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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
If I am a big jerk to you, 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. So it's inefficient. It's mean. It's inefficient. And there's a third and more subtle problem, which is, I don't know about you, but for me, when I realize I've landed in the obnoxious aggression quadrant, when I realize I've been a jerk,
It's not my instinct to go the right way on care personally. Instead, it's my instinct to go the wrong way on challenge directly. And then I wind up in the worst place of all, manipulative insincerity. If obnoxious aggression is front-stabbing, manipulative insincerity is backstabbing. It's where passive aggressive behavior, political behavior
all of the things that erode trust in the workplace most quickly creep in and yet this these two mistakes although that's where the drama is so when we talk about things going wrong we tend to talk about those two mistakes but those are not the most common mistakes we make the vast majority of people make the vast majority of their mistakes when we remember to show that we care personally but we're so worried about not hurting someone's feelings
or offending them that we fail to tell them something they'd be better off knowing in the long run. And that's what I call ruinous empathy. So that's like a quick snapshot of what radical candor is and what it's not, and why it's so hard, why it's so rare, because it's not instinctive.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think as I tell you the Bob story and for all the folks out there listening, I want you to think about your Bob story because everyone, I'm going to tell a painful story about a big mistake I made, but I'm not alone. I think almost everyone has made some version of this mistake.
And if you think about your Bob story, that is what will help you move from ruinous empathy to radical candor more than anything else you could do is just think of your story, your Bob story and give it a title. And then when you're tempted not to say the thing, you'll remember the story and you'll say the thing. So here's what happened to me. I had hired this guy. I really liked him a lot.
He was smart. He was charming. He was funny. His name was not really Bob, by the way, but, and he would do things like we were at a manager offsite and we were playing one of those endless get to know you games. And everybody was getting more and more stressed out. It was a software startup. There was what to be stressed out about.
And Bob was the guy who had the courage to raise his hand and to say, I can tell everyone wants to get back to work. I've got an idea. It'll be really fast.
whatever his idea was if it was fast we were down with it and then bob says let's just go around the table and confess what candy our parents used 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 pull out just the right piece of candy for the right person at the right moment so
Bob brought a little bit of levity to the office. Quirky, but funny. Everybody loved working with Bob. There was one problem with Bob. He was doing terrible work. He would hand stuff in, super creative, but filled with messy mistakes, sloppy mistakes, careless mistakes. And I would say something to him along the lines of, oh, Bob, this is a great start. You're so smart. You're so awesome.
We all love working with you. Maybe you can make it just a little bit better, which of course he never did. So let's pause. Why did I say that to Bob? Part of it was truly ruinous empathy. I really did love Bob and I really did not wanna hurt his feelings. But if I'm honest with myself, there was something more insidious going on because Bob was popular and Bob was sensitive.
And there was part of me that was afraid that if I told Bob in no uncertain terms that his work wasn't nearly good enough, he would get upset. He might even start to cry. And then everyone would think I was a big, you know what? The part of me that was worried about my reputation as a leader, that was the manipulative insincerity part.
The part of me that was truly worried about Bob and his feelings, that was the ruinous empathy part. And this went 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 best performers. Because not only have I been unfair to Bob not to tell him what he was doing wrong, I've been unfair to the whole team.
And everyone is frustrated. Their deliverables are late because Bob's deliverables are late. They're not able to spend as much time as they need to on their work because they're having to spend so much time redoing Bob's work and correcting his mistakes. And the people who are best at the job, they were going to quit. They were going to leave.
They were going to go work somewhere where they could do the best work of their lives. And so I decided it was time, past time, for me to sit down and have a conversation with Bob that I should have begun, frankly, 10 months previously. And when I finished explaining to him where things stood, he pushed his chair back from the table.
He looked me right in the eye and he said, why didn't you tell me? And as that question was going around in my head with no good answer, he looked at me again and he said, why didn't anyone tell me? I thought you all cared about me. And now I realized that by not having this conversation with Bob sooner, thinking I was being so nice, I'm having to fire him as a result of it. Not so nice after all.
But it was too late to save Bob because at this point, even he agreed he should go. 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, make that mistake again, and that I would do everything in my power to help other people avoid making that mistake. Because it was so painful. It was painful for me.
It was obviously much worse for Bob and his family. And it was bad for the whole team. And it was bad for our investors because we weren't getting the kind of results that we could have otherwise gotten. And yet it was a terrible, it was too late to save the situation. Bob had decided he should go. All I could do in that moment
was make myself a very solemn promise that i would never make that mistake again and that i would do everything in my power to help other people avoid making that mistake because it's painful so that's really why i'm talking to you today and talking to your folks today why i wrote the book etc etc
First of all, I have a lot of compassion for you for being in that situation. Like every great leader has been in that situation. And I think part of the issue is that It's easy to feel like as a leader, your job is to go out and defend your people. But one of the things that I came to realize over time is that you're not defending your people by not telling them.
Showing 201–220 of 322 · page 11 of 17
← Previous
Next →