whole cancel culture thing is sort of overblown, but I do think it is important. One of the things I write about in just work and being a good Upstander is you don't want to give in to self-righteous shaming, right? You don't want to say, oh, you know, I'm holier than thou and that is why I'm, you know, flagging this problem. You're doing it because you know that you yourself have biases and that you want your colleagues to disrupt your biases as well. 

0:10:13 - Sara
I would even say that the other way around, like the only way we can shine a light and help the organization begin to see and address is if we first see it in ourselves. 

0:10:23 - Kim Scott
We have to, yeah, and I guess that, and we can't see it in ourselves unless other people point it out, usually Right Like. We need other people for this, and it's also why I think you cannot address sexism without also addressing racism and homophobia and religious intolerance. All of these bias, prejudices, bullying make themselves manifest in a lot of different ways, and when we come together in solidarity and say, look, this is hurting our decision making process, these biases are bad. They're bad. They're bad for the people who ostensibly benefit from them, and they're also bad for the people who don't benefit from them. They create worse decision making and I think it was the undoing project in one of Michael Lewis's books. He talks about a baseball player I'm so bad with names but a baseball player who got recruited to Major League Baseball because he kind of looked the part. 

There was some bias going on. Billy Beane, oh, oh yeah, Moneyball. We know what Billy Beane is he talks about Moneyball, but he talks much more about how this happens and why and the undoing project, which is about Kahneman and thinking fast and slow. And so the point is that bias was really bad for everyone. Yes, bias was even bad for Billy Beane, who ostensibly got the job because of bias. He realized later it would have been better if he didn't get it Like it's not good for someone who gets? 

a job that they're not qualified for, because all of us have jobs that we would love to do, that we would be great at doing, and if we get a desirable job that we aren't quite qualified for, it's hard to turn that down and then we wind up doing a job we shouldn't be doing. So bias is bad for everyone and if we come together in solidarity to eliminate the bias together and to recognize that we all have biases and that the biases are bad, then maybe we can. You know, bias is a pattern and we as human beings are pattern makers, but we are also pattern changers. We can change that pattern. 

0:12:36 - John
Well, in getting back to the Billy Bean story, I mean, if you think about the old framework of how they recruited baseball I mean just to really talk about, I mean they recruited him based on an old framework. Just as we promote people based on an old framework, biases or mental models, whatever you want to call it that has got to change. If we don't change it, we will continue to have. You know, we just published an episode on Gallup's recent study that disengagement is at a nine year high and it's totally fixable not with the old model, though. It can't be. 

0:13:11 - Kim Scott
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I think one of the things in Radical Candor that I talk about is the traditional promotion framework, which I think is broken. The sort of performance potential. 

0:13:24 - Sara
Yeah, nine bucks. 

0:13:25 - Kim Scott
Yeah, Awful. I mean yeah, because there is no such thing. I'm going to say a controversial, so you can disagree with me, but I would argue there's no such thing as a low potential human being, right? Everyone has potential to be excellent at some job. 

0:13:41 - John
Right. 

0:13:41 - Kim Scott
And to love that job. Actually, I also don't think that work is something that is drudgery that we have to do in order to keep body and soul together. I mean, maybe that's a privileged position, but at certain points you do have to work, right, yeah, and in fact my management career was something that I chose to do. I didn't have to do it, but I chose to do as a way to subsidize my novel writing habit, because I could not make a living writing novels. Right, but that didn't mean that I had to hate being a manager. It just meant, you know, and it also didn't mean that I could get away with being a bad manager. I had to try to put the best of myself into that job that was supporting me so that I could write the novels. 

0:14:28 - John
And we will be right back. 

0:14:54 - Announcer
Real Good Ventures is a talent optimization consultancy specializing in world class analytics specific to your people and the critical role they play within your organization. Gain confidence in your hiring practices, keep the boss holes from driving your talent away, design your teams for flawless execution and create a culture that offers meaning and fulfillment. Real Good Ventures has a family of validated diagnostic tools specific to the human aspect of business, because we know that all business issues are people issues, visit us today at www.realgoodventures.com and bring meaning and fulfillment back into your workplace. 

0:15:41 - John
Okay, let's get back to the program. 

0:15:45 - Sara
Well, and if bias is a pattern? And I guess the question I would ask next is we need help sometimes to uncover the pattern, Right, we? 

0:15:55 - Kim Scott
do so here's. Here's a simple thing that I will recommend that that managers can do to help people disrupt bias, bias disruptors. To three part program that you can roll out in two minutes. The first is you want to have a shared vocabulary, so I like to use a purple flag. So if I say, if I realize I've said something bias, you're going to see me wave this purple flag and say, purple flag. If you all say, with your permission, if you all say something biased, I will wave the purple flag for the rest of this, for the rest of our conversation. And the important, don't just use the purple flag. Talk to your team about what's the phrase or vocabulary that they would most like to use to flag bias when they notice it. Some teams say yo, some teams say bias alert. Some teams say ouch, whatever you want to. I mean, don't use a bias term to flag bias. Words matter, but but let kind of defeats the purpose. 

0:16:54 - John
Yeah yeah. 

0:16:55 - Kim Scott
So that's number one. Number two is you want to teach people to respond well when their bias has been flagged, because it's it's painful. In fact, usually when someone points out to me that I've said or done something biased, I can tell you in my body where I feel the shame. I feel a tingling in the backs of my knees, the same feeling I get that that I get when my children walk too close to the edge of a precipice. So it's a real physical fear and we and I'm in lizard brain in that moment and I need to learn how to move through it. So teach your team what to do when they're, when their biases have been pointed out. You want to have compassion for the person who who was harmed by the bias, but you also want to have some compassion for the person who said the biased thing, because it's unconscious. 

0:17:45 - John
Right. Could that be the example be? Don't worry, you're pretty little head over it. 

0:17:49 - Kim Scott
Yeah, that is a bias. 

0:17:51 - John
There you go. So there's the purple flag. Go ahead, sorry. 

0:17:56 - Kim Scott
And so? So what do you do if you're the person who's you know? So now I'm in my boss's shoes and I've said I've just said, don't worry, you're pretty little head and someone has weighed the purple flag. The first thing to say is thank you for pointing it out, because it took some courage to disrupt the bias. And then the second thing to say is I get it and I'm not going to do it again, or I'm going to work on not doing it. 

And in acknowledgement that sometimes we say we have biased patterns of speech that take some time to disrupt, so we need to be persistent, patient and persistent. The second thing that he could have said is maybe what I said is thank you for pointing it out. I don't know what I said. That was wrong. I don't get. I don't get it. Can you talk, can you tell me, after the meeting? And the point is you want to disrupt the bias without disrupting the meeting, so that's why you talk about it after the meeting. 

But that's really important is teaching people the vocabulary to use to disrupt it, but also teaching people and acknowledging to everyone that sometimes you're going to be the person who said the bias thing and if you don't even know why it was biased, you're gonna be doubly ashamed because you've harmed someone and are ignorant. That's not a happy place to be, but the only way out is through. You gotta learn how to learn from this instead of be defensive. You gotta have a growth mindset, and this is really hard to have. It's hard to have a growth mindset about math, but it's even harder to have a growth mindset about these things that feel very core to morality or identity, and so if we're all gonna become, together, the people who we want to become, then we've gotta learn how to move through that shame and to take the feedback. 

And then the last thing is a shared commitment to flagging bias in every meeting that you have, because if you get to the end of a meeting and you haven't flagged any bias, it probably means not so much that there was no bias, but that either people didn't feel comfortable flagging it or they didn't notice. So let's take a moment to notice what we failed to notice. So that's bias disruptors. That's something that leaders can do to help Upstanders stand up and also to help people who are harmed by bias know what to say, should they choose to say something To that. 

0:20:27 - Sara
I say Upstanders and bias disruptors unite. 

0:20:32 - Announcer
We have tools we can use. That's right. 

0:20:34 - Sara
Well, and as we head toward the close of our conversation, kim, you recently have co-authored an article Fast Company or one of those amazing magazines with Dr Amy Edmondson, and what makes total sense to me is what you described the article is about. Is that the radical candor, this approach? It's really the seeds for psychological safety. We've been talking a lot about psychological safety, but everyone's like what is it? How do you create it? Well, you have some thoughts on that? 

0:21:08 - Kim Scott
Yes, absolutely. I mean Amy and I were talking, because so often people misunderstand radical candor as an excuse to act like a jerk and they misunderstand psychological safety as saying nothing or you know, and the truth is that to create psychological safety and to create radical candor, you've got to move through some discomfort. There's neither. Amy nor I are promising that there will be no discomfort. In fact, we're promising that there will be discomfort. We're offering people tools for how to move through it, to get to a better place, to get to a place of trust, and so, for me, the seeds of psychological safety are sown in radical candor, and they're sown in radical candor. I want to talk about it from the boss's perspective and from the employee's perspective. Most important thing that a manager can do is to solicit feedback. That is the core that's not giving it. I think people often misunderstand radical candor as the boss criticizing the employee. It should always start with the boss soliciting criticism and rewarding it when they get it, and that creates an atmosphere of psychological safety so that the employees can do their most important job, which is speaking truth to power. 

I was at a I don't think of. I didn't, I didn't used to think of the military as a great place for kind of touchy feely management training, but actually they've got it down in the military. So I went to West Point. We were talking about radical candor in the context of your job is a follower, not as a leader, but as a follower is to speak truth to power. But we don't want to tell followers to speak truth to power and then have their managers just fire them or create unfair consequences for their willingness to speak truth to power. So there's a there's sort of a give and take between manager and employee, and that was sort of what Amy and I were writing about. 

0:23:14 - John
That's great. 

0:23:15 - Sara
Well, I can't wait to get my hands on that article, and if we can find it, we'll make sure to throw it in the show notes. 

0:23:19 - Kim Scott
Yeah, I'll send it to you, for sure. Yeah, I'll be there, I think that'd be great. 

0:23:23 - Sara
So the question I always like to ask at the end is what's next? What's coming up for you, amy? I'm sorry what's coming up for you, Kim. 

0:23:31 - Kim Scott
Kim's life. Amy, I am writing a novel. I'm doing what I'm finally doing full time, what I always wanted to do. Took me 55 years to figure out how to do it, but now I can do it. So my children, who are 13, mars and Battle, are a little, I would say not, optimistic about the future. And you know I grew up in the seven, which is not surprising. I mean, there's what to be between change and the rise of authoritarianism, and you know there's what to be concerned about. And but when I grew up like, I make them listen to 70s on seven all the time because the music is so optimistic. 

0:24:13 - John
It is. 

0:24:14 - Kim Scott
It really is, so what? 

0:24:15 - John
I'm trying Just listen to Abba, right? 

0:24:17 - Kim Scott
Yeah, exactly, and everything will be fine. But I mean also, like the rise of Motown I don't know all of it, it was it was optimistic, not only in a like sort of cheerful way, but also like we're going to make this world a better place, resilience, and so what I'm writing about is a group of high school students who are the class of 2020, and they're going to fix everything. So it's kind of a utopian novel, but to paint a picture of what good might look like in the future for my kids. So that's what I'm doing. 

0:24:50 - John
Good. 

0:24:51 - Sara
That gives me some hope and if you need a subject for your research, I had a daughter who graduated from high school in 2020. 

0:24:57 - Kim Scott
Oh good, okay, Well, I'm going to reach out to you about that. If she wants to make, the last thing she may want to do is read some old ladies novel. 

0:25:05 - Sara
Well, it's clear that you have your fingers on the pulse of some very critical and important things that are woven into the fiber of who we are as a nation and who we are as people, and it's important that we pay attention and begin to adapt to these things. 

0:25:21 - Kim Scott
Yeah, I think you know we've talked a lot about sort of interpersonal radical candor, but let's end on a note of sort of social radical candor and how we can create a better culture, not only in our workplace but sort of in the world, with radical candor. Okay, I'm game for that, because I think what happens often is we start out actually in radical candor where people really know each other and they care about each other and therefore they're challenging each other when they see each other making mistakes, and that's successful. 

And then as things grow and maybe there's more people and we don't know each other as well, we kind of drift over towards ruin a sympathy because it feels harsh to it feels mean to tell people the thing, but the problem there is that that gives people who indulge in obnoxious aggression an advantage, because as bad as obnoxious aggression is ruinous empathy works even less well. And so now, all of a sudden, as I said, the the assholes begin to win. You know, bull and the bad bay. And then the vast majority of people tend to respond to that with manipulative insincerity. Instead of challenging this powerful person who's bullying other people and maybe harassing them as well, instead of challenging them directly because it's risky, they talk about that person behind their backs. 

So they retreat, to manipulate it, and that creates a very toxic polarized culture, and I think that's kind of where we are. I was. I was invited to speak at a conference recently it was a policy group and one of the people from the policy group called me up right before and I realized, oh my gosh, these people are espousing policies that I could not disagree with more vehemently, right and, and so I thought about canceling. And then I thought that does not feel like it's in the spirit of radical candor and so I went and I talked to them and I said look, if you look at my Twitter feed, you'll notice that I disagree with you all, but I think we're all and so we're talking and we had a good conversation and in the Q&A, inside my head it was like someone was yelling at me Kim, these people are not your enemies, these are your fellow citizens. 

And I like how did I get to a place where I would view these people as my enemies? And then, after it was over, this woman came up to me and said do you believe this? And I said yes, do you believe that? I said yes. She kind of cocked her head and looked at me and she said you don't seem like an evil person and I would have thought she was ridiculous. But I had just had the same thought five minutes before. 

So, let's, let's talk to it. We can disagree with each other and still respect each other. That is, you don't have to respect every belief that another person has, but you do have to respect the person. And that's the floor of care. Personally, for radical candor. 

0:28:21 - John
Absolutely, and I'm sorry I'm going back to the 1970s, when you just said that the civility that we seem to have between people, not to say that there weren't social issues going on in the 70s, 80s, 60s, all decades but gosh. I hope we can get back to civility and kindness. 

0:28:42 - Kim Scott
Yes, no one understands. Yes, no one is kindness without the denial that Exactly, exactly the civility and the yes. Right and we can get there, we can do that. 

0:28:49 - John
I think we can yeah Well great. 

0:28:52 - Sara
Oh, kim, we can't thank you enough for your time and for the way you packaged this essential information, and we're so grateful to have the chance to feature you and your work and your writing on the Bosshole Chronicles. We are kindred spirits indeed, we would like to conjointly rid the world of Bossholes all together by giving them tools. 

Because I think when we started talking before we hit record, you said you know managers need hugs too. We believe no one's born to be a Bosshole. We surround people with love and respect and we thank you for bringing us to this conversation today. 

0:29:26 - Kim Scott
Thank you so much, really enjoyed the talk. 

0:29:28 - John
And when the novel publishes, we'll have to have you back. 

0:29:31 - Kim Scott
All right, I'll be back. 

0:29:33 - John
All right, everybody Sounds good. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. On the Bosshole Chronicles. We'd like to thank our guests today on the Bosshole Chronicles and if you have a Bosshole Chronicles story of your own, please email us at mystery @thebossholechroniclescom. Once again, mystory@thebossholechroniclescom. We'll see you again soon.