Kim Scott: The Power of Radical Respect and Candor

Guy Kawasaki:
I’m Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Helping me in this episode is Kim Scott. She is the author of a book called Radical Respect: How to Work Together Better. It offers a framework for creating collaborative cultures where everyone can do their best work.
Kim is also the author of the bestseller, Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. She has a bachelor's in Slavic literature from Princeton and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Scott coached executives at tech companies such as Dropbox, Qualtrics and Twitter. She served on the faculty at Apple University and we almost overlapped there.
She has also led the AdSense, YouTube and DoubleClick teams at Google. Her experience includes managing a pediatric clinic in Kosovo and starting a diamond cutting factory in Moscow. One of my questions to her is, are you really a spook? Although I guess if you're a spook, you're not going to exactly admit that in a podcast.
Anyway, I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. I am thrilled to have the remarkable Kim Scott on the Remarkable People Podcast. I saw that you started a diamond cutting factory in Moscow. Walk me through, are you some secret agent for Russia or something?
Kim Scott:
No, a hundred percent no. My mother believes, and there's nothing I can do to persuade her otherwise that I work for the CIA, but I do not. In fact, I couldn't even get a job as a nanny in the US Embassy in Moscow because I was too liberal. Anyway, there you have it. I studied arms control in college, and I graduated in 1990, so my senior year, the Berlin Wall fell and all the problems I was studying to solve that seemed so intractable, just evaporated.
I went to Moscow, and I was doing a study on military conversion and swords in the plowshares. I wound up working for a financial management company that was investing and all these converting Soviet defense plants. Then the coup happened and they put their money in China, but I wanted to stay in Russia. Through a friend of a friend, I got a job working for this diamond cutting company called Lazare Kaplan.
Guy Kawasaki:
Kaplan, that's a huge deal. They make radiant cuts.
Kim Scott:
Yeah, you may have bought one of their diamonds at some point.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh yeah, absolutely. I used to be in the jewelry business.
Kim Scott:
Oh, I did not know that. Yeah, so Lazare Kaplan, nobody else has ever known them, but you do.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, no. Lazare Kaplan, the radiant cut, which is a combination of basically like an emerald cut, square cut, but a round cut in the middle. Right?
Kim Scott:
Yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
It has more facets, yeah.
Kim Scott:
More sparkle. Exactly. The Soviet Union had been stockpiling its large diamonds for a rainy day and they decided it was raining, so we cut them for them.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow, what a great story.
Kim Scott:
Yeah, and in fact, that was my first management. That was when I got interested in management. I had to hire these Russian diamond cutters and I felt this was going to be easy. This was 1992 and the ruble was collapsing and the dollar was strong, and I had studied Russian literature. What did I know about starting a business? Nothing. I was twenty-two, but I thought, "I have money and it's valuable, and hiring people is easy when you have money, that's all it's about."
I went to talk to them, and they didn't just take the job. They wanted a picnic. I was like, "Okay, I can do a picnic too." We went on this picnic and by the time we were finished with a bottle of vodka, I realized that the thing they really wanted was more than money. They wanted to know they would have a boss who gave a damn, who would get them out of the country if it went sideways. That was like, "Oh, maybe management is a human thing and interesting."
Guy Kawasaki:
When is the Netflix series about your life going to come out?
Kim Scott:
As soon as I can find someone who won't make a hash of it. It's funny, I go all over the place giving these Radical Candor talks. In the Radical Candor framework, there's radical candor and the upper right-hand quadrant ruinous sympathy the upper, and everybody says they're ruinously empathetic. Except when I went to Hollywood, they were like, "Oh, we're a bunch of assholes here. We're all obnoxiously aggressive."
Guy Kawasaki:
You started this diamond cutting operation in Moscow, and then eventually you ended up working, fast forwarding a few decades, you started working at Apple University.
Kim Scott:
I did.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Kim Scott:
I did.
Guy Kawasaki:
Here's a funny story for you.
Kim Scott:
Okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
I left Apple twice in 1987 in 1997, and then around, oh, I think 2000, I was at some conference, the Kara Swisher Walt Mossberg conference, and I saw Steve. Steve says to me, "I want you to come back to Apple and run Apple University."
Kim Scott:
You should have done it.
Guy Kawasaki:
I know I would be a billionaire today. I told him, "No, I don't think so, Steve." Then he hired the guy who ran the Yale School of Management.
Kim Scott:
School of Management, yeah, Joel Podolny.
Guy Kawasaki:
Could I have been your boss then?
Kim Scott:
Yes, you could have been my boss, but that would've been awesome. I might still be at Apple today.
Guy Kawasaki:
Then I would be in your book, but I would say, "Okay, in this corner is obnoxious aggression. The example of that is Guy Kawasaki."
Kim Scott:
No, never praise in public, criticize in private.
Guy Kawasaki:
I wish I could tell you that nobody ever asked me this question, but I'm going to ask you a question probably everybody asks you because of your Apple University time and your Radical Candor question. You know what question I have to ask, right?
Kim Scott:
I'm ready.
Guy Kawasaki:
What corner is Steve Jobs in?
Kim Scott:
You know what? I think from the outside, most people would put him in obnoxious aggression.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'd say that's true, yes.
Kim Scott:
I'll say, and I did not ever work directly with Steve. I saw him from afar, but there are a couple of things that might indicate that he was radically candid. One is that as Tim Cook offered to give him part of his liver when he was ill, Steve refused the offer, and I don't know of a word to explain the offer or the refusal of the offer other than love, those two men truly cared deeply about each other. I think in his closest personal relationships, there was definitely radical candor. There was a lot of love.
I'm going to say that even though I probably would not have wanted to work directly for Steve, because I would've found it very intimidating, the people who did work directly with him, at least some of them, had a radically candid relationship. That's the thing about radical candor. There's not an objective standard for it. It's interpersonal.
I'll give you a simpler example. I had worked with this guy for a long time and I liked him a lot. We had a good relationship. He worked for me at a startup, and then he came and worked for me at Google, and there were a bunch of people on the team who didn't know me very well, and then he joined.
We were localizing AdSense, and this guy, Jared is his name, he kept confusing Slovakia and Slovenia, and I corrected him once. I corrected him twice. The third time I was like, "It's Slovakia, not Slovenia, dumbass." But in the context of my relationship with him, that was radical candor because that was fine.
I knew it wasn't going to upset him. He knew I respected him and liked him, but from the perspective of everybody else in the room that was obnoxious aggression, I realized for the sake of the others, I needed to pause and back up and say, "Look, I'm not going to call the rest of y'all a dumbass, but Jared likes it when I do it." There's not an objective measure for it. I don't know. What do you think? You knew Steve much better than I did.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, I don't know if that's true, but I would definitely have to put him in the obnoxious aggression quadrant. But having said that, I think you have to consider another factor, which is not that it makes it okay with someone like Steve, obnoxious aggression is part of the shtick and made him effective, so more power to him.
I cherish the days that I worked for him, and if you played for Bobby Knight or Vince Lombardi to date myself, people love those coaches, who played for those coaches. Anyway, this is my last historical question here. I want to hear about your course at Apple called Managing at Apple because man, that sounds like an oxymoron to me. What was that course about?
Kim Scott:
That course was about soliciting feedback. It was about building a great team and it was about getting results. There was another class called Communicating at Apple, and it was ironic because I had managed a lot at Google. I had managed AdSense, YouTube and DoubleClick teams at Google. I left Google, I had 700 employees. I joined Apple and I had zero employees. It was ironic.
Guy Kawasaki:
You got paid more?
Kim Scott:
Yeah, no, I got paid less. Actually, I took a pay cut, 50 percent pay cut to go to Apple. As it turned out, the stock appreciated so it was not a 50 percent pay cut, but I thought it was going to be a 50 percent pay cut.
Anyway, at some point as I was designing this course, it was really interesting because if I had designed a course called Managing at Google, I would've designed it in about five hours and started teaching it. At Apple, they gave me five months and I couldn't believe it. I was like, "Am I going to get fired? I'm not doing anything."
It was a real education in how Apple gave people the space and time to really think deeply about things and to perfect ideas, whereas Google's just launch and iterate. That was really fun. But then when I left Apple and decided to write Radical Candor, I had done a lot of the thinking for the class and I thought, "Oh, I've already done all the thinking I can write this book in three months." It took me four years.
Guy Kawasaki:
Why?
Kim Scott:
Because it turns out when you present something you don't think as deeply as when you write it. When I started writing it, I started arguing with myself, "Is this right? Is this wrong?" The Radical Candor framework is care personally, challenge directly. On the vertical line is care personally, horizontal line is challenge directly, but at Apple, it was unclear to clear, smiley face to frowny face. The two by two wasn't quite right. It took me three months just to get the two by two right.
Guy Kawasaki:
You should have hired McKinsey to help you.
Kim Scott:
I think I did better than McKinsey would've done. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it was better that I did it. I worked, by the way, at McKinsey for two months.
Guy Kawasaki:
You did?
Kim Scott:
I did, in between my two years of business school.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow. This is before or after you were a diamond mogul in Moscow?
Kim Scott:
This is after the diamond cutting episode and before I joined Google, before I did three failed startups.
Guy Kawasaki:
Kim, I got to tell you, the more you describe your career, the more I am convinced you are a spook.
Kim Scott:
You and my mother can chat.
Guy Kawasaki:
One of the people featured in our book is Julia Child, and I don't know if you knew this, but she worked for the OSS until her mid-thirties.
Kim Scott:
She did?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes.
Kim Scott:
Oh my gosh, I did not know that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Kim Scott:
Wow.
Guy Kawasaki:
Then Julia Child moved to Paris where she fell in love with French cooking. Maybe that's the next stage of your life. You're going to be a chef.
Kim Scott:
No, my next, I wish I had my T-shirt right here. My next phase of my life is going to be all about rewilding California landscape and growing poppies. That's what I want to do in my retirement. There you go.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, so oh man, this is going to be the most defocused episode in the history of Remarkable People. I live in Watsonville and I have a hill behind my house.
Kim Scott:
I'll come and plant it. I will come and teach you how to turn it orange in the spring.
Guy Kawasaki:
Holy shit, you got to read, Think Remarkable. There's a whole section about, so I had about 150 or 200 eucalyptus trees removed from this hill.
Kim Scott:
Oh, good for you.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't want those things falling on my cars or burning my house.
Kim Scott:
Catching on fire, yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. I had them all removed and then I decided I got to restore this to its native species. I decided to plant Oaks, and then I did this whole investigation of what it takes to plant Oaks in it. Now, please don't correct me because I don't want to have to redo my book, but what I concluded was you go find acorns, you throw them in the water, the ones that float, you throw away.
The ones that sink, you put in a tray, you cover it with a cloth, you put it in your refrigerator for two months and then you plant it, and then some seedlings happen, and you protect those from the deer. Then you wait twenty years and maybe if you're still alive, you can sit under the shade of the oak tree that you plant in 2023.
Kim Scott:
That's true. I think that's an excellent plan. But what you can do in the meantime is plant some poppies, while the Oaks are growing, the poppies will not hurt the Oaks. Then you can enjoy a nice orange hillside.
Guy Kawasaki:
Then I can have this little side business of opium.
Kim Scott:
No, California poppies, you can't make opium out of them, unfortunately. But they're very beautiful.
Guy Kawasaki:
I have a friend in Afghanistan who said he would send me seeds.
Kim Scott:
Don't do those. Use the California native. They're adapted for the drought. Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh man, I got to get you to my house to help me with my rewilding.
Kim Scott:
Rewild, yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh God.
Kim Scott:
Yeah. This is what a career in tech will do to you. You want to get out and get dirt underneath your fingernails.
Guy Kawasaki:
God, we've only been thirteen minutes into this episode and now I know how to rewild my hill and I know what I can do with my extra liver if I ever want to give it to. Madisun, if you ever need a liver, I'll give you my liver.
Kim Scott:
Not all of it, just half of it. You can share your liver, it turns out.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's what co-authors do for each other. They're sharing livers.
Kim Scott:
Yeah, it is true. It's absolutely true.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh my God. Let's get to the topic of your book. First of all, for the ignorant among us, you just got to tell me what does respect mean in your vernacular?
Kim Scott:
It's really interesting. There's two definitions of respect. One is something you have to earn, you have a skill. You need to demonstrate that you're good at the skill and then people respect you for that skill. That is not what I'm talking about in Radical Respect. The other definition of respect is the regard that we owe, maybe I should have called it radical regard.
But anyway, the regard that we owe to everyone for who they are, what their emotions are, what their background is, that's what I'm talking about, is something that is every human being's birthright, is that kind of respect, the respect that we owe one another regardless of what we've done or haven't done in our lives.
Guy Kawasaki:
What makes radical respect radical?
Kim Scott:
I think it's because it's rare and it's fundamental. It's not because it's extreme. Radical, we think of as extreme, but I think of it as a foundational thing. The reason why it's so foundational and so rare is because, you know me, I love a good two by two. It combines two different things. It combines a kind of environment where we optimize for collaboration, not coercion, and where we honor everyone's individuality rather than demanding conformity.
It's the environment where the strength of the team is the individual and the strength of the individual is the team. You get the best of both worlds. Yet, this rarely happens, and it's weird that it rarely happens because I think we all intend to create these environments that optimize for collaboration. I've known a lot of different kind of leaders, and none of them really wanted to create a coercive environment.
Certainly, nobody wants to take a job at a place that's going to coerce them. We know that innovation thrives in freedom and collaboration. I also have never met anyone who wants to work in everybody's marching in lockstep 1984 style environment.
We expect our own individuality to be honored. Most of us think of people who honor other people's individuality. We don't want everybody to be exactly the same. Yet, so often we fail on one dimension or another, and sometimes we fail on both. Then we wind up in what I call brutal incompetence. That's not what we're shooting for, but sometimes we land there.
Guy Kawasaki:
Two things. First, so as I told you, I live in Watsonville, Santa Cruz, and I got to tell you, there's a local mentality where respect is not at all defined how you defined it. Respect is about "I got to get respect." If you look at me the wrong way, I'm going to fight you. I'm going to pull a gun on you, I'm going to yell back. I want my respect.
It's like not even passive aggressive. It's an aggressive, aggressive thing. I demand respect. How did we get to that point where I thought respect was a positive thing, but it's now like this. It's like this justification. "I want respect. I'm going to storm the capitol because I want respect." How did we get to this point?
Kim Scott:
I think a lot of people feel profoundly disrespected in the world in which we live. I think part of the problem is actually the dramatic income inequality that exists in the world where the 1 percent are getting more and more. I'm part of the problem, not part of the solution, but so many jobs that people have, they don't pay a living wage. You have to have two jobs. You should be able to just have one job to survive in this world.
You shouldn't have to have two, you shouldn't be 400 dollars from homelessness all the time. I think that's a big part of the problem. I think there are too many people whose lives are genuinely too precarious. I think that's part of the problem. But I also think part of the problem is this idea that it's your own damn fault if you're in that situation, which adds insult to injury.
I think we really need to focus on improving that. Although I also think that there's core fundamental things that get in the way of respect, I think are bias, prejudice and bullying. Those are the root problems. I think we often conflate those three things as though they're the same thing. One of the things that I try to do, I'm not going to fix the whole economy in this book, but I'm trying to address the things that we as individuals can address and fix.
I think very often we'll be in a situation, and something will happen, and it'll leave you gob smacked. You don't know what to say. I think part of the problem is that we have conflated bias, prejudice, and bullying as though they're the same thing.
If we break them apart, then it's easier to know what to say rather than saying, "Oh, this is this monolithic problem that we can never solve." Let's break the problem down. There's all kinds of big problems that we've solved as people. I've tried to break it down. I'm going to offer some simple definitions, but it looks like you want to say something.
Guy Kawasaki:
No, I'll just say please define the three things.
Kim Scott:
Okay. Bias, I'm going to define as not meaning it, it's usually unconscious, whereas prejudice is meaning it. It's very consciously held belief, usually incorporating some unfair and inaccurate stereotype. Bullying, there's no belief, conscious or unconscious. It's just being mean. If you think about those three things in a different way, it becomes easier to figure out what to say when you don't know what to say.
If it's bias, I recommend responding with an “I” statement. "I don't think you meant that the way it sounded." A great example of this comes from a friend of mine who started a company, and she was going into a meeting with two colleagues who are men, and she sat at the center of the table because she had the expertise that was going to win her team the deal.
When the other folks came in, the first person sat across from the guy to her left, the next person sat across from the guy to his left, and then everybody else filed on down the table leaving her dangling by herself.
I think they assumed she was the assistant and she started talking. That's often how bias shows up. She started talking and when the other side had questions, they would direct their questions at her two colleagues, who were men, happened once, happened twice, happened a third time.
Finally, one of her colleagues stood up and he said, "I think Joanne and I should just switch seats." That was all he had to do to totally change the dynamic in the room. He did that for three basic reasons. The first was emotional. He liked her and he didn't like seeing her get ignored.
The second was very practical. He wanted to win the deal and he knew if they wouldn't listen to her, they wouldn't win the deal. The third was around efficiency because he knew it was going to be easier for them to hear it from him than from her.
Not because she couldn't speak up for herself, but it was just they were going to be more likely to understand what they had done if he pointed it out than if she had. That's an example of an “I” statement. It holds up a mirror, but if you hold up a mirror to prejudice, the other person is going to grin in that mirror.
They're going to like what they see because they believe that thing. In the case of prejudice, you need an “it” statement and an “it” statement draws a line between one person's freedom to believe whatever they want, but they can't impose those beliefs on others. An “it” statement can appeal to the law, an “it” statement can appeal to an HR policy, or it can appeal to common sense.
For example, a colleague of mine was in a hiring meeting and everyone who had interviewed all the candidates agreed that the most qualified woman for the job, most qualified person for the job was a Black woman who had worn her hair out naturally. When the hiring manager heard everybody's feedback, they said, "Oh, I'm not going to extend an offer to that candidate." My colleague said, "Why not?"
The hiring manager said, "I'm not going to put that hair in front of the business." Unbelievable. This was not long ago, and at a company everybody would recognize. How can my colleague employ an “it” statement? In that situation, it is illegal not to hire someone because of their hair, which it was in that state thanks to the CROWN Act.
It is an HR violation not to hire someone because of their hair, which it was at that company. Or if she hadn't had the law or the HR policy on her side, she could have said, "It is ridiculous not to hire the most qualified candidate because of their hair." That's an example of an “it” statement.
However, if it's bullying, an “it” statement is not going to work because a bully wants to kick past any boundary you set up. Their natural instinct is to kick past it. An “I” statement also won't work. An “I” statement brings somebody closer to you and with a bully, you want to push them away. My daughter taught me about this when she was in third grade. She was getting bullied, and I recommended to her, and I said, "Tell this kid I feel sad when you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."
She banged her fist on the table, and she said, "Mom, they are trying to make me feel sad. Why would I tell them they succeed it?" I was like, "Oh, that's a really good point." In the case of bullying, you can't talk to me like that or "What's going on for you here? Why are you doing this?" Or if that feels too scary to say you could just use a you non sequitur, like "Where'd you get that shirt?"
The point of that is you're now not accepting whatever it is this person is dishing out at you. You're in an active stance, not a submissive stance. There's obviously tons more to do to deal with bias, prejudice and bullying, but those are just like, especially when you observe them, when you're the upstander. Those are some quick responses and you may not even know what you're going to say, but just figuring out if you're going to start with the word it or you can be really helpful to get the ball rolling.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so I'm going to tell you a story and I'm going to ask you what I should do if this happens again. All right?
Kim Scott:
Okay. All right.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now, this story happened, I don't know, twenty-five years ago, but it was a formative occurrence in my life, my wife and I had one son. We were living on Union Street in San Francisco, where Union Street dead ends into the Presidio. That's a hoity-toity area.
Kim Scott:
Yeah, fancy.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. I'm out there and I'm trimming our hedge, and this older white woman comes up to me and says, "Do you do lawns, too?" Okay, so now how do I know if that's bias or prejudice?
Kim Scott:
I think the thing that you do, but the thing I would do in that situation is I would start with an “I” statement. I would assume it's bias because that's easiest for people to, and so what I would say is "I own this home and I'm doing my own work, but I don't work for other people." Then she would be probably super embarrassed and hopefully she would apologize.
However, if she doubled down and said, "You could still come," then you know what it is prejudice. I'll share an example, a story from my career. I had just come back from maternity leave and I was chit-chatting with a guy before a meeting and he said to me, "My wife doesn't work because it's better for the children." That, of course, in my current state was like a gut punch, but I assumed it was bias.
I didn't think he really meant it. I tried to make a joke that would point out to him. I said, "I decided to show up at work today because I wanted to neglect my children," and I was expecting him to laugh like you did and apologize, and we would move on.
But no, he doubled down and he was like, "Oh no, Kim, I'm going to give you some research. It's really not good for your kids." Now I know I need an “it” statement, and so I said, "Look, it is an HR violation for you to tell me that I'm neglecting my children by showing up at work." That had the desired impact.
He stepped back and then I was like, "Look, I'm not going to make a thing of this with HR, but I think we can agree," so now I'm appealing to common sense. "I think we can agree that it is my decision together with my spouse, how we raise our kids, and it's your decision together with yours, how you raise yours.
Furthermore, I'm guessing you don't want to read my research any more than I want to read yours." I think you could have said, "It is your job to trim your hedges, and it is my job to trim my hedges," to the woman if she had doubled down, but I'm sorry that happened. It's infuriating.
Guy Kawasaki:
If you want the rest of the story, my father came and visited me about two weeks later, and I'm third generation Japanese American, he's second, and he served in the US Army, all that kind of stuff. His generation, they were trying to prove there were more American than Americans.
I tell him this story and I fully expect him to absolutely go off on this situation like "How dare this woman ask you if you're the yard man just because you're Japanese? You went to Stanford, you work for Apple, you've written books, blah, blah, blah." Instead he says to me, "Japanese American guy cutting a hedge on Union Street? Most likely you were the yard man, so get over it."
Kim Scott:
Oh my gosh. Wow. I'm sorry.
Guy Kawasaki:
Then ever since that day, it is taken a lot to offend me. I give people the benefit of the doubt and all that. Anyway, now you mentioned something in your answer, which I have to ask, which is you said several times "I'm going to go to HR, I'm going to tell them I'm not going to hire this woman with her hair or whatever."
But I think that we need to explore this concept of going to HR because it seems to me that HR is not always the advocate of the employee. HR job could be to protect the company from a lawsuit. They might try to talk you down or they might try to get you out of some class action suit. How do you know if you should go to HR?
Kim Scott:
Yeah, it's a really important question. I think HR, there's an agency problem. HR has three different constituents that it represents. HR represents the company, and it's supposed to not let the company get fired. HR represents the managers. Often, HR is like a coach to the most senior leaders at a company, and HR is supposed to represent the interest of the individuals. That's a pretty tough thing.
In fact, it's maybe impossible to resolve. I think that before you ever go to HR, you want to understand how HR operates at your company. I think there's a lot of cynicism out there and frankly earned cynicism about HR.
But I think that some of my greatest mentors like Shona Brown who led business operations, which included HR at Google, is one of my great mentors in life. There are some wonderful people out there who can resolve this agency problem and who will do the right thing, but very often they won't do the right thing.
If you read Susan Fowler's blog post about what happened at Uber, you'll see some horror stories about why HR was not doing the right thing at Uber. It was interesting. I asked her later, I said, "Why did you keep going to HR? You knew that they weren't going to help." She said, "It was really important part of building the record of what was going wrong was to prove." But that's a very different mentality of going to HR than going to HR to really get them to help.
I would also say about HR is that very often we over delegate to HR, and that was why in the case of it's an HR violation, I reassured this guy, "I am not going to go to HR, we're not going to get into this thing, but I want you to know where the boundaries are." I think that in an ideal world, HR can make it very clear or the company can make policies that are very clear, but it's better if two people can work it out independently.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. In 2024, if you are sexually harassed at work, there's two schools of thought. One is you go to HR or you sue or you do whatever. The other is you suck it up because they're going to ruin your career. Where are you on this today?
Kim Scott:
I think that the first thing you want to do if you get sexually harassed at work is you want to start to document what happened. Because even if you don't think you're going to file a lawsuit, because it's so easy to feel gaslit in that situation, and when you document, you become more clear in your mind what reality is.
Then it's also useful to form a contemporaneous record with your documentation. Send an email about what happened to a friend you trust and send it from a personal email on a personal device. That's number one.
Number two is you want to build solidarity. There's so much evidence that shows that when you have even one friend at work, one person you can really trust at work, you're happier at work, you do better work at work, and those friends can also help you dispel the gaslighting and figure out what to do. Then last but not least, I would say locate the exit nearest you.
Figure out what is the other job you could get, whose couch could you sleep on. Look at your savings, can you not work for a while? Because the next things I'm going to suggest that you do involve a negotiated agreement. Before you go into any negotiation, you want to know what your BATNA is, your best alternative to a negotiated agreement.
I recommend always doing those three things. Sometimes you'll get bad advice, sometimes you'll get good advice. One time was in a situation where it wasn't exactly sexual assault, but my boss bought me the tightest pair of jeans I ever wore and told me my pants weren't tight enough. It was ridiculous.
Guy Kawasaki:
This wasn't at Apple, I hope.
Kim Scott:
It was.
Guy Kawasaki:
No. No way.
Kim Scott:
Yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
No way.
Kim Scott:
It was. My only alternative was to go to Tim Cook, which I was not going to do.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait. Let me put my pieces of my brain back into my skull. You're telling me a top level manager at Apple told you that?
Kim Scott:
Yeah, and sent someone out to buy me these.
Guy Kawasaki:
No freaking way. That's not possible.
Kim Scott:
Yes, it is. It wasn't just the jeans. There was also a shirt that if I wrote on the whiteboard would reveal my bra. It was ridiculous. I think he really thought that he was doing me a favor. I'm not very fashionable. Google was like everybody was just wearing Google T-shirts and jeans and Apple wasn't that way. I think he really thought he was doing me a favor, but I did not experience it that way.
Anyway, I talked to two different mentors and one of them said, "Sue," and the other said, "Don't blow up your career." It's very interesting. I was telling this story later, and I did not sue. I wasn't going to, basically what I did was I did those three things. I documented what had happened and I talked to a mentor. It was Andy Grove who told me to sue apple, by the way, which I do not take that advice. There you go.
Guy Kawasaki:
This is getting better and better. Okay.
Kim Scott:
Yeah, it's a good story. It was somebody else who told me not blow up. Also famous but prefers not to be quoted, who told me not to blow up my career. I was telling the story later to Sarah Koontz and I was advising that don't rock the boat. Because the person who said, "Don't blow up your career, that felt like the right advice." Sarah Koonz, who had gone public with a sexual harassment claim looked at me and she said, "Look at me. Does it look like my career is blown up?"
I'm like, "Oh, no, it doesn't actually." She said, "The problem with you saying that, Kim, is that people will listen to you." I was like, "Oh, I always thought the problem was that people wouldn't listen to me," but I realized she was exactly right. I'm not going to say sue or don't sue, but if you do those first three things, then I recommend taking a few more steps before you get to suing.
One is talk directly to the person in charge, the person who did this thing to you, if it feels like you're not going to get sexually assaulted again or harassed again. If it feels safe, and in this case it felt safe. I went to the boss who bought me the tight jeans and I told him, A, I had quit, so it was super safe.
And I explained to him exactly why, and he apologized. I think he knew, he understood. That was important to me because I was leaving people behind. Then the next thing you can do is you can consider going to HR. In this case, he was the head of HR, so I was killing two birds with one stone.
Guy Kawasaki:
No, no, no, no, no. You're telling me the head of HR told you to buy tighter jeans and a tighter shirt?
Kim Scott:
He didn't just tell me he sent someone out and bought them for me.
Guy Kawasaki:
There is no freaking way, you are making this shit up.
Kim Scott:
No, I promise you.
Guy Kawasaki:
There is no way.
Kim Scott:
Yes. Ridiculous things in every company every day. It's funny, when I was writing this book, Radical Respect, my husband was having responses. His jaw was on the floor. He said, "What?" "You don't know, Andy, because you would never do this stuff and this stuff would never happen to you, but it happens."
It was so funny when I started writing this book, Radical Respect. This is a sign of how deep in denial. I was like, "I've never really had anything terrible happen to me in my career, so I'm going to have to go and interview a lot of people." Then when I started writing, I was like, "Holy shit, I have a story for every day of my whole career."
So sometimes it can be a little useful to just keep moving forward, but I think at a certain point, denial is like dragging a ball and chain around with you. It's useful to acknowledge what's happening, but we haven't gotten through all the steps about what to do. Talk to the person directly unless you feel like you're going to get physically assaulted again, you can talk to HR if you feel like that makes sense.
You can also tell your story publicly and you can hire a lawyer if so inclined. For me, it's interesting. You can tell me whether you think I did the right thing or the wrong thing or what you would've done in that case, I didn't want to spend the time or the energy in a lawsuit. It just felt like a great soul sucking activity. I just got another job and in fact, I got a better job and I moved on.
That's privilege right there. But the interesting thing is I talked to a couple of other women who did sue and it was in fact really hard and really soul sucking. But I feel that those women, I feel like they took one for the team almost because we should be able to rely on our legal system to address these things. This stuff should not happen to people.
I can laugh about it now, but I'll tell you the truth. I did wear those tight jeans once and they gave me a stomach ache. I felt sick all day. Then I never wore them again. I reverted to my preferred Levi's 501s that are baggy a little bit, but I no longer felt like I belonged. It was part of the reason why I left Apple was that experience because I just didn't feel good after that. I can laugh it off now, but it actually wasn't funny at the time.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow.
Kim Scott:
Yeah, there you go.
Guy Kawasaki:
We are just going to have to drop the mic here for a while. Oh my God.
Kim Scott:
Apple's a great company. I love Apple. This will not happen to you if you take a job at Apple. I think everybody's learned their lesson.
Guy Kawasaki:
Jesus. Holy cow. I think I'm speechless. Madisun will tell you I am never speechless. But at one level I just want to ask you, and you also tell the story about how somebody came up to you, some male executive at some conference and asked you to find a safety pin to pin a shirt or something like that. How do men get to that position? What makes them so stupid and such assholes? Trace for me the genealogy of that.
Kim Scott:
I want to say men are not stupid and they're not assholes. I don't want to recreate the same. That would be a highly prejudicial statement. The vast majority of men I've worked with in my career have been fantastic. One of the reasons I wrote Radical Respect is an homage to all the great upstanders in my career who helped me when I was in these bad situations.
Why would this happen? It was funny, at this conference, the conference organizers knew that this was a risk because it was a conference for CEOs of tech companies, so it was very male dominated, but they had, to their credit, been conscious about inviting as many women CEOs as they could find and also inviting speakers who are women.
Condoleezza Rice was there, I was there, and a lot of the people who were working the conference were young women. They had given them these bright yellow t-shirts, so they were easily identifiable. I was thirty years older and not wearing a yellow t-shirt.
Guy Kawasaki:
But were your jeans tight?
Kim Scott:
No, they were not. They were my preferred baggy. I now won't wear any other pants other than my Levi’s 501s, as a result of that experience.
Guy Kawasaki:
We're going to sell a sponsorship for this episode.
Kim Scott:
Yeah, Levi’s thank you for your impregnable inseam and your nice fitting. Anyway, so I was wearing my jeans, this orange sweater, which I always wear, and I was much older. But this guy assumed because all he could notice was my gender and his need. This guy probably had gone through his whole career surrounded by women who were there to fulfill his needs and given the situation that he was in, I think that is what did it.
There's a great book by Naomi Alderman called The Power, and it's a science fiction book. In this book there's some sort of chemical that gave women, but not men, the ability to shoot electricity from their fingertips. Now, women are physically stronger than men even though they're not bigger. In this book, when women get this power, they start doing all these same kinds of things. I don't think the problem is men. I think the problem is power and a power imbalance. Go ahead.
Guy Kawasaki:
But I want you to go further back. Did their parents raise these people to have these beliefs? What happened that some of these men have this attitude?
Kim Scott:
I think probably what happened was like I want to honor all stay at home moms. I was raised by a mom who dedicated herself to raising me, but I think that if your closest female role model was there always to serve you, and then you went into a career where like he was in tech, so he was surrounded by men almost all the time. There are very few instances where you have women at the very top of these tech companies and a series of assumptions get made.
I'll give you another example. I was coaching a CEO and he had no women on his team of his direct reports, CEO of big tech company. To his credit, he assumed that the problem was their promotion process, not the women at the company, that nobody was getting promoted to that level. He hired me, he paid me to sit in on the promotion meeting and to note to see if I noticed anything going wrong.
He said, "Look, we're all men, we probably won't notice." There were two people up for promotion, a man and a woman, and they both had achieved incredible results. They were both sales leaders, they had both built great teams and loved them. They were both great leaders and they referred to the man as a great leader.
Then when they started talking about the woman, one person said, "She's a real mother hen." I was like, "All right, back the train up." They're like, "Oh, Kim, we didn't mean it. It's no big deal." I'm like, "Get real. Who are you going to promote, the real leader or the real mother hen?"
I think a lot of this stuff, this is why you can't really over delegate to HR. A lot of this stuff is subtle and the law is not going to sort it out and HR is not going to sort it out. We got to get together as human beings and sort this stuff out.
Because one of the things I talk about in Radical Respect is designing your management systems to be fair, to really hire and promote the right people. Because if you don't consciously design your management systems that way, you're going to get systemic injustice. You just are. Because unconscious bias becomes unconscious discrimination unless you take steps like that CEO did to block it to prevent that from happening.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so what are these design paradigms to prevent this systemically?
Kim Scott:
Yeah, so I think there's two big things and then there's a million little things. But the two big things are make sure you have checks and balances in your management systems. Don't give any one person unilateral decision-making over who gets hired, who gets fired, create a process. This is one of the things I learned at Google.
Shona Brown, who designed a lot of the management processes at Google, had a firm belief that for important decisions, teams make better decisions than individuals, especially decisions about who are we going to hire, who are we going to promote, who are we going to fire?
How much are we going to pay? She systematically stripped unilateral decision-making authority away from managers over those decisions. At first when I got there, it was very frustrating. I was like, "You hired me because I've been CEO of my own company and let me go."
But I learned actually that when I went with these processes that had been designed, and they weren't super heavyweight, they didn't take a lot of extra time, but they did insist that I get input from other people, that we made better decisions. It was both better for the business, but it was also a little bit more fair. I'm not saying that Google was some paragon of gender equality, it was not, but it was one of the best places I ever worked in that regard.
You want checks and balances, and you also want to measure what matters. You want to quantify your bias in every step of the employee life cycle. When you identify bias, you want to figure out how to strip it out. A simple example of that happening was in orchestras in the seventies, orchestras were like 85, 90 percent men.
They decided that this was probably not because men were better musicians than women, but because there was something about the auditioning process, and there's a famous story where they started putting a curtain up so you couldn't see, but it didn't change. They figured, but they didn't give up. They didn't say, "Oh, see, men just must be better musicians."
They realized that what was happening is that women were wearing high-heeled shoes. Despite the curtain, people still knew when it was a woman or a man. They made the musicians take their shoes off when they walked out. Now orchestras are fifty-fifty. You've got to do the work to really understand where is the bias creeping in? Why is the bias creeping in and how can we get it out? The goal is to make better decisions.
Guy Kawasaki:
I am not being hypothetical here, but what about you just put people's applications in and you let ChatGPT decide.
Kim Scott:
I think that ChatGPT is not there yet. Google actually experimented with this quite a lot. It wasn't ChatGPT, obviously, it didn't exist then, but they were always trying to automate the decision making and it wasn't automatable.
But what they did do that worked was, first of all, they stripped personally identifiable information out of resumes. The people who were figuring out which resumes to move on to interview didn't know the person's identity, they didn't know their name, and that was hard. It was time-consuming.
But anyway, that helped. Then the other thing they did was there was just a skills test. If you pass the skills test, then you went on to an interview with a person to see if you would work well, and they were very careful. Kahneman talks about this in thinking fast and slow. If you're going to interview people, be explicit about the things that you're interviewing for,
Google made a big mistake. I think one of the qualities that you were supposed to be interviewing for was Googliness. That was not very well-defined, and that became the super highway for people's biases. One of the things that I have recommended is that you, and this you could use ChatGPT for, I think, actually.
But I recommended when I wrote the book, because when I wrote it, ChatGPT was not at that level that it could do it, but I recommended hiring a grad student. But to read interview feedback, to read promotion feedback and identify biased language in the feedback and flag it. Textio, it's a great company who'll do this for you actually, and you want to be careful about how you roll that out.
But for example, Kieran Snyder, who started Textio, wrote this article called “The Abrasive Problem”. It turns out in performance reviews, and she analyzed hundreds of performance reviews. Men, "Sure he is aggressive, but he has to be to get the job done. Let's promote him."
Then this woman who's exhibiting the same behavior, "She's abrasive, and so let's not promote her." That kind of language can have a big impact on people's careers. Those are the kinds of things you want to address in your management systems to make sure that you're not skewing things in a way that's unreasonable.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Now it seems to me that, not that I want to show my bias too much, but it seems to me that the current Republican Party and its lead candidates have set back radical respect about fifty years. Here is a role model that's the antithesis of what you've described, so what happens now?
Kim Scott:
I think that in our culture, there's this notion that's very profound that bullying, or even harassing, or even physically violent behavior is a leadership attribute. I'm just going to say it is not a leadership attribute, but we've got to undo this notion, and I think it actually begins in school. What do you get told if you get bullied in school? Ignore them. No, it is the responsibility of leadership to create consequences for bullying behavior.
But leaders can't do it alone because very often the leader is the bully. It's also the responsibility of upstanders to intervene in that kind of behavior. I think if we can learn to create, and we can't just do it with one person, it's got to be a general thing. We've got to learn how to create conversational consequences for bullying behavior to stop it in its tracks. We've got to learn how to create compensation consequences for bullying behavior.
Atlassian, the software company has a no brilliant jerks rule. If you bully your peers, you cannot get a bonus. You cannot get a good rating there. I think that is really important. Last but not least, there have to be career consequences for bullying behavior. That means don't promote a bully.
Too often they do get promoted, and when the jerks begin to win, that's when the culture of the company begins to lose. What you want to do is you want to make sure that you're giving feedback to people on your team who bully others. If they can't stop it, you got to fire them. I think in the immortal words of Steve Jobs, "It's better to have a hole than an asshole”, although I don't think that's quite how he meant that.
Guy Kawasaki:
In this fictitious world that I'm about to craft, let's say, God, I won't even know who would make the call or do it, but let's say that somebody empowers you to consult to today's Republican Party and says, "Oh, we have some problems here. Matt Gates is saying that the only women who care about abortion rights are the fat ones that look like thumbs and they're the least likely to get pregnant." I think I would categorize that as bullying. What do you do when an entire organization seems to be infested like this?
Kim Scott:
Yeah, I think until you start to define what's acceptable behavior and what's not acceptable behavior and to create consequences for it, I think you would have to be willing to remove these people from their positions of power for behaving this way. I wouldn't take that job, I think, because I don't think that's going to happen. We are going to have to make this happen. Creating a better world is going to be a real barn raising, and I think we're going to have to demand it as a society.
Guy Kawasaki:
But seriously, Kim, it seems like roughly 49 percent of the registered voters in America, they hear a candidate say, "I can go around and grab women by the you know what.” Nothing happens. In fact, it has no consequence on his electability. How do you even wrap your head around that? This is not like an outlier.
Kim Scott:
Yeah, it is not. That's why I said it's very profound in our society and we've got to take this seriously in our personal lives and in the situations that we're closest to, we got to deal with it. I'll say that I think part of the reason the TLDR is, I don't know, it baffles me, but I grew up in Memphis and a lot of the people who taught me about how to be a good person are supporters of this guy who said, "Grab them by the you know what.”
That is upsetting and bewildering to me. But I will say at the same time, when Trump won the first time I went back home. I was behind a car and there was a bumper sticker on the car, and the bumper sticker said, "My kid beat your honor roll student's ass."
I feel like the intellectual elite is that has pervaded the Democratic Party is part of the problem. To me, that bumper sticker was the best explanation I had for what was going on. That bumper sticker combined with what I'll call the 1 percent problem. I think we've got to do better. We need to be more respectful.
Guy Kawasaki:
No kidding.
Kim Scott:
We need to share our stuff. We need to share the money a little better than we're doing.
Guy Kawasaki:
I can't say it was a similar discussion, but on a similar vein, I once interviewed someone who was the CEO of Fuller Seminary. I asked him, "So how do you explain evangelical Christians now. They're supporting Trump. They're supporting what seems to me just the opposite of what the gospels of Jesus Christ are," right?
Kim Scott:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
He said, "Guy, when you encounter a person like that, do not ask them what they believe. Do not ask them why they believe it. You ask them how they came to believe that, because by asking them how you might gain insight into what led them to thinking like that, and you might have greater understanding of what the problem is."
Kim Scott:
Yes. I think that is wise advice.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now, ask me if I've taken his advice.
Kim Scott:
I'll say, I grew up, I had an enormous faith. My faith was totally destroyed by my Bible teacher who was an evangelical, and my class was about a third Jewish, and I was raised as a Christian scientist, so I never got baptized.
This Bible teacher came in and I was in fifth grade, so we're ten, eleven-year-old kids, and she came in and she said, "All of y'all who haven't been baptized are going to hell." I was like, "What? Where's the love?" That made me question a lot of things, and I never did. I wish I could go back to her now and say, "What were you thinking? How did you come to that conclusion?"
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow.
Kim Scott:
We've ranged on a lot of stuff neither one of us were expecting to talk about.
Guy Kawasaki:
I got to tell you, I'm still suffering PTSD from finding out someone at Apple at a high level to buy you tight jeans and a tight shirt, I just cannot even wrap my mind around that. I might have to switch to Windows and Android after today.
Kim Scott:
No, we love Apple. People join companies and they leave managers.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, I love that. That's better a hole than an asshole. I'm going to print bumper stickers like that so that women driving around, you're going to see that this car and say, "Oh, I finally found something that explains what's happening here." Okay, listen, so I think we covered enough. My head is exploding. I'm getting a headache and I'm putting the brains back in my skull. But I like you to just summarize Radical Respect. In a nutshell, what do people get from reading your book?
Kim Scott:
The thing that you'll get from reading this book is you'll figure out how to build a culture and how to build a career that optimizes for collaboration and that honors your own and everyone else's individuality, and so you'll do the best work of your life and you'll build the best relationships of your career.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow.
Kim Scott:
There you go. A small promise.
Guy Kawasaki:
Way to undersell your book.
Kim Scott:
Read this book.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't know about you, but I'm not entirely convinced that she doesn't work for the CIA, but put that aside because if she does, she certainly has a great cover because she's clearly an expert in radical candor and radical respect. I hope you learn about bias, and prejudice, and bullying, and you fight those three things in this world because we need to get along better and collaborate and make life better for all of us. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. Let me thank the Remarkable People team.
First there is Madisun Nuismer. She's the producer and co-author of the book that you need to read. It's called Think Remarkable. Then there's Tessa Nuismer, who does the background research and transcript perfection for us.
Also, there's Luis Magaña, Fallon Yates, and Alexis Nishimura. Special thanks to Angela Duckworth. Angela Duckworth is the person who told me, "You should have Kim Scott on your podcast," and of course, Angela was right. You may start to recognize a pattern, when Angela Duckworth or Katie Milkman tell me to do something, whether it's for this podcast or my books, I just do it because Angela and Katie, they're always right. Until next time, be remarkable. Mahalo and aloha.