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
There's a lot of things, and they seem to be particularly salient right now in this moment in history. But I boiled it down to three, bias, prejudice, and bullying. And I think one of the problems is that we often conflate bias, prejudice, and bullying as though they're one thing. And then the problem of disrespect can begin to feel monolithic and impossible to solve.
So what do you do if you're facing a hard problem? You break it down into its component parts and you solve it one at a time. So one of the things that I am trying to do with Radical Respect is to offer some super simple definitions of bias, prejudice, and bullying so that we can distinguish between them. So bias is not meaning it. It's an unconscious bias is really what I'm talking about.
Whereas prejudice is meaning it. It's a very consciously held belief, usually incorporating some kind of unfair and inaccurate stereotype. And bullying is just being mean. It's not about a belief, conscious or unconscious. You're just trying to dominate or coerce someone.
And so those are the sort of core three problems that I try to take a look at what we can do as upstanders, as leaders, in order to prevent those things from getting in our team's way of a good, respectful work environment.
Yes, love Dolly Chug.
It's hard. It's hard for all of us leaders. And I think the special difficulty that leaders have is that they don't have to say they have some power and power corrupts. And so often you can get away without saying you're wrong as a leader. One of the things that I tried to do is to think about times when I was the leader who had not created the great work environment.
And what happened in those times and why was it so hard for me to say that I was wrong? I will say that when I started a software company back in the 90s, I, in 1999, part of the reason why I started the company was because I thought, well, if I'm the founder, I mean, I had a great business idea, great software idea.
But I also felt like if I were the founder and CEO of the company, that all of the BS that happened in other places where I had worked wouldn't happen if I were in charge. And you know what? Just because I was in charge and had good intentions did not mean that human nature had changed. All that BS happened under my watch too. And that was really hard to come to grips with.
And so one of the things that I... came to realize when i went to work at google and i was working very closely with shona brown who designed all of google's management system she was the head of business operations is that it's not enough to be a good leader and to have good intentions it's not enough to be a good person you actually need to design good systems
And you need to put some checks on your own power. And so one of the things that I did as I was writing Radical Respect is I thought about mistakes I had made as a leader and what I wish I had done. And I also tried to give words to what it's so tempting to do as a leader.
When I got feedback that I had done something that I had harmed people, I got feedback at one point that I had created a hostile work environment for women, which as a woman was certainly not my intention. And I dismissed it way too fast. What I did was what Jennifer Fried calls DARVO.
deny attack i denied oh i didn't do anything wrong i attacked the person who gave me this feedback and then i pretended like i was the victim reverse victim and offender that's darvo don't darvo and and sometimes having a word for a bad response can help us avoid that response which is why i think darvo is such a brilliant term that jennifer fried coined in fact if you want to learn more about it you can google darvo south park did a whole episode
So instead of DARBOing, what I recommend is, don't say this out loud because it sounds disrespectful, but say in your head, and what does ACK mean? be aware of what you did wrong. Like, ignorance is no excuse. I wasn't aware is not an excuse. Accept the consequences of what you did wrong.
Very often, the reason why we don't do the next thing we should do, which is to acknowledge publicly what we did wrong, is that we're afraid of a lawsuit or something like that. Accept the consequences. You made a mistake, you may have to pay for that mistake. So acknowledge what you did wrong. Maybe go beyond what the consequences require and actually make amends.
And only after you do those four A's does your apology have any meaning. So then apologize. And last but not least, the C in ACT stands for change. We all have people in our lives who make the same mistake over and apologize over, and then the apology just becomes an irritant. So those are some quick thoughts. There's obviously a ton more to it.
Yes, it's good.
Yeah. So I think as an upstander, the difference between, at least in my mind, the difference between being a bystander and an upstander is that an upstander intervenes in some way. So one way that one can intervene as a bystander, not a bystander, but an upstander, is to use an I statement in the meeting. I think... so-and-so just said that. I think that's a great idea.
And that's what so-and-so said a few minutes ago. Just point it out. Because again, an I statement, I think, an I statement holds up a mirror. You're assuming that the other person isn't intending to bully or dismiss this person. It's unconscious bias that is playing out. And so that's what an I-statement can do in the moment.
One of my favorite stories about the use of an I-stander comes from a guy who went into a meeting with a colleague who's a woman. They were at a small company. They were meeting with a big company. So they walk into this conference room. And his colleague, the woman, had the expertise that was going to win her team the deal. So she sat at the center of the table.
It's this big, long conference table. And the other side came in. There's 15 of them. The first person sat across, not from her, but from him. Then the next person sat across from the guy to his left. And then everybody else filed on down the table, leaving her dangling by herself. And she...
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