225: Kim Scott | Care Personally, Challenge Directly with Radical Candor

Transcript for Kim Scott | Care Personally, Challenge Directly with Radical Candor (Episode 225)

Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:03] Welcome to the show. I’m Jordan Harbinger. As always, I’m here with my producer Jason DeFillippo. Maybe you’ve heard of that concept called radical honesty, where you basically tell people what you’re thinking no matter what. You make no apologies, and then you say you’re being authentic even though everyone just thinks you’re an a-hole. Well, today Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor helps us find a little balance here, especially in the workplace today. Today, we’ll hear how Kim found out what her boss really thought of her and her work when he accidentally CC’d her on an email to her colleagues, all of them, by the way. Of course, her response to this and what she learned is what can help us in our own careers. We’ll also learn why most of us actually resist being honest with others around us and why this is actually a disservice to the company and to that person and ourselves. Of course, we’ll also find out how we can be radically candid with people who are not only our subordinates but also those who might be above us in the hierarchy. That’s even more important. I think the formula and techniques we’ll hear about today will help us view honesty, candor, and empathy and a totally different way and I think you’ll find it extremely useful

[00:01:05] if you want to learn how I’ve created such an amazing network of people that appear on the show, that offer opportunity to our life, to our business. Six-Minute Networking is where I’ve cataloged all that. It’s a free course. There’s no credit card required. It’s my favor to you because it will do so much for you. It’s at jordanharbinger.com/course. That’s Six-Minute Networking over at jordanharbinger.com/course. Enjoy that and enjoy this episode here with Kim Scott.

[00:01:30] So this book was born of your own experience as well. It seems like your boss wanted to ridicule you in an email chain and was kind of up to CC you on that exchange.

Kim Scott: [00:01:39] Yes. I think what happened was he had BCC’d someone ridiculing me and then the person who was BCC’d replied. I forgot what happened. It was like one of those weird things where he didn’t realize I was going to be on the thread and all of a sudden I was on the thread. I think so much of what we learn about management, we learned from the worst boss we ever had. And in that case with that particular boss, I actually lost height. I lost like half an inch or an inch of it and I’m only five feet tall. I didn’t have any height to give because it was so depressing and demoralizing. Working with a bad boss really has a big impact. It hurts your ability to get enough sleep. It hurts your ability to feel good about yourself. It has a tremendous impact. And that was a big part of why I wrote the book because so many good people become bad bosses and then they have a huge negative impact on there. It’s like there’s managerial leverage and this is kind of the opposite because every boss usually has more than just one direct report. They have five or six that are like ruining the lives of five or six people. And it’s funny, I really had written off that boss is a horrible human being. And fast forward a decade I bumped into him, we wound up having a glass of wine together and he wasn’t really such a horrible human being, but in his role as boss, he made me miserable.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:09] What do you do in that situation when you get an email? What was your reaction aside from actually getting shorter, which I didn’t know as possible? How do you react when you see that? Because I saw this in my Feedback Friday inbox where people send me listener questions and there’s stuff like this in there where it’s like, “I just saw an email thread where the whole management is eviscerating me. What do I even do now?”

Kim Scott: [00:03:31] You know, it’s really interesting. I mean, at the time I did the wrong thing. So at the time I, I just sort of absorbed it and I didn’t fight back. And which is I think why I had strong caffeine. And I think it’s so tempting to do that because it feels so dangerous to confront that kind of behavior. But as Audre Lorde said your silence will not protect you. So one of the things that that made me want to write the book was also seeing what happens when people get it right and just watching when people were criticizing me, but criticizing me directly in a way that was helpful was a way to understand what makes it right, what’s the right response. So the point of Radical Candor is the right response is to challenge it directly, but also in a way that shows you see that other person as another human being. And ideally, you care personally, but at the very least, you don’t sort of write them off as a worthless waste of space on the earth. You see them as a, as a human being, and then you’re able to come up with a response that is going to move things forward.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:43] What was the experience that you contrasted with that negative experience where you went, “Oh, there is a right way to do this”?

Kim Scott: [00:04:49] So early on in my career at, at Google, I had to give a presentation to the founders and the CEO about how the AdSense business—

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:56] No pressure, right?

Kim Scott: [00:04:58] No pressure, no pressure at all.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:01] Where on the food chain were you at this point? Like were you seeing them every day working with them or was it like, “Hey, you’re going up to the top floor, don’t blow it”?

Kim Scott: [00:05:09] Somewhere in between the two, the company at the, I thought it was a big company, but it was maybe 2000 people, slightly under 2000 people. You kind of saw a lot of people. So I reported to Sheryl Sandberg who reported to Omid Kordestani who reported to Eric Schmidt. So that was kind of the chain of command if you will. So it was a big deal, but it wasn’t like a huge, huge deal.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:32] It’s not like this is your first exposure to leadership.

Kim Scott: [00:05:34] No, no. I had already, I had already met them all a couple of times and parties and whatnot. It was a very social place in Google at that time, but it was still a big deal. So I walked into the room for this important meeting and there in one corner of the room is Sergey Brin one of the founders on an elliptical trainer peddling away.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:56] During the meeting?

Kim Scott: [00:05:57] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:58] That’s not weird at all.

Kim Scott: [00:06:00] It was normal for that, but I didn’t know it was normal. It felt weird, you know, and there’s Eric Schmidt who was CEO at the time, sort of so deep in his email. It’s like his brain has been plugged into the machine. And so I did feel nervous. I was wondering how in the world I was supposed to get these people’s attention. They said they seem to be doing other stuff and to be empathetic with them, they were in that room all day long. They had to come up with some kind of coping mechanism for doing all these meetings. But anyway, luckily for me, the business was on fire. And when I said how many new customers the AdSense business had added over the last couple of months, Eric almost fell out of his chair. He said, “What did you say? This is incredible. Do you need more engineering resources? Do you need more marketing dollars? How can we help you?” So I’m thinking like the meetings going, all right. In fact, I now believe I’m a genius. And as I walked out of the room, I walked past my boss and who is Sheryl Sandberg, and she said to me, “Why didn’t you walk back to my office with me?”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:08] To receive my pat on the back of course.

Kim Scott: [00:07:10] The ecstasy to the—No, I knew I did not. I knew something had gone wrong and she started out by telling me about the things that had gone well in the meeting, not in a feedback sandwich kind of kick me, kiss me, kick me, kiss me.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:29] The compliment sandwich is much easier, I guess.

Kim Scott: [00:07:31] Yes, the compliment sandwich. Not in that kind of insincere way, but actually seeming to me in what she was saying and tell me, telling me some things I didn’t know. But of course, all I wanted to know was what did I do wrong? And eventually, she said to me, “You said um a lot in there. Were you aware of it?” And I said, “Oh yeah, it’s no big deal. It’s a verbal tic.” And meanwhile, I’m breathing this huge sigh of relief because if that was all I had been wrong, who really cared. And Sheryl looked at me and she said, “I know great speech coach. I bet Google would pay for it. Would you like an introduction?” And once again, I made this brush off gesture with my hand. I said, “No, I’m busy. I don’t have time for a speech coach. Then you hear about all those news customers.” So now, Sheryl’s realizing I’m not getting it. So she stops, she looks me right in the eye and she said, “I can see when you do that thing with your hand, I’m going to have to be a lot more direct with you. When you say um every third word, it makes you sound stupid.” Now she’s got my full attention and some people might say, it was mean of Sheryl to say I sounded stupid, but if she hadn’t said it to me just that way, using just those words, and she wouldn’t have used those words with somebody else. And if she hadn’t said it using just those words, I never would’ve gone to see the speech coach. And when I did and watched a video of myself, one of life’s more painful situations, please don’t make me watch this. But, you know, I realized that she was not exaggerating, that Sheryl had not been exaggerating. I literally said um every third word. This was news to me. I had been giving presentations for my entire career. I had raised millions of dollars for a startup giving presentations. I thought I was pretty good at it. And now all of a sudden I felt like I had been walking through my entire career with the giant hunk of spinach between my teeth. And nobody had had the common courtesy to tell me it was there.

Kim Scott: [00:09:33] I could get it out if I knew it was there, but I didn’t know was there. So now I realize that is a radical candor. Now, what was it? Then I started thinking, what was it about Sheryl that made it so seemingly easy for her to tell me but more interestingly, why had no one else told me. Why had no one else told me? it wasn’t that big of a deal. It wasn’t like it would crush me. And I realized in the case of Sheryl, the things that helped her were basically two simple things. She cared about me, not just as an employee, but as a human being. She cared personally, but she never let her concern for my short-term feelings get in the way of telling me something that I’d be better off in the long run knowing. She was willing to challenge me directly, so care personally challenged directly. That became all of life’s hardest problems can be boiled down to a good two-by-two framework. So that became the basis of the radical candor framework and when you can care personally and challenge directly at the same time, that’s radical candor. Very often what happens is we do challenge directly but we fail to show we care. That’s Obnoxious Aggression and I used to call that the Asshole Quadrant because it seemed more radically candid.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:59] So if we’re looking at this in like a two-by-two grid or matrix I guess, which is on the cover of the book. If you’re watching us on YouTube, you can see that on the front of the book. I believe. So you’ve got the Obnoxious Aggression quadrant is what don’t care personally and—

Kim Scott: [00:11:17] Obnoxious Aggression is you don’t care personally, but you do challenge that. That’s what I used to call the asshole quadrant, but I stopped calling it the asshole quadrant for a very specific reason because as soon as I did that, people would use the radical candor framework to sort of start writing names in boxes. They would use it like some kind of new Myers-Briggs score and that’s not what this is. Radical candor, think about it like a compass, not like a judgment and it’ll help you move a specific conversation to a good place if you let it, but you need to realize when you’re going in the wrong direction. So one wrong direction to go in is you do challenge directly, which is good, but you fail to show you care personally, which is bad. That’s Obnoxious Aggression. Most people I think are actually nice people and most people fear the Obnoxious-Aggression quadrant.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:12:12] Yeah. We don’t get honest with people at all generally because of social pressure. We’re taught as kids to be nice to other people. We don’t want people to dislike us.

Kim Scott: [00:12:20] Yeah, I mean I think one of the biggest sources of problem in the workplace is something that we all were told from the moment we learned to speak, which is if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. And that’s really what moves us in the wrong direction on challenge directly. And very often when we realize we’ve made a mistake and we’ve landed in Obnoxious Aggression, instead of moving the right direction on the care personally dimension, we moved the wrong direction on challenge directly. So instead of showing we care, we just back off and we say, “Oh, I didn’t really mean what I said,” or “I’m sorry, I said what I said,” or “It’s no big deal.” We kind of issue the false apology and now we’re in the worst place of all where we’re not challenging and we’re not caring. We’re just trying to, we’re now—

Jordan Harbinger: [00:13:09] You make it go away.

Kim Scott: [00:13:12] Yeah, we’re now worried about our own reputation and the impact on us. We’re worried that we have been a jerk instead of worrying about the impact we’ve had on this other person. And we wind up in this quadrant that I call Manipulative Insincerity. And that’s where backstabbing behavior, political behavior, the false apology, passive-aggressive behavior, all that bad stuff happens there. And it’s fun to tell stories about Obnoxious Aggression and Manipulative Insincerity because that’s like the stuff of drama in the workplace. But the vast majority of people make them the vast majority of mistakes when they do care personally, but they’re so worried about hurting somebody’s feelings that they don’t tell them something they’d be better off knowing. And this last mistake is what I call Ruinous Empathy. And that’s what often kills us. And we’re often, we’re not trying to be mean, we’re actually trying to be nice when we’re being ruinously empathetic, we’re just failing. It’s just that we’re failing slowly.

Kim Scott: [00:14:17] So to explain to you what I mean by Ruinous Empathy, I want to tell you probably the worst moment of my career. So I just hired this guy, we’ll call him Bob. I really liked Bob. He’s smart. He was charming, he was funny. He would do stuff like we were at a manager offsite and we were playing one of those endless get to know you games that everybody hates but feels guilty per se. Trust ball, whatever. And Bob was the guy who had the courage to say, “Look, we’re all really, but we all really like each other. I’ve got an idea that’ll help us get to know each other and it’ll be really fast.” We were down with really fast, whatever it was. And he said, let’s just go around the table and tell one another what candy our parents used when potty training us. Weird but fast. We all even weirder yet. We all remember that. Hershey kisses right here. I remember. We all remember the activity at hand.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:15:19] That’s dangerously close to the activity at hand.

Kim Scott: [00:15:21] Yes, exactly, exactly. And then for the next 10 months, every time there’s a tense moment in a meeting, Bob would whip out just the right piece of candy for the right person at the right moment. So weird, but quirky and funny. You know, source of levity around the office. Everybody loved working with Bob. One problem with Bob. He was doing terrible work. He would hand stuff into me and there was shame in his eyes. I was so puzzled, I couldn’t understand it because he had this incredible resume, this great history of accomplishments. And I learned later, the problem was that Bob had taken up a new habit of smoking pot in the bathroom every four hours which may be explained all that candy, but I didn’t know any of that time, any of that at the time. All I knew was that Bob was doing terrible work, but I also knew that Bob was kind of a sensitive guy and that he was well-loved in the office. And I was afraid if I told him in no uncertain terms that his work wasn’t nearly good enough, he would get upset, so I didn’t tell him.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:16:37] So, you just let it ride.

Kim Scott: [00:16:38] I would say something like, “Oh Bob, this is a great start. Maybe you could make it a little better. You’re so smart. Everybody loves working with you. And of course, he never did.” And this goes on for 10 months and eventually—

Jordan Harbinger: [00:16:52]. That’s a long time.

Kim Scott: [00:16:52] It’s a long time and everybody else is having to cover for him and redo his work. And eventually the inevitable happens. I realized if I don’t fire Bob, I’m going to lose all my best performers because it’s not fair to them that they’re having to do their job and his too. I sit down to have a conversation with Bob that I should have started 10 months previously and he kind of listens and then he pushes the chair back from the table and he says, “Why didn’t you tell me?” That question is going around in my head with no good answer. He says, “Why didn’t anyone tell me? I thought you all cared about me,” and now I realize I’d been trying to be nice to Bob and in fact, I’d been cruel because now I’m having to fire him because I haven’t told him. I failed him in a bunch of different ways. I’ve failed to solicit feedback from. I haven’t asked him. Maybe I was doing something that was driving him so crazy, he was forced to smoke up in the bathroom. I don’t know.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:17:58] Yeah, or he’s got some personal issue. He obviously, he thought he was getting away with smoking pot in the bathroom and probably thought like, “I like this work’s more fun now,” or “Hey, I have some stressful things going on in my life. I can medicate with marijuana and I’m still doing well enough. They would have told me, these are all people that care about them.”

Kim Scott: [00:18:16] Yeah, they would have told me.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:18:18] Meanwhile, nobody wanted it an awkward five minutes, so now he’s got to go find another career.

Kim Scott: [00:18:22] Yeah, yeah. If I’m honest with myself, part of the reason why I didn’t tell him was Ruinous Empathy. I really did care about him and didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but the harsher underlying reality is also there was some manipulative insincerity there because everybody liked Bob. Bob was sensitive and I was worried not only about his feelings but my reputation. If I told him in no uncertain terms that his work wasn’t nearly good enough. What happened if he got upset? You know, it’s a big open office space. What happened if he even started to cry? Now everybody’s going to think I’m big, you know what, and so I’m worried about Bob and his feelings, but I’m also then that’s the Ruinous Empathy part, but I’m also worried about my own reputation and that’s the Manipulative Insincerity.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:12] Yikes. Because we don’t want people to dislike us. I get that, but it builds this resentment over time or certainly after you fire them for something where they thought like, “This is out of no way.”

Kim Scott: [00:19:22] How did this happen?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:24] So we ended up avoiding the person entirely and people who’ve got to cover for their work. Then everyone else actually thinks, “I can’t believe Kim is giving me Bob’s crap. This is like three months, I’m still doing Bob’s job.”

Kim Scott: [00:19:37] And they’re not telling me that because it’s hard to speak truth to power. I can just sue you and so it was like a feedback-free zone. Everybody’s getting more and more mad except Bob who’s blissfully ignorant but it’s not so blissful in the end because he gets fired. It’s terrible.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:55] Yeah. So you’re drawing this, this line between the lack of guidance and then you’ve got poor results on top of it and then you’ve got to let you lose a team member because obviously, he was there at some point he was qualified for the job. So instead of making a minor 10-degree shift three times and getting him back on track or five degrees shift, now you just literally have to unplug it. It’s such a mess!

Kim Scott: [00:20:19] Yeah. I mean even Bob at this point agreed that he should go because there was so much water under the bridge and so much resentment from the team. It was too late to fix it. And that was the hardest part, worse for Bob than for me, but it was so hard for both of us because maybe we could have fixed it if we had had this conversation 10 months previously, but now it felt too late to fix and all I could do in the moment was make myself a very solemn promise that I would never make that mistake again. And that’s really why I wrote Radical Candor and came up with this framework.

Jason DeFillippo: [00:20:57] You’re listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Kim Scott. We’ll be right back.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:21:02] This episode is sponsored in part by Calm. If you’re struggling to sleep, you are not alone. A lot of us do, and I’m having a kid soon. So I’m just waiting for that, but one in three us adults doesn’t get enough sleep and I’m surprised it’s not more frankly, and if you’re not sleeping enough, it affects your cognitive function during the day. It affects your learning, it affects your problem-solving. It affects your decision making, and if you’re like me, it sure as heck affects your mood in a negative way and a good night’s sleep is just like the magic remedy for the brain, for the body. You’re more focused, you’re relaxed, you can recover from your workouts, you actually feel like working out. So when I’m having trouble sleeping, I use Calm and I love this app for sleep. Sleep deficiency causes a lot of damage. We’ve interviewed Dr. Matthew Walker and other sleep experts on the show, and Calm is something that will get you out of your funk and hopefully into some REM sleep. Jason.

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:32] You have in the book, you’ve got two or you have multiple categories of people, two of them, rock stars versus superstars. I like that everyone’s a star. Even the falling stars are still stars. That was very nice of you. Can we talk about what these are because that nuance difference between those I think is really important?

Kim Scott: [00:24:49] Yes, I’d love to talk about it, but can I make a slight correction?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:52] Let’s do it.

Kim Scott: [00:24:54] So I really like to avoid putting labels on people.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:58] Despite this being the labeling section of your—

Kim Scott: [00:25:02] Maybe I wasn’t careful enough in the book. I tried to be pretty careful in the way I wrote it to say you’re in rockstar mode or superstar mode. I may have missed a couple of edits. Well, we all do this. I am radically candid.” I’m not radically candid. Sometimes I am. Sometimes I’m obnoxiously aggressive, sometimes I’m manipulatively insincere. Sometimes these are mistakes we all make sure. And rockstar mode and superstar mode are two very different modes you can be in and your career. And all of us are in one of those modes at different times in our career. So, but let’s talk about the different modes.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:42] It makes sense. We’re not always going to be A performers and A student doesn’t get a B that gets a lot of A’s.

Kim Scott: [00:25:49] Yeah. And to say someone who isn’t A student like they’re much more and much less than that. All at the same time. Rockstar mode and superstar mode, it sounds so confusing. Like what in the world could be the difference?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:26:06] Yeah. Like okay, the way to pick two labels that are really similar sounding.

Kim Scott: [00:26:13] It was in the executive that I worked with at Apple who explained the difference to me and what she said was on every high performing team you need rockstars and superstars and they need very different things and say you have to manage them very differently. And I sort of said, “What in the world could the difference be?” So, there was some labeling even in the way I just said that. So I made the same mistake. But when people are in rockstar mode, they are in a mode where they’re great at their job, but they don’t necessarily want the next big job. They’re just great at their job and they’re content to do it for a long time. Whereas when people are in superstar mode, they’re equally great at their job, but they’re kind of have an eye for the next job. They’re on a steep growth trajectory. So there’s another two by two. I love the two by two is a way to analyze things. But so there’s your growth trajectory and sort of your performance and when you’re a great performer, but on a gradual growth trajectory for a moment in your career, you are in rockstar mode. But when you’re, when you’re doing great work, when your performance is fantastic, but you’re on a steep growth trajectory at that moment in time, then you’re in superstar mode. So what is someone in rockstar mode look like? Sometimes a person is in rockstar mode because they’ve gotten really good at their job, but there’s some outside interest, something outside of work that is more important to them than getting the next big job.

[00:27:56] So for a while, when I was at Google, I was writing a novel and so I was kind of in rockstar mode I think because I was really good at the job, I think, but I wasn’t really gunning for the next big job. And other times you have, you’re starting a family and that can be a reason why a person goes into rockstar mode or Einstein in the patent office was really, he was, I’m sure decent at his job in the patent office, but he was great. You know, he wanted that job because he wanted to leave at five o’clock go home and, and work on the general theory of relativity.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:28:36] Talk about an outside interest.

Kim Scott: [00:28:38] Yeah. Yeah. And would the world have been a better place if instead of going home at five o’clock and working on the general theory of relativity if instead—

Jordan Harbinger: [00:28:48] Put an extra couple of hours.

Kim Scott: [00:28:49]—to get to the next rung on the ladder in the patent office, not so much. Would the world be a better place if when you’re starting a family, you neglect your children to get to? Not necessarily so. Some people can do, some people can do the general theory of relativity and be a great parent and get to the next rung on the ladder, but not all of us.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:29:16] Not all of us. Certainly not me.

Kim Scott: [00:29:17] Not all of could do that And the fact of the matter is on a team, you want to balance growth and stability. Even if you could have 100 percent of your employees in superstar mode, you wouldn’t necessarily want that because—

Jordan Harbinger: [00:29:35] Too competitive in the workplace?

Kim Scott: [00:29:37] Well, people are always moving. Like there’s a great deal benefit to having some people who are good at the job, great at the job, who are so great at it that they can teach others to be great at it as well. They continue to make those incremental changes that improve things, but they’re not spending tons of time and effort catapulting themselves to the next level. And you, you need stability as well as growth on a team. If it’s all growth all the time, the wheels tend to come off the bus.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:30:12] It makes for happier employees to like my outside interests. My particle physics theories are taking a major backseat to this podcast recently. But I mean, I think most of us want people that are going to be stable in positions, especially at key positions. I don’t necessarily want somebody who’s really great at one thing trying to move up to management. It’s like, “No, I rely on you for this. You change. Yeah, it’s good for you. But like I don’t know. Is it good for the rest of us? Maybe not.”

Kim Scott: [00:30:42] I think when you’re a manager, you’re responsible to help the person get what they want and not to hold them back if they want. If a person wants to be in superstar mode and you’re trying to hold them back, you’re trying to clip their wings, you’re making a mistake because you’re going to lose that person and you’re going to create unnecessary friction and tension. At the same time, if somebody is really happy and they’re rockstar mode and you’re trying to push them to be something they don’t want to be and to do stuff they don’t want to do, you’re also not benefiting that person or the team. So I think it’s really important as the leader to first and foremost understand where people are and where they want to go and what’s important to them. Then to try to design jobs that accommodate for that but of course, you can’t always. There’s no right ratio, there’s no one right ratio. You know, you need 20 percent of your people in superstar mode and 80 percent of your people in rockstar mode. It’s different. Different industries or different companies or they’re different moments in time. But I think the important thing is to be very clear on the difference and to offer equal respect to people in superstar mode and rockstar mode. You need both.

[00:32:16] And I think especially in Silicon Valley where I had so much of my career, there’s a bias to superstar mode and not sufficient value is given to the people who create the stability that keep the wheels on the bus.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:32:32] Yeah. There’s a culture here and I know that this might be compatible in many ways. At Apple, for example, you mentioned in the book, we hire people that tell us what to do. We want to hire people and have them come in and bring these fresh ideas. But often I think that you, and that’s great. I hire people that direct me to, I like that, but sometimes you just have to have people that are going to be at standby in that role and work really well in that role.

Kim Scott: [00:32:58] Yeah, and I think it’s equally important that you allow your people when they’re in rockstar mode to tell you what to do too because they know how to do the job.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:33:10] They might know even better than you.

Kim Scott: [00:33:12] They definitely know better than you.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:33:14] Certainly know better than me, but possibly better than somebody who’s on an upward trajectory and is looking at the next target.

Kim Scott: [00:33:19] Yeah. They’re not paying as much attention to that particular role. And there are certain roles that lend themselves more to people in rockstar mode and there are certain roles that lend themselves. If something’s changing all the time, it lends itself more to a superstar mode because people need to embrace that change and want to learn the new thing. And whereas when you’re in rockstar mode, you’ve achieved a certain level of mastery and now you’re kind of reaping the dividends from that level.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:33:52] Yeah. I’m thinking of things like marketing or digital marketing where somebody—If they’re really good at Facebook ads, that’s great, but if it’s Facebook, “Hey, this isn’t converting as well as our LinkedIn stuff now.” And they go, “Well, I don’t know, I kind of just do Facebook.” It’s like, “Well, we really need somebody who’s just going to be a digital marketer and go to where the blue ocean is and nail that and wants to stay up and really learn about Instagram TV or whatever the newest thing is.” Not just somebody who’s like, “But I got my ads dialed in on Facebook.” It’s like, “Yeah, and they work 10 percent as they did three years ago.” We kind of want a superstar mode person in this like flip the switch or maybe we have to bring in somebody else who’s going to cover that.

[00:34:35] I know that you’ve written that workplaces are yearning for candid bosses and yet bosses continue falling short. So how do we start to roll in that direction if we find ourselves in Ruinous Empathy, Manipulative Insincerity, Obnoxious Aggression? How do we correct the course? Because I, for sure, see myself never really in Ruinous Empathy probably unfortunately, but certainly in Manipulative Insincerity where I’m like, you know, I could have this conversation but I’m just being a broken record and I don’t feel like it and they should know and all these other things I tell myself that are just BS excuses for me to not deal with it. Or I sent him an email about this like six months ago, he knows and Obnoxious Aggression where I go into it and then I go, “Shoot, I need to send an apology. Don’t I?” And then my wife goes, “I mean I would. You don’t have to, but I would.” And I go, “I know what that means.” How do I correct the course? How do we correct the course?

Kim Scott: [00:35:34] So I think the most, there’s kind of order operations to this. The first thing to do is to really dial in the way that you solicit feedback. Because I think one of the mistakes that I’ve made, if I can be radically candid with myself, one of the mistakes that I’ve made is telling too many stories about how bosses are giving feedback to employees. And that’s not the place to start with radical candor, the place to start is with soliciting it. And that’s true no matter what your role is. That’s true whether you’re the boss or the peer or the employee. The right place to start is asking what you could do or stop doing. No. But that would make it easier to work with you. And there’s, there’s an art to soliciting feedback because nobody wants to give you feedback and so you’ve kind of got a drag it out of people and I think there are four things you can focus on. The first is really dialing in your question. If you say, “Do you have any feedback for me?” You’re wasting your breath because I can already tell you what the answer is. “Oh no, everything’s fine.” You know, 99 times out of a hundred, that’s the end.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:50] I remember bosses asking me that. It’s like you’re in there with HR for like a performance review and there are two partners at this law firm that I used to work at. There are two partners or one partner. “Do you have any feedback on the summer program?” Of course not. Yeah, it was great. How’s that? I loved every minute of it.” Does that check the box? What am I going to say? Like you never gave me any work. You couldn’t have cared less that I was here. I generally hate working with most of these people because they’re self-absorbed and miserable. No, I’m going to tell you it was amazing because I want a job offer like give me a break.

Kim Scott: [00:37:21] Yeah. Yeah. So, so they didn’t really take the time to figure out how to ask you in a way that was going to elicit—

Jordan Harbinger: [00:37:26] No, it was ludicrous.

Kim Scott: [00:37:28] So first of all, they didn’t ask the right questions. So, and if I could give you one right question, I would, but there’s none. There are two things that the question needs, well, there’s a lot of things, but two important things. First of all, it needs to sound like it’s coming from, from you, not from me. And second of all, it needs to put the other person in a frame of mind that they’re going to answer. So for example, my personal favorite question is what can I do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me but I worked with one person who told me that that question to them sounded like I didn’t really want to hear an answer because it was too abstract and too big. For that person, I needed to ask more specific questions. So you’ve got to figure out what works for you, but also what works for the other person. So figure out the way you’re going to ask for feedback.

[00:38:26] And then the next thing I think you need to do is you, you really need to embrace the discomfort. Like when you ask somebody for feedback, you’ve put them in an uncomfortable situation and you need to actually make it more uncomfortable and more uncomfortable until they give you an answer. So I can, the case of the law firm, what they could have done is that’s not, I want what I want. What I want from you is not praise. I want criticism. Tell me what could have been better.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:57] Force it out of me. Like you have to give me some negative feedback or some criticism. You have to pick one. If you had to pick one thing, what would it be that would have come up with something?

Kim Scott: [00:39:07] Yeah. So you’ve got to, you’ve got to embrace the discomfort. And I think it’s maybe those lawyers were really just being ruinously empathetic with you. Maybe they, they saw that you are uncomfortable, you gave them all this positive stuff and they didn’t want to make you more uncomfortable. But it did. You have to embrace the discomfort.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:39:25] I think they wanted to feel permission to then unload on me cause that’s what happened after. And this particular example was, “Oh okay good. Well here’s like a huge laundry list of things that we don’t like but oh no, no, no. We’re still giving you a job offer. We just really hope you don’t take it basically is where that dah, dah, dah.” Yeah, it was terrible. They actually ended up getting, I wouldn’t say getting in trouble, but when I told the career services back at my school who had placed me in this job or helped me get the job, placed me in the job about that meeting, because I was like, Hey, I think I’m like really screwed and never going to get a career. And they’re like, what happened? And I told them and they were like, “Whoa, they’re not supposed to do any of that.” One, it’s bad management. And two, they’re not supposed to give you these like fake job offers. They’re supposed to give you real feedback so you can improve. And then additionally, they’re supposed to not give you an offer if you’re not a fit. But they do this at law firms, and I don’t know if this is also in Silicon Valley, they do this at law firms because they want to be able to say, “We had 16 summer interns, we gave a hundred percent offers, so you should come work for us next summer because everyone gets a job offer. So there’s no uncertainty in you coming to work with us.

Kim Scott: [00:40:34] Wow. So they give you the offer, but then they’re so mean to you.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:40:38] Yeah, it’s like we’ll give you the offer, but you probably won’t work in our New York office, even though everyone else is going to get a job there. You might have to work in our White Lake office, which is where we do all of our document reviews for all these litigations that never go anywhere and you’ll be in a basement by yourself and the pay might be slightly lower and you know, they just kind of keep laying it out until you go, “Ugh, okay. I’m not taking a job. Calm down.”

Kim Scott: [00:41:02] Wow. Wow. I’ve never heard of that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:04] It’s called a cold offer. Yeah. And I did the smart thing and did not take it. And I ended up going to work in for an amazing law firm that didn’t tell me that I was basically not fit to be breathing their oxygen.

Kim Scott: [00:41:19] Wow. Wow. That’s awful. That’s awful.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:23] Yeah, it was really bad. And a lot of the feedback that I got was things that had happened like months prior.

Kim Scott: [00:41:28] So they didn’t give you feedback in the moment?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:30] No, and I saw that when I was reading Radical Candor, I was like, “Oh, this would have been really helpful because—”

Kim Scott: [00:41:35] To know earlier.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:37] I started getting really lame assignments or not enough and I was like, “Hey, is everything okay? And they’re like, yeah, we’re just really busy. Your group is really busy.” And I’m like, “That should mean I’m getting more work, not none.” And then it was like, “Oh, well you’ll have to talk to this person about it.” “Oh no, we’re, it’s fine. It’s great.” And then other people would, there were all these little things like that and then it would be like, “Hey, three months ago when we went out to lunch, you did something that nobody can remember, including you. And that somehow turned off one of the associates and we don’t know, but don’t do that again.”

Kim Scott: [00:42:07] That’s why we don’t know what it was.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:42:09] Totally. Yeah, it was stuff like that.

Kim Scott: [00:42:11] Okay. These are all great examples of giving feedback, but let’s continue to dig in. They failed together and they failed to solicit. We talked about two things for soliciting. Come up with the right question. Embrace the discomfort. The next thing that they should have done when soliciting feedback from you is to listen with the intent to understand, not to respond. Because once you’ve embraced the discomfort, you’ve gotten something out of someone and it may not be a huge thing, but you’ve dragged them out on a conversational limb. They never wanted to go on in the first place and now they’ve told you something that you probably didn’t really want to hear if you’re honest with yourself. And so it’s vital that you not get defensive. It’s vital that you listen with the intent to understand, not to respond, but you’re still not done with soliciting feedback because if you ever want to get it again if you want to build a relationship, you’ve got to reward the candor. And that’s pretty easy. If you agree with the feedback, you fix the problem and you tell the person how you fixed the problem and you ask them if you went far enough to fix the problem and hopefully you’re good. Sometimes you’re going to disagree with the feedback. And if all you do is say thank you for the feedback, the person is going to hear, you know, F you. That’s doesn’t, that’s a good point. Yeah. And so what you need to do is you need to take a look at what was said and you need to find something. And what was said that you can agree with disagreement is rarely a hundred percent disagreement. Find that five or 10 percent of what was said that you can agree with to demonstrate that you’re really listening. You want to make your listening tangible and then say for the rest I want to think about it and get back to you and do go and get back to them and explain why you disagree in a sort of calm, non-defensive, rational way. And at some point you got to listen, challenge, commit. But in other words, you don’t want to argue endlessly. But often disagreement, although it’s uncomfortable, can deepen a relationship, but ignoring a person or making them feel visible for giving you, especially when you’ve asked for feedback, you know, now you’re just pretending like it never happened. That never deepens our relationship. So, so those are the four steps to soliciting feedback and, and you know, I mean, let’s go back to that experience. Like you knew something was wrong and you knew they weren’t telling you and they were being manipulatively insincere. But what could you have done to drag them up to radical candor, even drag them over to obnoxious aggression because that would have been better?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:02] I think it would have been better. I don’t know. I mean I was 24 so I was really scared. I think looking back now at 39, I should have said, ”Well I’m not getting any work here and so what I need to know is why that’s happening. Either I’m not aggressively pushing for the work or people don’t want to give it to me and I need to figure out which one it is. Cause right now I’m not growing at all and not learning anything. And so I need to figure out exactly what’s going on. Do you have any idea and if not you, do you know who here would have any idea?” Something like that? Yeah. They would’ve had to be like, “Fine, you know why nobody likes you. You’re little punk. Everyone thinks you get your head up your ass.” Whatever, that would’ve been better than, “No, it’s just everyone’s just really busy with their own project and I don’t know the workflow has been slow,” whatever sort of BS. Because I knew something was wrong because it was one day it would be, well, workflows really slow and then everyone’s really busy with their own stuff. And it’s like, well, okay, if there’s either no work or there’s too much. It’s not both. So what the hell?

Kim Scott: [00:46:04] I think when you’re in that situation, it’s so hard. I mean it’s so easy for us to talk about like looking back, hindsight is 20/20 when you’re in this situation, it’s incredibly hard. But if some of your listeners are in this situation, I think the one thing to do when you want to solicit, when you want to figure out what’s going wrong is to make sure that you’re opening yourself up. But like I believe I’m not getting any work because I did something wrong, but I don’t know what I did wrong. Can you help me? So now all of a sudden you’re, you’re sort of lowering the other person’s defense. Because remember, when you’re asking someone for feedback, they don’t want to give you feedback for the same reason. You don’t want to give other people feedback because they’re afraid that you’re going to make their life miserable if they tell you what it was. You’ve got to make sure that you’re doing whatever you can to say, “I’m not blaming you because I’m getting no work. My concern is that I’d done something wrong and I really want to know what I did wrong so I can fix it. Will you help me?”

Jason DeFillippo: [00:47:25] You’re listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Kim Scott. We’ll be right after this.

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[00:50:51] Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, so you can check out those amazing sponsors, visit jordanharbinger.com/deals. Don’t forget that worksheet for today’s episode. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com/podcast. If you’re listening to us on the overcast player, please click that little star next to the show. It really helps us out. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Kim Scott.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:51:19] you mentioned in the book that radical candor is never personal. Sheryl Sandberg didn’t say you’re stupid. She said you sound stupid.

Kim Scott: [00:51:25] Yeah. Well, so it’s not personal is actually a phrase I recommend you just eliminate being rude because it is personal.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:51:33] It’s personal. Yeah. I guess it’s not a label as much as the amount of work

Kim Scott: [00:51:36] Yeah, but, but you don’t want to make it about personality attributes. It’s very new. It’s surprisingly nuance. It sounds so easy. It’s like there are two things and there are four quadrants, but there’s a big difference between telling someone don’t take it personally and actually caring personally. All right, so when you say don’t take it personally, you’re sort of dismissing someone’s emotions, you’re sort of saying you shouldn’t be dealing the way you feel. And that’s, that’s a useless thing to say. Like the thing to do when someone’s feeling upset is to acknowledge how they feel and to say, I can see you’re upset. I’m sorry you’re upset. How can I say this? But I’m trying to help you. How can I say this in a way that?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:52:26] I think it’s also, it’s okay if someone’s upset about it in the beginning, at least as long as it’s effective.

Kim Scott: [00:52:32] Well, I mean, look, it’s normal. We’re, we’re human beings and we have emotions and most of us spend more time at work than we do in any other part of our lives. It’s normal. If you learn that you’ve screwed up, it’s normal to feel upset and that’s okay. It’s okay. Communication happens on a logical plane, but it also happens on an emotional plane. And when you’re giving feedback to someone, it’s so important to be able and willing to communicate both on the emotional plane and on the rational plane. And if you say don’t take it personally, you’re, you’re sort of saying, I don’t care about you personally really. So as soon as you say that you’re failing on the care personally dimension. Whereas if you can acknowledge that it’s uncomfortable, we’d all rather never have any emotions at, especially at work but we do have them. So it’s uncomfortable to say, I can see you’re upset. But I think it’s tricky because you don’t want to, you don’t want to imagine if you’re giving someone feedback that you control their emotions because you don’t like, you can’t, you don’t get to manage my emotions only I get to manage my emotions. But you can say something that’s going to have an impact on me that might elicit an emotion. I’m still responsible for the emotion, but it might elicit emotion. And that doesn’t mean that if I start to cry because you tell me I sounded stupid in the meeting, that doesn’t mean it’s your fault that I started to cry. But it does mean if we’re having a conversation that you have a responsibility for seeing the emotion and caring.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:54:22] Yeah, sure. I understand that. And I think a lot of times we avoid this because we want people to like us rather than be w and we’ll say I don’t want this person to feel bad or I don’t want to hurt their feelings, but then it’s really about us. It’s not about them because we’re thinking like what you do with Bob. It was like, well I don’t want to hurt Bob’s feelings. I want them to work well with the team. We’ve not working well with the team. So now, we’ve made a choice between caring about Bob and making it about us being liked by Bob so that we can go to lunch.

Kim Scott: [00:54:54] Yeah. And I think also it’s really important. I don’t want to totally eliminate empathy from the equation.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:55:03] Sure. Of course. It’s front stabbing instead of backstabbing.

Kim Scott: [00:55:06] Well, I think I think Obnoxious Aggression is front stabbing and backstabbing is Manipulative Insincerity. So neither one of those cases is there a lot of care personally, but in Ruinous Empathy, there is a lot of care personally and that’s a good thing. I don’t want to get rid of that. I just want to channel it to a better place where you’re both caring and challenging. And very often the reason we don’t challenge someone, we don’t offer them some criticism is that we know it’s going to hurt their feelings and it will like it. Bob probably would’ve gotten upset if I had told him, but the point isn’t going to be more upsetting if I don’t tell him, don’t tell him, don’t tell him and then fire him. Then if I just tell him that. So, it’s part of, part of the problem I think with empathy is that it’s very focused on the one moment and compassion, on the other hand, is like a bigger picture, a way to approach it. And so the compassionate thing for Bob would have been to tell him because I would have been able to see beyond the moment. Sometimes you can get paralyzed by empathy. But I could’ve seen beyond the moment to what’s the longer-term impact on Bob going to be of not telling him.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:56:20] What about the compliment sandwich that everyone talks about?

Kim Scott: [00:56:24] What do you think about that? I think there’s no always to any of this, but it usually is a disaster. And the reason why the compliment sandwich or the shit sandwich as it’s often called, the reason why the shit sandwich is such a problem is that it usually, not always, but it usually winds up with very insincere praise and harsh criticism. It’s like, “I love your haircut, your podcast sucks, but those boots are great.” Your podcast doesn’t suck by the way.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:56:58] Thank you.

Kim Scott: [00:56:59] I wouldn’t be here if it did. It’s awesome.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:57:01] So far so good.

Kim Scott: [00:57:02] “And your boots are genuinely great and I really do like your hair.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:57:05] This is a great compliment sandwich so far. What’s wrong with this thing again?

Kim Scott: [00:57:08] Yeah, exactly. But so one of the problems with the feedback sandwich is that the praise is often insincere and meaningless. It’s about unimportant things. I think the other bigger and more fundamental problem with it is that it sort of taps into this confusion about praise and criticism. I think one mistake a lot of people make is they think that praise is the way they show they care and criticism is the way they challenged directly. But good praise should both show you care but it should also challenge the person to do more of what’s good. Good criticism should challenge, but it should also care and sometimes there’s almost like a false dichotomy between praise and criticism. They’re not so very different actually. They’re both trying to accomplish the same thing, which is to guide the person to a better place and also to be guided to a better place. Like the reason why I call it candor and not the truth is that candor to me kind of implies, here’s what I see. What do you see? Let’s talk about it. Where’s truth kind of implies I have a pipeline to God. You don’t know shit from Shinola and that’s not a great place to start a conversation from.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:58:27] What is this fly down technique, your fly is down technique. This like a good option here.

Kim Scott: [00:58:34] So I think one of the things that’s hard in the moment about offering radical candor or soliciting it is that the topic can be very emotional and that can sort of paralyze you, but if you try to think of a simpler situation. Like if you have a really hard math problem and you can’t figure out how to solve it, it can be much easier to solve it. If you think of a similar math problem, but an easier one. So let’s say, I want to give you some really tricky feedback. You did not have BO, but let’s pretend that you did for the purposes of this. I want to tell you that you have BO, that’s hard. And so if I think about an easier situation, like let’s say I to tell you that you have spinach in your teeth, what’s the right thing to do? That’s easy. I know that if I don’t tell you, it’s not nice because then you’re going to go to your next meeting and you’re still going to have spinach in your teeth and so I know the right thing to do is to tell you and not to like broadcast it, not to tell you in an obnoxious way, but to say, you know, I have a gap in between my teeth and I often have Spanish there and I’m not aware of it and I really appreciate it when people tell me, so do you mind if I tell you that you have spinach whatever. And so, you know, you take an easy example. So if I’m faced with a much harder situation like body odor, I pretend that it’s spinach.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:00:01] So the whole your fly is down. I would tell anyone that even if it’s a little awkward because you know they’re going to appreciate it. Whereas if you’re telling someone, “Hey, when you give a presentation and you said you know,58 times, it was really distracting.” You think I don’t know if I want to do that. You have to think about it as what if his fly was down? Would I tell him? Of course, I would. Okay. It’s the same situation.

Kim Scott: [01:00:27] Yeah, and there’s, of course, a little tweak of nuance because sometimes these things are not as black and white as spinach in the teeth. I mean the flies down or it’s not down and you’re pretty sure you’re right. Yeah, I mean you’re pretty sure this is not the way these jeans were designed. But sometimes you’ll see something and you think it’s a problem. You think that they lost credibility in the meeting because they said you know 58 times, but maybe you’re wrong. Maybe it didn’t really matter to the other people. Maybe it only bothered you, but you still want to tell them what you, what you think you saw. You just want to make sure you’re humble about it. Like here’s what I think I could be wrong. I think another reason why people often fail to give feedback as they think they have to be 100 percent right and they have to have the answer. And if that’s the standard, then there’s a lot of things that we’re not going to tell each other.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:01:24] Sure. Yeah, I like that because I think it is easier to use an analogy kind of in the moment or to really think, would this person want to hear this if it were something else that’s really similar. And even if you’re wrong, they might go, you know, I said, you know, a lot and I even, I just did it there as a filler word, but I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. I’m going to watch the video. You know what? That person’s crazy and they just have a thing for that phrase, fun. But I’d rather get feedback that turns out to be wrong than not get feedback and turned out to be career-limiting or something along those lines.

Kim Scott: [01:02:04] Well exactly and feedback is a gift in one of two ways. It’s either a gift of, I mean specifically criticism as a gift in one of two ways. It’s either a gift because I’m right, and by telling you I give you the opportunity to fix the problem or it’s a gift because I’m wrong, but only by telling you what I think do I give you the opportunity to correct my thinking. And as long as you offer it in and that spirit, it’s the beginning of a conversation and it’s not this sort of harsh thing.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:02:35] especially if it’s your boss, because even if they just have a weird quirk for the phrase, you know, do you want to be giving presentations for the next three years and kind of grading your nails on your boss’s personal chalkboard every single time, you know, figure out another filler word. If you’re going to replace it with something else, fine. As long as your boss isn’t going, I just can’t stand listening to him turn right. You don’t want that. What if we have to give radical candid feedback to our boss, somebody above us instead of somebody that’s working underneath us. Is it different?

Kim Scott: [01:03:07] So the order of operations is always the same. Solicit the feedback first and then focus on the good stuff, offer praise, and then you want to offer criticism, but start in a gentle way. Ask, I want to tell you something that’s bothering me is now a good time. And that’s true, whether it’s your boss or your employee or your peer or your spouse or whatever. And so that’s the next order of operation. And then it’s so important to gauge the response that you get from the other person so that you can adjust. I think very often people think of feedback or radical candor, they think it’s like this, I’m going to deliver you these words and I’m done. And that’s not how it works. I’m going to say this thing to you and now I need to observe how you respond. And if you respond by getting mad or sad, if you have an emotional response, the right thing for me to do is to attend to the care personally dimension. Again, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that I’ve got an emotional response. It may just mean that you care a lot about your work and when you see something is going well or it’s going well, but you’ve got, you’ve needed to do that 10 more times in order to succeed or it’s going badly and you need to fix it, that’s hard. So getting an emotional response does not mean you failed, it just means you need to move up on the care personally dimension. You need to say, “I can see you’re frustrated. It seems like you’re frustrated. How can I help or whatever.“ But a lot of the time what you’ll get is sort of what I did to show this brushoff where the person says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I’ll, you know, it’s no big deal though.”

[01:05:07] And it’s very tempting in those moments to stop. Like I, I did what I was supposed to do. I told him if he chose to ignore me or if she chose to ignore me, that’s on her and, and that’s when you need to attend to the challenge directly dimension and sometimes when you’re giving feedback to someone, and I’m sure Sheryl felt this way when giving feedback to me, she’s probably thinking, do I really have to pick up a two by four and hit Kim on the head. But yes, actually, I mean not literally. She didn’t actually have to hit me but she had to keep going. She had to keep moving out on that, on that challenge directly dimension and that’s what’s so hard is figuring out is this my moment that I need to attend to care personally or assist the moment when I need to attend to challenge directly.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:05:57] Do you think her next step would’ve been something like, okay, clearly this is not going through. I’m hiring you a speech coach, you are going to this coach and it has to happen because you can’t keep giving presentations where you do this. Like what do you think? What’s next?

Kim Scott: [01:06:15] Even after she said, when you say um, every third word it makes you sound stupid. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:06:18] You sound stupid. No, I don’t. That’s all in your head like.

Kim Scott: [01:06:21] Yeah. And actually, it’s interesting. I’ve gotten, I’ve gotten a number of people sent me articles about how these filler words are a good thing.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:06:29] Sure you can find something to back up any bad habits that you have I’m sure.

Kim Scott: [01:06:35] Or you can find something to learn in this situation. You know, I think in cases where you really do try, you go pretty far out on challenge directly and the person’s still not hearing you, you have an important decision to make. I think you can either let that person fail and see it for themselves. Like sometimes a school of hard knocks will get through to them when you can’t. And I think if Sheryl had done that, it would have hurt my career and I might not have under ever understood why. So, you know, but she would have at least tried. I think another thing you can do is decide that in order for me to get through to this person, I’m going to have to go so far out on challenge directly that I’m going to have to cross a line that I’m not willing to cross.

[01:07:29] I once had somebody working for me who really would not. I tried as hard as I could to get through and the person just didn’t believe me that this was a problem and I decided in that case that for me to break through the defenses I was going to risk like hurting the person in some sort of fundamental way. Like psychologically, there might be some, and I decided the better thing to do is to part ways. Radical candor, you won’t always get through. You can’t always get through. But at least I felt like I had done everything I could possibly do to get through to them before I fired them.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:08:10] What about this concept of allowed listening? I like that it’s like trying to get a reaction of other people that’s constructive.

Kim Scott: [01:08:16] So at one point in my career, someone came to me and said, you need to just be quiet. You need to be quiet more in meetings. You need to be like so-and-so, some other leader. So I thought, I won’t be me if I tried to behave like that other leader. And so I took the feedback. The feedback was people are afraid to tell you what they really think. So I needed to fix that problem. I needed to, I needed to listen better, but I tried going into meetings and just being utterly silent and that it didn’t, it didn’t work for me. And people still weren’t telling me what they thought. And so this HR person said, why don’t you try going in and telling your team to do something ridiculous and to see if they if anybody pushes back. The HR person’s assessment was that I was intimidating, but I’m short, blonde, and Southern. I had spent my whole career fighting to be taken seriously. I just didn’t believe the problem was that I was intimidating, but I was prepared to acknowledge that there could be a problem. And so I told them to do this ridiculous thing and nobody pushed back. So I realized the HR person was right. And so I had to figure out how can I get people, so I confessed what I had done. I said I know this isn’t Bob. Why didn’t you all push back on me? And people had some, some advice. And I realized that in my case, what I needed to do was sort of state my position and the way that I liked it, but then say, okay, now I want you to state your position equally as flamboyantly.

Kim Scott: [01:10:11] And that didn’t always work for people either because they were quiet. They needed to be able to communicate and their style. So then I tried saying, okay, we’re going to switch roles. And so you state my position, I’ll state your position. And then they’re stating my position very quietly and I’m stating their position very flamboyantly but that worked too. I think Jony Ive said something really wonderful. Jony Ive, who’s the Chief Design Officer at Apple, said something very wonderful about leadership and he said one of your most important jobs as a leader is to give the quiet ones a voice. And so I realized that that I needed not only to let my own voice be heard but to make room. So another simple thing I would do in meetings is just going around the table and make sure that people got airtime. But that for me was loud listening. I could be loud, but I couldn’t be the only one talking. Everybody had to talk about the same amount of time in the way that was most comfortable for them.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:11:20] I think the other idea here that you had said in the book, Steve Jobs is a lion. If he roars at you, you roar back, but only if you’re a lion too. Otherwise, he’ll eat you for lunch.

Kim Scott: [01:11:30] Yes. Yeah. Steve Jobs is a classic loud listener and Tim cook is a very quiet listener in my observation anyway. And they work very, very well together. So it’s possible to have both on a team as long as everyone gets a voice. And I think when you think about your job as the leader to make sure everybody is talking about the same amount of time, it really changes the way you conduct yourself and the way you lead meetings.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:12:10] For YouTube only. I’d love to hear about how we use radical candor between races and genders and that’ll be on YouTube only if you go to our YouTube channel, jordanharbinger.com/youtube is where you can find that. Thank you very much for doing the interview. I really appreciate it.

Kim Scott: [01:12:24] Thank you. Thank you for reading the whole book.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:12:26] Yeah I read the whole book.

Kim Scott: [01:12:26] I can tell you really read it and it was a fun conversation.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:12:32] Big thank you to Kim Scott. We did this at her house, which is just awesome. It’s this a frame Jason that overlooks a lot of forests. She’s an outdoorsy type and she just has great taste. Her places really awesome laid out really nice. The video is quite a boss over there on YouTube.

Jason DeFillippo: [01:12:48] Excellent.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:12:49] Yeah. She’s a really cool person. She’s very, very candid but not in that sort of way where you go, “Ooh, I’m going to hear something I don’t want to hear.” She’s very nice, but you can tell that it’s not fake. She really walks the walk when it comes to this and I would imagine if you work with her you get that radical candor all up in your face and it makes you a better worker, makes you a better professional, and that’s how she struck me as professional but very warm. So that’s a great combination. You can have the book title, of course, is Radical Candor. We’ll link to that in the show notes.

[01:13:20] If you want to know how I managed to book all these great folks and manage my relationships using systems and tiny habits. Check out our Six-Minute Networking course. It’s free. It’s over at jordanharbinger.com/course. I know that you think you’re going to do it later, but the problem with kicking the can down the road, you’re not able to make up for lost time. When it comes to relationships and networking, the number one mistake I see people make is postponing this, not digging the well before they get thirsty and then trying to leverage relationships later on when they haven’t made them. Once you need those relationships, you are too late. These drills are designed to take just a few minutes per day. I wish I knew this stuff 20 years ago, 10 years ago. It’s not fluff. This is game changing and you can find it and it’s free at jordanharbinger.com/course. Speaking of building relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Kim Scott. I’m at @JordanHarbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. There’s a video of this interview on our YouTube at jordanharbinger.com/youtube.

[01:14:15] This show is produced in association with Podcast One and this episode was co-produced by Jason radical a-hole DeFillippo and Jen Harbinger. Show notes and worksheets by Robert Fogarty. I’m your host Jordan Harbinger. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, which should be in every episode. So please share the show with those you love and even those you don’t. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show, so you can live what you listen, and we’ll see you next time.

[01:14:44] This podcast today is sponsored by another podcast called Disgraceland. Disgraceland, great title, I am jealous. It’s hosted by Jake Brennan. Disgraceland is a true-crime podcast about musicians specifically getting away with murder, behaving really badly. Each episode traces the most insane criminal stories surrounding our most interesting and infamous pop stars. Jerry Lee Lewis, his fifth wife, dead, Sam Cooke 3 a.m. in a seedy motel dead, Sid and Nancy dead. Why? Because musicians are freaking crazy because crazy things happen to them. We love those things and those people and we let them get away with it. Johnny Cash, Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, the Rolling Stones, the Hell’s Angels run security, all that is on Disgraceland. If you love true crime and you love music, I think you’ll love disgrace land so you can listen to that at Apple podcasts on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you’re listening to this show.