Great leaders aren’t born, they’re built through candor, respect, and the courage to face hard truths. In this conversation, Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor, Radical Respect, and Just Work, shares her journey from the diamond factories of Moscow to Google’s leadership halls, revealing how feedback and culture can transform organizations.

She explains the true meaning of radical candor, why respect is essential in addressing bias and bullying, and how leaders can foster workplaces that thrive on honesty, accountability, and collaboration. With practical strategies and hard-earned wisdom, Kim challenges us to rethink leadership and build teams where everyone’s voice matters.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/kim-scott/.

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Radical Candor, Radical Respect And More, With Kim Scott

Best-Selling Author And Former Google And Apple Executive

My guest is Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor, Radical Respect and Just Work and a veteran of Google and Apple. In our conversation, we’re going to be talking about Kim’s bestselling books, her broader career journey and what she’s up to. Let’s dive in.

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Kim, welcome. Thanks so much for doing the show with me. I appreciate it.

Thank you. I’ve been looking forward to our conversation.

From Memphis To Moscow: An Unlikely Career Path

As have I. We’re going to dive into some of your books and the work you’re doing more recently in a bit, but let’s start with your background. Where did you grow up? How did you come to be working at one point at a diamond cutting factory in Moscow?

I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. When I was in high school, the headmaster of my school was invited to go to one of these US Air Forces to reach out to the population of a particular city trips. He couldn’t go, so he said, “You need a student. You need a young person.” He sent me instead and we flew out to Omaha, Nebraska. There was a general there who explained to us why it wasn’t enough to have enough nuclear weapons to blow the world up once.

We needed to be able to blow it up four times and I thought, “This can’t be right.” I don’t know much. I’m just a seventeen-year-old kid but this makes no sense. That caused me to study Russian literature and arms control then to move to Moscow in 1990, when it was still the Soviet Union. I was working on a project on military conversions, sort of sorts in a plowshare and that blew up and I wound up working in a diamond cutting factory, as one does early in one’s career.

There you go. I was in the Air Force at that time. We were inbetween state of the cold war era. I was working on this project that was designed to deploy a satellite communication system that would survive a new nuclear war. That was part of what I was doing when I was in the Air Force and I was not. I worked at a base outside of Boston called Hanscom Air Force Base. This particular project was spread all over the place.

The Air Force piece was partly embossed and partly in LA. There was an army piece and navy piece, but where you were in Omaha off at Air Force Base. I would imagine at the time it was the head of what was then called the Strategic Air Command, which is like all of the bombers and all of that stuff.

The planes were always in the air. In fact, on the way from Memphis to Omaha, we did air refueling. It was incredibly cool.

That is pretty cool. I got to experience that once, too. Did you go down in the bay and watch?

I don’t think I can do it now. My fear of heights has increased with age but, at the time, I remember thinking it was one of the coolest things I ever did.

I got to do that, too. It was very fun.

In the military, so much of what I learned later about management came from veterans I hired. The military does incredible leadership training.

The Journey Into Tech: From FCC To Google And Apple

They do and I certainly benefited from my time in the Air Force. It helped me get into business school because Harvard likes military veterans. There were a lot of us there and the rest of it played out from there. You also spent some time at a pediatric clinic in Kosovo.

That was in 1999 and it also stemmed from childhood experiences. When I was 10 years old, 11 years old, or 12 years old, I read Diary of Anne Frank, as kids do at that age. I remember thinking, if something like that were ever happening. I wouldn’t be one of those people who sat back and did nothing. When the genocide was happening in the former Yugoslavia. I started looking around for something to do. A friend of mine is a pediatrician and she was going to Kosovo to be a pediatrician to the children who had to flee and then were starting to come back.

They needed somebody to be an organizer, a COO, if you will. Also, somebody with an American passport could bring $10,000 in the country easily. It’s silly. There was no banking infrastructure. I did the grunt work of keeping the pediatric clinic up and running and she was the doctor. It was an incredible experience. It was a lesson in how a timely intervention can turn what would have been a massive human tragedy into a terrible situation but most people survived, most of the people who fled because we were able to come back.

Many years later, I was just there hiking. It’s got the extension of the Alps that runs through Montenegro and Kosovo and in Albania. That’s where we were hiking. It was a great trip, but it was interesting to go there just knowing the history and the fact that there’s still this dispute about whether Kosovo is its own country or not. They believe yes and most of the world believes. It’s still one of those things that’s a little bit ambiguous, which is just amazing.

I remember when we were there. I was there with my friend and we were living in Pristina. The clinic was outside of Prussia. We were driving back from the clinic and there was a column of Russian tanks about to go into Pristina. We thought, “Oh gosh.” My friend and I both speak Russian and we jumped up on the tank. There were young guys and we were young. We chatted and we fancied that we had helped avert a crisis but I’m sure we didn’t.

It’s a good story, so stick with it. How did you then find your way into the tech industry?

I went to business school after I lived in Russia. In 1990 to ’94, I was in Russia and then in ’94, I went to business school. At the end of business school, I didn’t want to be a consultant and an investment banker, which is what most of my colleagues were doing.

You just took out half of the graduating class, basically.

More than half. Those were pretty much your choices. It was like coming out of college. You were going to be a lawyer or a doctor, and I didn’t want to do either one of those things. One of my professors was lifelong friends with Reed Hundt who was the Chairman of the FCC. This was in 1996. The Telecom Act was taking shape and so I went to work for the Federal Communications. I was the only person in my class to go to work for the federal government. It was a fantastic experience. I learned a ton. I keep learning.

We made some mistakes with the Telecom Act of 1996. That’s why we can’t hold these social media platforms accountable. There needed to have been something. The idea at the time in ‘96 was we’re not going to regulate these nascent tech companies and remember in 1996. Google hadn’t even started in anybody’s garage yet.

Back then, it was all the competitive local exchange companies that were taking advantage of the breakup of Ma Bell. That was a superhot space for a lot of money to be made then.

I wish in retrospect, we had said, at some point, these companies will no longer be nascent. They need these tech platforms to work well for their benefit as well as for ours and for societies. I’m now taking you down a tangent, so feel free to interrupt but this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about. If there’s a competitor that doesn’t have to take down terrible content, content that is disinformation or worse. If one of their competitors doesn’t have to take it down but they choose to do it. Now, they’re putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage. There’s an externality involved in these societies. It’s the job of the government to manage the externality for the sake of the companies just like child labor laws.

For a long time, child labor laws were controversial. Finally, FDR said, “If I don’t pass the law that makes child labor illegal, then the companies that don’t hire children are at a disadvantage to those who do.” It’s better for the industry to have some guardrails. Anyway, we didn’t imagine any of that happening. We were just busy not regulating the internet in ’96. That was how I got into tech then I went to work for a voiceover IP company. I started a couple of software companies that fail and then I joined Google and that worked out much better.

I realized after about six years at Google, the thing that interested me about tech was not cost per click. Although, that was going pretty well at Google, but the management side of things. It’s like, how can you create a team on which everyone can do the best work of their lives and build the best relationships of their careers? There wasn’t a job that was focused on that at Google at the time but my professor who got me the job at the FCC had left Harvard and joined Apple. He said, “Come to Apple and help us design and teach how to manage it.”

I left Google and I went and did that. That was fun, then a friend of mine from Google became the CEO of Twitter. He said, “Help me design and teach at Twitter.” Lo and behold, it was exactly the same thing as managing. The core aspects of management are the same company to company, industry to industry. When I did that, I decided to become a coach so that I would have enough time to write Radical Candor. That’s how it all happened.

The Birth Of Radical Candor: Challenging Politeness

When did the colonel of Radical Candor emerge and become a book idea that you wanted to get down on paper?

It was emerging for a long time. First of all, I was raised in the South, which is a very polite culture, a very nice culture. Sometimes, the niceness takes on the form of false harmony, but there’s something genuinely nice about the culture. I wanted to hold on to that. A very core to who I am is to be a good and kind person or who I want to be. Anyway, I have failed on both sometimes and I struggled with the rules of the road growing up of never saying no to anybody and if I had critical thoughts to keep them to myself.

Those tendencies were holding me back in my career. I especially struggled with it when I was CEO of my own company. People were depending on me to say no. People are depending on me to give critical feedback and to solicit critical feedback. I struggled with it. The initial colonel came from that struggle. The friction between the way I was raised and what I had to do in my career and then we sold the company that I started. Selling it is a generous term for what happened. We lost a lot of our investor’s money.

I wound up taking this job at Google and Google things were working much better. I’ll never forget there was an argument that we were having with Larry Page, one of the founders, about an AdSense policy. I remember going in with Matt Cutts who was in charge of search quality. Matt and I wanted to do one thing and Larry thought we should do another thing. Matt was passionately arguing for our position. I was brand new. I was mostly just waiting for the ride.

I was watching that and he was yelling. He was getting red in the face and Matt’s not a yeller. He’s a very genial guy. I remember feeling scared, like, “Larry’s going to fire my new friend.” I noticed Larry’s face had this big grin and he was encouraging Matt. He was happy that Matt was disagreeing with him and disagreeing so vehemently. I realized this is not rude. This is an act of generosity. This is how we get things done. This is fun.

The feeling that I would have had around the dinner table at home, if such a conversation had happened, was very different. I learned nothing about managing people at business school but I did learn about a good 2 by 2 frameworks. I started trying to think about it in terms of what are the right two things that we’re trying to optimize for in order to get that conversation that Matt and Larry were having. I thought about that for quite a while. In fact, when I was at Apple, I came up with a framework that wasn’t quite right. It was close. It was a smiley face to a frowny face unclear to clear, but that wasn’t quite right.

When I started writing Radical Candor, I wasn’t sure that it was going to be a book that I was going to publish. I’m now coaching some people and I’m playing with ideas. I spent three whole months playing with the 2 by 2 and coming up with care personally challenged directly. It seems so simple but, was it love and truth? That was too abstract and I’m playing with all the different words for a while. Instead of calling it ruinous empathy, I was calling it cruel empathy. I was getting lots of feedback and my husband hated that. I was coaching Jack Dorsey at the time and he said, “I refuse to read a book called cruel empathy. It sounds like a harlequin romance.”

I struggled just boiling the idea down to this 2 by 2. Finally, I sent it to my friend Ellen Konar. She was someone I had worked at Google with and she was very skeptical and very psychologically aware and smart. Also, she’s a quantitative marketer. She had all this critical feedback after another. Finally, I sent her one version and she said, “This is interesting. I would like to have a conversation with the person who came up with this,” then I knew I was onto something.

That was when I decided to sit down and write the book. Even after I wrote it, I had written a couple of novels earlier that never got public. I never thought the book was going to help me with my coaching. I didn’t know if I would even publish it and then I had a friend. A friend’s husband died tragically and a bunch of business girlfriends came and stayed with me. One of them was friends with an agent and she said, “You’ve got to send us to Howard Yoon,” and I did. He sold it and the rest is history. It was not a straight path.

Demystifying The Radical Candor Framework

They rarely are. For the uninitiated, the final version of the 2 by 2 framework was?

Imagine a vertical line which is labeled care personally. A horizontal line which is labeled challenge directly and in the upper hand quadrant is radical candor. That’s what happens when you care personally and are challenged directly at the same time. In the bottom right-hand quadrant is obnoxious aggression. That’s what happens when you challenge yourself but you don’t show you care. Maybe you do care but you fail to show it. The worst quadrant of all is where you’re neither caring nor challenging and that’s manipulative insincerity.

The upper left-hand quadrant is the mistake that most of us make most of the time. This is what happens when you do remember to show that you care about someone but you’re so worried about not hurting their feelings or not offending them that you fail to tell them something they’d be better off knowing in the long run. That’s what I call ruinous empathy.

I have an alternate version of ruinous empathy that I was thinking about that I call ruinous apathy.

Although, ruinous apathy may be more like manipulative insincerity.

It may. On paper, you care and in practice you don’t care. I’ve worked with people who’ve been in that category.

There’s something about radical hypocrisy somewhere in there. I’m not sure.

Probably. You’d have to have a third dimension and that just doesn’t play well in books.

No, it does not.

The book came out and it was a big success, lots of discussion and debate and all of those things that happen after a book comes out that prompts thinking. As you were taking all of that in, what did you hear from people that felt like misunderstanding or misapplications of what you were trying to convey in the book?

Hands down the most painful feedback that I got, the most frustrating thing that happened was that I would get emails from people and they would say, “My boss, read your book and they’re using it as an excuse to act like a garden variety jerk.” The word radical is maybe prone to misinterpretation. Perhaps I should have called the book Compassionate Candor. That would have been more clear but it probably wouldn’t have sold as many books. It doesn’t sound as cool as radical candor.

What I mean when I’m talking about radical candor is that it’s rare. The combination of love and truth. The combination of caring personally and challenging directly is rare. It’s also radical and fundamental meaning they’re elemental. They’re foundational is what they are. It’s the foundation you need to sit on in order to build something great. That’s the idea I was trying to get at. Not extremism or something that was mean. That’s one thing that happened. I also got some helpful feedback that prompted me to write a whole other book, Radical Respect.

What was some of that feedback that led to that?

I was giving a radical candor talk at a tech company in San Francisco and I was excited to give this talk. The CEO of the company had been a colleague of mine for the better part of a decade when we worked together at Google. She’s a person I like and respect enormously. I was excited to go and talk to her team. When I finished giving the radical candor talk, she pulled me aside and said, “Kim, I’m excited to roll out radical candor. It’s going to help me build the culture, innovative culture that I want to build you here. I got to tell you it’s much harder for me to roll it out than it is for you.”

She went on to explain to me that as soon as she would give people even the most gentle compassionate criticism. They would call her an angry Black woman. I know this was true and how unfair it was because she’s one of the most cheerful and reasonable people I’ve ever worked with. It’s incredibly unfair. As soon as she said it to me, I had four different realizations and these became the chapters of the book. The first thing I realized was that I had not been the colleague that I imagine myself to be. I’ve not been an upstander. Instead, I had just pretended that these things were not happening to her. I probably didn’t even notice.

It never even occurred to me the toll it must take on her to have to show up unfailingly cheerful and pleasant, even though she had what to be pissed off about at work as we all do. That was number one. There’s all chapters on how to intervene when you notice and also how to notice disrespect in the workplace. The second thing that I realized was that not only had I been in denial about the kinds of things that were happening to her. I was also in denial about the kinds of things that were happening to me, as a woman in tech.

It’s hard for the author of a book called Radical Candor to admit, but I had gone through much of my career pretending that a whole host of disrespectful attitudes and behaviors were not happening, that were in fact happening probably because I never wanted to think of myself as a victim. I had pretended this stuff wasn’t happening. I defaulted to silence when I would have been better served to speak up. That was thing number two.

Now, the third thing that I realized and was probably the hardest thing to realize was that as much as I don’t want to be the victim. Even less do I want to be the culprit. The thing that I was most deeply in denial about was the times when I was the one who was expressing a disrespectful attitude or behavior. There’s a whole chapter on what you can do when you’re the person who is disrespectful, how you can become aware of it and how you can make amends properly.

The fourth thing that I realized was that I prided myself on being this leader who’s creating these BS-free zones where everybody can do the best work of their lives and build the best relationships of their careers. Often, I was pretending that these disrespectful attitudes and behaviors were not happening when it was my job to prevent them from happening. There’s a whole chapter and in fact, it begins with what leaders can do to prevent this nonsense from getting their team’s way of working better together.

There’s a lot of nonsense in the world, even in the best intentions of companies.

That’s the thing, it’s a leader. It’s not enough to be a good person. You’ve got to build good management systems and that doesn’t sound so exciting, but it’s important.

Unmasking Organizational Dysfunction: Signs Of Lacking Candor And Respect

It is very important. To start with the before picture, what are the signs that an organization has a culture that’s lacking in the radical candor and respect that you’re talking about? How have you seen them make that journey successfully?

When companies start, they are often radically candid. It’s a small group of people and they know each other well so it’s easier for them to challenge each other and because of that, they find some success and they start to grow. As they grow, what feels natural starts to feel uncomfortable and they fall prey to the gravitational pull of ruinous empathy. That first sign is when there’s uncomfortable silence. There’s the meeting after the meeting.

The meeting after the meeting gets particularly insidious because then you’re usually dropping down into manipulative insincerity because now you’re talking about people behind their back. When people are BCCed often is a sign of manipulative insincerity. Now, problems are not getting fixed. Problems are growing and growing and people are frustrated. Often what happens is somebody will finally explode. I don’t know about you, but when I’ve been silent about something for too long, when I finally do speak up, I maybe don’t say it in the nicest way. I go from ruinous empathy to manipulative insincerity to obnoxious aggression.

I can relate to that.

Now I explode and I say the thing in this harsh mean way but to a certain extent, it feels like a relief at first because at least it’s been said. At least it’s on the table and the problems are getting fixed. Now I get rewarded for my obnoxious aggression and nobody is complaining to me. I think, “This is the way to be. I’m just going to be as obnoxious as possible and then maybe I even get promoted.” This is a very dangerous moment in a company’s history. On every team, there comes a moment in history when the jerks begin to win. Not necessarily because they’re inherently jerks but bad behavior starts to become rewarded.

You have a few people in power who are being obnoxiously aggressive and the rest of the company is responding with manipulative insincerity. That’s like a recipe for a bad culture. What you want to do is you want to recognize this pattern. Before you let your organization succumb to the gravitational pull of ruinous empathy, you want to remind people that the kind thing to do is to solicit feedback, to make it easy for people to tell you when you’re screwing up and to give feedback as a gift. It’s a gift you want to receive before you give.

Kim Scott: The kind thing to do is to solicit feedback, making it easy for people to tell you when you’re screwing up, and to give feedback as a gift.

It doesn’t need to be two ways in the end. You have to be willing to receive it too. Otherwise, you’re not setting the example for people.

You’ve got to think practically and tactically about where and when you’re going to solicit feedback, especially as a leader. It’s also important as an individual contributor. You want to think about the one-on-one meetings you have. You want to make sure that you’re mostly listening to people when you’re meeting with them one-on-one, that you’re letting them get their agenda items out. If you’re someone’s boss and having a one-on-one, it’s important to put the onus on them to come prepared with an agenda but you get the last five minutes.

You get the last five minutes of the one-on-one to solicit feedback. Not to give it. You want to give it these impromptu conversations, two-minute conversations. You want to solicit it in every one-on-one meeting that you have, then you want to reward the candor when you get it. That’s like a practical and tactical thing that leaders can do to begin to build this culture of radical candor.

For an individual manager or individual contributor for that matter, this can be hard, especially when you’re being asked to do it up or even just with your peers or whoever had it. How do you get people comfortable? Get them past that stage of it feeling awkward, worrying about it creating conflict or somebody’s feelings getting hurt. You just described it earlier that feedback is a gift. There is a generosity to it but a lot of people have a hard time seeing that. It doesn’t feel like a gift.

I think a couple of things. First of all, it’s never going to get comfortable, get comfortable with the discomfort. You’ve got to embrace the discomfort, so you’ve got to learn to ask your questions. The first thing that can help and this is going to help, if you are soliciting feedback. This is going to help you start a conversation, but there’s no way you can come up with a question that contains emotional Novocain. The other person is still going to feel uncomfortable. Let’s try it. What could I do or stop doing for the rest of this interview to make it a better experience for your readers?

You’re putting me on the spot here.

What am I going to do now? Step number one is to think about your questions. If everybody reading what’s going on can think and don’t ask Kim’s question. If you sound like Kim’s, people won’t believe that you want the answer. You want to think about a question that can’t be answered with a yes or no. It will be hard for you to answer that question. “Nothing. Everything’s perfect.” You could, but it would be hard. I’m trying to put you on the spot a little bit.

You want to ask a question that sounds like you and you also want to make sure that you’re paying attention to the other person. You don’t seem like a person who’s going to want a pow question. I tried to ask it in a way that was gentler. That’s step number one. Now, step number two is for me to shut my mouth and count to six and give you the answer.

I will answer you in a second. That silence is important because I remember hearing this from Rob Kaplan. I don’t know if you know him. He’s written a bunch of books and a Goldman guy came and spoke at one of the companies that I worked for. He talked about the fact that at the end of a meeting he would ask, “How can I be helpful to you?” He would sit there until they came up with an answer.

Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple is good at this, too. He is not uncomfortable with silence and this is what I mean by embracing the discomfort. That willingness to sit there and let the other person sweat a little bit, and you’re sweating a little bit. It’s uncomfortable for both of you.

I will answer your question. I would say we’re 35 minutes roughly into the hour. I’m going to keep time with you because I appreciate you doing this. I want to make sure we dive a little deeper into the practical applications of radical candor and have enough time to talk about your other two books and hear some of the things you’re doing now. In terms of managing our time, that’s how you can help me. have the episode discussion over the remaining minutes that we’ve got.

The third step is to listen with the intent to understand. A good way to do that, I’m going to now repeat back what you said and you can tell me if I’m right or wrong. I think what you’re saying is, maybe I need to make my answer a little more punchy for us to keep on time.

We need to be mindful of that because we will otherwise run out of time, so that would be great.

I’m going to reward the candor and do that, so let’s go. These are the four steps to soliciting feedback.

Navigating Candor: Avoiding Micromanagement And Fostering Feedback

How do you make sure if you are a manager that Radical Candor doesn’t turn into micromanaging or spot correcting every little thing?

What your goal as a manager is to be a thought partner with each one of the people who are working for you. That means you don’t want to be a micromanager but you also don’t want to be an absentee manager. One of the things that’s been helpful to me is to be aware of what the people who work for me want from me and what one person might feel is micromanagement. Another person might feel like an absentee. Some people who work for you want more of you and others want less.

One question is just to make sure that is one of the things you ask in your one-on-one. Where did I get involved that you wish I hadn’t and where did I fail to get involved that you wish I had? That’s one thing. Another thing to keep in mind is for every good relationship, it’s important to leave three important things unsaid every day. Maybe you don’t like my orange sweater but does it matter what I’m wearing? You can just keep that to yourself unless it’s important for some reason.

You have to learn to focus on what matters and not obsess about every little detail. Have you found and have people told you in all of the conversations that you’ve had over the years since you wrote the book. What differs in a remote environment? What differs in different cultures or with global teams spread across the world in terms of being able to do this well and what makes it harder?

Radical Candor gets measured not at the speaker’s mouth but at the listener’s ears. It’s important to be aware. I can say the same thing in New York. I can say the same thing in Memphis and the same thing in California. It’s going to be interpreted very differently because even though those places are all in the same country, they’re very different cultures. I can go to the Netherlands and I can challenge myself directly and that will be interpreted as respectful.

If I say the same thing in the same way in Japan, it’s going to be interpreted as quite rude and dismissed. It’s important to learn how to figure out what’s happening at the listener’s ear and to figure out, do I need to move up more on care personally or over more on challenge directly over Zoom or whatever platform you use. Over video it’s harder.

I recommend picking up the phone and calling someone. There’s research coming out of the University of Chicago that says, “We’re apt to misinterpret people’s facial expressions and body language, especially when we’re just a little square on a screen.” Use the telephone. Pick up the phone, reach out and touch someone.

Which is counterintuitive. I had not heard about that research. It’s counterintuitive because if you believe the adage that only 7% of what you say is coming out of your mouth and the rest of it in your body language and all of those other things. You’re losing the whole physical aspect of it, which you would think video would do better than a phone call. It sounds like it’s ending up working against you.

I used to recommend video but now I realize that a lot of what we communicate but also a lot of what we miscommunicate happens in the facial. There may be more noise than signal. For example, if we’re talking and you’re giving me some critical feedback and I tear up. You might think I’m sad but more likely, I’m furious but you don’t know. How are you supposed to know?

If we’re on the phone and you don’t even notice that I’m tearing up. I’m able to explain to you what’s in my head then you’re not distracted by my tears, just to pick it out on random examples. If you get very mad, you might be sad but I don’t know. I think you’re mad, so I respond like you’re mad and then we just miscommunicate.

Cultivating Radical Respect: Overcoming Bias, Prejudice, And Bullying

Let’s shift into Radical Respect. You talk a little bit about the origin of that book came to be. Let’s talk about practical applications here. What are some of the things that leaders can do to start addressing these issues in their team? We had a little bit of a George Floyd wake up moment that lasted for a few years. It feels like we’ve mostly forgotten that stuff. It would be great to hear your perspective on how this is playing out and how you counsel your clients on it.

We’ve slipped back into denial. When I was telling you about why I wrote Radical Respect, it was because I had this sudden moment where I realized I had been in denial. Denial is such a tricky thing, but denying a problem does not solve it. We need to be aware of these problems. I have met almost no one who woke up in the morning and said, “What I want to do is create a disrespectful work environment.” There’s a pretty strong consensus that you’re going to get more out of people in a respectful work environment.

You’re hiring people because you want them to do good work. You never hire someone intentionally to disrespect them. That would be irrational. Despite our best intentions, we often wind up in these environments that are not respectful. What gets in the way of respect and also what is respect? Respect is this fundamental regard for the dignity of others. There’s another definition of respect which is I have to earn your respect for me as a writer by writing a good book, but that’s not the respect I’m talking about.

I’m talking about this unconditional regard that we owe each other for our shared humanity. What gets in the way of that? There are a million things that get in the way of that respect but I’m going to boil it down to three things, bias, prejudice, and bullying. One of the problems here is that we often conflate those three problems as though they’re the same thing then the problem feels insoluble. That’s part of the reason why we’re tempted to retreat back into denial.

If you can’t solve a problem, what’s the point in looking at it? What do you do when you’re faced with a gnarly problem? You break it down into its component parts and you solve it one at a time. Let’s break bias, prejudice and bullying down. Bias is not meaning it. It’s unconscious. Prejudice, however, is a very consciously held belief. Usually, it’s incorporating some unfair and inaccurate stereotypes. I’m going to define that as meaning it. Bias is not meaning it. Prejudice is meaning it and bullying is just being mean. It’s not about a belief conscious or unconscious. It’s about trying to dominate someone for some personal gain.

We used to call those people equal opportunity offenders.

Exactly. Often, they’ll pick on the most vulnerable people first. Once they’re finished picking all the vulnerable people, they’re coming for you.

They start working their way up the food chain.

If you don’t happen to be in the most vulnerable category. It’s good to nip that behavior in the butt because it’s going to bite you eventually. The thing that leaders need to do is they need to realize that they need to prevent these things from happening. In the case of bias, I recommend learning how to disrupt bias in meetings. Sit down with your team, come up with a word or phrase that people will use when they notice bias. Teach them how to begin to learn how to recognize even unintended offenses that may be happening.

Don’t just leave those as elephants in the room because they’re going to prevent you from getting stuff done. In the case of prejudice, you need to be very clear about the policies you’re creating. Make sure that everybody understands that there’s a line between one person’s freedom to believe whatever they want but they can’t impose those beliefs on others. It’s easy for me to say, “There’s a very clear line,” like very hard for a leader to define where that line is but you need policies that make it clear to people.

In the case of bullying, you’ve got to create consequences for bullying. It’s your job as a leader to make sure that a person gets penalized and that there are consequences for bullying others. Sometimes, it looks like the person who bullies others is getting stuff done but what they’re doing is they’re preventing their teammates from getting things done. They’re doing more harm than good. It’s your job as the leader to notice that and prevent it.

Kim Scott: You’ve got to create consequences for bullying. It’s your job as a leader to ensure a person is penalized; there are consequences.

As colleagues. You talked a little bit about your own realization that you aren’t necessarily always the best colleague either by behaving actively in a way that wasn’t good or by being silent. How can you, as a colleague, break the cycle and be a bit more of an active ally, if you want to think about it that way?

One of my favorite stories in the book which I call these folks upstanders. People who are colleagues and who notice something going wrong and who do something, who intervene in some way. A woman I know was going into a meeting with two colleagues. Both of whom were men. She had the expertise that was going to win her team the deal, so she sat at the center of the table and her two-colleague sat to her left. When the other side came in, the first person sat across from the guy to her immediate left.

I’ve seen this happen.

Bias shows up in who we sit across from. She started talking and when the other side had questions, they didn’t direct them at her. They directed them at her two colleagues who were men as though she weren’t in the room. She hadn’t been the one speaking. It happened once and it happened twice. Finally, it happened a third time. Her colleague stood up and said, “We should switch seats,” and they did. That was all he had to do to totally change the dynamic in the room. That’s an example of an eye statement. Responding to bias was an eye statement, “We should switch seats.”

He was holding up a mirror to the other side to let them notice what was happening. It’s hard to think of that. On the one hand, that’s a simple story. On the other hand, I’ve been in similar situations and I didn’t think to say, “We should switch seats.” There have been other times where I felt like if I said something publicly in the moment that it might make the situation worse rather than better. For example, I was working at a company. There was a leader of the company who had problems with a woman who worked for him. We’ll put it that way.

His HR director for some reason decided that she was going to defend him by doing the same thing to the men on his team that he was doing. It was awful. She’s introducing this guy on the team. She’s like, “This guy who worked for the guy.” There’s a hierarchy. She introduced him and started talking about his Rockstar thighs. I was like, “This is awkward,” but I didn’t want to stand up publicly and say anything. I pulled him aside later and I was like, “That was weird.” He said to me, “I’m so glad you said something,” because I felt weird but nobody else said anything.

I was like, “Is it just me?” It’s very important. I’ve been in similar situations that he was in which is why I knew I should say something to him. If you can’t say something directly, this is called the five Ds of being a better colleague. You can say something directly. You can also delay by which, check in later with the person. You can also cause a distraction. Sometimes spilling your coffee. There was one time when I was working in college on a trading floor. There was this one guy who was bullying. He was screaming at me. This other guy on the trading floor just had a hacky sack and he just did it to the guy’s head.

That was awesome because it created a distraction. He quit yelling at me. It wasn’t a direct, “You can’t talk to her like that,” which would have made me feel awkward. Creating a distraction is another thing you can do if you notice some disrespectful incident happening. You can also delegate. A lot has been written about the upstander problem or the silent bystander problem. Often when these things happen, they’ll be five or six people who are colleagues who are witnessing the event but nobody knows what to do. It comes less likely that anybody will intervene.

If you can catch someone else’s eye who might be better situated to intervene you can delegate. Ask someone else to intervene. If you’re on a flight, call the flight attendant button if you notice something happening next to you or you can document what’s happening. We’re all carrying these movie cameras around in our pockets. You can document but then make sure that the person who was on the receiving end of the disrespectful attitude or behavior, the person who is harmed by it owns. Don’t publish your documentation to social media without their permission. Those are five different ways you can intervene as a colleague when you notice something bad happening.

Beyond Business: Kim Scott’s Next Chapter And Life Lessons

Kim, if I go back to the very beginning of our conversation when you’re that high school kid in Memphis, Tennessee, going out and wondering like, why the hell do we have so many nuclear weapons and then your time in Kosovo and what you’re doing. You may describe yourself as not being a consistent upstander, but you’ve been standing up for what you believe in for a long time.

I hope so. That is very core to who I want to be. Like all of us, sometimes it feels awkward. Sometimes I’m tempted not to say the thing and I wrestle with it.

We all do.

Hopefully, I wrestle successful with it.

What are you working on now that you’re particularly excited about? I know you’ve got a mix of things going on.

I just read this book called Awe by Dr. Keltner. It’s a wonderful book. It’s a book about where I feel like we’re living in this very cynical harsh time. What this book is about, it’s about how awe is the antidote to this and he has eight different kinds of awe like natural beauty and moral courage. There’s all these different ways to feel inspired. I think backpacking like you and I both love to do is a great way to experience and to find that energy.

What I am trying to do is write a novel that is not a utopian novel because Utopia turns into dystopia. It’s a novel that imagines a world in which we have figured all the things out that are going so badly wrong. It turns out even in a fictional world where I can control everything, it’s pretty hard to figure out how this might all work out, but that’s what I’m excited about doing.

Fiction is harder to write than nonfiction in many ways, especially when you’re trying to imagine some future world. I marvel at these books that have projected forward, either in a dystopian or utopian direction who’ve created these worlds that are so intricate but also consistent. It takes unbeatable thoughts. I wish you luck with that.

It takes a lot of time and I’m just trying to give it a lot of time. I’m trying to let it marinate and believe. I wrote a couple hundred pages. I dim away. I started over and then I wrote a couple hundred more pages. Now I’m starting over a third time.

Have you ever thought about going back to the old books and trying to get them published?

If anybody reading wants to publish my old books, Virtual Love, The Measurement Problem, and The Househusband. They’re great novels. You can buy them. If you can’t publish them, you can’t buy them on Amazon but they’re self-published. Fiction is hard. Fiction is hard to write and it’s hard to publish.

You talked a minute ago about the problems that we’re having. What are the biggest challenges that you see organizational leaders facing now?

It’s tempting as a leader, and I certainly have succumbed to this. If I were the uncontested leader, all this other BS wouldn’t be happening. I need more power. For example, when I started my first company Juice software, I made sure that I was in control of the company. The venture capitalists couldn’t tell me what to do. It also meant that I made sure that the employees could not tell me what to do and that was a big mistake.

What I needed to do was to very consciously design management systems that would limit my own power. That would allow people. Not just allow people but demand that people give me feedback. “Tell me when I’m wrong. Challenge me.” We started to touch on this. We imagine that if we’re a good person and we’re in control, everything is going to be awesome. I promise you, just because you’re the CEO doesn’t mean that human nature is going to change.

It’s not going to be all awesome. The same BS that happened in other places will happen in your company unless you design management systems that limit the harm that power can do in an organization. We need a hierarchy but we need a hierarchy that is optimized for a collaboration, not dominant.

There’s a bunch of thoughts in Radical Respect about how to create such a collaboration hierarchy. I learned a lot of that at Google. shown a brown Shona Brown, who led business operations at Google, very consciously designed the management systems to strip power, traditional sources of power away from managers. Google still had a management hierarchy, but you didn’t get to choose laterally who you hired, who you fired, or who you promoted. There was good friction in the system.

Career Wisdom: Staying Present And Embracing Discomfort

Last question. If you could go back to your 25-year-old self and give her advice or you were giving advice to somebody who’s early in their career now. What would be the key piece of advice you’d want to leave them with or your younger self with?

I would say try to stay loose. Try to have fun. Try not to imagine that you must do this because it’s going to have this impact but try to stay more grounded in the present. I feel like I wasted too much time in my career worrying about resume things and too little time trying to enjoy and bring my best self to whatever it was I was doing at the time. I had a great coach when I was at Google, Fred Kofman. He described a situation where he had five young sons under the age of ten or something. A lot of energy.

His wife wasn’t with him and he was stuck on a flight with these five young boys. They were on the tarmac for like four hours. Two hours in, he just wanted to be anywhere but there. You’re going to have times in your career where you’re stuck on the tarmac with five energetic children. He said he just needed to be present. He said, “Being present in this moment means this is not a situation I want to be in but I’m going to bring my best self to it. I’m going to choose how I respond to this.” If I had done that earlier in my career rather than thinking, “What I want to be is here,” but realizing where I am is here and I’m going to bring my best self to it. I would have had a little more fun along the way.

Sometimes when you find yourself in those crisis moments, I’ll describe this as a crisis of sorts. You have no choice but to just surrender to the moment. It’s harder to surrender to the moment. I know I struggle with this when there isn’t a crisis, but you’re still thinking about a step ahead or I’m thinking about tomorrow or the next thing or whatever. It’s hard. It’s hard to do that.

When you have choices, ironically. It’s like, “Should I quit?” If you can quit, you can go on an endless loop of, should I stay or should I go and just saying, “I’m going to make a decision and I’m going to stay for a year or six months. I’m not going to think about it. I’m going to be fully present for six months and then I’ll reevaluate.” Do the short-term, medium term or long-term. Don’t bring the long-term too soon. Don’t obsess on the long term too much. Don’t ignore it either.

Good enough. Thank you. Thanks for doing this, Kim. I sincerely appreciate it.

It’s a fun conversation.

I enjoyed it as well and I look forward to staying in touch. Thanks so much to Kim for joining me to discuss Radical Candor, Radical Respect, and how her own career journey inspired them and some of the things she’s doing. As a reminder, this episode is brought to you by PathWise.io. If you’re ready to take control of your career, you can visit PathWise now and join our community. Basic membership is free. You also sign up on the website for our newsletter and visit us on LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.

Important Links

• Kim Scott
• Kim Scott on LinkedIn
• Kim Scott on Twitter
• Radical Candor
• Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
• Radical Respect
• Just Work
• Diary of Anne Frank
• Awe
• Virtual Love
• The Measurement Problem
• The Househusband
• PathWise.io on LinkedIn
• PathWise.io on Twitter
• PathWise.io on Facebook
• PathWise.io on YouTube
• PathWise.io on Instagram
• PathWise.io in TikTok

About Kim Scott

Kim Scott is the author of Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, Radical Respect: How to Work Together Better and Just Work: How to Confront Bias, Prejudice and Bullying to Produce a Culture of Inclusivity. She is also the co-founder of the company Radical Candor. Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and other tech companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University and before that led AdSense, YouTube, and DoubleClick teams at Google. Prior to that Kim managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo and started a diamond-cutting factory in Moscow. She co-hosts the podcasts Radical Candor and Radical Respect. She lives with her family in Silicon Valley.