Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Kim Scott: Radical Candor, How to Say What You Mean Without Being A Jerk | Leadership E227

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

Kim Scott has made an impressive name for herself in Silicon Valley as a business leader and tech executive. After a few failed startups, Kim started working at Google, where her boss was the infamous Sheryl Sandberg. After Sheryl gave her some tough love, Kim decided to write Radical Candor to teach bosses and employees how to improve their leadership while providing guidance that helps others grow. In this episode, Kim will share how to instill “radical candor” in a workplace environment, both as a boss and as an employee. She will talk about what it means to care personally and challenge directly while avoiding toxic behaviors. She will also discuss her latest book Just Work and how to get shit done - fast and fair.  Kim Scott is an author and the co-founder of the company Radical Candor. Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and other tech companies. She was also a member of the faculty at Apple University, and before that, led AdSense, YouTube, and DoubleClick teams at Google. In this episode, Hala and Kim will discuss:  - Kim’s career - from Russia to Silicon Valley - Why we should care personally and challenge directly - How to solicit feedback - Using radical candor - Avoiding obnoxious aggression - The difference between superstars and rockstars - Steve Jobs's Management style - Overcoming unconscious bias - And other topics… Kim Scott is the author of Just Work: How to Root Out Bias, Prejudice, and Bullying to Build a Kick-ass Culture of Inclusivity and Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity and co-founder of the company Radical Candor. Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and other tech companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University, and before that, led AdSense, YouTube, and DoubleClick teams at Google. Prior to that, Kim managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo and started a diamond-cutting factory in Moscow. Resources Mentioned: Kim’s Website: https://kimmalonescott.com/bio Kim’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimm4/ Kim’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/kimballscott Kim’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kimmalonescott/?hl=en Radical Candor Podcast: https://www.radicalcandor.com/candor-podcast/ Radical Candor Company: https://www.radicalcandor.com/our-approach/ Kim’s book Radical Candor: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Candor-Revised-Kick-Ass-Humanity/dp/1250235375  Kim’s book Just Work: https://www.amazon.com/Just-Work-Done-Fast-Fair/dp/1250203481  LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass, Have Job Security For Life: Use code ‘podcast’ for 30% off at yapmedia.io/course. Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship podcast, Business, Business podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal development, Starting a business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side hustle, Startup, mental health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth mindset. Leadership, Productivity, Networking, Goal Setting, Time Management, Problem Solving, Decision Making, Leadership Skills, Strategic Planning, Mindset, Time Management, Team Building.

There's an order of operations to radical candor, and it all starts with soliciting feedback. And that's true no matter what your role is, but it's especially true for managers. It gives you an opportunity to lead by example to prove that feedback really is a gift and to show people how to respond well to it, how to reward the candor when you get it, by either fixing the problem or explaining why you disagree. Biased prejudice and bullying are three different things. but we tend to conflate them as though they're the same thing. Bias is not meaning it.

Prejudice is meaning it. And bullying, there's no belief conscious or unconscious going on at all. It's just being mean. For me, just sort of breaking it apart has offered different kind of responses that we can make. What is up Young and Profiters? You're listening to Yap, Young and Profiting podcast where we interview the brightest minds in the world and unpack their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your daily life. I'm your host, Halitaha.

Thanks for tuning in and get ready to listen, learn, and profit. Kim, welcome to Young Improfiting Podcast. Thank you so much. It's great to be on the show. I am really excited. We've been wanting to have you on Young and Profiting Podcast for a few years now. Yapam, we are joined by Kim Scott. She's an experienced CEO who worked for a variety of Silicon Valley companies,

including Twitter, Dropbox, and Google. She's a former faculty member of Apple University and the current CEO of Candor Incorporated, a company she co-founded to provide more resources for managers and bosses in need of support. She's also the best-selling author of two books, Radical Candor and Just Work. In this episode, Kim and I will talk about

how to instill radical candor in a workplace environment, both as a boss and an employee. She'll teach us what it means to care personally and challenge directly while avoiding toxic behaviors, and we'll also discuss her late. latest book Just Work and how we can get shit done fast and fair. So Kim, I'm super happy you're here. Let's jump right into it. You have a very impressive corporate background. You've made a name for yourself in Silicon Valley as a business leader and tech executive. But some people may not know

that before that you worked at a diamond cutting factory in Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed. And so I'd love to understand how that job played a pivotal role in your future career and how it led you into career management ultimately. That was such an important experience for me because I in college studied literature. And I thought business was sort of boring, intellectually uninteresting. I thought the only thing was you paid people and they did work. But reading books and writing books doesn't pay. So I wound up taking a job for this diamond cutting factory, this diamond cutting company,

and they wanted me to start up a factory in Moscow. And so I had to go and hire these Russian diamond cutters. And I thought it was going to be really easy. because the ruble was collapsing, the dollar was really strong. This was in 1992, and I thought I would just pay them and they would come. And so I offered them this salary that was like 15 or 20 times what they were currently making. But they didn't immediately take the job. They wanted a picnic. So I thought, huh, well, I can do a picnic too. And so we went out into the outskirts of Moscow. And by the time we got finished with a bottle of vodka, I realized that what I had to offer that

the state did not have to offer was not just money. It was to give a damn. It was to understand that they were worried about an unstable situation. And they wanted to know that they had a boss who cared enough about them to get them and their families out if things went sideways in Russia. So as you can imagine since the invasion of Ukraine, I've been thinking a lot about these folks. That was the moment when I realized management matters and it's interesting. And it's a big part of what I care about. It's a big part of creating environments in which we can all love our work in each other. I love that.

And how did you make your way to Silicon Valley eventually? Yeah, it was a circuitous path. After about four years living in Russia, I went to business. school. And after business school, I took a job at the Federal Communications Commission. I was definitely the only person in my class at business school who took a job working for the federal government. But I was really interested in communication and how we as a world could communicate better. After about a year working in the federal government, I realized it had been designed to do nothing in the absence of a compelling reason to do something. And I found that very frustrating. So I went the

opposite direction and took a job for an Israeli startup that was doing voice over IP. And I spent about a year working for this company called Delta 3 and working actually with Noam Bardeen, who wound up starting ways later on. Wow. Yeah, small world. And then I decided that I had made enough money. I'd saved up enough money. The company did well to write a novel, which was what I always wanted to do. My whole business career was a giant plot to subsidize my novel writing habit. So I took the year 1999 off and I wrote a novel. And then I ran out of money. So I joined another startup.

And while I was at that startup, I had an idea for my own startup. So I wound up starting this company called Juice Software. And it was collaboration software. That ended basically our biggest, some of our biggest customers. were in the World Trade Center. So that company basically ended on 9-11, although we limped along for a little while and sold the company, sell being a very generous term for what actually happened. And then I took a job at Google. That worked out a lot better than the failed startup. And after about six years at Google, I realized that the thing that got me out of bed in the

morning was not so much cost per click, although that was going very well at Google. but building a team and creating the structures so that the team would, to the maximum extent, possible sort of self-organized, but being present and available to be thought partners for each of the people on the team, each of my direct reports anyway. And that was interesting to me, like creating those environments. It sort of goes back to that diamond-cutting story where what they really wanted was a boss who cared and who would set up a good environment. And I wanted that to be my full-time job, not leading adsens YouTube and double-click sales and operations,

which was what I spent most of my time doing. And there wasn't really a role at Google for me to do that, but my favorite professor from business school had become a member of the faculty at Apple University. And at that point, he called me up and he said, you know, Steve Jobs has decided he wants to throw away all of Apple's management training and start from a blank piece of paper. And he said, those of us at Apple University, we're professors. We haven't actually managed anything. So why don't you come and help us? So I did that for a couple of years. And then I wound up becoming a CEO coach and writing radical candor. It's a really interesting career journey. And what I really like about your career journey is how even though, like, for instance, with writing novels, you weren't making money doing it, but it was something that you decided to still get the experience. And now you are a bestselling author. Mind you, it's nonfiction. business books, but you get to utilize that passion in a different way and make money doing what you love. So it sounds like you really designed a career that you really enjoys. So I respect that a lot. Well, thank you. I don't really feel like I designed it. I feel like it kind of emerged.

But I'm very happy with where I am, yes. Yeah, that's awesome. Okay, so let's talk about when you were ahead of Google at AdSense. You worked under Cheryl Sandberg. She's the author of Leanin, very popular book. And after you gave a presentation to Google's founders and CEOs one day, she asked you to come back to the office and she gave you some, like, pretty hard advice. Talk to us about that story and how it sort of, I guess, inspired you to write the book Radical Cander. Yeah. So I had on that day to give a presentation about how the AdSense business was doing to the founders and the CEO. And I walked, I'll never forget it. I walked into the room and there in one corner was one of the founders on an elliptical trainer,

kind of stepping away wearing toe shoes and a bright blue spandex unitard, not what I was expecting or frankly wanting to see in the room, like super tight. And there in the, it was like something from the circle. And there in the other corner of the room was the CEO doing his email. And it was like his brain had been plugged into his machine. And probably like all of your listeners in such a situation, I felt a little bit nervous. How is I supposed to? to get these people's attention. Luckily for me, the AdSense business was on fire. And when I said, how many new customers we had added over the last couple of months, the CEO looked at me and he said, this is incredible. What do you need? Do you need more marketing dollars? Do you need more engineers?

So I'm thinking the meeting's going, all right. In fact, I now believe that I am a genius. I walked out of the room. I walked past Cheryl 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 messed something up in there and I'm sure I'm about to hear about it. But I was open to hearing about it because Cheryl had already done the work of soliciting feedback for me and rewarding my candor and like proving to me that feedback was a gift. But, you know, it's a gift, but are you sure you really want that gift? So I was a little reluctant. And she began starting the conversation by telling me what I had done well, not what I had done wrong. Not in the feedback sandwich. I think there's a less polite term for that.

I don't know if I'm allowed to curse on your podcast, but really seeming to mean what she said. And so that was fine, but all I wanted to hear about, of course, was what I had done wrong. And eventually she said to me, you said, I'm a lot in there. Were you aware of it? And with this, I breathed the huge sigh of relief. And I kind of made a brush off gesture with my hand, because if that was all I had done wrong, who really cared? I said, yeah, I know, it's a verbal tick. it's no big deal really. And then she said to me, I know this great speech coach, I bet Google would pay for it. Would you like an introduction? And once again, I made this brush off gesture with my hand. And I said, no, I'm 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, I'm going to have to be a lot more direct with you. When you say every third word, it makes you sound stupid. Now she's got my full attention. And some people might say it was mean of her to say that I sounded stupid. But the fact of the matter was, if she hadn't used just those words with me,

and by the way, this is a really important point. She never would have used those words with other people on her team who were perhaps a better listener than I was. But she knew me well enough to know that if she didn't use just those words with me, I wouldn't go visit the speech coach. And when I did, I learned that Cheryl was not exaggerating. I literally said every third word. And this was news to me because I had raised money, millions of dollars for two different startups giving presentations. I thought I was pretty good at it. I realized I felt like all of a sudden I had been marching through my whole career with a giant hung of spinach between my teeth and nobody had had the common courtesy to tell me it was there. And this really got me to thinking, you know,

know, what was it about Cheryl that made it so seemingly easy for her to tell me, although, of course, it wasn't easy? And why had no one else told me? Like, I could get the spinach, I could fix the um problem if anybody had had the common courtesy to tell me. And as I thought about Cheryl's management style, I realized it boiled down to two pretty basic seeming things. She cared personally and she challenged it directly. I knew that she cared about me, not just as an employ, but as a human being, because she would do things like when I moved from New York to California to take the job, I got out here, and I was lonely because I didn't know anyone out here. And she could tell I was lonely, and she introduced me to a book group. I'm still friends

with a number of those people to this day. When a couple of months after I started the job, my father was diagnosed with late stage cancer. And I was devastated. And she could tell that I was devastated. And she said, Kim, you need to go to the airport right now, fly home to Memphis, be with your family. Your team and I will write your coverage plan. That's what great teams do for one another. We've got your back. And those were the kinds of things she didn't do just for me. She did for everyone who worked directly with her. She couldn't, of course, do those kinds of things for all 5,000 people in her organization because no matter how talented you are, relationships don't scale. But culture does scale. And when a leader,

treats their direct reports with that kind of care, it's much more likely that their direct reports are in turn going to treat their direct direct reports with real care. And that builds a caring culture and culture does scale. But it wasn't all sunshine and roses. I also knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if I screwed up, as I was bound to do from time to time, Cheryl would tell me in no uncertain term. She would challenge me very directly. Care personally challenged directly, that doesn't really sound so radical, that combination. And yet, everyone I've ever worked with, including myself, has struggled with feedback at work and in my personal life as well. That's why I call that that combination radical candor, because it's rare.

So when it comes to caring personally, I just want to point something out, it's going beyond just caring about somebody's career trajectory or their career dreams. It's actually caring about their life. Is that right? Yeah, caring about. like building a real relationship. A relationship between a boss and an employee is it's not a friendship. Better not be a romance. But it is a human relationship. And I think sometimes because it's not a friendship, because it doesn't fall into the usual categories of relationship, we pretend as though it's just professional, that it's not a real relationship. But that is a big mistake because it's more than professional. It's very deeply human.

human. And there's increasingly, there's evidence that shows that command and control just doesn't work very well, especially if you're, if you need to innovate. But any kind of industry, actually, command and control doesn't work very well. And so you really, basically, the most fundamental part of being a good boss is a good relationship with each of your direct reports. That's how you get stuff done. And I think that is, has been under, I think it's more. more and more these days appreciated. But I think traditionally, in traditional management training,

that was underappreciated. Yeah. So earlier, you mentioned that Cheryl used to solicit feedback from her team. And because she did that, it actually made you more receptive to the feedback she was giving you

because I guess it made you feel less attacked because she was open to getting feedback herself. Could you explain to us why that's important as a manager to solicit feedback from your team? Yes. There's an order of operations to radical candor. And it all starts with soliciting feedback. And that's true no matter what your

role is, but it's especially true for managers, because there's a power imbalance if you're a manager. And there are a few things that are more damaging to a good relationship than a power imbalance. And so when you have the power, to the maximum extent possible, you need to lay it down and get on a level playing field with your people so that you can build that relationship. And soliciting feedback is part of that. Soliciting feedback is also important because it gives you an opportunity to lead by example to prove that feedback really is a gift and to show people how to respond well to it, how to reward the candor when you get it. It's also really important because in Amy Edmondson, who sort of coined the term, psychological safety and I have written about this, it's also true

because when a leader solicits feedback, it creates the conditions for psychological safety where people feel that they can speak up. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors. At YAP, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about obsessive excellence. We even call ourselves scrappy hustlers. And I'm really picky when it comes to my employees.

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Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today. at Shopify.com slash profiting. Go to Shopify.com slash profiting. That's Shopify.com slash profiting. Yeah, fam, hear your first. This new year was Shopify by your side. Yeah, that totally makes sense. You have an acronym that you write about in your book called H-H-I-I-P,

and it's a helpful reminder for how to give good guidance. Can you break that down for us? Yeah, so after you have solicited feedback and after you've given praise, it's time to give criticism. And for both giving praise and criticism, it's really useful to keep this H-H-H-I-I-P-P. Actually, it's hippie-corn. I'll explain more about what I mean by that in mind. So H is for humble, and it's also for helpful. I call it candor and not truth, because to me, candor implies, here's how I understand the situation. I also want to know how you understand the

situation so that we can get on the same page. So candor implies more of a dialogue. If I say, I'm going to tell you the truth. I'm kind of implying like, I've got a pipeline to God and you know no shit from Shinola. And that's not a great way to start a conversation. So you want to make sure that you're being, that you're being humble, that you state your intention to be helpful. The purpose of praise is to help people know what to do more of. The purpose of criticism is to let them know what to do less of. So you want to state your intention to be helpful. You also want to make sure that you're not trying to establish dominance or coercion with your feedback or to like kick someone in the shins to humiliate them. Your goal here is to really help them succeed. And it's worth it to like keep that

top of mind and actually state your intention. Again, this doesn't have to be a long, I'm explaining it in a long way. But what I mean by being helpful is I can. can tell you really care about this project, I've got an idea that'll help it get better. Or I can tell you really care about this project. There's something you're doing that's great that you may not be aware of that you should do more of. So that's what I mean. So that's H. I is for immediate.

Again, why wait? And the more you hang on to stuff, the more it kind of builds and the weirder the conversation is when you finally have it. And it's also in the before times I used to say had these conversations in person. That's often now not possible in a hybrid work environment. So what I say is if you can't have the conversation in person, have it synchronously. And what I mean by that is pick up the phone and call the person. If you send a text, you can't take the next step, which is to gauge how it's landing. So you want to make sure that you're having a real back and forth two-way conversation.

That's not a text, not an email. Slack is a feedback train wreck. waiting to happen. There's slack is good for a lot of things. It is not good for feedback. And so you want to make sure that you're talking to the person. You're having a real conversation. Like at its core, the idea of radical candor is to be able to really have a two-way conversation. So that's I. And then P is praise in public, criticize in private. And don't make your feedback about someone's personality attributes. Really hard to change personality attributes. So one of the things that, but it's hard to know how to make it not about personality. One of the things that helps is the

corn acronym. So you want to offer, and this is true for praise and criticism. Context, observation, result, next step. In the meeting, when you offered both sides of the argument, you won credibility, do more of that. Or in the meeting, when you're said, um, every third word and made you sound stupid, go see this, go visit the speech coach. Yeah. So it's more about, in this corn acronym, it's more about actually giving feedback about the actions they took rather than the person and their personality. Is that, is that correct?

Yes, absolutely. Cool. So let's talk about radical candor for employees. Why is this not only just for bosses and managers? Because the whole idea of radical candor is that it helps you improve. And also, I think it's important to acknowledge that your boss may be human and may be imperfect and may be reluctant to give you feedback. My mother used to tell me, not that I'm comparing your boss to a snake, but she used to say when we were on a hike, I was very afraid of snakes. And she would say, Kim, those snakes are more afraid of you than you are of them.

And that is often true of your boss. Your boss is afraid, maybe afraid to give you feedback. Or maybe your boss gives you feedback that is what we call obnoxiously aggressive. So maybe they remember to challenge directly, but they're not showing the care personally. So how can you make sure that you can get feedback that is actionable from your boss? Again, there's an order of operations. You want to start by soliciting it and really drawing it out of your boss. Sort of think about your go-to question.

think about how you're going to embrace the discomfort, like sit with the silence. Think about how you're going to prepare yourself to listen with the intent to understand, not to respond. And then you've got to reward the canter by either fixing the problem or explaining why you disagree. That last thing is pretty tough. But this is about radical candor. Don't pretend to agree when you disagree. That's so interesting.

So you're saying there's a point in this conversation where you can kind of be like, Well, I appreciate your feedback, even though I requested it, but I don't necessarily agree. Yes, because if you can't do that, then you get wedged, right? You ask for the feedback, you disagree with it, and you're like, and that's often why people fail to solicit feedback because to avoid that awkward situation. So what do you do if you disagree with your boss's feedback? Look for that five or 10% of what your boss said that you can agree with. and give voice to that. And then say, as for the rest of that,

but can I think about it and process it? And then can we have another conversation? And then you've got to get back to them. Some of my best professional relationships started with a good, respectful disagreement. And you can't argue endlessly. You can say, look, before you disagree, say, look, I will do it your way.

But I want to explain to you why I have some questions about this way. So you want to make sure that you're communicating your willingness to listen, challenge, commit. But don't skip that challenge part because it's when you challenge that you give your boss the opportunity to explain to you why you may be wrong. I'll give you an example of how this worked out, another story from early on in my experience at Google. And if you think about radical candor, radical candor is caring and challenging at the same time. You're going to watch me go to a dark place here. So where I challenged but I didn't show I cared, so I wound up in what I call obnoxious aggression.

And then when I realized what I had done, I went to an even worse place, manipulative and sincerity, where I was neither caring nor challenging. So I got into an argument with one of the founders about an AdSense policy. And I sent an email to him and about 30 other people. So first problem was it was an email. I didn't have a conversation with him. Criticism in public broke the rule. Yeah, in public and not synchronously. I was breaking two rules.

It was public and over email. And I said, Larry claims he wants to organize the world's information and may get universally accessible and useful. But if it'll make us a buck, he's willing to create clutter sites that muddle the world's information, not my most politically astute moment. So let's pause for a moment. Think about why I did that,

because I bet a bunch of your listeners have made the same mistake. I think I did that because I believe, like I bet you do, that there's a special place in hell for people who kiss up and kick down. But that doesn't mean doing the exact opposite is such a brilliant movie either, right?

And so that was sort of why I sent that obnoxiously aggressive email. That was a bad way to disagree. And then a friend called me up and said, why did you do that? That was incredibly obnoxious, and I realized it was. And the next time I saw Larry, I said to him, oh, Larry, I'm really sorry about that email. You're right. I'm wrong. Two problems with that. First is that I was lying. I did not think that I was wrong. So that's why I was going the wrong

way on the challenge directly dimension. And the second problem is that Larry, like most people, has a pretty good BS meter. And he could tell that I was lying. And he kind of scowled at me and stalked off. It was one of those cringe moments. The guy sitting next to me said, I think he likes it better when you disagree with him. It's really important when you get some feedback or you're having some kind of disagreement with your boss that you don't pretend to agree. Because if by pretending to agree with him, not only was I lying, I also was depriving him of the opportunity to explain to me why I was wrong. And, you know, he may have explained it and I may not have agreed, but at that point I probably would have said, well, thank you for listening.

I'm still not sure I agree, but we'll do it your way. Yeah, that totally makes sense. And I'd love to try to understand some of these bad behaviors that we can fall into if we don't know how to give feedback in a constructive way. And we don't do the two principles that you mentioned, which is to challenge directly and to show that you care. So one of them, you just went over obnoxious aggression. Then there's runeous empathy and manipulative insincerity.

Can you tell us what those mean? Yes. So obnoxious aggression, you can think of as front stabbing. Manipulative insincerity, you can think of as backstabbing. Or like the false apology, like what I did to Larry, after my friend pointed out, I had been obnoxious. Like, oh, I'm sorry. You're right. I'm wrong. But I didn't think that. That was classic manipulative insincerity. And the problem with manipulative insincerity is that it really erodes trust. The problem with obnoxious aggression is that it hurts other. people. It's also a waste of breath because when you've hurt someone, they go into fight or flight mode, and then they literally can't hear what you're saying. So why talk? And the other problem with obnoxious aggression is that most people really don't want to land there. But it's their instinct. At least it's my instinct. And I've noticed a lot of other people make this same mistake. When I realize I've landed there, I do exactly what I did in that story about the email I sent to Larry. I zoomed the wrong way on challenge directly.

instead of going the right way on care personally. So don't make that mistake. But the thing about sort of obnoxious aggression and manipulative insincerity is that these are sort of where the drama is. But it's not where most of us make most of our mistakes. The vast majority of people make the vast majority of their mistakes when 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. To explain what I mean by ruinous empathy, I'm going to tell you about probably the most painful moment of my career. I had just hired this guy, we'll call him Bob. And I really liked Bob a lot. He was smart. He was charming. He was funny. He would do stuff like we were at a manager offsite playing one of those endless get-to-know-you games. And he was the guy who had the courage to raise his hand and to say, I can tell everybody's really stressed out. And I've got an idea. It'll help us get to know each other and it'll be really fast. And Bob says, let's just go around the table and confess

what candy our parents use when potty training us. Really weird, but really fast. Weirder yet, we all remembered Hershey Kisses right here. And then for the next 10 months, every time there was a tense moment in a meeting, Bob would whip out just the right piece of candy for the right person at the right moment. So we all loved Bob. He was a little quirky, but he brought some levity to the office. One problem with Bob, he was doing terrible work. I was so puzzled because he had this incredible resume, but he was doing very detailed work and he would hand stuff into me with a million sloppy mistakes. I learned much later that the problem was that he was smoking pot in the bathroom three times a day, which maybe explained all that candy that he had on hand at all

times. But I didn't know any of that at the time. All I knew is he was handing in stuff to me, riddled with sloppy mistakes. And I would say something to him along the lines of, oh, Bob, this is a great start. You're so awesome. You're so smart. We all love working with you. Maybe you can make it just a little bit better, which, of course, he never did. And so let's pause for a moment and think about why I said that to Bob. Part of it was truly ruinous empathy. I really did like him and I really didn't want to hurt his feelings. But if I'm honest with myself, there was also a little bit of manipulative insincerity going

on there because Bob was popular and Bob was sensitive. And I was afraid that if I told Bob in no uncertain terms that his work wasn't nearly good enough that he would get upset. He might even start to cry. And then everybody would think I was a big, you know what. The part of me that was worried about my reputation as a leader was the manipulative and sincerity part. The part of me that was worried about Bob's feelings was the ruin of sympathy part. And this goes on for 10 months and eventually the inevitable happened. And I realized that if I didn't

fire Bob, I was going to lose all my top performers because they were frustrated. They were unable to do their best work because their deliverables were late when Bob's deliverables were late. they couldn't spend as much time on their work because they were constantly having to redo his work. And they were fed up. They were going to go someplace where they could do their best work. And so I realized I had no choice, but to sit down and have a conversation with Bob that I should have started, frankly, 10 months previously. And when I finished explaining to Bob where things stood, he sort of pushed his chair back from the table. He looked me right in the eye and he said, why didn't you tell me? And as that question was going around in my head with no good answer, he looked at me again and he said,

why didn't anyone tell me? I thought you all cared about me. And now I realize that by not telling Bob, thinking I was being so nice, he's getting fired as a result of it, not so nice after all. It's one of the worst moments of my career. But even Bob at this point agreed he should go, because his reputation on the team was just shot. All I could do, in the moment was make myself a very solemn promise that I would never do that again and that I would do everything in my power to help other managers avoid making that mistake because that mistake is the most common mistake that we all make. Not just managers, all of us in all our different relationships.

And I feel like this is such an important point because if people don't hear the feedback, they're not going to know how to get better and you basically let him like fester in his ways. for so long and it ruined his reputation at work. So it is in their best interest. Even if it hurts in the moment, it's good for the long term. Even if they don't stay at this job for their future, it's good for their future. Yeah. It was good for him, if I had told it was by not telling him, not only was it bad for him, got him fired. It was bad for the whole team. It frustrated them. It was bad for their relationship with him because they were frustrated by him. And it was bad for our results. It was just bad, bad, bad, bad, bad all the way down. Yeah, makes sense. Okay, so one of my last

questions about radical candor, then we can get into Just Work, it's about understanding motivations of people. So in your book, you say there's a difference between superstars and rock stars, and it's important to know the difference. I always thought they were one of the same. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Me too. So, and I try to say superstar mode and rockstar mode, because we're all in these two different modes at different points in our career. And I learned this when I was working with a leader at Apple who said, well, you know, you have to manage people in superstar mode very differently from people in rock star mode. And like you, I was like, what's the difference? She explained to me that people when they're in superstar mode, you should think of them almost like a shooting star. They are growing really

quickly. They want to continue to grow really quickly. They want the next challenge. They want to learn new stuff. They probably want to get a promotion, and they may want to leave the company and start their own company. They have great ambition, and it's your job to give them the opportunities to fulfill those ambitions. But a person who's in rockstar mode is a person who's great at the job. They're doing excellent work, just as good a work as the person in superstar mode, by the way. but they don't have that ambition to take the next step, to get the next job. Maybe they have something else in their life, like maybe they're writing novels on the side. But they're still great at their job.

They don't want your job. They don't want to be steve jobs. They just want to do their job. And if you don't screw it up for them, then they will keep doing that job, often for a long time, and be sort of like the rock of Gibraltar on your team. I love that. And so it's important to understand what motivates each. each team members so you can get the most productive work out of them. So how should you treat a

rock star versus a superstar? So if you have someone who's in superstar mode, again, you don't want to label people rock stars and superstars because it changes over time. But if you have someone who is in superstar mode, you want to make sure that they know what their path to promotion is. You want to make sure that you're giving them new things to learn. They're on a steep learning curve. they want to be on a steep learning curve. They often are pouring a lot of their energy, most of their energy into their job, whereas a person in rockstar mode,

they don't necessarily want the next promotion. But they do want to be respected and honored. And I think very often the mistake that managers make is either they clip the wings of people who are in superstar mode or they disrespect people who are in rock star mode. So you want to make sure that a person who is in rockstar mode gets recognition for the work they do, the expertise they have. If they like to teach, you want to give them opportunities to teach others. You also want to make sure that you're giving fair ratings.

A mistake that a lot of managers make is they save all the highest ratings for the people who are in superstar mode. And then they give unfairly low ratings to people who are in rock star mode. even though in that job, they're both doing equally great work. And the financial reward that people who are in superstar mode get should come after they get promoted and they get a bump up in compensation and equity and all of that sort of thing. Whereas the financial reward that people who are in rock star mode get should be a good bonus, a great rating. So you want to make sure that you're not hoarding all your top ratings for people in

superstar mode. I totally know what you're saying right now. So I'm, I'm the CEO of a company that has about 60 employees. And we definitely have our, like, as you're saying it, we definitely have our rocks, we definitely have our superstars. And superstars just call out more attention because they're just so much more ambitious and things like that. But then there's people that are doing really good work who have been there for a long time who are keeping the organization running and you need to retain your employees to have a successful organization. Those people are very important. So you've got to, you know, call them out, make sure you respect them, reward them. So it makes a lot of sense. I also think it's really important not to allow your organization to get promotion obsessed.

So I actually wouldn't, I mean, unless somebody, when they got promoted, they changed their jobs and everybody needed to know. But I wouldn't send out the big email, woohoo, so-and-so got promoted. The promotion comes with plenty of extrinsic motivation in terms of compensation and equity. But you want to celebrate great work, not promotions. And so you want to make sure that you're publicly celebrating people who are in rock star mode as much as people who are in superstar mode. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Okay.

So Steve Jobs is somebody who you talk about his management style a lot. And you say he led people Apple flawlessly, but he did doing, he did that without actually telling people what to do. I don't think I said flawlessly. He's a flawed man. But he was a great leader. So how did he get people to get stuff done without actually? telling them exactly what to do. Yeah, I mean, he said, and he really meant this. This was true,

I think, at Apple. He said, at Apple, we hire people who tell us what to do, not the other way around. So he was very focused on, for example, making sure that there were directly responsible individuals. They were called DRIs. And the DRI had full autonomy over there, over what they were working on. If Steve, for example, had a question about something that a DRI was working on, some feature, he would go, he would show up at that person's cube. Even if that person was, you know, a very recent inexperienced employee, he wouldn't talk to the person's manager who would talk to their, you know, he would go directly. And that, I think, was really important, allowing people a lot of autonomy, oh, not over everything, but over their sphere of, of, of, of, of, work was important. And I think another thing that he did that was really important was he really, he didn't just encourage. He demanded that people would challenge him. And so, for example,

when Apple was making the decision whether or not to launch iTunes on the Windows platform, when Max had like 3% market share. And initially, the purpose of the iPod and of iTunes was to convert people from Windows to Apple, from Microsoft to Apple. That was the thought. But as the iPod and iTunes became very successful, that team wanted to launch it on the Windows platform because the Apple only had 3% market share for obvious reasons.

And at first, Steve was very opposed to this idea. And he realized that if he always argued for his side, that he would win because of who he was. And because he had very, I mean, even if he hadn't been the founder of the company and the CEO, he had very strong personality. And so he would switch roles. And he encouraged this argument. He called it, he likened a debate on a team to a rock tumbler. And he said, you throw these ordinary stones in three days. later out come these beautiful polished stones. And he said that, you know, there's a lot of noise,

a lot of friction and the rock tumbler. Same thing with debate on a team. But he knew he had to keep the debate going. And eventually, he allowed himself to be overruled. If a team backed down too soon, there was another time when he was in an argument with one of his direct reports about a feature. The direct report argued once, he argued twice. He argued a third time. And then he did sort of what I was saying, listen, challenge, commit. But he committed too soon. So they did it Steve's way, and it emerged that Steve was wrong, and this guy was right. And Steve came charging into his office, and he said, why did we do it this way? And he said, well, was your idea? And Steve looked at him and he said, yes, and it was your job to convince me, I was wrong, and you failed.

So not like the kindest, most gentle way to make sure that people were arguing. him with him. But he tended to hire people who were very, who had strong personalities. So that, that kind of style worked for most of them. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors. Hello, young improfitors. Running my own business has been one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. But I won't lie to you. In those early days of setting it up, I feel like I was jumping on a cliff with no parachute. I'm not really good at that kind of stuff. I'm really good at marketing, sales, growing a business, offers. But I had so many questions and zero idea where to find the answers when it came to starting

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Stop guessing. Start working in your genius. I love it. Thanks for sharing that. Let's move on to your latest book, Just Work, Get You Done, Fast and Fair. It's a really important one. What was the genesis of writing this book? So if you write a book about feedback, you're bound to get a lot of it.

And indeed, I did. And so 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 the decade, a person I like and respect enormously, and also one of two few black women CEOs in tech. And after I finished the radical candor talk, she pulled me aside and she said, you know, Kim, I'm really excited to roll out radical candor. I think it's going to help me, I think it's going to help me build the kind of culture, the kind of innovative culture that I want. But I got to tell you, it's much harder for me than it is for you to roll out radical candor.

And she went on to explain to me that as soon as she would offer anyone, even the most compassionate, gentle criticism, she would get slined with the angry black woman stereotype. And I knew this was true. And as soon as she said it to me, I realized that I had not fully considered how often biased, prejudice, and bullying taint our feedback and make us shut down to feedback that we need to hear. And I realized that that was a failure of the book and I needed to write a whole new book. That was kind of the genesis of just work, of starting to work on just. And when I say just work, I mean work justly or justice at work, not. just work all the time. Yeah, when I first wrote it, I was thinking only work, and then I realized it meant like just fair work, right? So now I get it. Yes, the title, I would say just didn't work.

When we launched the paper back, we're going to have a different title. What are some examples of these injustices that we can find in the workplace? So I think that part of the reason, for much of my career, I didn't recognize bias, prejudice, and bullying when they were happening to me or to other people like my colleague Michelle. So one of the things that I tried to do is I tried to sort of break the problem apart into its component parts. So I think bias, prejudice, and bullying are three different things, but we tend to conflate them as though they're the same thing. So bias, I'm going to offer you some overly simple definitions. Bias is not meaning it. It's usually unconscious thought, whereas prejudice is meaning it. It's a very consciously held belief, usually reflecting some

kind of unfair and inaccurate stereotype. And bullying, there's no belief conscious or unconscious going on at all. It's just being mean. So for me, that just sort of breaking it apart has offered different kind of responses that we can make. So whether you're the upstander, hopefully not the silent bystander, or the leader or the person to whom this is, happening, I think if it's biased, you can respond to it with an eye statement. So a great example of that comes from a story that Aileen Lee told me. She's the founder of Cowboy V.C. And she told me about going into a meeting with two colleagues who were men. And they sat down at a long conference room table. And Aileen sat in the middle because she had the expertise that was going to win her team

the deal. And then the other side filed in. The first person sat across from the guy, to Aileen's left. The next person sat across from the guy to his left, and then they filed on down the table, leaving Aileen kind of dangling by yourself. And that's often how bias shows up, just who sits next to whom. Aileen started talking, and as soon as the other side had questions, they would direct them at her two colleagues who are men. It happened once, it happened twice. You're shaking your head. You've noticed this happening. It happens all the damn time. The third time it happened, her colleague, who was a man, stood up and he said, I think Aileen and I should switch seats. That was all he had to do to totally change the dynamic in the

room. And why did he do that? Why did he use an I statement? An eye statement sort of invites other people in to notice what's happening, notice what they're not noticing, notice what they were unconscious of. It doesn't call them out. It doesn't say you all are a bunch of sexist, racist jerks. It's just, I think Aileen and I should switch seats. When, as soon as he and Aileen switched seats, everybody recognized what was going on and they, they started involving, including Aileen in the conversation. And he did that. He was an upstander, not a silent bystander, for a couple of reasons. One, he cared about Aileen, and he didn't like sing or get ignored. So there was sort of an emotional, moral part of it. But he also did it. There were practical reasons. He also did it

because he wanted to win the deal. And he knew if he couldn't get them engaging with Aileen, they wouldn't win the deal. And I think that is a good example of an upstander using an eye statement to point out bias. Yeah, kind of holding up a mirror. There's so much to unpack here. Let me start with this.

Why is it important that he took that situation with compassion and didn't shame everyone for being biased in that moment? So shaming people is kind of a form of obnoxious aggression. It puts them as soon as we're in shame brain where our lizard brain kicks in. When we feel ashamed, the parts of our brain that feel physical fear for our safety light up. And I can tell you, in fact, it's useful to recognize in your body where you feel shame. When I feel ashamed, and I, you know, I'm human. When someone points out to me that I've said or done something biased, I do sort of feel

There's no way for you to tell me that I've done something that is biased without invoking a little bit of shame in me. But you want to try to minimize it because I feel shame in the backs of my knees. It's like the backs of my knees tingle. It's the same physical sensation that I have if my children walk too close to the edge of a precipice. It's real fear. It was really important that he tried to minimize that, that he didn't sort of. of shame them intentionally. At the same time, he didn't say nothing because he was afraid they might feel ashamed if he said something. That's kind of a nuance that I think gets lost often.

So something else I wanted to ask you about that I found really interesting that I never really tied this together until reading your book. You mentioned that bullying will become harassment once somebody has power. And prejudice can become discrimination once somebody has power. So I never really put those two together and it was just so interesting. So I'd love for you to explain that to us. Yeah. I mean, an example of, I guess this is not so subtle, but a way that bias becomes discrimination is obviously in performance reviews and in promotions. And so one time I was working with a CEO. I was a coach to a CEO who noticed that there were no women on his team. And to his credit, he figured the problem was probably the promotion process.

not the women at the company. And so he invited me to sit in on a promotion meeting. And there were two people up for promotion, a man and a woman. In the promotion conversation in that committee, they referred to the man as a great leader. And then they referred to the woman as a real mother hen. And I was like, oh, my God. Back the train up. And at first they were a little bit defensive.

They were like, oh, Kim, it doesn't mean anything. And I said, it is a big deal, because who are you going to promote? Are you going to promote the real mother hen or the great leader? And they acknowledged it. And they changed your language and the woman wound up getting promoted. And so I think that sort of learning how to quantify your bias, using tools like Textio to figure out how bias is showing up in performance reviews that are written. But also, if you're having kind of a committee, and it's a homogeneous committee, hire a bias buster. I mean, it was so much easier for me to speak up because they were paying me to do exactly that than if they had brought in someone from HR who happened to be a

woman to sit in on the meeting. So really give people the opportunity to point your biases out to you when they may be impacting decisions like who you're hiring, who you're promoting, that sort of thing. Yeah. So when it comes to bias, I know that a lot of it is unconscious. So bias technically means it's something that you don't really know that you're doing. But once you are aware of it and you continue to do it, it becomes prejudice. And if you have a power, that could then become discrimination, right? So how can we become aware of our biases then? So one of the thing, that I recommend. And by the way, just because you're aware of a bias doesn't mean it's going to change automatically. You have to be patient with yourself, but also persistent because very often

these are deeply ingrained patterns of thought. Another CEO who I was coaching, I pointed out to him that he tended to refer to people at the company as you guys when he was addressing the whole company and 30% of the people, they were trying to get it to 50% of the people were not guys. They were women. And that's not the biggest deal in the world to call people you guys. But, and it didn't annoy all the women, but it annoyed about half the women. And so he agreed that he would try to change it. But this was a deeply ingrained pattern of speech. So I wouldn't say that he was guilty of discrimination because he couldn't change this right away. But it took a lot of effort for him to change it. And one of the things that I recommend that teams do is a technique called bias disruption.

There's three parts to disrupting bias. The first part is to sit down with your team and to come up with a shared vocabulary. What are we going to say when we notice bias? This is a really important follow-up, I think, to something like unconscious bias training, because the danger of unconscious bias training is that it leaves everyone feeling helpless. Like, oh my gosh, I'm doing this terrible thing and I don't know what to do about it. I'm not saying unconscious bias training is bad. I think it's a great thing to do, but it's a first step. It's not the last step. The other thing about that's risky about unconscious bias training that you don't follow up with an action is that it kind of boils the ocean. It's like there's all these biases in the world and

it can feel overwhelming. And what I want to encourage teams to do is to just deal with the biases that are present in the room with a group of people in the room. You don't have to boil the ocean. Let's deal with what actually showing up with whatever group we're in. And so the first step is to sit down with the team and to say, what are we going to say? What's the word or phrase that we're going to say when we notice bias? Because it's really hard to know what to say when you notice bias. And if you have a shared vocabulary, it makes it much easier. And I think it's really important not to impose words on your team and not to ban words on your team, but to talk about this and to flag it as it shows up.

So I wave a purple flag, which I usually, oh, there's my purple flag. There it is. Here's my purple flag. So I like to wave a purple flag when I notice bias if I've had the conversation with my team. So that's what I'll do. But other teams hate the purple flag. One team I work with would throw up a peace sign. Another team would say yo.

Another team would say bias alert. The important thing, there's no right magic words that are going to make this more comfortable. This is going to be uncomfortable. And it's not going to feel safe. What you want to do is to encourage your team to feel free to disrupt bias. And that, a shared vocabulary, can be freeing. So come up with your shared vocabulary.

Can you give us some examples of common biases that show up in the workplace? Sure. One very common bias. I'm going to speak from an American-centric point of view. Like I also am coaching a Turkish CEO of a Turkish gaming company, and he has a whole different set of biases. But I'm going to talk from an American point of view. One example is the one that Michelle, my colleague, pointed out.

a black woman says something and someone says you seem angry. And I think it's important to recognize that maybe she did, maybe she didn't. Probably if my husband, who's a white man, spoke exactly the same way that Michelle did, who's a black woman, he would have been called a great guy so easy to work with, you know? Yeah. And if I, as a white woman, it said exactly the same thing and exactly the same way. Maybe I would have been called a badass, which is like a little good and a little bad. But I wouldn't have been called a great guy really easy to work with. And so I think it's important to recognize that there are certain tropes like angry black woman that we need to eliminate from that. So I would tend to wave the flag there, especially if she didn't seem angry.

I think another one is abrasive. Guys are called aggressive, but sure, he has to. He has to to be to get the job done, whereas women are often called abrasive or lacking in executive presence. Executive presence is like a superhigh way for bias, I find. Another common one is Asian women are expected to be sort of docile. And if they're not, then they get criticized unfairly. And so those are examples of biases that might show up. Another bias, I asked someone, to have lunch and someone waved the purple flag. And I had no idea what I had done wrong. And I said, which brings me to the second part of bias disruptors, I said, thank you for pointing it out, but I'm not sure what I did wrong. Can you tell me after the meeting? And that was important

because normalizing, making sure that everyone understands, it's going to happen that we're going to say or do something wrong, we're going to mess up, but we don't even know what we did wrong. And I felt really ashamed. I was like, not only had I hurt someone, I was ignorant of what I had done wrong. And so teaching people to say, thank you for pointing it out, but I'm not sure what I did wrong. Can you tell me after the meeting is the second part, sort of norms of responding when you're the one whose bias is being, not accused, but whose bias is being called in, although it probably is going to feel like an accusation. By the way, what I had done wrong, it was Ramadan.

This person was fasting. And so I just, I was not aware. I was making an assumption that the person could have lunch, and I was wrong about that. And then the third part of bias disruption is you want to create a commitment. If you get through a meeting, so we should do this. Let's commit to doing this. if we get through a conversation and nobody has flagged anybody else's bias,

then it probably doesn't mean no bias showed up in that meeting. Because biases are very pervasive habits of thought and speech. But it probably means either we didn't notice something or we didn't feel comfortable pointing it out. And so let's give 30 seconds at the end to sort of say, what do we miss here? Yeah, I love that. I feel like these are really great actionable steps.

that teams can take to kind of unpack their bias, having a secret word for your team to kind of raise awareness and then talk about it after the meeting. So I think that's great. So we're going to close out this interview. Kim, it was so lovely to chat with you. The last two questions I ask all of my guests are what is one actionable thing our young improfitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow? One thing is to solicit feedback and specifically come up with a go-to question. Don't say, do you have any feedback for me? You're wasting your breath. I can already, oh, no, everything's fine. So you want to ask a question that demands an answer. What could I do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me is my question. But you got to come up with your question. Because if you sound like Kim Scott and not like yourself, then people won't believe that you really want the answer. That's great advice. And what is your secret to profiting in life? And this can be beyond financial. My secret and profiting in life is to figure out what I love to do and to give myself time to do it. So I love to write.

Even when I was working at Google and I was super busy, I would block time in the morning and time in the evening at work to write. It was my writing time. And I treated this like my most important meeting of the day. Right now, I get to write all the time. and my new hobby is weeding. So figure out what you love to do, what gives you strength and do it. Block time in your calendar to do it. I love that advice. Kim, where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do? Radicalcander.com or just work together.com. I am less and less on Twitter, although it's at Kimball Scott. And I'm more and more on LinkedIn. Oh, awesome. We love LinkedIn here.

Yes, so do I. Well, thank you. so much for your time. Really appreciated all your wisdom. Thank you so much. Love our conversation. Yapam. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Kim as much as I did. And I really appreciated it because this year I'm focusing on shaping our company culture at Yap Media. I've done tons of exercises around this. It's a huge focus for me. And I can't wait to introduce some of Kim's philosophies to my team. I think the biggest takeaway from this interview is that practicing radical candor means that you care personally, and challenge directly.

You take interest in people's personal lives, but hold them accountable for the mistakes they make. And this means you care about your employees and coworkers as people. The relationship between a boss and employee is deeply human. Now, it's not quite a friendship, but developing deep relationships with your employees is key to building a foundation of trust and honesty. When it comes to challenging directly,

you want to make sure that you're soliciting feedback as much as you're giving it, if not more. Radical candor starts with asking for feedback. This is especially important if you're a leader because asking your employees for feedback puts you both on a level playing field, which makes it easier to form genuine, honest connections with your team. After you ask for feedback, embrace the discomfort.

Sit with the silence and listen to your feedback with the intent to understand and not necessarily to respond. And if you don't agree with your feedback, don't pretend like you do. Respectfully explain why you disagree. And finally, fix your problems. Remember Kim's motto, listen, challenge, commit.

And some other tips from Kim. You want to make sure that you're not giving feedback in an obnoxiously aggressive way because that puts people in fight or flight mode. And on the flip side, you don't want to withhold your true feelings for the sake of the other person's feelings. That's ruinous empathy. And that can keep people from hearing

what they need to hear in order to grow. Sometimes you've got to have those tough conversations for the better of everyone. And finally, keep in mind that these conversations should take place in private and never give somebody feedback about their personality. I recently had Seth Godin on the show again, and this is something he emphasized as well. In order to cultivate safe, positive company cultures, you relentlessly need to criticize the work, but never the worker.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to share it with your friends and family and drop us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcast. podcast. That's the number one way to thank me and everybody who works hard on the show. If you like watching your podcast videos, you guys can find us on YouTube. We upload all of our full episodes to YouTube. You can also find me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn by searching my name. It's Hala Taha. I want to shout out my amazing and hardworking YAP team. You guys are so on fire right now. Thank you for all that you do. This is your host, Hala Taha, signing off.