How to Have Challenging Conversations with Best-Selling Author of Radical Candor Kim Scott
Episode 161
Are you tired of communication breakdowns at work, watching valuable feedback go unspoken or ignored? Do you feel like eggshells scatter beneath your feet every time you approach a difficult conversation? Perhaps you've witnessed the destructive force of bias and prejudice in your workplace but feel powerless to confront it. In this must-hear episode of the *Unstoppable Grit Podcast*, we break down the walls of workplace woes with our esteemed guest, Kim Scott, author of "Radical Candor" and "Radical Respect".
After this Episode, You Will Be Able to ...
Integrate radical candor's principles seamlessly into your daily interactions
Foster an environment of trust and direct communication within your team
Initiate conversations that tackle bias without fear or hesitation
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About the Guest
Kim Scott is the author of Radical Respect: How to Work Together Better and Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity and co-founder of the company Radical Candor. Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and other tech companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University and before that led AdSense, YouTube, and DoubleClick teams at Google. Prior to that Kim managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo and started a diamond-cutting factory in Moscow.
Connect with Kim Scott:
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Kim, I am thrilled to have you on today's podcast. The reason is I remember taking your course many moons ago when I was a leader in a leadership position for a Fortune 500 company. I took your course, then read your book, and I still have all of my notes and actually refer back to it quite frequently when it comes to having these difficult conversations, sometimes, especially when we are giving radical candor as a leader, which is not always an easy conversation to navigate through. So tell us a little bit about what inspired you to write radical candor.
What Inspired Kim to Write ‘Radical Candor’
Well, like you, I struggle with radical candor, which is really what prompted me to write the book. I think that there was a moment in my career when I realized how important it was. It was shortly after I had taken a new job at Google and I had to give a presentation to the founders and the CEO about how the AdSense business was doing. I walked into the room and there in one corner of the room was one of the founders on an elliptical trainer, stepping away, wearing toe shoes and a bright blue spandex unitard. Super tight. Not what I was wanting or expecting to see in the room. And there in the other corner of the room was the CEO typing away on his computer, doing his email or something. It was like his brain had been plugged into his computer.
So probably like you in a similar 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 past couple of months, the CEO almost fell off his chair. What did you say? This is incredible. Do you need more marketing dollars? Do you need more engineering resources? So I feel like the meeting is going all right. In fact, I now believe that I am a genius. I walked out of the room, I walked past my boss and I was expecting a high five, a pat on the back, and instead, she said to me, why don't you walk back to my office with me? And I thought, oh wow, I messed something up in there and I'm sure I'm about to hear about it. And I was open to hearing about it from her because she had already solicited feedback from me and rewarded the candor and done all the right things.
She had led by example, but still, it was sort of a tense moment. And she began not by telling me what I had done wrong, but by praising me for what had gone well in the meeting. But of course, all I wanted to hear about was what I had done wrong.
And eventually, she said to me, you said, I'm a lot in there. Were you aware of it? And with this, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Who really cared? That was all I did. I kind of made this brush-off gesture with my hand. I said, yeah, I know it's a verbal tick.
It's no big deal, really. And then she said to me, I know this great speech coach. 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, I'm busy. I don't have time for a speech coach. Didn't you hear about all those new customers? And then she stopped. She looked me right in the eye and she said, I can tell when you do that thing with your hand that I'm going to have to be a lot more direct with you.
When you say every third word, it makes you sound stupid. Now she's got my full attention. Some people might say it was mean of her to say that I sounded stupid, but in fact, it was the kindest thing she could have done for me at that moment in my career.
Because if she hadn't used just those words with me, and by the way, this is a very important point, she knew me well enough that she could say something like that without crushing me. And she also knew me well enough to know that I was kind of stubborn.
She never would have used those words with other people on her team who were perhaps a better listener than I was. But she knew me well enough to know that those were the words she had to use to get through to me. And as soon as she said to them, she said them to me.
What Does Radical Candor Really Mean?
I went to the speech coach and I learned that she was not exaggerating. I literally did say every third word. And this was news to me because I had been giving presentations my whole career. I had raised money for two different startups giving presentations. I thought I was pretty good at it. It really got me thinking, why had no one told me? It was almost like I suddenly realized I'd been marching through my whole career with a giant hunk of spinach between my teeth, and nobody had had the common courtesy to tell me it was there, and so why had no one told me? And also, what was it about my boss that made it so seemingly easy for her to tell me? And as I thought about her management style, I realized it boiled down to two pretty basic things. She cared personally, and she challenged me directly at the same time.
And that really is what radical candor is: it's that combination of caring personally and challenging directly at the same time.
It's not being a jerk. Sometimes people will say in the spirit of Radical Candor, and then they will act like a garden variety jerk. And that is not the spirit of Radical Candor. That's the spirit of what I call obnoxious aggression. But when you truly show people that you care and challenge them at the same time, that's what radical candor is.
It also sounds like you two have had a trusting relationship because that's kind of what led to you being open to hearing. What she had to say is because you had said she probably wouldn't use those words with other people. However, she knew you well enough. You knew that she cared, and that's why you were willing to listen.
Although I will say the seeds of that trust were sown in radical candor. I think one of the mistakes that people make about radical candor is they think, oh, I don't know this person that well. So I'm going to hang out in what I call ruinous empathy. So if you think about radical candor as a two-two framework, care personally is on the vertical line. The challenge directly is on the horizontal line. The upper right-hand quadrant is radical candor. But what happens when we don't challenge directly, but we do try to show we care? That's what I call ruinous empathy.
From the very beginning, she sort of solicited criticism from me, but she also gave it. She didn't wait.
The Humanity in Honest Feedback
In fact, the very first origin story of radical candor came from a perfect stranger, a man on the street of Manhattan. I had just gotten this puppy, golden retriever puppy, and I loved this dog. I loved her so much. I had never said a crossword to her. As a result, she was totally out of control. So I was taking her for a walk one night.
She jumped in front of a speeding cab. I pulled her out of the way in the nick of time, and I was sort of standing on the street corner with my heart in my throat. My dog had almost been hit by a cab. And this man, a perfect stranger, looked at me and he said, I can tell you really love that dog. That was all he had to do to move up on the care personal dimension. But he said to me, you're going to kill that dog if you don't teach her to sit. And then he pointed at the ground in this kind of harsh gesture, and he said, sit. The dog sat.
I had no idea she even knew what that meant. And I kind of looked up at him in amazement and he said, it's not mean, it's clear. So don't make the mistake of thinking that you have to get to know someone really well before you offer Radical Candor.
If you think about it, imagine that you're having lunch with someone for the very first time and they have spinach in their teeth. You know that the thing to do to build that relationship is to tell them it's there, not to ignore it. Because if you don't tell them, they're going to go to the restroom after lunch and they're going to think, gosh, why didn't Kim tell me about that spinach in my teeth?
So I think it's important to remember that you want to show you care. You want to sort of notice that other person's humanity, but that doesn't mean you have to have this deep, profound relationship with them before you can begin to put this into practice.
And it seems, in leadership, radical candor seems to be one of the hardest to do and yet the most impactful.
When you do it well, 100%. I don't know why they call this a soft skill. Because it's the hardest skill to learn.
Let's go through an example. We have an example here because I think this is one that a lot of us will run into. And to really go through how we can use radical candor, we're in a business meeting, and the business meeting is going well. However, you're looking over and you consistently see somebody on their phone.
Using Radical Candor Effectively
And I believe that all of us can relate to this story, and we've been in this experience, and it's so distracting, not only to the person presenting. I also believe it can be very rude to the other people in the room. It doesn't set a good tone. So how might we use Radical Candor in that particular situation when somebody is consistently on their phone in the meeting? Maybe you don't have a relationship well enough to be able to just go with them and be like, hey, man, let's put the phone down. What would their best approach be?
So in an ideal world, you want to stop it as soon as possible.
So if you can just catch their eye, if they look up from their phone for a moment, catch their eye, and then point at your own phone in kind of a private way, that's one thing you could do to just sort of give them a heads up. It's sort of like I was having dinner with a bunch of people. The other night and somebody had spinach in their teeth, literally. And someone else at the table just sort of didn't say, look at Jane's spinach in her teeth. I know you and I are both like, uh oh, do we have spinach in our teeth? So that's one thing you could do if it feels like that is not going to work. I think another thing that I recommend is to pull them aside after the meeting and say, can you walk back to my office with me? Or if it's a Zoom meeting, text the person towards the end of the meeting and say, do you have time for a quick chat? And then you want to try to get on the same side of the table with the person.
Say, look, someone told me once that I was on my phone too much and it really helped me get along better with the team and I really appreciated that this person did it for me. So I'm going to do that for you now. Like, you were on your phone and maybe something was going on, but you were on your phone a bunch during that meeting and it felt disrespectful to the person who was presenting.
And you can do that. You don't have to be the person's boss to do that. That's part of being a good colleague or even an employee. I had an employee tell me that once. I was in a meeting with him and a few other people, and I was inundated with emails and I was responding and he pulled me aside afterwards, this employee, and he said, you know, you were really rude to the person who was presenting in that meeting.
You may not think it was obvious that you were answering emails the whole time, but it was totally obvious. Don't do that. And I was really grateful to him for giving me the heads up because I thought I was getting away with it. Yeah.
And that's always an interesting dynamic, too, when the employee is doing the Radical Candor to the manager.
I think it's really useful to think about power and when you need to pick it up and when you need to lay it down.
So if you're the boss in the situation, you need to lay your power down and you need to reassure your employees that not only is it safe to give you critical feedback, but you will be rewarded for it. And that is really important. And if you are the employee in the situation, you kind of need to step up and pretend like this power balance isn't there and speak truth to power. The people I know who've been the most successful in their careers are the people who have found a way to speak truth to power productively. I mean, you don't want to kick down. You also don't want to kick up.
You want to be respectful up, down, and sideways, but you want to make sure that you show your boss that you care about them. And because you care, you're going to tell them that being on the email in the meeting was rude.
And also in those moments, it really does set the tone of what the expectation is for the team as well. So if the manager is the one that's on their phone, then it's showing that this isn't as important as what's going on in the phone. So it sets the tone for the meeting. Yeah. Should everybody really be paying attention to this meeting? I think it's so important that we address that as well.
If everybody's on their phone doing other stuff, like, let's cancel the meeting, it's not necessary to have.
The Evolution of Workplace Culture
So you have this new book, Overcoming Out.Radical Candor has been a very successful book. Companies have been implementing radical candor throughout their programs in career development. But you now have this new book coming out. Tell us a little bit about that.
If you write a book about feedback, you're going to get a lot of it. And indeed I did. And some of the most useful feedback that I got prompted me to write my new book, Radical Respect. This happened shortly after Radical Candor had come out, and I was at a tech company in San Francisco doing a Radical Candor talk. And the CEO of that company had been a colleague of mine for the better part of a decade. She's a person who I like and respect enormously, and she's one of too few black women CEOs in any other sector.
And when I finished giving the radical candor talk, she pulled me aside and she said, kim, I'm really excited to roll out radical candor at my company. I think it's going to help me build the kind of culture I want.
But I got to tell you, it's much harder for me to do it than it is for you. She went on to explain to me that as soon as she would offer someone even the most compassionate, gentle criticism, they would fire back at her that she was an angry black woman, which, of course, was not true. She's one of the most even killed people I've ever met.
And I realized four things at the same time when she gave me this feedback. One was that I had not been the kind of colleague that I imagined myself to be.
I had failed to be an upstander for her. I had failed even to notice the extent to which she had to show up unfailingly cheerful and pleasant at every meeting we were ever in together, even though she had what to be pissed off about in those meetings, as we all do. We worked together for the better part of a decade, but she was not allowed to show it because of the culture.
And I had failed even to consider the toll that must take on her. So that was my first failure. I had been more of a silent bystander and not a real upstander. The second thing I realized was that I had been in denial about the kinds of different biases, but biases nevertheless, that I had experienced as a white woman in tech.
And it's hard for the author of a book called Radical Candor to admit it, but I had been in denial about things that were happening to me. I'd pretended a whole host of things were not happening that were in fact happening. I think I had been in denial because I never wanted to think of myself as a victim, and so just went along my merry way. But the third thing that I realized was that even less than wanting to be sort of a victim, I want to be the culprit in a situation.
So I was even more deeply in denial about the times when I had said or done things that were biased or prejudiced or bullied others.
As a person who caused harm, I had failed to make amends because I was pretending that I hadn't caused harm, as we all are bound to do when we all make these mistakes.
And then the fourth thing I realized was that as a leader, by not acknowledging bias, prejudice, and bullying, and the extent to which they get in the way of our ability to be radically candid, I had failed to prevent them. And I had failed to create the kind of BS-free zones that I claimed I was creating.
As soon as I had these four realizations, I realized I needed to write this new book, Radical Respect, and sort of get practical and tactical about how can we create better work environments because if we don't respect one another, we're not going to care personally or challenge directly. So it's kind of like the prequel to radical candor.
And what are some of the key learnings that we can expect in learning from this book? I mean, I definitely feel like this is a book that we should all get, just in addition to Radical Candor, because that was such a profound book. I remember reading as a leader and how it really shifted and changed my perspective on how I was leading my team and providing Candor for them.
From Awareness to Action: Responding to Bias, Prejudice, and Bullying
So, in radical respect, one of the things I tried to do is when you're faced with a problem that feels insoluble, and sometimes unfair workplaces seem insoluble, inevitable, but it's not the case. We want to create more fair, reasonable, respectful workplaces.
We want to create these workplaces that optimize for collaboration and that honor everyone's individuality. And so one of the things I tried to do is to really break the problem down. And I think one of the reasons why we often don't respond to these problems is that we conflate three different problems, three different problems, as though they're the same problem. So I try to break them down. I try to break down bias, prejudice, and bullying into their component parts and suggest some responses that we can make to each, both as individuals and as leaders. So bias I define as not meaning it.
There's a ton more to be said about it. I don't pretend to have, but I think it's useful to have really quick definitions. So bias usually reflects some kind of unconscious thought process, pattern of thought, or speech. So that's not meaning it. Whereas prejudice, I define as meaning it.
Prejudice is a very consciously held belief, usually incorporating some kind of unfair and inaccurate stereotype. And we need to respond to prejudice very differently than we respond to bias. And then bullying I define it as just being mean.
There's not a belief, conscious or unconscious.
The person is just trying to dominate in some sort of unfair way. And so one of the things that I tried to do is think about how we can respond as upstanders. So, like, how could I have responded and done better for my colleague as an upstander? And if it is biased, I think we want to respond as a bystander with an I statement.
One of my favorite stories about this comes from Aileen Lee, who started a company called Cowboy VC. And she told me a story about walking into a meeting with two colleagues who were men. And Aileen had the expertise that was going to win her team the deal. So she sat down in the center of the table, and then her two colleagues sat to her left.
The next person sat across from the guy to his left, and then they filed on down the table, leaving Aileen dangling by herself. That's often how bias shows up. Just who decides to sit next to whom or across the table from whom? Aileen started talking, and when the first person had a question, he directed it at her colleague, who was a man. The next person had a question, also directed it at her colleague, who was a man. It was as though Aileen were not in the room and were not speaking. You've also probably seen this happen.
And finally, her colleague stood up and said, I think Aileen and I need to switch seats. That's an example of an I statement.
That was all he had to do to totally change the dynamic in the room because as soon as he sort of held up a mirror, people realized what they were doing and they stopped doing it. They didn't intend to exclude aliens. It just sort of was a reflection of unconscious bias.
And when they became conscious of it, they naturally challenged.
And why did he do that? He did that in part because he liked Aileen. So there's sort of an emotional, moral part of it, and he didn't like seeing her get ignored. He also did it. There's a practical part of it. He did it because he wanted to win the deal. And he knew that if the other side wouldn't listen to Eileen, who had the expertise, they wouldn't win the deal. Then the third reason he did it was because he knew it was going to be easier for the men on the other side of the table to hear it from him than to hear it from Aileen. They were going to get less defensive if he held up the mirror than if she did.
So it was sort of an efficient play and it is now problem-solved. Right now I had to think long and hard and talk to a lot of people to get that story. That's not usually how it goes. Usually, there's this uncomfortable moment, but everybody is silent. Right. What would you say?
I would say that everyone's uncomfortable seeing the dynamic.
Well, some people will have the social awareness around it, and then some people will not have the social awareness.
And then if bias doesn't get disrupted, then it gets reinforced and it's more likely to happen again. It's like taking the wrong route somewhere, taking the wrong way to the grocery store.
If you drive that way three times, you're likely to keep driving the wrong way. Another thing that I recommend is that leaders work with their teams to learn how to disrupt bias so that it's more likely for what happened in the case of this story to happen again or to happen in different situations. The thing that I like to do is to think about three steps that you can take with your team to disrupt bias. The first step is to come up with a shared vocabulary for what are you going to say. What do you say when you don't know what to say? I like to wave a purple flag.
It's not a red flag, it's not a yellow flag. It's a friendly purple flag, and it matches the COVID of the book. And so if I say something that is biased, as I probably will do in the next 5 minutes, I'll wave the flag on myself. And with your permission, if you say something that's biased, I'll wave the flag on you. So you sit down with your team and you say, what's the word or phrase that we'll use? Some teams hate the idea of the purple flag, but one team would throw up a peace sign. Another team that I talked to had kind of a cat theme, and they would meow at each other. One team just said, yo. So the words that are the best words to use are the words your team agrees to use.
So let them come up with it. You don't want to disrupt bias with bias. So I'm not saying any words are fine, but you want to let your team come up with the shared vocabulary. That's step number one. Step number two is you want to talk to your team about how to respond when it's you who has said or done the biased thing. Because every single person listening to this podcast has said or done something biased, it's inevitable.
And very often when people point it out, we feel ashamed. And when we feel ashamed, we go into like, fight or flight mode in our brains.
I can tell you, I don't know about you, but when someone points out that I've said or done something that's biased, I can tell you where I feel it in my body. I feel a tingling in the backs of my knees, and it's like the same physical sensation that I get if my children walk too close to the edge of a precipice. It's like a real panic response.
And when I'm panicked, I rarely respond at my best. So help your team come up with a response. And it usually starts with, thank you for pointing it out. And then either I get it, I'll work on not saying that again or doing that again, or sometimes I don't get it. Can you explain it to me after the meeting? The second thing I don't get is that it is doubly hard.
I'm ashamed now because I've hurt someone, and I'm ashamed because I'm ignorant. I don't even know what I did wrong. But we all do things unintentionally and without awareness of what we did that was offensive to someone else. And so we want to adopt a growth mindset. We want to learn how to become open to that, and we want to normalize that that happens to all of us. And it doesn't mean you're a horrible person. It just means we're all learning together. We're in this together.
And then the third thing you want to do as a leader is you want to create a shared commitment to actually doing this because it is uncomfortable. Even if you love the purple flag, you're going to be tempted not to wave it. So those are some thoughts about how to respond to bias. Does that make sense?
The Importance of Asking Permission
I was at a speaking engagement. There were 160 managers that were, it was mid-level managers, directors, and then the executive team that were in the audience. And I was shown a video. I was speaking for 2 hours, and I had shown a video during one of the sections, and this woman, I was walking around a room, and the woman pulled me aside, and she said, can I share something with you? Can I give you some feedback? What I really liked was that she asked permission first. That kind of set the tone of, hey, this is a moment to just be receptive for a second. And she says, you've played this video, and there's something that I notice, can I share some feedback about it? I said, absolutely. And she says you played this great video, except it was all men in the video. There was one woman, and I didn't even notice.
For me, when you talk about the feeling that you get in the back of the knee, mine's in the pit of my stomach. For me, that feeling, the best way that I can describe that feeling is it says, if you're scared, if you're terrified of heights, yes. And you're standing about to go jump.
You're about to go skydiving. You're at the edge of the plane, about ready to make that jump, but you're terrified of heights. That's the feeling I get in my stomach. It's in the pit of my stomach. It's nauseating.
And then I said, I really appreciate you bringing that to my attention. I said I didn't create that video. And she goes, no, you're right. I know you didn't create the video. And playing that video is a representation of your brand. And I said you're absolutely right.
Yeah, sure enough, I won't be playing anymore.
It's a great motivational video. So I'm really bummed that there's not more women representation, there's not more diversity in.
I bet there's another great video. I'll help you find it.
I'm sure there is, but that is really an example of. Exactly. And this is somebody that didn't know me. This was my first time meeting him.
But you can tell she cared. Yeah. How did you move out of that feeling of panic so that you were able to be receptive? Because I want to give you hats off to you. It's really hard at the moment. The more natural thing is to get defensive and to get shut down. So how did you remain open in the
Well, I believe a lot of it comes down to the fact that I have taken radical candor.
So I know the framework I've used.
It and I've applied it many times. I do believe that she also really set the tone by saying that asking for permission, I believe, is always the first step of any conversation. Can I provide some feedback? Can I share something with you? It really just opens up, and sometimes people will say, no. Like, my husband and I do this sometimes where he'll look at me and he'll be like, well, do you want some feedback?
Setting the Tone: Establishing Expectations for Feedback
So a lot of times we'll even start our conversations and we'll say, hey, I'm going to share something with you. Either after that, I'll say, I'm looking for feedback, or I'm just wanting to vent, and I just need you to.
Listen, and I set the tone right from the beginning. That is really good. That is really good. Yeah, I think you're exactly right. If you aren't in a situation where you're on a team, where you all have agreed that you're going to disrupt bias publicly, I think you want to pull someone aside in private. I think, though, if you can, if you're a leader of a team, or even if you're not the boss of the team, but you're a leader on the team, you want to demonstrate some leadership on the team.
I think it can be a good idea to say, can we all agree that it's okay to disrupt bias publicly in the moment?
Because the thing about unconscious bias is that it's a thought pattern and we can change a pattern, but only if we're aware of the problematic pattern and what we want to do differently. And so I think of disrupting bias.
You want to create the conditions where everybody has given everybody else permission to do it.
But I think that disrupting bias is something that is really important to do so that we don't reinforce it. Because when we're silent about it, it's going to happen again, and then we're going to be a little matter, but we're silent, so it happens again, and then we're a little matter, but we're silent and it happens again. I call it the silence and rage cycle. If we don't disrupt it it's like a correction, and that can happen in public.
If somebody's on a baseball team and they're running to second and they need to get back to first, you don't want to pull them aside afterwards and say, you should have gone back. You want to yell back and give them a chance to fix it in the moment.
And thinking, too, about the importance of doing it right, like you just said, right in the moment.
Confronting Bias and Prejudice Head-On
I remember there was a time, and I'm not going to address it now because so much time has gone by. But I distinctly remember that I really did this particular manager a disservice. And this is one of the managers I used to work with. He had such a sweet demeanor about him. And I know that he's saying it with kindness, but I remember every time I'd go to our national sales meeting, he would always ask me, who's watching the kids? And I always ask my husband. I'm like, how often do you get that quest
And he's like, yeah, never.
And I say, I get that question every time I travel. My dad even asks me this question.
Who do you think is watching the kids? They do have a father that's at home.
And I will say this as a preface because a lot of my listeners know that I'm a military spouse. These are times when people know that he's not deployed, they know that he's home. And so this same manager at one point, I remember I had just come back from maternity leave. I had severe postpartum depression after maternity leave, and I had lost a lot of weight. I was really thin. And I remember him coming up to me and going, Danielle, you're getting to a point where you need to eat a hamburger.
He didn't know what I was going through, so I'm going to give him some grace on that. And assuming positive intent that he didn't know what I was going through. But I also think about how I do a disservice by not actually addressing that right then and there? Because he's probably going to do it again and be complete, just unaware. I think he's really naive sometimes in his comments.
But I think I just did that manager a disservice because he has such a sweet, kind heart about him and I know he's not saying it with ill intent. I just believe deep down in my soul that he's naive about it. The importance of saying it in the moment and by not saying it, we're doing other people a disservice.
I think that's such an important point. It's an act of kindness and generosity to tell him because the next person he says it to might not assume good intent and he might get in real trouble. I had a similar experience shortly after I came back from maternity leave, and I had twins, so it was kind of a long maternity.
I did not know you were a twin mom. I'm a twin mom as well.
I have a boy and a girl who are just about to turn 15.
So I have two boys and they're six.
So you're still in the thick of it.
Which is why one of them is in the other room with the flu on the couch.
Well, he's allowed to come in and talk to us if he wants to. But anyway, I had just gone back to work and I was chit chatting with a guy before the meeting, and he said, oh, well, my wife doesn't work because it's better for the children. And I didn't think it was devastating. I already felt so much guilt, but I assumed he didn't quite mean it, I assumed it was biased. And so I tried to make a little joke of it, and I said, I decided to show up at work today because I chose to neglect my children. And I expected him to apologize and we would move on. But no. He said, oh, no, Kim, you really shouldn't be.
So it was not biased. It was prejudice. It was very consciously held.
And so responding with an I statement, like I feel sad would not have worked, because he's like, you should feel sad. And so what I said was, it is an HR violation for you to tell me that I'm neglecting my children by showing up at work. So that's an IT statement. And in the case of bias, if you hold up a mirror, I mean, in the case of prejudice, if you hold up a mirror, the person's going to smile in the mirror. They're going to like what they see.
It's not going to work. You need an IT statement. An IT statement kind of draws the line between one person's freedom to believe whatever they want, but they can't impose those beliefs on others. He looked afraid, but I didn't want to mess up my relationship with him. So I said, look, I'm not going to make a thing of this with HR, but I think you and I can agree that it is my decision with my spouse how we raise our children, and it is your decision with your spouse how you raise yours. And I'm just guessing, but I don't think you want to read my research any more than I want to read yours.
And then we were able to work through it. But it was really important to say something in the moment, because if I hadn't, then he would have felt like he would decide for me that I shouldn't travel for work or something like that, and that was going to hurt my career, and that was not why I had gone back to work after having the twins.
That's kind of a difference between prejudice and bias and how to respond. And it was really important at my company that they did have that HR policy in place. I think it's really important that leaders explain to people where that line is between one person's freedom to believe whatever they want, but not to impose it on others, because it's easy to say, hard to define, actually.
I feel like this can be a whole nother episode on the differences between bias and prejudice. Yes. I mean, you definitely gave some great examples that we can use and really define both of them. But I also believe that this could be another great thing.
Then you get, then you get bullied.
Which is just being which, you know what? I have had an episode where somebody, Jess Pettit, came on and she talked about what to do. Workplace bullying.
I've also had Catherine Matisse, talk about workplace bullying. And then I also had Serita Maben and she talked about what to say when you have nothing nice to say. Yes, three great episodes to listen to in addition to yours. So I would encourage our know, I've read radical candor. It's a book that I have on my bookshelf. I still have all my notes from when I took the course.
Definitely want to get it. And after hearing Kim speak about this new book, we want to get this one as well.
Radical Candor & Radical Respect
So where can our listeners find both of your books?
Both of the books are available wherever you like to buy books. So you can get them at your local neighborhood independent bookstore. You can get them on Amazon, wherever you like to buy books, however, if you like to read or listen to books, both of them are available. Radical Respect is out May 7, and Radical Candor has been out for quite some time. You can also listen to the Radical Candor podcast if you finish the book and want more. Absolutely.
I'll be tuning into the radical Candor podcast, and I'll be sure to include both of those links in the show notes so that you guys can pre-order your book. Now. Order both of these books. I promise you it will transform the way that you provide candor to the people who are in your lives, both professionally and personally. So thank you, Kim, so much for coming on the podcast. So grateful for your time. I know that you are a busy, busy woman. So to come on board and join us, I appreciate it.
Well, thank you. And I love your book. Unstoppable grit writing is a labor of love. So thank you for doing it. It is a labor of love. Absolutely.
Well, for those of you listening, thank you so much for tuning into the unstoppable Grit podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode or you know somebody who could benefit from listening to this episode, be sure to share it with them. I'm sure you know somebody who's in a leadership position who could really benefit from listening to this episode, and learning more about prejudice and bias and radical candor.
