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
Like only your employee could fix the problem. You could say till you're blue in the face that you've heard him say creative ideas, but until his peers hear his ideas and until your peers hear his ideas... he may as well not be having them.
And so one of the things that I've done with folks who I know to be brilliant in their work, but somehow they're not showing their brilliance, either because they're afraid or they're too shy or they're introverted, is what I've tried to do is... we hired you because you have great ideas.
But if you don't share your ideas with your peers, if you don't enter the rock tumbler of debate with your peers, then you're never going to make things happen and you're going to fail. And I'm here to help you, but I cannot, if you can't share your ideas with your peers, then there's nothing I can do to help you. So I can help you learn how to
find the confidence or maybe it's not lack of confidence. Sometimes people who are introverted feel like the bloviators in the room are taking up all the airspace and they don't want to be that person. But helping people realize that if they're not contributing to conversation, that they're actually withholding things. They're not being generous to the team can sometimes help.
I mean, what do you think was going on for him? Why do you think he was reluctant to share his ideas more broadly?
It's a great deodorant, right?
Yeah. I think that's such an important point. When you bring someone new into an organization, especially an organization with a lot of people who have a long tenure and there's a strong culture, and you bring someone in part to make change, they often get punished for the change they're trying to make. And it can feel unfair and infuriating and enraging to that person and helping people.
In fact, there's a term for what happens to people who come in to make change. It's called mobbing. They get mobbed. And so I think as a leader, figuring out how to help that person learn how to build those one-on-one relationships is really important. I had a similar kind of situation. I'd been at Apple. I'd left Google, I'd been at Google for a long time.
And then I went to Apple, which had, you would think they're both tech companies and they're a 10 minute drive apart. They're very different cultures. And after I'd been there a year, this guy who I had worked very closely with said, oh, You are doing this because you care, not because you're trying to drive me crazy. And I realized I should have taken him out to lunch a long time ago.
Yes, so different.
Yeah. That's not going to work out so well for your man.
Yeah. I think one of the things that you want to do is you want to think of yourself as a partner to each of the people who work for you, not like the boss, because telling people what to do doesn't work, but you want to be, your job is to be a coach, a mentor, a thought partner. Your job is not to be a micromanager.
So I think when people are like, oh, I'm just going to hire the right people and then get out of their way, they're avoiding being a micromanager, which is good, but then they become an absentee manager, which is bad. You don't want to be an absentee manager.
people take a job with you because they want to work with you they think that you're going to help them grow in their career succeed in this job and that in fact is your job as their leader you take care of your people and your people take care of the mission so what one of the things that i think can be really helpful is to become aware of when you're veering to
too far towards being a micromanager and when you are veering too far towards being an absentee manager. And it's going to be different. But this is one of the things that I, even after I wrote the book, learned. There's someone who I work very closely with and I like a lot of time alone. I don't want too much engagement. I like working on projects independently. I mean, I'm a writer.
What's the ultimate independent project? Although I got a lot of, there were a hundred people giving me feedback on the book. So it wasn't as independent as you might think. But one person who I work closely with said, I feel like I'm being ignored. I feel like I'm being sent out to do stuff on my own. I feel lonely. And so I realized that it's important.
Like one of the, I recommend soliciting feedback. Don't dish it out before you prove you can take it. And I recommend soliciting feedback at the end of every one-on-one. And a good question to ask folks is, this week, where did I get involved that you wished I hadn't? And where did I fail to get involved that you wish I had?
And that's going to help you find that right balance and recognize that the balance is going to be different for each of the people who work for you because each of them wants something slightly different from you.
So when I'm talking about respect, and I think also when Bob is talking about respect, it's important to remember there's two different definitions of respect. And we're talking about one, not the other. So the definition of respect that we're not talking about is the kind of respect that one has to earn. So I have to earn your respect for me as a writer by writing a good book.
But I'm not talking about earned respect. The second definition of respect is the kind of unconditional regard that we owe each other for our shared humanity. And that's the kind of respect that I think both Bob and I are talking about. And when I sat down to write Radical Respect, I tried to think about what gets in the way of that kind of unconditional regard for our shared humanity.
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