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
So I said, it is an HR violation for you to tell me that I'm neglecting my kids by showing up at work today. And that had the desired impact, he backed off. And I wanted that impact because I didn't want him to think he could just say things like that. And then I said to him, it's not necessary to make a thing of this with HR. So now I'm going to try another statement using common sense.
I said, but it's 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 thank goodness you and I are not raising children together. So it's not relevant to our ability to work together. And he grudgingly acknowledged that. But I realized I needed to take a third crack at this.
So I used the third it statement, also appealing to common sense. And I said... And it's my guess, you don't want to read my research any more than I want to read your research. And then he laughed and he agreed that that was true.
And I'm not saying this solved all the world's problems, but if I had said nothing, then I would have resented him and it would have been hard for us to work well together. So I think it was important for our working relationship for me to say something. It was also important, I felt like it was an act of kindness for him. He was going to get into trouble going around saying things like that.
And I felt like it was important for me to say something because for my career, because if he thought I shouldn't even be working, he definitely was going to think I shouldn't travel and he was going to try to prevent me from going on trips. And I didn't need that at that moment in my career. So that's an example of.
using an it statement to really block someone's and to just show someone like we can disagree. There's a whole host of topics about which we can disagree and still work together. And so that I think is really important, especially in this moment in time where half of the nation disagrees so vehemently with the other half of the nation as it's important for us to learn how to work together better.
Yeah. And I try to do that with radical respect as well.
I think that it's really important for leaders to remember that one of the most important things they can do is solicit feedback. They can lay their power down and get on a level playing field with others. In fact, Amy Edmondson and I wrote an article together about how important soliciting feedback, not giving it, but soliciting feedback is to creating that culture of psychological safety.
And the part of the reason why I think it's so important for leaders to really prevent bias, prejudice and bullying from getting in their team's way of collaborating is that The whole point of hiring people is to encourage them to make a contribution.
I mean, there's no point at all in hiring great people and then telling them to sit down and shut up, which is really what bias, prejudice and bullying in different ways do to people.
And so I think it's important for leaders to learn how to teach their teams to disrupt bias in the moment, because if we ignore bias, if we ignore that joke, if that joke was biased or I don't know whether the joke was biased or prejudiced, but if we ignore these comments, then we reflect and reinforce them.
It's also really important for leaders to create a space for conversation, to talk about where that line is on their team between one person's freedom to believe whatever they want, but not to impose it on others, because there's not an absolute I can't tell you where that line is on your team. Like you've got to define it for yourself.
There's not an absolute answer to where that line ought to be. And so you've got to sit down with your team and make sure that people understand the company's policies and where that line is so that people can use its statements appealing to company policy and your team's norms appropriately. And then last but not least, I think in terms of preventing bullying on your team,
It's really important for leaders to create consequences for bullying, because if you don't create consequences, it's going to escalate. I can promise you. And so you want to create conversational consequences. You need to learn how to shut down bullying in a meeting when you notice it happening. You also need to create compensation consequences.
You don't want to give people high ratings if they bully others because or a bonus, because then you're rewarding it. Not only are you not stopping the behavior, but you're actually rewarding it. So it's definitely going to escalate. And thirdly, you've got to create career consequences for bullying on your teams. I think that there comes a moment on too many teams where the jerks begin to win.
And that is the moment when the culture begins to lose. And ultimately, the results will follow. But it doesn't happen immediately. That's part of the problem. People think they get away with their bullying. And so you've got to make sure that you're not promoting people who bully others, that you're giving them feedback. Sometimes people bully others, but they're not aware of the impact.
So you want to give the person feedback, give them an opportunity to fix their behavior. And if they can't fix it, you've got to fire them. And this is really maybe one of the most difficult things because very often it feels like that person is doing some essential work that they'll leave a hole on your team. But I'm just going to say it, it's better to have a hole than an asshole.
So that's your job as a leader.
So I think the first thing to realize is that maybe that person is getting 40% of the results of your team because they're preventing other people from getting good results. And that if you remove that person, your team might not do better. In fact, there's a lot of evidence. Bob Sutton has evidence in his books
about how when you remove that person who is making it hard for the rest of the team to do their best work, the collective efforts of the team improve. So I think that's the important thing to remember. That kind of behavior is it accrues benefit to the bully and it hurts everybody else.
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