Kim Scott: The Power of Radical Respect and Candor

26:55Fancy. Yeah. And so 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? I think the thing that you do, 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. 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. And then she would be probably super embarrassed and hopefully she would apologize. However, if she doubled down and said, well, you could still come, then you know what it is, is prejudice.

27:43I'll share an example, a story from my career. I had just come back from maternity leave and I was chit-chatting with the guy before a meeting. And he said to me, my wife doesn't work because it's better for the children. And 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. And so I tried to make a joke that would point out to him. And so I said, well, 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.

28:20And he was like, oh, no, Kim, I'm going to give you some research. It's really not good for your kid. And so 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. And 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.

28:52And furthermore, I'm guessing you don't want to read my research any more than I want to read yours. So 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. If you want the rest of the story. I do. My father came and visited me about two weeks later. And I'm third generation Japanese American. He's second. He served in the U.S. Army, you know, all that kind of stuff. his generation they were trying to prove there were more american than americans right yeah and so i tell him this story and i fully expect him to absolutely go off on this situation right like how dare this woman ask you if you're the yard man just because you're japanese and you went to stanford you work for apple you've written books blah blah blah yeah and 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.

29:51Oh my gosh. Wow. I'm sorry. Ever since that day, it's taken a lot to offend me. I give people the benefit of the doubt and all that. So 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. Right. But I think 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's job could be to protect a company from getting a lawsuit. Yeah. So they might try to talk you down or they might try to get you out of some kind of class action suit.

30:36So how do you know if you should go to HR? Yeah, it's a really important question because I think HR, there's sort of 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. And that's a pretty tough thing. In fact, it's maybe impossible to resolve. So I think that before you ever go to HR, you want to understand how HR operates at your company.

31:17I think there's a lot of cynicism out there and frankly, well-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. And so 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. And it was interesting. I asked her later, I said, why did you keep going to HR?

32:01You knew that they weren't going to help. And 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 sort of 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'm 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. So 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.

32:45And so in 2024, if you are sexually harassed at work, there's two schools of thought. One is you go to HR or you like you sue or you do whatever. The other is you suck it up because they're going to ruin your career. So where are you on this today? 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, like what reality is. And then it's also useful to form a contemporaneous record with your documentation.

33:32So send an email about what happened to a friend you trust and send it from a personal email on a personal device. So 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. And 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.

34:14Can you not work for a while? Because the next things I'm going to suggest that you do involve a negotiated agreement. And before you go into any negotiation, you want to know what your BATNA is, your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. So I recommend always doing those three things. And sometimes you'll get bad advice. Sometimes you'll get good advice. I 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. And so I went to two - This wasn't an apple, I hope.

34:52It was. No, no way. No way. It was. And my only alternative was to go to Tim Cook, which I was not going to do. He had other things. Wait, let me put pieces of my brain back into my skull. You're telling me a top-level manager at Apple told you that? Yeah. And sent someone out to buy me these. No freaking way. That's not possible. Yes, it is. And 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. And I think he really thought that he was doing me a favor because I'm not very fashionable. And Google's like, everybody was just wearing Google t-shirts and jeans and Apple wasn't that way.

35:39I 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. And 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. Like it was Andy Grove who told me to sue Apple, by the way, which I do not take that advice. There you go. Better and better. Okay. Yeah. It's a good story. And it was somebody else who told me not to blow up by also famous, but prefers not to be quoted, who told me not to blow up my career.

36:27And I was telling the story later to Sarah Kuntz. And I was advising that don't, you know, don't lock the boat. And because the person who said, don't blow up your career, that felt like the right advice. And Sarah Kuntz, 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. And she said, the problem with you saying that, Kim, is that people will listen to you. And I was like, oh, I always thought the problem was that people wouldn't listen to me, but I realized she was exactly right.

37:02So 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. So if it feels safe. And in this case, it felt safe. So 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. Like, I think he knew, he understood. And that was important to me because I was leaving people behind.

37:41And 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. No, no, no, no, no. You're telling me the head of HR told you to buy tighter jeans and a tighter shirt. He didn't just tell me. He sent someone out and bought them for me. There is no freaking way. You're making this shit up. No, I promise you. There is no way. Ridiculous things in every company every day. It's funny, when I was writing this book, Radical Respect, my husband was having responses like you as jaw was on the floor. He's like, what? No, you don't know, Andy, because you would never do this stuff and this stuff would never happen to you.

38:23But it happens. That was one. It was so funny when I started writing this book, Radical Respect, I thought I've never really had 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. And 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, like denial is like dragging a ball and chain around with you. So it's useful to acknowledge what's happening.

39:02Okay, but we hadn't got through all the steps about what to do. So 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 you're so inclined. And for me, it was, it felt, it's interesting. You can tell me whether you think I did the right thing or the wrong thing or what you would have done in that case. I just, I didn't want to spend the time or the energy in a lawsuit. I just felt like a great soul sucking activity. And so I just got another job.

39:37And in fact, I got a better job and I moved on. And so that's privilege right there. But the interesting thing is that 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. Like this kind of stuff should not happen to people. And I can laugh about it now, but I will tell you the truth. I did wear those tight jeans once. And they gave me a stomach ache. I felt sick all day. It has an impact.

40:19And 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. And so I can laugh it off now, but it actually wasn't funny at the time. Wow. Yeah, there you go. We're just going to have to drop the mic here for a while. Oh, my God. And 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. Jesus. Holy cow. I'm speechless. And Madison will tell you I am never speechless.

41:06But okay. Up next on Remarkable People. What about you just put people's applications in and you let ChatGPT decide? I think that ChatGPT is not there yet. Google actually experimented with this quite a lot. It wasn't ChatGPT, obviously, because 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, 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.

41:48It was time consuming.

41:53Become a little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People. It's found on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. 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 his 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. So I want to say men are not stupid and they're not assholes. I don't want to recreate the same, but that would be a highly prejudicial statement.

42:39The vast majority of men I've worked with in my career have been fantastic. And 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. So why would this happen? Why would a guy assume that? And it was funny, like 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, like been conscious about inviting as many women CEOs as they could find and also inviting speakers who are women.

43:18So Condoleezza Rice was there. I was there. And a lot of the people who are working the conference were young women and they had given them these bright yellow t-shirts so they were easily identifiable and i was 30 years older and not wearing a yellow t-shirt but were your jeans tight no they were not they were my preferred baggy levi's but i now won't wear any other pants other than my levi's 501s as a result of that experience we're gonna sell a sponsorship for this episode yeah levi's levi's thank you for your impregnable inseam and your nice fitting jeans. Anyway, so I was wearing my jeans, this orange sweater, which I always wear.

44:01And I was much older, so I didn't look anything. But this guy assumed because all he could notice was my gender and his need. And so 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. And in this book, there's some sort of chemical that gave women, but not men, the ability to shoot electricity from their fingertips. So now women are physically stronger than men, even though they're not bigger.

44:42And in this book, when women get this power, they start doing all these same kinds of things. And so I don't think the problem is men. I think the problem is power and a power imbalance. Go ahead. But I want you to go further back. Did their parents raise these people to have these kind of beliefs? What happened that some of these men have this kind of attitude? 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.

45:37There 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 and of his direct reports, CEO of a big tech company. And 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. And so he hired me. He paid me to sit in on the promotion meeting and to see if I noticed anything going wrong. Because he said, look, we're all men. We probably won't notice. And there were two people up for promotion, a man and a woman.

46:21And 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. And then when they started talking about the woman, one person said, she's a real mother hen. And I was like, all right, back the train up. And they're like, oh, Kim, we didn't mean it. It's no big deal. And I'm like, get real. Who are you going to promote? The real leader or the real mother hen? And so 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.

47:04We got to get together as human beings and sort this stuff out. Because one of the things I talk about in radical respect is like designing your management systems to be fair, to really promote, 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. Okay. So what are these design paradigms to prevent this systemically? Yeah. So I think there's two big things and then there's a million little things.

47:44But 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? And so she systematically stripped unilateral decision-making authority away from managers over those decisions.

48:29And 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. And so it was both better for the business, but it was also a little bit more fair. And 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.

49:05So 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. And when you identify bias, you want to figure out how to strip it out. So like a simple example of that happening was in orchestras. In the 70s, orchestras were like 85, 90 % men. And they decided that this was probably not because men were better musicians than women, but because there was something about the auditioning process. There's a famous story where they started putting a curtain up so you couldn't see, but it didn't change. And they figured out, but they didn't give up.

49:50They 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. So despite the curtain, people still knew when it was a woman or a man. So they made the musicians take their shoes off when they walked out. And now orchestras are 50-50. And so 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? And the goal is to make better decisions. I am not being hypothetical here, but what about you just put people's applications in and you let ChatGPT decide?

50:31I think that ChatGPT is not there yet. Google actually experimented with this. quite a lot. It wasn't ChatGPT, obviously, because 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. And so 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. And then the other thing they did was there was just a skills test.

51:19And 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. And Google made a big mistake, I think. One of the qualities that you were supposed to be interviewing for was Googliness. And so that was not very well defined. And that became like the super highway for people's biases. One of the things that I have recommended is that you, and this you could use chat gbt for i think actually but i recommended when i wrote the book because when i wrote it chat gbt 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 a great company will do this for you actually And you want to be careful about how you roll that out.

52:28But for example, Karen Snyder, who started Textio, wrote this article called The Abrasive Problem. And it turns out in performance reviews, and she analyzed hundreds of performance reviews, men, sure, he's aggressive, but he has to be to get the job done. Let's promote him. And then this woman who's exhibiting the same behavior, she's abrasive. And so let's not promote her. And so that kind of language can have a big impact on people's careers. And those are the kinds of things you want to address in your management system. So make sure that you're not skewing things in a way that's unreasonable.

53:05Okay. 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 50 years. I mean, here's a role model that's the antithesis of what you've described. So what happens now? 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. And 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?

53:58Ignore 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. So 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.

54:41And if you bully your peers, you cannot get a bonus. You cannot get a good rating there. And I think that is really important. And last but not least, there have to be career consequences for bullying behavior. And 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. And so what you want to do is you want to make sure that you're giving feedback to people on your team who bully others. And 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 hold than an asshole.

55:23Although I don't think that's quite how he meant that. In this fictitious world that I'm about to craft. Okay. Let's say, God, I wouldn'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, we have some problems here. Like Matt Gaetz 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. And, you know, I think I would categorize that as bullying. What do you do when an entire organization seems to be infested like this? 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.

56:25And I wouldn't take that job, I think, because I don't think that's going to happen. I think 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. But seriously, like Kim, it seems like roughly 49 % of the registered voters in America, they hear a candidate say, no, I can go around and grab women by, you know what? Yeah. Like, you know, nothing happens. In fact, it has no sort of consequence on its electability. How do you even wrap your head around that? This is not like an outlier. Yeah, it is not.

57:05That's why I said it's very profound in our society. And we 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 will 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. And 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 and I was behind a car and there was a bumper sticker on the car.

57:53And the bumper sticker said, my kid beat your honor roll student's ass. and I feel like the sort of intellectual elitism 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 and so that bumper sticker combined with what I'll call the one percent problem and so I think we got to do better. We need to be more respectful. We need to share our stuff. We need to share the money a little better than we're doing. 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.

58:43And 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. And he said, you know, 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. Yes. I think that's very, that is wise advice. Now ask me if I've taken his advice.

59:25Yeah. And I will say I grew up, I had an enormous faith and 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. And this Bible teacher came in, I was in fifth grade. So we're 10, 11 year old kids. And she came in and she said, all of y 'all who haven't been baptized are going to hell. And I was like, what? Like, 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?

1:00:05Wow. Yeah. We've ranged on a lot of stuff. Neither one of us were expecting to talk about. I got to tell you, I'm still suffering PTSD, but 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. No, no, no, no, no. We love Apple. People join companies and they leave managers. 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 on this car and say, I finally found something that explains what's happening here.

1:00:45Okay, 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 would like you to just summarize radical respect. Like in a nutshell, what do people get from reading your book? The thing that you will 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. Wow. There you go. A small promise.

1:01:27Way to undersell your book. Read this book. 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 is clearly an expert in radical candor and radical respect. So I hope you learned 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 Madison Nismer. She's the producer and co-author of the book that you need to read.

1:02:22It's called Think Remarkable. Then there's Tessa Neismer, who does the background research and transcript perfection for us. Also, there's Louise Magana, 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 this is Remarkable People