Introduction
We Can Fix Problems Only When We Are Willing to Notice Them
When you write a book about feedback, or guidance as I prefer to call it, you’re bound to get a lot of it. In 2017, I published a book called Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. It advocated for caring personally and challenging directly at the same time, a combination of real compassion for the other person and a commitment to helping them succeed.
Hands down, the best feedback I got on the book came from Michelle,1 who’d been a colleague for the better part of a decade. I liked and admired Michelle enormously and was thrilled when she invited me to give a talk about Radical Candor at the tech start-up where she was CEO.
When I finished giving the presentation, Michelle pulled me aside and said, “I’m excited to roll out Radical Candor here, Kim. I think it’s going to help me build the kind of innovative culture we need to succeed. But I gotta tell you. As soon as I give anyone even the gentlest, most compassionate criticism, I get accused of being an angry Black woman.”
I’d been in innumerable meetings with Michelle. I’d never once heard her raise her voice or even seem annoyed, let alone angry. She’s one of the most even-keeled, cheerful people I’ve met. Calling her “angry” and following that up with “Black” and “woman” was no small indication that something other than an objective assessment was going on with the people who called her that.
Michelle’s story made me realize I had not done much to dig into how bias, prejudice, and bullying get in the way of Radical Candor. These attitudes and behaviors destroy the trust that is foundational to the healthy exchange of different perspectives, they mar the quality of feedback, and therefore hurt our ability to do great work and build strong professional relationships. Michelle’s feedback also made me realize I’d treated bias, prejudice, and bullying as though they were all the same thing, making it difficult to respond effectively. Different problems demand different solutions, after all.
My failure to consider all this had put Michelle in a jam when she implemented Radical Candor. Come to think of it, it had put me in a jam, too, though in different ways. Why had I not paused to think about this when writing my book?
I was certainly aware of the problems of bias, prejudice, and bullying and how they can give way to discrimination, harassment, and violence. I grew up in an upper-middle-class household in Memphis, Tennessee. Since I was a teenager, I’d been wrestling with being White2 and Southern. Then I moved to New York and Silicon Valley and learned racism was unfortunately not just in the South. A tech CEO I coached was active in the BLM movement after the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. But he didn’t need to fly to Missouri to fight racism. There was plenty of that in California.
Bias, prejudice, bullying, discrimination, harassment, and physical assault weren’t things that happened to “other people.” I’d personally experienced all of these throughout my career. Given these experiences, how was it possible that I had written a book about management that barely touched on what causes the worst management train wrecks? Freud calls this kind of knowledge “knowing without knowing.” Linsey McGoey and others call this strategic ignorance. Charles Mills has written about “epistemologies of ignorance.”
Michelle’s Radical Candor on Radical Candor helped me break through that kind of hazy knowing / not knowing so that I could analyze problems clearly enough to begin to develop a framework that might help me (and hopefully you, too) figure out what to do when we notice them. Too often in my career, I have not said or done anything about these problems either because I refused to notice them or because I didn’t know what to say or do.
It wasn’t Michelle’s job to educate me, so I’m grateful to her for doing so. This book is my effort to pay it forward. It will offer a framework that helps us all recognize the different ways that bias, prejudice, and bullying interfere with our ability to work together and what to do to get back on track. It will also examine the ways they enter our management systems, creating even more intractable problems. It will also offer some design principles that will allow us to create better management systems.
The goal is not simply to describe the problems but to figure out what to do about fixing them. Awareness is the first step to change. But awareness without action quickly breeds despair. Unless we figure out the next step to take, we’ll retreat into denial. Oedipus gouged his eyes out after he realized he’d committed crimes he was ashamed of. This violent depiction of the denial that comes before coming to grips with our own misdeeds, be they intentional or not, is a kind of denial complex. If we are willing to notice problems rather than retreating to denial we can fix them—a much better response than gouging our own eyes out.
This book doesn’t promise to fix everything. What it offers are some practical, tactical suggestions that will help us start putting more wins on the board so that we can keep moving forward, so that we don’t retreat back into denial.
You can use this book to figure out what you can do to improve your own situation and build a better culture where you work. Of course, your degrees of freedom are different depending on your role or roles—often, we are in two or more roles at once: leader, upstander/observer, person harmed, or person causing harm. Some key questions it addresses:
What must leaders do to prevent bias, prejudice, and bullying from destroying respect and collaboration on their teams?How can we make sure we are upstanders and not silent bystanders when we observe bias, prejudice, and bullying affecting colleagues?When we are the person harmed by bias, prejudice, and bullying, how can we choose a response that will help us maintain personal agency?What can we do when we realize that we have caused harm? How can we come to grips with the fact that we all have our own biases and prejudices, and most of us bully others at least occasionally? If we want to do better in the future, we need to adopt a growth mindset about our own problematic attitudes and behaviors. As my son’s baseball coach told his team, “You can’t do right if you don’t know what you’re doing wrong.”How can we design our management systems to minimize rather than reinforce these problems? When organizations layer power on top of bias, prejudice, and bullying, the result is discrimination, harassment, and physical violations. If leaders don’t design management systems for justice, the result is predictable: systemic injustice. And if you are not a leader, how can you navigate your career so you minimize the damage that unfair, inequitable systems can do to you?How can we as individuals speak truth to power without blowing up our careers?There are things each of us can do, today, to create a more respectful, collaborative working environment for ourselves and those around us. An equitable working environment in which we can all do the best work of our lives and build the best relationships of our careers is within our grasp.
Just Work, the original title of this book, just didn’t work. People thought I was telling them to work all the time, or to return to the office, rather than to work more justly. Hence the new title: Radical Respect. I also revised the book based on feedback from people who read the hardcover, to make it shorter and more user-friendly.3
I hope this book will energize you to build the kind of working environment where you can love your work—and the people you work with. We must do better than merely tolerating one another if we are going to optimize for collaboration and honor individuality. We can work together better—joyfully, even.
Notes
1. When I tell a story in the first person, I’m describing something that happened to me. When I tell a story in the third person, it’s either a composite of things I’ve seen firsthand told abstractly for clarity and efficiency, or it’s a story that someone I know told me. Except when I use a first and last name, all names in this book have been changed. I am not naming names, because I want to focus on what we can learn from what happened and how we can apply the lessons to create more radically respectful workplaces everywhere. Also, I chose names that are common in the United States and do not reflect the cultural diversity of our country or our world. This is because when I chose a different set of names, it prompted others to start guessing who was who and to read the wrong things into certain stories.
2. I will capitalize both Black and White throughout this book. I’m persuaded to do this by the logic of Kwame Anthony Appiah, who argues that these are “both historically created racial identities—and avoid conventions that encourage us to forget this.” In his article “The Case for Capitalizing the B in Black,” he chose not to capitalize either. I choose to capitalize both, as to me capitalization implies the distinction is an arbitrary one, rather than something essential; you could call me a Tennessean since I grew up there or a Californian since I live there now; or you could call me a Minnesotan since I was born there. But those descriptors are arbitrary and therefore artificial, not essential. Yet useful.
3. A diverse range of thinkers have influenced this book in significant ways, and their contributions are noted in the notes sections in the relevant chapters. The hardback version had footnotes for each chapter, but many readers felt they slowed them down, so I opted for this more user-friendly approach in the paperback.
1 A Framework for Success
WHAT IS RADICAL RESPECT?
The word respect has two very different meanings. The first has to do with admiration for someone’s abilities, qualities, or achievements. That kind of admiration has to be earned. But that’s not what I’m talking about in this book.
The definition of respect I’m using here is a regard for the feelings, wishes, rights, and traditions of others. This kind of respect is something we owe to everyone; it is not something that needs to be “earned.”
The kind of respect that is the birthright of every human being is crucial to a healthy culture. We don’t have to respect a person’s opinion on a particular topic—we can disagree, vehemently. We don’t have to respect a particular action a person took—we can still disapprove and hold them accountable. But we do have to respect that person as a human being if we want to be able to work together productively while also leaving space to disagree and hold each other accountable when necessary.
Radical Respect happens in workplaces that do two things at the same time:
Optimize for collaboration, not coercion.Honor individuality, don’t demand conformity.What makes it radical is that it is so fundamental, and yet it rarely occurs.
1. OPTIMIZE FOR COLLABORATION, NOT COERCION
Collaboration is essential to any great human accomplishment. Designing organizations that promote healthy collaboration requires proactive efforts to combat coercive behaviors from individuals and groups, such as arbitrary, ego-driven, fact-ignoring biased decision-making, bullying, harassment, and physical violations or violence. When we build management systems that put checks and balances on the power of leaders, they can be held accountable for their behavior and their results. Employees contribute ideas rather than being silenced. We help each other improve, and we achieve more than we could ever dream of achieving alone.
There is growing consensus that coercion, even by otherwise visionary leaders, neither gets the best results out of people nor generates the innovation necessary to thrive in the modern economy. Yes, most of us have the impulse to coerce when we can get away with it, and leaders often can get away with it unless checks and balances constrain them. When we design management systems carefully, we can mitigate the damage this can do.
2. HONOR INDIVIDUALITY, DON’T DEMAND CONFORMITY
If we want each person we’re working with to bring their full potential to our collaborative efforts, we need to honor one another’s individuality rather than demanding conformity. None of us (except actors) can do their best work while pretending to be somebody they aren’t. Telling people to bring their best to work while discouraging them from being their true selves seems obviously doomed to fail. But we do that all the time, usually unconsciously. Too often, we look for “culture fit” rather than “culture add” when we hire, forcing employees to pretend to be someone they are not, making it difficult for our organizations to evolve, and excluding people who could make important contributions. Often we advertise that we admire people who “think different,” but then we punish or ostracize outliers.
Successful collaboration requires diversity of thought and experience. Part of the benefit of collaboration is that “many hands make a light load.” But the more important benefit is that diversity allows us to challenge each other because each of us has a different point of view, different life experiences. One person easily notices something that another person is oblivious to. But if that person is punished for speaking up, they will go silent and nobody will get the benefit of their observations in the future. When we challenge one another, we improve one another’s work. That is why feedback at work is so vital to our individual and collective growth and success.
If we were all exact clones, we’d lose much of the benefit we get from working together. What is impossible for one person is simple for another. What is tedious drudgery for one person is a pleasure for another. We need one another.
WHAT GETS IN THE WAY OF RADICAL RESPECT?
A “TOXONOMY”
Why is the combination of optimizing for collaboration and honoring individuality so rare that I dub it radical?
All too often, our biases cause us to expect conformity without even realizing what we are doing. And when you layer power and management systems on top of that, that expectation gets baked into who we hire, promote, and fire. Unconscious bias enables discrimination.
When we are at our worst, we seek to establish dominance or to bully others at work, rather than seeking to collaborate with them. And again when you layer management systems and power on top of those instincts, things go from bad to worse. Bullying escalates to harassment, physical violations, and violence.
These are universal human failings. “Progressive” organizations drift toward coercion and conformity as surely as do “conservative” ones. But these problems are not inevitable. Fighting the gravitational pull toward conformity and coercion requires much more than good intentions. We must act. Part of the solution is for leaders to consciously design norms and systems that keep us moving toward respect and collaboration. But leaders can’t do this alone. We all have a role to play.
What can we do to make Radical Respect less rare? Let’s start by naming the problems so we are more apt to notice them. As I learned when Michelle gave me some feedback on Radical Candor, we can’t fix problems we refuse to notice.
What precisely do we mean when we talk about a “toxic” or “unfair” work environment? Those terms make the problem feel monolithic, insoluble. When you break a big problem down into its component parts, it’s easier to find solutions. I’m not promising a quick fix; but by diagnosing more precisely what was unfair, we can figure out what to do about it and make our situation a little better.
This book offers a “toxonomy” that will help you notice the different problems that need fixing so you can match the right solution to the right problem. Throughout my career, I tended to lump a whole set of different problems into something I thought of as “BS.” In so doing, I made it much harder to find solutions and much easier to feel cynical or helpless. I found that by forcing myself to be more precise—was it bias or actually discrimination; was it prejudice or bullying?—I put myself in a much better position to break free of my tendency to default to silence and easier to take some action to make things better. I also found that it was easier to build solidarity with people who were experiencing different but related things—racial bias rather than gender bias, for example. This simple toxonomy helped keep me oriented in disorienting situations. I hope it will help you, too.
BIAS PREJUDICE BULLYING DISCRIMINATION HARASSMENT PHYSICAL VIOLATIONS
Bias, prejudice, and bullying are big problems, and it can be hard to distinguish between them. When you lay power on top of them, things go from bad to worse. Bias and prejudice plus power creates the conditions for discrimination. Bullying plus power creates the conditions for harassment. Both positional and physical power create the conditions for physical violations and violence.
Throughout this book, I’ll use this toxonomy to keep us focused on one problem at a time. Of course, these problems aren’t mutually exclusive, and as with all dynamic situations, they can change over time. But the advantage of imposing order like this is that it can help us identify solutions rather than getting lost in the complexity of the problem.
DISAMBIGUATION
Let’s look for a moment at the first half of the toxonomy. People often treat bias, prejudice, and bullying as though they are synonymous. For example, the term microaggression is useful in pointing out small injuries that add up to repetitive stress injury—a big problem that can keep you from doing your best work or living your happiest life. The problem is, there are three different reasons why people commit microaggressions: they can result from bias, prejudice, and bullying. As you’ll learn in the pages that follow, each of these things requires a very different response.
To help parse the problem, let’s start with some simple definitions.
Bias is “not meaning it.” Bias is unconscious. It comes from the part of our minds that jumps to conclusions, often reflecting stereotypes that we don’t believe if we stop to think.
Prejudice is “meaning it.” It is a consciously held belief, often rationalizing flawed assumptions and stereotypes.
Bullying is “being mean.” There may be no belief, conscious or unconscious, behind it. Often it is the instinctive use of in-group status or power to harm, humiliate, dominate, or coerce others.
Depending on one’s perspective, these three problems carry different weight. For example, we are all biased, and bias usually doesn’t come with bad intent. So it’s tempting to dismiss bias as less severe than other infractions. That is certainly true from the perspective of the person who caused harm. However, it may be different from the perspective of the person harmed. Many people feel that bias is more harmful than prejudice or bullying because it happens much more often. Others have found prejudice or bullying looms larger in their experience. The point is that these are all problems that we need to solve, and comparing which one is “worse” than the other isn’t helpful.
Often there’s no belief, conscious or unconscious, behind bullying. But belief, be it conscious or unconscious, tends to guide our actions. So bias and prejudice tend to make bullying likelier. A person might bully with biased language, using words that wound, even if they don’t consciously believe the implications of what they are saying. I worked with a woman who did not consciously believe that women were less courageous than men but who routinely called men she wanted to humiliate “p*$&ies.” I’ve seen racist or homophobic slurs employed in an analogous way. When bullying is emboldened by conscious prejudice, it often becomes violent, as occurred in the Jim Crow South.
Here’s a story that illustrates why it’s important to distinguish between bias, prejudice, and bullying.
Mr. Safety Pin
I was just about to give a Radical Candor talk to the founders and executives of some of Silicon Valley’s hottest start-ups. A couple of hundred men were at the conference. I was one of only a handful of women. Just as I was about to go onstage, one of these men ran up to me.
Copyright © 2024 by Kim Scott
