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[Top Agency Series] Mastering Radical Candor with Kim Scott: Transform Your Leadership

Kim Scott

Kim Scott is an esteemed author, leader, and coach specializing in optimal workplace communication strategies. With her bestselling books Radical Candor and Radical Respect, Kim revolutionizes leadership approaches, emphasizing the balance between personal care and direct challenges. She is Co-founder of Radical Candor and a member of faculties at many companies, including Dropbox, Twitter, Apple University, and Google, where she offers insights into creating collaborative and respectful corporate cultures.

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Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

  • [05:00] The Radical Candor framework
  • [07:57] Kim Scott’s personal story that illustrates the pitfalls of “obnoxious aggression”
  • [13:17] Kim’s own experiences of growth through candid feedback
  • [18:51] Why the feedback sandwich approach is ineffective
  • [26:29] “Ruinous empathy” and its negative consequences
  • [28:10] The importance of soliciting feedback as a leader
  • [34:41] Distinguishing bias, prejudice, and bullying and how to address them

In this episode…

What if negative feedback could actually be a springboard for growth rather than a setback? Could the manner in which we challenge others actually be stifling potential? Is there a way to deliver criticism that empowers rather than deflates?

Kim Scott, the acclaimed author of Radical Candor and Radical Respect, provides actionable insights into evolving beyond traditional command-and-control leadership structures. By emphasizing a balance between genuine care and direct challenge, Kim has developed frameworks that help leaders foster environments of collaboration and respect. From her experiences at Google to managing a pediatric clinic in Kosovo, Kim offers a rich perspective on human interactions within leadership settings. She delves into her unique approach, which is centered on optimizing individual strengths within a team while upholding a culture of honest feedback.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Kim Scott, esteemed author and Co-founder of Radical Candor LLC, about nurturing a climate of candid feedback and respect in the workplace. Kim dissects her radical candor and respect frameworks, sharing stories and examples that will resonate with anyone looking to improve their approach to leadership.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Special Mentions:

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    Episode Transcript

    Intro 0:00

    You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

    Dr Jeremy Weisz here, founder of InspiredInsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Kim Scott of Radical Candor and Radical Respect. Check both of those books out, they’re fantastic. And Kim, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. And since this is one of my favorite books, Radical Candor is definitely one of my favorite books, and it’s been mentioned numerous times on the podcast. Some of the other other interviews I’ve done with fantastic authors include Jeff Wetzler of Ask, actually he brought up your book, How to Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You for Unexpected Breakthroughs In Leadership and Life, Scaling Up by Verne Harnish, Traction by Gino Wickman. That was a good episode. Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, 80/20 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall, Stand Out by Dorie Clark, and Giftology by John Ruhlin. Some of my favorites. I don’t know if you have any of your favorites. I know Gretchen Rubin wrote something nice about you. And also, Angela Duckworth is on the cover of Radical Respect. What are some of your favorites?

    Kim Scott 1:32 

    You know, I feel really lucky. Dan Pink also helped me name Radical Candor. So props to him and endorsed both Radical Candor and Radical Respect. Henry Louis Gates, Jr also endorsed Radical Respect, and Sarah Koontz also endorsed Radical Respect. So I feel very fortunate to have even a blurb from Adam Grant so I feel very lucky.

    Jeremy Weisz 2:08

    I love it. Yeah, I love Adam Grant’s books too. So well, I’ll go and talk a little bit more about Kim in a second. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. And how do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution. Kim, we kind of call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background that make it look easy for the host so they can just run their company and create amazing content. 

    You know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships, and I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I have found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people and companies I most admire on this planet and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you thought about podcasting, you should. Kim has a few podcasts, actually, you know, definitely do. If you have questions about it, you can go to Rise25.com or email us at [email protected] 

    I am excited to introduce Kim Scott, the author of Radical Respect and Radical Candor. The radical candor approach is a combination, I would say, of caring personally while challenging directly, and it’s helped many leaders move from a command and control culture to one of collaboration. And the radical candor framework was developed by Kim as a communication framework for specific and sincere praise and kind and clear criticism. And we’re going to go into the radical candor approach and framework, as well as the radical respect approach and framework. Her background is really impressive: ws a CEO coach at Dropbox, Twitter and other tech companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University. Before that, Kim actually led AdSense, YouTube and double click teams at Google, and she cut her teeth as a leader with her software startup. I think she raised millions of dollars for that. And I’m not sure if everyone knows this about you, Kim, but I know you also managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo and did work at the diamond cutting factory in Moscow. So Kim, thanks for joining me. 

    Kim Scott 4:19

    Thank you. I’m excited for our conversation.

    Jeremy Weisz 4:22

    So I’m going to share my screen. This is a video too. If you listen to the audio, you can check the video out as well. And I just want to start with the radical candor framework. And let me pull this up so you can see here, right, radicalcandor.com. You can check out all her work there. You can see the Radical Candor book. The Radical Respect book as well. And I know the newest work is Radical Respect. This is built off of all your years of experience. But I want to start with radical candor. Can you just talk a little bit about this framework for a second?

    Kim Scott 5:00

    Sure absolutely. Radical candor is what happens when you show that you care personally and challenge directly at the same time as you said before. Radical candor is often mistaken for obnoxious aggression, which it is not. Sometimes I’ll be working with a team and someone will charge into a room and say in the spirit of radical candor, and then they proceed to act like a garden variety jerk. That is not the spirit of radical candor, that is the spirit of obnoxious aggression. Obnoxious aggression is what happens when you remember to challenge directly, but you forget to show that you care personally or maybe you don’t actually care. And obnoxious aggression is a problem for a bunch of reasons. First and foremost, it’s a problem because it hurts other people. It’s also a problem because it’s inefficient. If I am a jerk to you, you go into fight or flight mode, and then you literally cannot hear what I’m saying. So I am wasting my breath. I think it’s also a problem because I don’t know about you, Jeremy, but when I realize that I’ve landed here and obnoxious aggression, it’s not my instinct to go the right way on the care personally dimension. Instead, it’s my instinct to go the wrong way on challenge directly and then I wind up in the worst place of all, manipulative insincerity. If obnoxious aggression is front stabbing, manipulative insincerity is backstabbing. Manipulative insincerity is where passive, aggressive behavior, political behavior, all of the stuff that erodes trust, most insidiously in an organization, creeps in. 

    And it’s kind of fun to talk about both obnoxious aggression and manipulative insincerity, because that’s where the drama is. In fact, the HBO show Silicon Valley did a whole episode on what they called radical candor, but what was actually obnoxious aggression and manipulative insincerity. The thing is, though, that these are not the quadrants where we make most of our mistakes. The vast majority of us make the vast majority of our mistakes in this last box, the upper left hand quadrant where we do remember to show that we care personally, but we are so worried about not offending someone or not hurting their feelings, that we fail to challenge them directly, and that’s what I call ruinous empathy. So that is the TL;DR on radical candor. But please do read it. 

    Jeremy Weisz 7:36

    I want to, you know, we’ll talk about some of your favorite stories here, one of my favorite stories from the book, and I’ll let you paint the picture. But I think in the room was Eric Schmidt, Neil Sandberg, Sergey Brin. When you walk into this room, just explain to people what you were you were seeing,

    Kim Scott 7:57

    Yeah. So, I had just gotten a new job at Google, and I had to give a presentation a few months after I had joined about how the AdSense business was doing. And I walked into the room, and there in one corner of the room was Sergey Brin on an elliptical trainer, stepping away wearing toe shoes and a bright blue spandex unitard, super tight. Not what I was expecting, not what I was wanting to see when I walked into the room. And there in the other corner of the room was Eric Schmidt doing his email, it’s like his brain had been plugged into the machine. So probably like you 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 over the last couple of months, Eric almost fell off his chair. Why did you say this is incredible? Do you need more engineers? Do you need more marketing dollars? So at this point, I’m feeling like the meeting’s going all right. In fact, I now believe that I’m a genius. And I walk down to the room, I walk past my boss, who is Sheryl Sandberg, and I’m expecting a high five, a pat on the back, and instead, Sheryl says to me, why don’t you walk back to my office with me, and I thought, Oh, wow, I messed something up, and I’m sure I’m about to hear about it. 

    Now she began not by telling me what I had done wrong, but by giving me some kudos for what had gone well in the meeting, not in the sort of shit sandwich sense of the word, but really seeming to mean what she was saying. But of course, all I wanted to hear about was what I had done wrong. Eventually, she said to me, you said, um, a lot in there, were you aware of it? And with this, I breathed a huge sigh of relief, because if that was all I had done wrong, who really cared? And I kind of made this brush off gesture with my hand. I said, Yeah, I know it’s a verbal tic, it’s no big deal really. And then she said to me, I know a great speech coach. I bet Google would pay for it. Would you like an introduction? And once again, I made this brush off gesture with my hand, I said, No, you know I don’t have time. Did you hear about all these new customers? I don’t have time for a speech coach. 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 gonna have to be a lot more direct with you. When you say um every third word, it makes you sound stupid. 

    Now she’s got my full attention, and some people might call what she said to me obnoxious aggression. They might say that it was mean of her to say that I sounded stupid, but in fact, it was the kindest thing that 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, she never would have used those words with other people on her team who were perhaps better listeners and maybe a little more sensitive than I was, but she knew me well enough to know that if she didn’t use just those words with me, that I wouldn’t go visit speech coach and I wouldn’t learn that she was not exaggerating. I literally said every third word. And this was news to me, because I had raised money, millions of dollars for two different startups, giving presentations. I thought I was pretty good at it, and that made me sort of wonder, you know, what was it about her management style? First of all, why had no one else told me? But what was it about her management style that made it so seemingly easy for her to tell me, and that was when I really started thinking about care personally and challenge directly. I knew that she cared about me because and cared about me, not just as an employee, but as a human being, because she would do things like when I moved from New York to California to take the job at Google, I didn’t know anyone here in California, or I didn’t know very many people, and I was lonely, and she could tell that I was lonely, and and she introduced me to a book group. I’m still friends, in fact, I just went to that book group last night, I’m still friends with those people to this day also, you know? And that was the kind of thing she did, not only for me, but for everyone who worked directly with her. 

    She couldn’t do that kind of stuff for all 5,000 people in her organization, no matter how talented you are, relationships don’t scale, but culture does scale, and when a leader treats their direct reports with that kind of care, then it’s much more likely, in turn, that their direct reports will understand it’s their job to treat their direct reports with that kind of care and that does scale, that kind of caring, that kind of culture of caring. But it wasn’t, of course, all sunshine and roses. I also knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that if I screwed up, she was going to tell me in no uncertain terms, she was going to make sure that she got through to me and that’s the challenge, directly part of the equation.

    Jeremy Weisz 13:17

    I’ve definitely, Kim, had people rip into me online of how I’m talking, and I think it was more obnoxious aggression, because I don’t know if they care for me personally, but that was still helpful, honestly. And I still took their advice. I’m like, they’re totally accurate with that, and I had to reevaluate sometimes how I talk, or, you know, some of the gestures I make. So it’s definitely helpful. 

    Kim Scott 13:41

    Yeah, by the way, you made a really important point there, like obnoxious aggression is bad, but it’s more helpful than either ruinous empathy or manipulative insincerity. If you can, sort of pan for gold or separate the wheat from the chaff of the obnoxious aggression that you get. I think that’s important to write. I am not condoning obnoxious aggression, I want to be very clear. But ruinous empathy feels nicer and is actually meaner in the long run.

    Jeremy Weisz 14:12

    So in the obnoxious aggression, if you’re looking at the video, you can see the the chart here, would you consider the Larry Page interaction under obnoxious aggression?

    Kim Scott 14:26

    No, not at all. I mean, again, shortly after I joined Google, I got into an argument with Larry. Well, Larry, I was obnoxious to Larry. Larry was not obnoxious to me. Which story do you want?

    Jeremy Weisz 14:42

    The one I think more of you instigating.

    Kim Scott 14:47

    Yes, where I was the obnoxious one. So Larry and I got into an argument about an AdSense policy, and I sent an email to him and about 30 other people. By the way, mistake number one was email. I should have had a conversation in person. Mistake number two was cc’ing 30 other people, and the email read this. Here comes mistake number three. The obnoxious part, Larry claims he wants to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, but if it’ll make us a buck, he’s willing to create clutter sites that muddle the world’s information. Very clever, but obnoxious and shortly after I sent that email, a friend of mine called me up and said, Kim, why did you do that? 

    And let’s think for a minute. Why did I do that? It’s worth pondering. I think I did that because I believe, like I bet you believe, and all of your listeners believe that there’s a special place in hell for people who kiss up and kick down. But that doesn’t mean that doing the exact opposite is such a brilliant move, either. So if you find that you’ve landed in obnoxious aggression, the right thing for me to have done, would have been to show I care personally. And you know, because common human decency is the one thing that we owe to everyone who we work with, regardless of who they are in the company. So it’s no better to be obnoxiously aggressive. Well, it’s worse to be obnoxiously aggressive to people who have less power than you. But that doesn’t mean it’s good to be obnoxiously aggressive to people who have more power than you. 

    So what I did was I made a mistake after I got that phone call that I think a lot of people make. Instead of moving the right way on care personally, I went the wrong way on challenge directly and wound up in the worst place of all. Then here’s my hero’s journey to manipulative insincerity. The next time I saw Larry, I said, Oh, Larry, I’m so sorry about that email. You’re right. I’m wrong. Two problems with that. One is that I was lying, I did not think I was wrong. And the second problem is that Larry, like most people, has a pretty good BS meter, and he could tell I was lying. And he said, he kind of looked at me, glared at me, said nothing, and he just stopped off. It was one of those cringe moments. The guy sitting next to me looked at me and he said, I think he likes it better when you disagree with him than when you pretend to agree and you don’t agree. So if you, if you find that you’ve landed in obnoxious aggression, don’t make that mistake. Don’t go the wrong way on challenge directly. Instead go the right way on care personally.

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