The Provocateurs:

Stuart Crainer:

Hello, I’m Stuart Crainer. I’m the co-founder of Thinkers50, and I would like to welcome you to the monthly podcast series Provocateurs, in which we explore the experiences, insights, and perspectives of inspiring leaders. Our aim is to provoke you to think and act differently through conversations with some fantastic people. This is a collaboration between Thinkers50 and Deloitte. So my co-host today is Steve Goldbach. Steve is Deloitte’s Chief Strategy Officer [ed: Steve’s job position has changed since the time of the recording, he is now Deloitte’s Sustainability, Climate, & Equity Leader] and co-author of the book Provoke, which ignited this series. Steve, welcome and please introduce today’s fantastic guest, one I know you are really excited about.

Steve Goldbach:

Indeed, I am, Stuart. So it’s great to be here and you are correct that I’m super excited. So I owe Kim a debt of gratitude. In fact, both Geoff and I owe Kim a debt of gratitude who really helped launch some of the thinking about how we promote Detonate, which was a real help and we’re grateful for her advice along the way. But Kim herself is the author, as many of you know, of the New York Times bestselling book, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. And more recently Just Work: How to Root Out Bias, Prejudice, and Bullying to Create a Kick-Ass Culture of Inclusivity. She’s the co-founder of Radical Candor, a company that helps people put the ideas in her books into practice. Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and other tech companies, and she was a member of the faculty at Apple University. And before that she led teams at Google.

She’s managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo and started a diamond cutting factory in Moscow. And that’s not all. She’s also the author of three novels, Virtual Love, The Househusband, and The Measurement Problem. And I will just share that she is a super cool person, amazingly kind and generous with her time. So we’re very excited to explore some of her ideas today.

Stuart Crainer:

And Kim, what a career. It’s just amazing, as Steve was going through it. And we’ll come back to Kosovo and Moscow at a later stage perhaps, and the novels. But how do you make sense of your career? Is there a golden thread that runs through it? How do you explain it to yourself?

Kim Scott:

Yeah, my whole goal in my career was to become a manager or to build a career in business so that I could subsidize my novel writing habit. So I wanted to do things that were interesting and fun. And I would say if there is a thread, it is about creating environments where everyone can do their best work and enjoy working together. Can live and work happily together.

Steve Goldbach:

Well, let’s maybe start with Just Work as a place to dig in. And you and I had the opportunity to sit down a little while ago and get to know each other a bit. And I shared with you that Just Work was, at least my words were, more raw and unflinching. But I found it so helpful, and I was maybe thinking that a great place to dig in would be to share your thinking about the different words you can use in instances of bias and prejudice and bullying and how ‘I’ statements are a great place to start in bias and maybe a good… Maybe tell one of the stories from the book as a place to dig into how you thought about conceptualizing it.

Kim Scott:

Sure, absolutely. I think that one of the reasons at least that I found, throughout my career, that I responded with, I defaulted to silence. When something felt wrong, I wouldn’t respond, and that felt bad. Over time, I felt like that was robbing me of my agency. So as I sat down to write Just Work, I really wanted to try to understand why this was happening. And I think part of the reason why it was happening for me at least, and others seem to have found it helpful as well, is that I often conflated bias, prejudice, and bullying as though they’re the same thing, but they’re actually three very different things. And so I want to offer some quick definitions so we can disambiguate the problem and then some ideas about how to respond to each. Bias, there’s a lot more to be said about all these topics, but bias, I’m going to define as not meaning it, it’s usually unconscious. Whereas prejudice is, I’m going to define as meaning it, it’s a very consciously held belief, usually reflecting some unfair and inaccurate stereotype.

And bullying, I’m going to define as just being mean. So how do you respond to each? I find with bias, it’s useful to respond with an ‘I’ statement. So I’ll tell you a story explaining what I mean by this. Aileen Lee actually told me this story. She’s the founder of Cowboy VC and she told a story about going into a meeting with two colleagues who were men and they were pitching a deal, and Aileen had the expertise that was going to win her team the deal. So they filed into the conference room, Aileen sat in the center of the table, and then her two colleagues sat to her left. And the other side came in and the first person sat across from the guy to Aileen’s left. The next person sat across from the guy to his left. And that’s often, by the way, how bais shows up, it’s just who decides to sit next to whom. 

Everyone else filed on down the table, leaving Aileen dangling by herself. But Aileen was undeterred. She started talking and when the other side had questions about what she was saying, they directed them not at her, but at her two colleagues who were men. That’s also how bias often shows up. And it happened once, it happened twice, it happened a third time, and finally her colleague stood up and he said, “I think Aileen and I should switch seats.” That was all he had to do to totally change the dynamic in the room. So that’s an example of an ‘I’ statement, responding to bias. An ‘I’ statement invites the rest of the people in the room to understand what’s going on from your perspective. And usually they’ll change it. I mean maybe they’ll feel a little defensive, but everybody started then engaging with Aileen.

And it’s worth pausing and thinking, why did he do that? I think he did that in part because he likes Aileen and he didn’t like seeing her get ignored. But he also did it because he just wanted to win the deal. And he knew that if he couldn’t get the other side listening to Aileen, they wouldn’t win the deal. So there’s always an emotional element to this, an ethical element to this and a practical element to disrupting bias.

Steve Goldbach:

And you have a name for that kind of person. Do you want to share?

Kim Scott:

Yes. Yes. So he was an upstander, he was an upstander. And an upstander is someone who stands up to some form of injustice that they notice going on. So if you notice something that seems off and maybe it’s not happening to you, it’s happening to someone else, I think it’s really important to intervene in some way. And one of the reasons why I wrote Just Work is in gratitude to all the people who’ve been upstanders in the course of my career. And upstanders have so many different advantages. There’s usually more upstanders, there’s usually more observers to something going wrong than there are culprits and victims. And very often an upstander shares an identity with the person who’s saying or doing the problematic thing. So it’s easier for that other person to hear it from the upstander than it would be from the person who’s being harmed.

So I think that it is really important to intervene, but also, because I’m so grateful to upstanders, I want to acknowledge that sometimes it’s dangerous to intervene. So it doesn’t always have to be a direct intervention. Sometimes an upstander can simply pull the person who was harmed aside after the fact and say, “Are you okay?” That’s also a fair intervention. So you can intervene directly, you can intervene by delaying, by talking to the person later, you can document what’s happened and then give it to them, you don’t own that documentation, the person harmed owns the documentation. You can delegate, you can ask someone else to intervene. Or you can create a distraction. So those are the five D’s, which I didn’t make up, a firm called Hollaback! did.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah, I think the emotional, ethical, and practical delineation of bias is really useful.

Kim Scott:

Yeah.

Stuart Crainer:

What about prejudice and bullying? Can we move on to those now?

Kim Scott:

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So if an ‘I’ statement in the face of bias holds a mirror up for the other person to notice what’s going on and to make a change, then what do you do about prejudice? Because if you hold a mirror up to prejudice, it’s not going to work. The other person’s going to grin in the mirror and say, “Oh yeah, aren’t I good looking?” They believe that thing. So it’s not going to change it just to hold up a mirror. So in the case of prejudice, I think you really need an ‘it’ statement. And an ‘it’ statement can appeal to the law, an ‘it’ statement can appeal to an HR policy or it can appeal to common sense. So for an example, a colleague of mine was in a hiring meeting and everyone who had interviewed all the candidates agreed that the most qualified person for the job was a black woman who had worn her hair out naturally in the interview.

And the hiring manager at the end of debrief said, “Well, I can’t extend an offer to that candidate.” And my colleague said, “Why not?” And the hiring manager said, “Well, I’m not going to put that hair in front of the business.” So unbelievable that this is, and this was recent at a very well regarded US company. And so what’s an example of an ‘it’ statement, in that case? My colleague could have said, “It is illegal not to hire someone because of their hair,” which it was in that state thanks to the Crown Act. She could have said, ”It is an HR violation not to hire someone because of their hair,” which it was at that company. But if the HR policy and the law were not in place, she also could have just appealed to common sense. “It is ridiculous not to hire the most qualified candidate because of their hair.”

An ‘it’ statement makes it clear where the line is between one person’s freedom to believe whatever they want, but they cannot impose those beliefs on other people. So, easy to say that, hard to figure out where that line is, but that’s the notion of an ‘it’ statement. Whereas for bullying, neither the ‘I’ statement nor the ‘it’ statement will work. If a bully knows where the line is, they’re sure to try to push their way past it. And it’s very interesting. I really learned this; I was forced to think about this when my daughter was getting bullied in third grade and I was encouraging her to use an ‘I’ statement. Tell this kid, “I feel sad when you … blah, blah blah, blah, blah.” My daughter banged her fist on the table and she said, “Mom, they are trying to make me feel sad. Why would I tell them they succeeded?” And I was like, that is a really good point.

And so we talked about it and we realized a ‘you’ statement would work better, “You can’t talk to me like that” or “What’s going on for you here?” Or even a ‘you’ non-sequitur, “Where’d you get that shirt?” The point of a ‘you’ statement is that it pushes someone away. If an ‘I’ statement invites them in, a ‘you’ statement pushes them away and it puts you in the active role, you’re no longer receiving what they’re dishing out, you’re dishing something out back at them.

Steve Goldbach:

Yeah. One of the reasons I love the concepts in Just Work is that they’re just so pragmatic. I feel, and Kim, I’d be curious about your observations on this. I feel like many of us see instances of bias, prejudice, and bullying with all too great frequency. And the reason why I like Just Work is because I think the reason why a lot of it gets left unsaid or unaddressed is because we’re very unclear about how to address it and hence the pragmatic approach that you describe and clarity on it. Besides not knowing what to do, what are some of the other reasons why you think we just don’t tend to address this well in society or in business specifically?

Kim Scott:

I think that a lot of these patterns of thought that we have are very deeply ingrained and it is really difficult to change them. So we have to be persistent with ourselves, but also patient. We have to extend ourselves a little bit of grace. So one of the, it’s almost like, I was thinking about it this morning, it’s almost like dieting. It’s like we all went to the unconscious bias training class and it was good and we learned something from it, but it’s almost like saying, “Okay, well I ate something healthy this morning, so now I’m healthy.” It’s more like good habits of exercise and eating well. So I think we need more targeted interventions where we disrupt the bias without disrupting the meeting, for example. So in fact, I’m going to put it into practice. I’m going to wave this purple flag.

So bias disruptors, there’s three steps to bias disruptors, and the first one is to come up with a shared vocabulary. And there’s no magical words that are going to make the other person whose bias is being disrupted, not feel defensive. If you disrupt my bias, I’m always going to feel defensive and maybe ashamed. And so it’s my job to manage my feelings of shame and defensiveness, but we want to get in the habit of doing this and doing it often. And so with my team, we wave a purple flag, but your team may hate the purple flag and that’s fine. You can throw… One team I work with threw up a peace sign. Another one would say, ouch. And then giving the person who said or did the bias thing, the opportunity to say, oops. So, first thing to do is to sit down with your team and say, we’re going to do this. We’re going to disrupt bias in the meeting. What’s the word or phrase you want to use?

The second part of bias disruptors is working with people to respond well when they’re in the hot seat, when they’re the one whose bias has been disrupted. Because I can tell you where I feel that shame in my body. I feel a tingling in the backs of my knees, it’s almost the physical sensation that I get if my children will walk too close to the edge of a steep cliff or something. And when I am in that flight or fight mode, and that’s what shame brain puts us into, this fight or flight mode, it’s very hard for me to respond well. So it’s useful for me to have a thing that I know I’m going to say in that moment to try to reengage my executive function so that I don’t respond badly. So it’s, “Thank you for pointing it out” and either “I’m working on fixing it, so keep pointing it out,” and this is a nuance that I think often gets missed. Because, once we’re aware of a bias, we almost get in this paralytic state. I was working with a CEO who was trying to teach himself to say “you all” instead of “you guys.” Because he didn’t want to call half, well, a third of his company was women anyway. And he was trying to get that to 50-50, and excluding the women by saying “you guys” was not the right thing to do. But it was very hard for him because he had been saying “you guys” since he learned to speak. And so he had to be patient with himself, but also persistent. So that’s part of it. “Thank you for pointing it out again, often, I’m working on it.” Because sometimes, once someone has pointed something out, a problem out, it makes it more likely that you’re going to make the mistake again, and then feel bad about it and get in this … and we just have to break through that.

So that’s part of it. The other part of it that happens though sometimes, is, “Thank you for pointing it out, but I don’t know what I did wrong. Can you tell me after the meeting?” And that’s really hard too, because now I feel doubly ashamed. I feel ashamed because I have harmed someone and I feel ashamed because I’m ignorant. And so teaching people that they’re going to have these feelings and that it’s not the fault of the person who pointed out the bias, but that they have to manage their own feelings, is really important. And then the third part is we’ve got to have a shared commitment to pointing out one bias in at least every meeting. Because if we don’t, then it just means we haven’t either noticed or we didn’t feel comfortable. So I’m going to walk the talk here and I’m going to wave the purple flag on something that was just said.

You said, we see it many times a day. And I think what you meant is notice, at least when I was writing the book, Just Work, I hired someone to be a bias buster for me. And one of the things that she pointed out that I often write is sloppy sight metaphors. And I really understood what she meant, I didn’t want to use ableist language, so I understood at, sort of an intellectual point of view, but I also understood at an emotional place about that, because one of the people who was helping me edit the book is blind. And I didn’t want to use language that would offend him because I like him, I care about him. And so I thought I got it when I wrote the book, I really thought I got it both emotionally and intellectually. And then right before I handed the book into my editor, I did a quick search. And guess how many sloppy sight metaphors there were in a 350 page book?

Stuart Crainer:

17.

Kim Scott:

90, 90, 9-0! That’s what I mean by we have to be persistent. We have to be kind to ourselves and patient. But I didn’t need, self flagellation wasn’t going to help me change it, but I was going to have to keep looking for it. So that’s why purple flag.

Steve Goldbach:

I will try to model the behavior just to say thank you for pointing it out. To be candid, before I heard you say that I had not even thought of that concept before in the way I speak. So thank you for making me aware of it and I’m walking away with something to work on. So thank you for that.

Kim Scott:

Thank you for responding well. See it was no big deal. The purple… But we’ve got to do it. We’ve got to do it all the time. Because there’s a million of these things that, sort of, patterns of speech, patterns of thought, that we benefit from questioning.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah. I suppose bias, prejudice, and bullying are universal.

Kim Scott:

Yes.

Stuart Crainer:

But you are often working and talking to people working in global corporations. That must make it many times more difficult. 

Kim Scott:

Yes. And maybe it also makes it, it creates the opportunity for solidarity. So for example, one of the people I coach is a CEO in Turkey. And he had read Just Work, and obviously I wrote Just Work sort of from an American context. And he said, “We have different problems.” And he explained to me, a lot of regional biases and obviously there’s also gender, the gender issues I think everywhere in the world. But it was really useful, the opportunity to create solidarity, to use my experiences with the biases that I have been on the receiving end of helps me understand more and have more compassion for people who’ve been on the receiving end of other kinds of biases, and understanding when I have been the person who caused harm has helped me have more compassion for other people who might be causing harm for me.

So thinking through the different; there’s four different roles that we all play in this. And the opportunity to work cross-culturally helps us better understand all of the four roles. So sometimes we are the upstander, we already covered that. Other times we are the person who was harmed by the thing. Other times we’re the person who caused harm. And it’s hard to come to grips with that. And then other times we’re the leader. And so one of the things that happened after Just Work came out was that I got several emails from different black men who said, “Oh my gosh, this framework really helped me.” And I felt like success. That’s the goal here, is to build solidarity between differences, so that we understand and can do something about these problems when they arise. Because they are problems that are universal, but that doesn’t mean they’re inevitable. These are solvable problems.

Stuart Crainer:

Can we go back to the first one? I mean Just Work is your most recent work, Kim. Can we go back to Radical Candor? Can you tell us about the genesis of Radical Candor? Because it was such a huge success and the phrase has entered the management jar … not jar …

Kim Scott:

It’s jargon!

Steve Goldbach:

Lexicon!

Kim Scott:

Lexicon!

Stuart Crainer:

That’s the word I was looking for.

Kim Scott:

But jargon, I think you hit the nail on the head with jargon because sometimes people will say in the spirit of radical candor and then they proceed to act like a garden variety jerk. And that is not the spirit of radical candor. That is the spirit of obnoxious aggression. So I started thinking about the issue of radical candor probably, well probably when my grandmother told me when I was six years old that I would be better off if I listened to other people’s criticism. But anyway, I started thinking about it in a more structured way when I had started a software company and I came into the office and about 10 people had emailed me the same article. 10 out of 60 people had emailed me this article about how people would rather have a boss who’s really competent but a jerk than one who’s really nice but incompetent.

And I thought, gosh, are they sending me this because they think I’m a jerk or because they think I’m incompetent? And surely those are not my two choices. And I had gone to business school and I learned, like all of us, exactly nothing about management at business school, but I had learned about a two-by-two framework, a great way to solve all the world’s problems. And I started thinking about what makes for great managers and what makes for great feedback. And I was in a situation shortly after I joined Google where I had the opportunity to learn about what makes great feedback. So I had to give a presentation of the founders and the CEO about how the AdSense business was doing. And I marched into the room and there in one corner was one of the founders on an elliptical trainer stepping away wearing toe shoes and a bright blue spandex unitard, super tight. Not what I was expecting or wanting to see in the room.

And there in the other corner was the CEO doing his email. And so probably like all of your listeners in such a situation, I felt a little bit nervous. How was I supposed to get these people’s attention? Luckily for me, The AdSense business was on fire. And when I said how many new customers we had added, the CEO almost fell off his chair. “What? This is incredible. Do you need more advertising budget? Do you need more engineers?” And so I’m feeling like the meeting’s going all right. In fact, I now believe that I am a genius, always a dangerous moment. And I walked out of the room and I walked past my boss and I’m expecting a high five or a pat on the back. And instead she says to me, “Why don’t you walk back to my office with me?” And I thought, oh wow, I screwed something up in there and I’m sure I’m about to hear about it.

But I was open to hearing from her because she had done the right thing. She had solicited feedback from me, she had shown me that feedback is a gift. But she started by talking about the things that had gone well in the meeting. Of course, all I wanted to hear about was what had gone wrong. And eventually she said to me, “You said, ‘umm’ a lot in there, were you aware of it?” And with this, I breathed this huge sigh of relief and I made a brush off gesture with my hand. I said, “Yeah, I know it’s a verbal tick. It’s no big deal, really.” And then she said to me, I know this great speech coach, would you like an introduction? I’m sure Google would pay for it. And once again, I made this brush off gesture with my hand, and I said, “No, I’m busy. I don’t have time for a speech coach. Didn’t you hear about all those new customers?”

And then she stopped, she looked me right in the eye and she said, “I can tell when you do that thing with your hand that I’m going to have to be a lot more direct with you. When you say ‘umm’ every third word, it makes you sound stupid.” Now she’s got my full attention. And some people might say it was mean of her to say that I sounded stupid, but in fact, it was the kindest thing she could have done for me at that moment in my career. Because if she hadn’t used just those words with me, and by the way, this is a really important point, she never would’ve used those words with other people on her team who were perhaps a better listener than I was. But she knew me well enough to know that that was what she had to say to get my attention.

And if she hadn’t said it to me just that way, I never would’ve gone to visit the speech coach and I wouldn’t have learned that she was not exaggerating. I literally said “umm” every third word, and this was news to me because I had been giving presentations my whole career. I had raised money for two different startups giving presentations. I thought I was pretty good at it. And it really got me, it was almost like I suddenly realized I’d been marching through my whole career with a giant hunk of spinach between my teeth. And nobody had had the common courtesy to tell me it was there. And this really got me to thinking about her management style and what made it so easy for her to tell me and why no one else had told me. And as I thought about her as a leader, I realized there were two things. She cared personally and she challenged directly.

I knew that she cared about me because she would do things like, when my father was diagnosed with late stage cancer, she said, “Kim, you need to fly home to Memphis. Your team and I will sit down and write your coverage plan. That’s what good teams do for one another is we’ve got each other’s backs.” And that was the kind of thing she did, not just for me, but for everyone who worked directly with her. She couldn’t do it, of course, for all 5,000 people in her organization. But when a leader treats their team with real care it makes it much more likely that their team in turn will treat their team with real care, and that creates a culture of caring and culture does scale. But it wasn’t all sunshine and roses. I also knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that if I messed up, she was going to tell me in no uncertain terms.

And that caring and challenging are at the core of radical candor. But that doesn’t really sound so radical. So let’s break it down into this two-by-two framework. “Care personally” on the vertical axis, “Challenge directly” on the horizontal axis. When you do both, it’s radical candor, but when you challenge and you don’t care, that’s obnoxious aggression. And very often when we realize we’ve landed in the obnoxious aggression quadrant, we zoom … it’s not the instinct to go the right way on “Care personally”. Instead, it’s the instinct to go the wrong way on “Challenge directly”. And then we wind up in the worst place of all, manipulative insincerity. That’s where passive aggressive behavior, political behavior … and it’s kind of fun to tell stories about obnoxious aggression and manipulative insincerity because that’s where the drama is. But in my experience, the vast majority of us make the vast majority of our mistakes in this last quadrant where you do remember to show that you care personally, but you’re so worried about not hurting someone’s feelings that you failed to tell them something they’d be better off knowing in the long run.

And that’s what I call ruinous sympathy. So that’s the TLDR, but please do read Radical Candor.

Steve Goldbach:

Yeah, you went to the same place and I spent a lot of my time in an organization, at a client in the Midwest that everyone would characterize it as ‘Midwest nice.’ And I think everybody genuinely cares, it’s that challenge directly. So give us some advice, Kim. How can we challenge in a way that demonstrates that we are doing so with our best interests at heart? And I just had a conversation with my boss who, we were having a difficult conversation and it was about my future. And so it was a very personal conversation and he made it clear. He is like, “I am trying to put you first.” And it was like, but we have to have a conversation about these different things.

And so there was a way I thought he demonstrated even though he was challenging directly that he was doing so, and caring. What are other ways that you recommend that people can demonstrate while challenging directly that they are caring? Because I think people who are feeling challenged oftentimes just miss any cues in some ways. So how do we make it more obvious?

Kim Scott:

Yeah, I think there’s some tactical things, but before I get into the tactical things, I want to suggest that folks tell themselves a story, not a story, but remember an incident in their career or in their life when they didn’t tell the person the thing and it was much worse for them. So I can tell you my story in a moment. But all of us have had that experience where we didn’t say the thing to the person and then it really was much worse for them than if we had said it. And you know it’s true if you think about spinach in the teeth, for example, you know the right thing to do is to tell the person. But I would encourage folks to really think about a moment in their careers when they failed to tell someone something and then the consequences for that person were much worse than they would’ve been if they had told them.

Because I think it feels mean, challenging directly, and I chose the words very consciously. It feels harsh or mean to challenge someone directly. And if you realize that it is kind, it’s not just, state your intention to be kind, but if you really in your gut feel that it is more kind to tell them and you know in your gut that you’re not in service of that other person by being silent, I think that’s really important. The other thing that is really important, I think, is to remember that there’s an order of operations to radical candor. And it always starts with soliciting feedback. And so once you’ve gotten in the habit of soliciting feedback and responding to it well and treating it like a gift, it’s more likely that you’re going to give it like a gift. So don’t dish it out before you prove you can take it.

But now you’ve gotten to the point where it’s time to offer someone some criticism. You want to state your intention just like your boss to be helpful. “I’m telling you this because I’m on your side, because I want you to get what you want in your career.” Sometimes I talk about the origin story of radical candor, for me, happened when I was walking my puppy and this man said to me, “I can tell you really care about your dog. I can tell you really love this dog.” That’s all he had to do to move up on the care personally, dimension. You also want to make sure that you’re being humble. I call it candor and not truth, because if you go into someone and you say, “I’m going to tell you the truth,” you’re kind of implying, “I have a pipeline to God and you don’t know anything,” and that’s not a great way to start a conversation.

So remember that you could be wrong and that’s okay. You want to be humble. To me, candor implies, here’s how I understand the situation, but I also want to know how you understand this situation. You also want to offer this stuff, both praise and criticism, actually immediately. If the purpose of praise is to tell people what to do more of the purpose of criticism is to tell them what to do less of, why wait? In the before times, I used to say, have these conversations in person, but now that’s less and less possible. So my advice is to have it on the telephone. There you want to have a synchronous conversation. Do not send an email, do not send a text.

And the reason why I suggest the phone and not a video call is that even if you are going to do it in person, I don’t suggest sitting across the table from each other because that can feel unnecessarily confrontational. You’re in this like, I’m on this side, you’re on that side. I suggest if you’re in person, take a walk. And if you’re not in person, have a talk on the phone. We think that there’s a lot of good; that we understand people’s facial expressions and their body language, but we often do not. In fact, a lot of bias creeps in to our lack of understanding of people’s facial expressions and body language. So sometimes it’s better just to have a synchronous conversation on the phone. But the other thing that is really important is that this is not a monologue, it’s a dialogue. And so you’re going to have to gauge how it lands.

I’ll talk about that in a second, but that’s why it’s so important to have these conversations synchronously. You want to praise in public, criticize in private, and you don’t want to give people praise or criticism about their personality. So I just gave you a list of tips, if you want an acronym, it’s HHIIPP [ed.: Humble, Helpful, Immediate, In person, Private vs Public, don’t Personalise]. It’s hip! And it’s ‘HIP CORN,’ actually, because when I say not about personality, use Context, Observation, Result, Next step: CORN, to make sure that you’re not giving people either praise or criticism about their personality. Because the whole purpose of radical candor is to have a growth mindset, to help people change and improve. And so the idea of CORN is, “In the meeting when you said ‘umm’ every third word, it made you sound stupid, go visit the speech coach.” Or the same works for praise, in the meeting, that’s the context. When you offered both sides of the argument, that’s the observation. The result is it earned you credibility, the next step is, do more of that.

And I think we often tend to get confused about the purpose of praise and criticism. Sometimes people think praise is all about showing you care personally, and criticism is about showing how to challenge directly. But both praise and criticism need to do both. You don’t want ruinously empathetic praise and obnoxiously aggressive criticism.

Stuart Crainer:

In a sense listening to you, Kim, you’re kind of bringing humanity back to work.

Kim Scott:

Yes! That is the goal.

Stuart Crainer:

Yes, sensitivity to others and caring about others are basically characteristics of humanity, which have been excluded from the workplace, but your mission is to bring them back.

Kim Scott:

That is my mission. And I have an anecdote to tell you. So in the subtitle of the American version of Radical Candor is Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. But in the UK version, they were like, “Oh, we don’t think about humanity at work.” I’m like, but that’s the whole purpose of the book! I couldn’t persuade them. There’s a different subtitle in the UK, so there you go!

Stuart Crainer:

I can clarify that that’s true! What’s interesting as well, Kim, is that you refer to your novel writing.

Kim Scott:

Yes.

Stuart Crainer:

And which is obviously very important to you. And you’ve written three and have published three novels. But obviously writing novels is a very solo activity. You don’t have to think about interacting with other people. Is that an antidote to the rest of your life?

Kim Scott:

We imagine that writing is a solitary activity, and obviously there are large stretches of time alone, but for me, writing is very much a collaborative. Once you get an editor, once you’re working with an editor, a book gets much better. But even before I’ve had, and this may be why some of my early novels were not published; they were solitary. They did not get the benefit of criticism. But when I wrote Radical Candor, and I’m working on a novel now and when I’m writing it, I had a hundred collaborators. I wrote it in Google Docs, and I’d shared it with a hundred people, and I got a lot of feedback about the book, and that is what I think helped the book be better. And then you work with an editor and every word gets scrutinized.

So in fact, when I was talking to the editor about publishing Radical Candor, I didn’t want just my name to be on the book. I wanted a bunch of names to be on the book. And again, I got overruled by the publishing industry. But I think the myth of the solo writer is a myth. Great books are written in collaboration with a number of people.

Steve Goldbach:

Well, I can attest that writing with a co-author has that same effect. So I’ll give Geoff a shout-out as our co-host here. It makes a huge difference, and it does prevent some of that loneliness I know we’ve both experienced at the keyboard. I want to end maybe with an interesting orthogonal question, or at least I think it’s interesting. I’d be curious what you think, Kim. As someone who’s at the intersection of tech and bias and thinking about human interaction, I’m curious how you are thinking about the world as it evolves, as we think about bias creeping into algorithms, bias creeping into artificial intelligence and how society needs to address that particular issue. I don’t have a specific question in mind, but I’d just be curious, what are your thoughts on that space? And what are the big issues that companies who are developing AI, companies who are using it, need to be thinking about as we’re in the early innings of that particular development?

Kim Scott:

I think that, here’s an example. Are you familiar with Textio, the company Textio? They-

Steve Goldbach:

I’m a little bit, but maybe just for our listeners, in case they’re not, you can just hum a few bars on that.

Kim Scott:

Sure. So Textio will offer you feedback on your writing, and it focuses on job descriptions and performance reviews. But you can use it for a bunch of different things. And it’ll flag bias, it’ll flag biased language for you as you write. And it is really, really helpful, especially for performance reviews. There are so many women, for example, I know have been so frustrated by this abrasive problem where, the guy is sure, he is aggressive, but he has to be to get the job, let’s promote him. And the woman is, she’s too abrasive, let’s not promote her. And so it’ll flag that. And I think, so we can use technology to identify bias. As surely as we can ignore technology and it’ll reflect and reinforce the biases that we already have. I mean, in some senses, bias is a pattern and it’s not a productive pattern. And we are pattern makers as human beings, and our technology will either reflect and reinforce bad patterns or will help us correct bad patterns. So let’s use it to help us correct the bad patterns.

Stuart Crainer:

I like the idea of us as pattern makers.

Kim Scott:

Yeah.

Stuart Crainer:

We’re running out of time, Kim, but I’ve got to ask about the diamond cutting factory and the pediatric clinic. How did you get into those experiences and what did you get out of them?

Kim Scott:

Yes. So I studied Russian literature in college, and I studied arms control. It’s interesting, when I was in college, the big concern, well I graduated in 1990, and the big concern in high school and college was nuclear catastrophe. So that was my obsession. And then the Berlin Wall fell, and the problem seemed to resolve itself. It’s useful to remember that sometimes these big intractable problems can seem to resolve themselves quickly. But anyway, so I moved to Russia right after college, and I was writing a paper on military conversion, sort of swords into plow shares. And that turned into a job with Batterymarch Financial Management, which was investing in these Soviet, this was still the Soviet Union, in Soviet military factories that were converting to civilian production. And then the coup happened, and Batterymarch pulled out of Russia and invested the money in China instead.

And I wanted to stay, I did not want to move to China, I wanted to stay in Russia. And I wound up, through a friend of a friend, getting a job with this US company and starting for them a diamond cutting factory in Moscow and that was actually my first management experience. That was the moment when I realized that management could be interesting. It could be just as interesting as the great Soviet – it’s the great Russian, not Soviet, although there are some great Soviet novels – the great Russian novels. I had to hire these diamond cutters, and we were having a picnic. I thought it was going to be easy to hire them, I could pay them in dollars, the Ruble was collapsing, but no, dollars weren’t enough, they wanted a picnic. Well, I could do a picnic too. So we’re having this picnic, we get all the way through a bottle of vodka, and I realized that what they really wanted was not just money, they wanted to know that they would have a boss who would care about them enough to get them and their families out of Russia if things went sideways. And as you can imagine, given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I’ve been thinking a lot about these folks. 

But that was what they wanted. And that was the moment when I realized that humanity, like my humanity, was the thing that I could offer them, that the state could not offer them. That was the moment when I realized that management might be interesting. In fact, I was just rereading Anna Karenina. And there’s all these scenes where Levin is trying to manage, and I realized this was not a problem of capitalism or communism, Levin was a terrible manager.

So anyway, that is how that all started. And then I left Russia after four years and went to business school, and I went to Kosovo to manage the pediatric clinic because when I was 12 years old and, maybe 10, when I read The Diary of Anne Frank, I promised myself that if there were ever anything like that happening in my world, I would not be one of those people who did nothing. And that was why I went to Kosovo. I felt like genocide was happening again, and I needed to go and do some small thing to try to help.

Stuart Crainer:

So you became an upstander.

Kim Scott:

Yeah. I don’t know how effective an upstander I was, but at least I tried.

Stuart Crainer:

Kim, we’re out of time. Kim’s books Just Work and Radical Candor, we can endorse them with a great deal of enthusiasm, but, obviously these are big issues, but what’s brilliant about your work, Kim, is that you come up with practical, doable approaches to them. Not necessarily solutions, but ways to make things better and anything to bring humanity into the workplace. And I’m speaking as an Englishman, it’s something we would appreciate throughout the world. So thank you very much.

Kim Scott:

Thank you so much. Really an honor to be with you all.