Kim Scott
speaker
322 appearances
5 recordings
3 series
first heard Jul 2018
last heard Jun 2025
Kim Scott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
sure in many ways radical respect is a prequel to radical candor radical candor is all about feedback and caring personally and challenging directly and if you write a book about feedback you're going to get a lot of it and indeed i did and some of the best feedback i got came when i was at a tech company in san francisco giving a radical candor talk
And I was really excited to do this talk because the CEO of that company had been a colleague of mine for the better part of a decade. She's a person I like and respect enormously. And when I finished giving the radical candor 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 in order 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 people even the most compassionate, gentle criticism, they would call her an angry black woman. And as soon as she said it, I knew it was true.
And I knew how unfair it was because she's one of the most even-keeled, cheerful people I've ever worked with. And as soon as she said this to me, I had four different realizations at the same time. And these actually became the four chapters of the book. The first thing that I realized was that I had not been the kind of colleague that I imagined myself to be. I had not been an upstander.
Instead, I had been a silent bystander, which is not who I want to be, not how I imagined myself to be. But I had never taken into account the toll that it must take on her to have to show up unfailingly cheerful and pleasant and And every meeting we had ever been in together, even though she had what to be pissed off about at work, as we all do. And so that was realization number one.
I wanted to think about how I could be a better upstander in the future. The second thing that I realized was that not only had I been in denial about what was happening to her, I'd also been in denial about about what was happening to me in the workplace.
Hard for the author of a book called Radical Candor to admit, but I was pretending that a whole host of disrespectful attitudes and behaviors were not happening to me that were actually happening. And by being in denial that way, I was not able to choose a response. I defaulted to silence.
Again, not how I want to go through life, but so often I was just pretending that these things were not happening when they were in fact happening. And I think I did that because I never wanted to think of myself as a victim, but even less than wanting to think of myself as a victim that I want to think of myself as the culprit.
So the third thing that I recognized was that I had been most deeply in denial about the times when I was the one who had been disrespectful to my colleagues, making it harder than it needed to be for them to get their work done.
And the fourth thing that I realized is that I imagined myself to be this leader who creates these zones where everybody does the best work of their lives and builds the best relationships of their career.
But by pretending that these disrespectful attitudes and behaviors were not happening when they were in fact happening, I was not able to live up to the person that I, the kind of leader that I want to be.
So that was a big drink of water, but that was really what made me decide to take a step back and to think about what are the things we can do as leaders, as upstanders, as people who have been on the receiving end of disrespectful attitudes and behaviors, and also as people who have hurt other people inadvertently, I hope, with disrespectful attitudes and behaviors.
So what are the things we can do to get the workplace back on track, to build a respectful culture?
I think that Let's start with the radical candor framework. Radical candor is just about caring personally and challenging directly at the same time. And that hardly sounds radical. I mean, it seems like table stakes. Like very few people say, oh, I don't care about others. So I'm going to be a great leader, employee, colleague, whatever. And, and we imagine that we challenge directly.
So I think there's a couple of things that make it hard. I mean, there's a million things, but I'll boil it down to two. I think that very often we don't show that we care because we're told from the time that we get our first job, we're 18, 19, 20 years old. We're told be professional.
When you're right at that moment, when you get your first job, where your ego is maximally fragile and your persona, your mask of command is beginning to solidify.
And when someone says be professional to a young person at that moment, it's easy to translate that to mean leave who you really are, leave your emotions, leave your humanity, leave everything that's best and most real about you at home and show up at work like some kind of robot. And you can't possibly care personally if you're showing up at work like some kind of robot.
You also, by the way, cannot possibly compete with AI. So don't bother showing up like a robot. You've got to bring your full humanity to work. And in terms of challenge directly, I think the problem begins not when we are 18 years years old, but when we're 18 months old, we have a parent or somebody, a teacher who says, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.
And tons of people that I talked to were told that. And that makes it really hard to challenge directly. The instinct becomes to say nothing. But if you say nothing, problems get worse. Problems of behavior, problems of poor performance. And so we need to learn how to show we care and to challenge at the same time. And when we do both at the same time, that's radical candor.
but it's easy if you think about it in terms of a two by two there's three different mistakes you could make sometimes we do remember to challenge directly but we forget to show that we care personally and that is what i call obnoxious aggression and obnoxious aggression is a problem because if i act like a jerk to someone i hurt them but it's also a problem for a more subtle reason it's a problem because
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