Kim Scott on Bringing Radical Candor - and Respect - to Work

Speaker A: LinkedIn presents. Radical Respect is what happens when you optimize for collaboration, not coercion. So kind of what we were talking about before, it's not an authoritarian kind of leadership style, but you're optimizing for collaboration because you believe that's how you get the best out of people, and that's how you're going to get the most kind of breakthrough innovations. But also, you know, not just shumpetarian change kind of innovations, but the innovations that make a team run more smoothly.

Speaker B: That was the author of Radical Candor and the recently released Radical Respect, Kim Scott. And if you work in business, I'm sure that you have heard of the book Radical Candor. And in this episode, Kim and I sat down to talk about the framework for Radical Candor, its interpretation in the workplace, and the latest chapter, which is actually really kind of written as a prequel to Radical, Radical Candor, Radical Respect. And so we get into the frameworks within that, the keys to building a respectful, uh, company and business and culture and so much more. And we'll be right back with that conversation after a brief word from our sponsor. People have always been the key to unlocking business performance. Never has that been more true than today. I'm, um, Lars Schmidt and this is the Redefining Work podcast. In each episode, we speak with business leaders who are influencing modern work and people practices. This podcast is your key to understanding the link between business performance and progressive people strategies. And if you're a people leader wanting to have an impact on your business, I encourage you to join our Community for Progressive people leaders@amparmifytalent.com community. This community is unlike anything you've experienced before. Want more direct insight? Here are some words from community members Chloe Sesta Jacobs, um, Noah Warder, and Balvina Knight.

Speaker A: The caliber of humans that I have met in this group is like nothing I've experienced before.

Speaker B: It is truly the safest community I've ever been a part of.

Speaker A: One of the things I love so much about the Amplify community is having the opportunity to connect with a global group of peers.

Speaker B: And if you're a business leader on the market for a transformative people leader, be sure to check out our HR executive search services@archifytalent.com now onto the show. Welcome everyone. This is the LinkedIn presents Redefining Work podcast. I am your host, Lars Schmidt, and I'm really thrilled to be spending some time with our guest today. Kim Scott is the author of Radical Candor. She's the author of the upcoming or, uh, the new book, I should say, Radical Respect. And we are going to get Radical, I think, in this podcast. I think that's where it's taken. So, Kim, I think, you know, Radical Candor has certainly become. I, uh, kind of referenced it earlier in the week. It's on the Mount Rushmore of leadership books today.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker B: Yeah. I don't know if I've worked with many. Particularly. I do a lot of work in tech. I haven't worked with many tech companies that haven't had a CEO or founder reference, uh, yearbook. So, for our audience members who may not be familiar with that seminal work or just your background, what would you like for them to know about you before we kick, uh, off the conversation?

Speaker A: Sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me here. Thanks for being here. The most important thing is leadership is really hard. And very few people are taught how to manage other people before they start doing it. We all get thrown into the deep end. And when we think, as certainly I've done in my career, it's not just ourselves who are drowning. We're dragging a whole team down with it. It's so important that people are committed to learning how to be better managers. I'll share just, uh, quickly, what is radical candor and what it's not because it's sometimes misunderstood. So radical candor is what happens when you care personally and challenge directly at the same time. Not to be confused with obnoxious aggression, which is what happens when you challenge, but you don't show you care. And very often, I'll be working with a team, and someone will charge into a conference room and say, in the spirit of radical candor, and then they will proceed to act like a garden variety jerk. And that is not the spirit of radical candor. That's the spirit of obnoxious aggression. And obnoxious aggression is a big problem. It's a problem because it hurts people. It's also a problem because it's inefficient. If I'm a jerk to you, Lars, you're likely to go into fight or flight mode, and then you literally cannot hear what I'm saying, so I'm wasting my breath. Obnoxious aggression is also a problem because most of us have a dread of winding up there. Most people really don't want to be jerks. And I don't know about you, but for me, when I realize I've acted like a jerk, it's not my instinct to go the right way on care personally, which would be the thing I ought to do instead. It's my instinct to go the wrong way on challenge directly. Oh, uh, it's no big deal. It doesn't matter. But it is a big deal, and it does matter. And now I've left the person both sad and confused, and I've wound up in the worst place of all. Manipulative insincerity. That's what happens when you neither care nor challenge. And a lot of people talk a lot about obnoxious aggression and manipulative insincerity, because that's kind of where the drama is. But in my experience, the vast majority of us make the vast majority of our mistakes in this last quadrant, where we do remember to show that we care personally, but we're so worried about not offending someone or not hurting their feelings that we fail to tell them something they'd be better off knowing in the long run. And that's ruinous sympathy. So that's what radical candor is and what it is not.

Speaker B: I. I appreciate the overview, and I want to kind of spend a moment there before we move into your kind of next work. We have a lot of listeners and viewers in the podcast that are in people leadership roles. HR leadership roles. And so, you know, particularly for the chief people officers and heads of people, they're doing a lot of coaching and advising to their C suite. And I think that, you know, I imagine there's probably every single person listening right now has had that experience where they may have hoped somebody was working towards radical candor, but they hit one of the other levels. Uh, what recommendations do you have for leaders? And this doesn't necessarily have to be people leaders, but leaders who are trying to coach. You know, they may have a founder or a CEO or an executive team or just somebody in power who, you know, claims to embrace the view of radical candor, but doesn't match it with the care.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Doesn't match it with the kind of empathy and compassion. How do you. How do you coach that leader back to say, hey, look, this is actually what this means, and so I applaud you for embracing this, but this is how you need to show up if you're actually trying to embrace radical candor.

Speaker A: Yeah, you know, it's really interesting. I was lucky enough, uh, at one point in my career to have to work with a wonderful HR business partner. And this HR business partner came to me. This was shortly after I had taken a job at Google, and the HR business partner said, kim, you are intimidating your team. And I so don't think of myself as an intimidating person. In fact, I felt like I'd been struggling to be taken seriously for most of my career. Like, when did I become intimidating? And so I did not. I was. To my shame, I was not as open to the feedback as I should have been. And in fact, I'm imagining that a lot of the folks listening have also had this experience. So they've gone to a CEO or they've gone to a founder, and they've said, you're hurting your people and therefore you're hurting your results. And they're like, uh, they brushed them off. You know, I was that person. I brushed the advice of the HR business partner off. But luckily she was very persistent. And she said to me, look, go into your next team meeting and ask your team to do something that you know to be impossible. And if anyone pushes back, then I'm wrong, but if no one pushes back, then I'm right because you don't want to tell your. And so I did that, and nobody pushed back. And so I ran her experiment and she proved me right. And at that point she said to me, look, maybe it's not you who's intimidating. Maybe it's just your position that's intimidating, but that is still your problem to solve, you know. And so I think that was a great way that this HR leader really demonstrated to me that I was not doing the things I needed to do to prove to the team that I cared. It's important to have a little bit of compassion for these leaders because often I've described and I've founded a couple of companies as well as been kind of a middle manager at bigger companies. But often I've found when I'm any kind of leader in an organization, I'm like a projection screen for everybody's unresolved authority issues. And that is an uncomfortable place to be, frankly. But it's also just part of the job. And so getting people comfortable with that part of the job and figuring out how they are going to manage through that to earn the trust of their employees. I think the best way that a leader can begin to foster a culture of radical candor is not to dish it out before they prove they can take it. They got to start by soliciting feedback. So that's my. That's the, um. That was a long, rambly way of saying, teach these leaders to solicit feedback before you teach them.

Speaker B: Yeah, that was good. Look, uh, there's a role modeling aspect to it, right? If this is the way you want your leadership team and Cascading down to behave, that has to start with you as the CEO of that or it has to start with you by getting it right as well. Right.

Speaker A: And I think understanding that also reminding people that being an authentic leader does not mean ignoring the impact you're having on others. I think that's um, a mistake that folks often make. Like uh, reminding people that obnoxious aggression is a problem not only because it hurts people, but also because it doesn't work that well. Sometimes if you can't get into the sort of emotional reasons not to be obnoxiously aggressive, you can get into the practical reasons.

Speaker B: Right. Well, also it erodes trust and it erodes your leadership impact and capability also. Right. It's like people don't want to respond and work for and like go the extra mile for somebody who's a jerk. And I think, yeah, yeah, people don't

Speaker A: have to pay the asshole tax in this economy.

Speaker B: Yes, the asshole tax is a great way to frame that. Yeah, nobody needs that or wants that. And I want to, before we move on a radical respect, I want to kind of come on the other side of radical candor, which is receiving feedback. Do you have advice for, for how people can effectively kind of take uh, and role model receiving feedback in a productive way, particularly if it is again, get that kind of direct feedback. I think a lot of people tend to have a tendency to get defensive, maybe feel attacked, walls go up. Right. And it just becomes different, that kind of fight or flight mentality. How do we derail that? How do we try to kind of short circuit that before that happens so that we can actually learn from the feedback and grow from it?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that one simple thing, and I'll offer more practical tactical tips, but one thing that may seem sort of woo woo, but it's actually very helpful is to get people to tell stories. Get leaders to tell stories about the best feedback they ever got from their employees. Because in my experience, hands down, the best feedback I ever got has come not from my bosses, but from the people who worked for me. Because they are watching me more closely because they have to. Unfortunately not they. I hope I haven't created a situation where they have to. But when someone has authority, when someone is controlling your bonus or your promotion, you watch them more closely than the other way around. And so they've noticed problems in the way I'm working, mistakes I've made faster than my bosses have. So if you're open to that, you're going to do better in your career. So getting people to really think, tell stories about that is a great way to get people's minds on the same wavelength. And that literally happens. They've done FMRI studies where people tell stories with each other and their brains get on the same wavelength quite literally. So that's one thing to do. It's just a sort of storytelling exercise. But sort of at a practical level, when you're the person who's getting, getting the feedback and you feel defensive, what I would say is, I mean, first of all, you want to get the feedback. So think very carefully about how you're going to ask. If you say, do you have any feedback for me, you're wasting your breath. Nobody, especially not the people who work for you, wants to give you feedback. Really, the only people in your life who genuinely want to give you feedback are your teenage children. If you have those, they really.

Speaker B: I'm not there yet.

Speaker A: I'm close. Yeah, it'll have. The feedback is going to come fast and m furious and it's good to be open to it. Like it's the best parenting advice I can give you of teenagers because often they're correct, uh, about what they're pointing out. So number one is think about how you're going to ask. Number two is you've got to embrace the discomfort, close your mouth and count to six. Only made it to three. And I could tell you're getting nervous. Like six seconds is a really long time. This person will probably tell you something. So now you've gotten the feedback and you're probably feeling a little bit defensive about it, which is kind of an awkward situation to be in. You just asked for the feedback and now the person told you and you don't really want to hear it. And I think the most important thing you can do in that moment is to extend a little bit of grace to yourself. It's natural that you feel defensive. It doesn't mean you shut down the feedback. It doesn't mean you're a lesser mortal. It just means you're human and your humanity is all part of this. So be gentle with yourself. Sometimes we get very harshly judgmental with ourselves about how we're responding to the feedback. And it can be like, you know, the emotions can create a resonance like the Tacoma State Bridge and it can tear the whole thing down. So you want to make sure that you are prepared for your defensive reaction and that you're gentle with yourself. But then you also, you know, listen with the intent to understand, not to respond, that you ask a follow up question and you know, if you can repeat back what you think you heard in a respectful way. Do it, but don't sound sorry. It's tempting to sound. So what I hear you saying is, you know, don't do that. Make sure that you're really being curious. An example of this, my daughter said to me one morning at breakfast, I wish you weren't the radical Candor lady. And immediately I felt defensive and guilty. I'm like, spending too much time at work. And then I thought, well, I should take my own advice. So I asked a follow up question. I said, well, who do you wish I were? And she said, I wish you were the lady who minded her own business so I can spend a little more time at work. Like, make sure you really understand. Get curious in those moments about what the person means. And once you've understood it, then you want to reward the candor. And if you agree with the feedback, the best reward is to fix it. Ah. And then to make your listening tangible, be kind of public about so and so told me this. Here's what I did to fix it. I want the rest of you to let me know if I undercorrected, if I overcorrected. So be as public as you can about the feedback. Uh, in general, if you're giving feedback, I say praise in public, criticize in private. But if you're soliciting feedback and you're a leader, solicit it in public and share that feedback that you got publicly. There are several leaders I know who would share their 360 review summaries with their whole team, including the good, bad and the ugly. So I think that's really important. And then if you disagree with the feedback, my recommendation is that you look for that 5 or 10% of whatever the person said that you can agree with just to demonstrate that you were listening and that you're not. Shut down the feedback and then you've got to give them a respectful explanation of why you disagree. And you can't argue endlessly. At some point you want to listen, challenge, commit. But you want to make sure that you take Russ Laraway, who I worked with at Google and started a company with, he used to tell his team, if we have data, let's do what the data says, but if all we have are opinions, let's go with yours, not let's go with mine. So the more you can defer when you have a disagreement, say, I just disagree, here's why I disagree. But I respect you and your opinion, so let's go with yours. You know, don't let your position or your authority mean that the default is to go with your opinions if that's all you have.

Speaker B: Do you, I'm curious, do you think, when you, because you work with a lot of leaders in a range of different capacities, do you think leadership in general is getting more open to embracing, uh, in kind of role modeling the areas of strength and areas of development? Because I think it's interesting, like kind of we're four years into the after times, if Covid was the marker of the, uh, delineation between before and after times. But I think that, uh, there was kind of an archetype of leadership that was certainly before the pandemic. It was more infallible, buttoned, uh, up, said the right things, never took blame, had to be right, had to have this Persona. And that was a veneer. And for many people. And I think that those veneers over the last couple years have slipped a bit. And I think people are more open, they're more vulnerable, they're more open to discussing that. And frankly, I think that makes people more effective leaders because they're able to connect with their teams in authentic ways. But I'd love to get your perspective. Do you see more of that, do you see that kind of leadership profile maybe evolving, where they are open to being more real, more vulnerable and more role modeling the things that you're sharing 100%.

Speaker A: I mean, I think that's part of the reason why Radical Candor took off, because it was articulating this kind of leadership philosophy. And I think that is, I mean, I think certainly it became. We talked about this more during the pandemic. But I think the change really started to happen when the competition to hire people, when the competition for great skills. I don't love the word talent, that it's usually called the war for talent. I also don't love war metaphors. But when that really heated up in Silicon Valley, uh, there were a lot of companies that began to realize that people didn't have to pay the asshole tax, as I said before. And that was a big part of Google's philosophy, for example. So I think that the, um, things that Google's success did for the world was it helped articulate. Like if you read the S1, the S1 letter that Larry and Sergey wrote, when the company went public, there was a lot of talk about how much they honored the people who worked at Google and they were going to respect and treat them well and that, you know, it turned out that worked. Uh, and in fact, Shona Brown, who led business operations at Google and designed a lot of the management systems, very consciously designed the management system so that leaders would have to embrace this kind of tech. They couldn't fall back on unilateral decision making authority to become authoritarian. Because I think when you become a manager, you get a little bit of power. And if absolute power corrupts, absolutely, a little bit of power corrupts a lot. Uh, and so sort of being conscious of stripping that power away from managers and forcing managers to take a more relationship based approach to their leadership has been very positive. And I think it's happened in a lot of different industries all over the world. The opposite also happens. You know, I don't think we have eliminated tyranny from the world by any stretch. We got a lot more work to do, you know.

Speaker B: Well, in the world. Well, in the world, absolutely. In tech as well. I mean, you kind of have, you know, almost like two schools of thought, you know, happening kind of in parallel in terms of like that, that authoritarian approach of like, I'm making all the decisions and you will abide by them to like more of the, hey, let's co create something together. And I feel like that's a bridge to Radical Respect. So your, your new book, I'm curious, like, I love Origin Stories. Yeah, you know, I'll see you, I'll match you. Uh, but I'd love that, you know, I love Origin Stories. I'd love to hear how the book came together and how it either builds upon or perhaps even diverges from some of the principles that you first raised in Radical Candor.

Speaker A: Yeah, in many ways, Radical Respect is the prequel to Radical Candor. It's the book I should have written first. And I wrote it because if you write a book about feedback, you're going to get a lot of it. And indeed I did. And hands down, the most helpful feedback I got about Radical Candor happened when I was giving a Radical Candor talk at a tech company in San Francisco. And the CEO of that company had been a colleague of mine for the better part of a decade. She's a person who I like and respect enormously, and she's one of too few black women CEOs in tech. And after I finished giving the talk, she pulled me aside and she said, kim, I'm excited to roll out Radical Candor. I think it's going to help me build the kind of innovative culture that I need to succeed. But I got to tell you, it's much harder for me to roll it out than it is for You. And she went on to explain to me that as soon as she would offer folks even the most compassionate, gentle criticism, they would call her an angry black woman. And as soon as she said this, I knew it was true. And I knew how unfair it was because she's like one of the most even keeled people I've ever worked with. And I'd literally never seen her lose her temper, in fact. And I realized four things at the same time when she said this to me. The first thing that I realized was that I had not been the kind of colleague that I imagined myself to be. I had failed to be the kind of upstander who notices stuff going wrong and intervenes. In fact, I had just been sort of a silent bystander. And I hadn't even taken into account the toll that it must take on her to have to show up unfailingly cheerful and pleasant. So that was revelation number one, is that I hadn't been an upstander. The next thing that I realized was that not only had I been in denial about the kinds of things that were happening to her in the workplace, I had also been in denial about the kinds of things that were happening to me in the workplace. I think because I never wanted to think of either one of us as victims because we have this complicated relationship to that. So that was the second realization is that I had failed to respond to a whole, uh, in fact, pretended that a whole bunch of things were not happening that were in fact happening. Kind of hard for the author of a book called Radical Candor to admit, but there it was. I had not been radically candid with myself. But the third thing that I realized was that even less than wanting to be the victim, that I want to be the culprit. So I was most deeply in denial about the times when my own disrespectful attitudes or behaviors made it harder for the people around me to get their jobs done. And then the fourth thing that I realized was that as a leader, I imagine that I'm creating these BS free zones where everybody can do the best work of their life and enjoy working together. But by pretending, by ignoring disrespectful attitudes and behaviors and the way they were interfering with my team's ability to get the job done, uh, I had not, you know, I had not been the kind of leader I want to be, I'd failed to prevent this stuff from happening. So that was a big drink of water. But it caused me to really sit down and think about times in my careers When I had seen this go well, you know, little positive target identification, but also times in my careers, in my career when I had seen it go badly. And what made it go badly.

Speaker B: Um, I'm curious. You mentioned that conversation kind of being the tipping point for thinking back to this book. Uh, I mean, there's so many scenarios where we may have a view towards something, and it's shaped by our own direct experiences. But obviously it's based on our lived, researched, or attempted to understand kind of experiences. But there are always gaps there. And so how do you think about, particularly with a book like Radical Respect, how, uh, do you think about bringing in those different perspectives and voices and kind of lived experience to help inform how companies and leaders should be thinking about Radical Respect?

Speaker A: Yeah, it was definitely one of the things that made it challenging for me to write this book because, uh, there was this sort of inner conflict that I had as I sat down to write it. And part of me felt like as a white woman who has had a lot of unfair advantages, let's say privileges in her life, I had no right even to write this book. And on the other hand, I felt that because of who I was, I had an extra obligation to write this book. And those two things were kind of in conflict. I really wrestled with it. I also tend to write books that try to make sense of my own lived experience. Uh, but I didn't want to be oblivious to the lived experiences of. I mean, given that this conversation with this colleague of mine caused me to write the book. So I did a bunch of things as I wrote the book to try to make sure that I was breaking free of my own lived experiences. And part of that was just reading very broadly. And even reading fiction, like reading novels, gives you such an opportunity to get inside the life of another human being. I can't think of a better way to. I mean, I guess theater does a little bit. Movies do it a little bit, but there's nothing like a novel to really help you walk in another person's shoes, at least a little bit. Uh, and so part of it was reading, part of it was having conversations, and part of it was hiring someone. Breeze Harper is her name. If you're writing a book, I recommend hiring her. She was sort of my bias buster. She would point out when I was sort of too wrapped up in my own lived experience and not able to get outside of it.

Speaker B: Well, you know, in the beginning of this conversation, you gave us kind of a framework for radical candor and how to approach that. Is there a Similar framework for radical respect and how ideally people can think about, you know, bringing this into their own lives or their workplaces.

Speaker A: Absolutely. So radical respect is what happens when you optimize for collaboration, not coercion. So kind of what we were talking about before, it's not an authoritarian kind of leadership style, but you're optimizing for collaboration because you believe that's how you get the best out of people and that's how you're going to get the best. The most kind of breakthrough innovations, but also not just shumpetarian change kind of innovations, but the innovations that make a team run more smoothly. So you optimize for collaboration. If you imagine a vertical line is collaboration, not coercion, and the horizontal line is you're respecting everyone's individuality rather than demanding conformity. And it's sort of strange to think that we ever wouldn't do either. Um, I mean, I don't know anybody who says, I want to work in a coercive work environment, you know, and actually, I mean, I'm sure there are. I know there are leaders who do want to create a coercive work environment, but I've never worked, worked with them. They're, uh, comparatively rare. And I also have never met anyone who thinks that they're dying to work. And, uh, I want to work in a 1984 everybody's marching in lockstep kind of work environment. Most of us expect our own individuality to be honored when we're at work. And we think of ourselves as the kind of people who honor the individuality of others. We don't want everybody to be the same. And yet somehow we, you know, what makes us go in the wrong direction. Before I talk about what can go wrong and why it goes wrong, I want to pause and talk about what it feels like when you're in a kind of radically respective, radically respectful work environment. Because it is, you know, work can be traumatizing, re traumatizing, or it can help you heal from trauma. And we want to heal from trauma rather than traumatized.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Yes.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I will share an experience. So when I took the job at Google, and I am not saying that Google is perfect, I know a lot of people did not have a radically respectful experience, even in the early days at Google. But I think it's worth thinking about the times in our lives when we have had it and why it worked for us. And then I'll talk about why maybe it didn't work for everyone, but for me, I had my whole career. I had been underpaid, for example, as a woman, in particular a woman in tech. Even when I was at little startups, even when I was at a startup that had been led by a woman, I was underpaid. And so that was part of what had prompted me to go and start my own company. I was like, the only way I'm going to be paid fairly enough is if I'm the owner of the company. And I sort of imagine this was before I joined Google. I sort of imagined like if I was in charge everything would be better. You know, all the kind of BS that creates disrespect in the workplace would not happen if I were in charge. You know, sort of embarrassing to admit that I had to learn this the hard way, but you know, just because I was the CEO did not mean human nature was different. And lo and behold, a lot of um, I did pay people fairly. But a lot of other problematic behaviors, disrespectful attitudes and behaviors made themselves manifest at my startup. And that was deeply depressing to me. It was like, and then I got this job at Google and they had done a lot of things that created the kind of work environment that I had tried but failed to create. And so in some ways taking that job at Google in 2004 was like the resurrection of a dream because I realized it could happen. Like it was possible for people to treat each other well and to enjoy working together and to find a lot of success. And uh, I mentioned before Shona Brown, who designed these management systems that were explicitly geared to create that kind of environment. Uh, and I think that's really important. If you don't design your management systems to be respectful, you're going to get systemic injustice actually. But it takes a very conscious effort. It's not going to happen, happen automatically and it's not going to happen because a well intentioned person has started the company. It takes more work. Ah, uh, and what was the benefit of that kind of radically respectful work environment? I did the best work of my life. Absolutely. The business did really well. I mean we, AdSense was very successful and we all enjoyed working together. I mean the people on the team that I worked, we still get together, we still, you know, we're still friends, we still turn to each other for help. Some of us left Google, others, other people on the team are actually still at Google all these many years later. And so it was great, like it was a really great experience. So that's what we're shooting for. Right? So what gets in the. Why isn't it always like that? You know, we all, we, you know, it's great to work in a place where everybody's happy and money's blowing out of the air conditioning. You know, that's what we're kind of gunning for. Okay, so what gets in the way I think there and what does it look like? Like sometimes we get self righteous shaming. That's what happens when we are, when we're trying to coerce people to honor each other's individuality. That's just not going to work. And it's tempting, I think, but that kind of self righteous shaming tends to be the tool of the powerless. And I don't want to take away tools from people who feel powerless. But the problem with that tool is it doesn't work. In fact, it's like a boomerang that's going to come back and hit you in the head so we can do better. There's also what I call oblivious exclusion where we are optimizing for collaboration. We're not coercing people, but we're allowing sort of unconscious bias to creep into our hiring systems, our promotion systems. And I would say over time at Google, that kind of oblivious exclusion, uh, happened more and more unfortunately, as the company got bigger and bigger. And then there's, there's sort of brutal ineffectiveness or brutal incompetence. And that's what happens when you're coercing people to demand conformity. And the problem with that kind of brutal ineffectiveness is that it can work in the short term, but it doesn't work in the long term. And sometimes, um, because of the way that the market operates, it rewards short term results over long term. And so sometimes it appears to work better than it ought to as a result of what Cory Doctorow calls inshidification of tech platforms. So anyway, that's what it is and what it isn't. So what moves us from radical respect to those other bad three quadrants? I think there's three root causes. Bias, prejudice and bullying. I think one of the problems is that we often conflate bias and prejudice and bullying as though they're the same thing. And the problem with that is that then it can feel like we're confronting this monolithic problem that is insoluble. And so one of the things I try to do in this book is to break bias, prejudice and bullying apart. I'm in Silicon Valley. We love to break down big problems into little problems so we can solve them. And so that's a big part of What I try to do in the book and to think about what we can do as leaders to prevent bias, prejudice and bullying from messing up the respect that our team needs to succeed. What can we do as upstanders? What can we do when we're the target of those attitudes and behaviors? And also what we can do when we find out that we're the culprits, because we often are. All of us have our biases. Uh, uh, and I want to extend a little bit of grace to those of us who, which is all of us who mess up so that we can become part of the solution, not part of the problem, rather than attacking.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, I appreciate that framing of the book and kind of the framework. And what I found interesting about the book as well is just you have so many stories and anecdotes throughout it of your own personal experience that kind of bring these examples to life. I want to kind of take. Take both of your books together and kind of lay them over this moment of time that we're in, particularly here in the US we're kind of getting into, uh, what will probably be the most contentious election cycle and aftermath that any of us have experienced. And obviously, uh, those feelings, those thoughts, those views, those emotions will carry into our workplaces, you know, despite how we may have like a, you know, an apolitical mantra like, that's just not going to happen.

Speaker A: There's no such thing. You, uh, know.

Speaker B: And so, like, when you think about that through the lens of both radical candor and radical respect, uh, how do you think leaders should prepare to navigate their companies through just the volatility and, you know, contentiousness and, you know, potentially friction that may happen within their companies, because obviously, you know, companies are a mix of people, and people will have different views and perspectives. And this will, you, uh, know, as it unfolds, it will impact everybody differently. And so I'd love to just get your perspective. I know certainly from an HR perspective, it's front of mind for us just because we know that we're going to be navigating our workforces through, uh, you know, the coming election and aftermath. So just curious to get your perspective on that.

Speaker A: It's probably the most important question you could ask right now because I think we all have this pit in our stomach about the coming months, and it's tempting to say, well, we're just not going to talk about it. And that does not work. That just does not work. At one point, I was doing a podcast with a lawyer, and she said she's A black woman, and I'm a white woman. And she said, you know, my father told me when I was entering the workforce, we don't talk about race, religion, or politics at work. And my father had told me this same thing, and we both kind of agreed, you know, that didn't work. Not talking about it, it's not realistic. People are gonna. People are gonna. People are gonna talk about it at work, and people are gonna hurt each other unless we figure out, like, what are the rules of engagement here? And so I think that one of the things we can do. And look, we've had companies that have tried Basecamps, and we're not gonna talk about it, and then 30% of their employees, quote, quit. Uh, so that doesn't seem to work that well as an approach. Uh, at the same time, we don't want these topics and we don't want the election to kill productivity for months at a time. Like they have to get shit done. Uh, and so how can we help people, uh, come together in a way. Uh, so one thing I will say is that it's possible for people who feel very differently about politics to work well together. In fact, one of my, uh, I did a TEDx talk in Portland about this. One of the people who I have collaborated most closely with in the course of my career, he and I have very different political views, and yet we were able to start a company together. We were able to work together very well. We were also even more impressively able to shut that company down together and for our relationship to remain strong. And the key is respect. When you really respect someone, you're able to have these conversations and not to get sucked down into the conversation too deeply, but to figure out what's bias, what am I saying that is making it harder for you to do your job that I don't intend to. And so he and I were. We met. When we met, we were working in Silicon Valley together, which is very, you know, very deeply blue. And I know he pointed out to me that I was saying things that were offensive, that were disrespectful to him, and I didn't intend to do that. So I was glad that he was able to say that to me. And then I was able, you know, also give myself some credit. I was able to take that on board. I was to. Able to create an environment where it was not just safe, but expected for him to tell me if I was screwing up in that way. You want to create, uh, a situation where people can disrupt each other's biases. Uh, because if you allow biases to enter into conversations too often, like, you've got this elephant in the room, and that is unproductive. That makes it very difficult. So you want to create a situation where people who are unintentionally saying things that are offensive, it is expected that someone will flag, because bias is a pattern. And we as human beings are pattern makers. And so you want to create kind of a shared vocabulary for what are you going to say if you notice bias in a conversation? And you also want to help people know that we all have biases. And so to respond, well, thanks for pointing it out. Either I get it, I'm working on it, or I don't get it. Explain it to me after the meeting. And the reason to have the conversation after the meeting and not during the meeting is that the promise of bias disruption is that it's going to disrupt bias without disrupting every single meeting we're in. Right. You, uh, know, and then we got to have, we got to build stamina. This is uncomfortable to do. And disrupting bias, sort of. I, uh, like to wave a purple flag. I have one here on my desk. So my team and I will wave a purple flag. And that means we've noticed bias. It makes it easier to point it out, but it's still uncomfortable to do. And so we've had to commit to doing it and saying, if we get to, uh, the end of a meeting and we haven't noticed any, no bias has been flagged. Like, what did we miss? So that's really important. But it's not all bias. Bias is kind of not meaning it's unconscious. Um, sometimes it's prejudice, and sometimes people believe that thing. And holding up a mirror to prejudice is not going to change it. The person, in fact, is going to smile in that mirror. They're going to like what they see. And this is much harder. And so as leaders, we've got to create a space for conversation to make it as clear as possible where the line is on our team between one person's freedom to believe whatever they want, but they can't impose those beliefs on others. And this means having some uncomfortable conversations. I'll give you an example. At one point in my career, shortly after I had twins, I had gone on parental leave and then come back to work, and I was chit chatting with a guy before a meeting, and he said, oh, my wife doesn't work because it's better for the children, children that she not work. And this, of course, was like a, you know, A punch in the gut given, but I didn't think he really meant it. I thought this was kind of unconscious bias. And so I tried to use an I statement. Oh, I decided to show up at work today because I wanted to neglect my children. And I was expecting him to have your reaction, to laugh and apologize and we would move on. But no, he's like, oh, no, Kim, it's really not good for your kids that you're coming back to work. Yeah. So now I know it's a prejudice. Prejudice. It's not unconscious bias. And so I used an IT statement. And an IT statement can appeal to a law, it can appeal to an HR policy, and HR policies can make this line very clear, or it can appeal to common sense. So I said, it is an HR violation for you to tell me that I'm neglecting my kids by showing up at work. Which it was, you know, and that had the desired impact. I didn't want to over delegate to hr, so I said, look, I'm not going to make a thing of the this with hr, but I think you and I can agree. So now I'm going to use an IT statement that just appeals to common sense. Uh, I think you and I can agree that it is my decision together with my partner, how we raise our children, just as it is your decision together with your wife how you raise your children. And he laughed. And I said, and furthermore, you don't want to read my research any more than I want to read yours. We don't have to, we don't have, have to share a belief about how to raise children in order for us to sell AdSense together. And that was really, I think, useful. So I think a thing that leaders can do is to try to make that line clear. Like what is it doesn't have to. You are not a public space. People can't say or do whatever they want in your workplace. But you got to make the rules of engagement pretty clear. And it's not what. I'm not going to try to tell you where that line ought to be, because it's going to be different on different teams. Like some teams will say, you can't wear any political, uh, you know, in any political T shirts to work or hats or whatever. And other teams will draw the line in a different place. But try to make it clear and try to give your team kind of some specific examples of what's okay and not, you know, what those HR policies mean that you can and cannot do. And, um, in order to do that, you've got to create a space for conversation. It's so tempting to get impatient with this conversation. And Ernest Adams, who leads DEI at Ford Motor Co. Helped me with this in this part of the book because he said, kim, you're getting too frustrated too quickly with people who you disagree with. And you've got to remain, you've got to, you got to create a space for this to have a real conversation. And then last but not least, there's going to be bullying. And I think it's really important for leaders to create consequences for bullying. And this has always been true, but it's going to be more true in this environment because I think that you, uh, and you've got to create conversational consequences and compensation consequences and career consequences for bullying because bullying on a team is, it's damaging. It may help the person who is doing the bullying to get some results, but it hurts everybody else's effort. So it does more harm than good. And so it's important that you learn how as leaders to shut down bullying in conversations to create conversational consequences. You also want to make sure that you're not giving high ratings or bonuses to people who bully others. There's a number of companies where I've worked have created sort of some version of Atlassian's no brilliant jerks rule. And so you get a rating on your results, you get a rating on your teamwork. And if you get a bad teamwork rating, then you get a bad rating no matter how good your results are. I think that's really important. And then third, there have to be career consequences. I think there comes a moment on too many teams histories where the journey begin to win and that's the moment when the team begins to lose and the team's culture begins to lose. So don't promote people who bully others. Certainly instead you want to give them feedback and you want to let them know that this kind of behavior is disqualifying for a, uh, promotion. And if they can't change it, in fact they're going to get fired. And if they don't change it, no matter how essential that worker seems to your team's success. Plus you've got to fire them if they can't quit bullying others because it's better to have a hold than an so. Yeah, there you go.

Speaker B: I, I have not heard that, but I agree with that, uh, the ED slogan fully.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: You know, it's interesting. I think we've heard so much, especially tech, about like the no asshole rule.

Speaker A: Yes. But ultimately excellent book.

Speaker B: Yes. Uh, I think we. We use it often and we hear it often. But, you know, I've also heard, and I didn't come up with this, and I forget where this originally came from, but, you know, your culture can be defined by the worst behaviors that you tolerate. Uh, right. And so I think that is, you know, lots of companies, it's easy to claim a no asshole rule, but it's not easy to necessarily enforce and hold up those standards. And the moment you don't, it's a poster on the wall and it's meaningless. And so it's hard to come back from that, I think, uh, from a culture standpoint.

Speaker A: And it's. I mean, it is hard to enforce these consequences for bullying, but it certainly is doable. Doable. It's not. It's by any stretch. It's not impossible. I've seen it done. It can work.

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, Kim, I would love to spend more time. I know we have a narrow window of time. I want to leave you with a m. Moment just to let our audience know where they can find your new book and if they want to keep up with your work, Podcast media, all the things you have going on. What is the best place for them to do that?

Speaker A: Absolutely. So you can buy Radical Respect anywhere you like to buy books. Books. So you can go to your local independent bookseller. You can go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble. You can go to bestbookstore.com, there's any. Anywhere you like to buy books you can buy Radical Respect. It is widely available. I would love it if people listen to the Radical Candor podcast. Includes. We drop in episodes of the Radical Respect podcast. So. So check that out. And if you want to go to radical candor.com you can learn more about both Radical Radical Candor and Radical Respect.

Speaker B: All right, well, Kim, congrats on the new book. Thank you for helping us better understand the framing of it with Radical Candor and how to apply the principles of both books. I really appreciate the time and enjoy, uh, learning more.

Speaker A: Thank you so much. Great conversation, Lars.

Speaker B: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of LinkedIn presents Redefining Work. For more information on the podcast, past episodes, episodes, future guests, and more, be sure to check out our website@ampirmatetalent.com redefining-work and if you want to connect with me directly, you can find me on my website@ah, larssmidt.com or feel free to post on social using the hashtag redefiningwork. Ah, and I will find you. And if you dig this podcast I'd love for you to share it with your peers and your friends and help them discover it. And if you really dig this podcast, please leave a review on whatever podcast delivery your ears prefer. I'll see you next week.