Edited By Brandi Neal, Radical Candor podcast writer and producer, and director of content creation…
Resisting Coercion and Conformity Demands a Conscious Design: Here’s How to Get Started
Kim Scott is the author of Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity and Radical Respect: How to Work Together Better and co-founder of Radical Candor, a company that helps people put the ideas in her books into practice. Subscribe to her Radical Respect Newsletter on LinkedIn to get more tips for dismantling coercion and conformity so you can build a just workplace where Radical Candor can flourish.
Brutal Ineffectiveness is Bad for Everyone
Brutal Ineffectiveness is what you get when, in addition to management systems that unconsciously reward conformity, the systems optimize for coercion rather than collaboration, producing more outright bullying and harassment.
The Weinstein Company was an example of Brutal Ineffectiveness. So is Elon Musk’s Twitter/X, in a different way. The board of Uber made the determination that Travis Kalanick’s behavior was both brutal and ineffective and removed him. The Jim Crow South, apartheid South Africa, and Putin’s Russia are other examples of Brutal Ineffectiveness.
Brutal Ineffectiveness is worst soonest for the people harmed, but in the end, it’s bad for everyone. If we take the long view, everyone has a practical interest in changing these systems, even the people who benefit from them in the short term.
The aspects of human nature we are least proud of will always be pulling us away from efforts to collaborate and toward the instinct to coerce.
Sometimes Brutal Ineffectiveness springs from an evil leader, but it often springs from management systems that fail to hold people accountable for bad behavior or that even reward bad behavior. The assholes begin to win, and the culture begins to lose.
Power dynamics, competition, poorly designed management systems, and office politics can create systemic injustice in ways that may be subtle and insidious at the outset but over time become corrosive, and often even criminal.
And, really, who cares about the leader’s intentions? We should demand the same good results from leaders who create management systems as we do from CEOs when it comes to profitability. If the systems reflect and reinforce the injustice in our society, they need to be changed. If a leader can’t figure out how to change the system, the leader must go.
The examples of Brutal Ineffectiveness don’t have to be as dramatic as the Weinstein Company or as bloody as Stalinism.
Think about a time in your life when leaders demanded conformity and therefore hired homogeneous teams, passing over the most skilled people for promotion, touting their meritocracy while actually creating a mediocracy. And there were no consequences for bullying or harassment, so these behaviors were common, making it difficult for many to do their best work. A vicious cycle ensues.
It’s hard to understand how or why we let things get so bad that we land in Brutal Ineffectiveness. Considering discrete problems like bias, prejudice, bullying, discrimination, harassment, and physical violations can’t explain it.
To understand, we need to consider the dynamics between these attitudes and behaviors, and the vicious cycles such dynamics can set in place. How does bias lead to discrimination? To harassment? To physical violations? And are there times when a vicious cycle ensues?
Power dynamics, competition, poorly designed management systems, and office politics can create systemic injustice in ways that may be subtle and insidious at the outset but over time become corrosive, and often even criminal.
For example, a man believes women don’t handle stress well, so he discriminates against women, offering them lower-paying jobs. Having less power in the office, a woman is more vulnerable to being sexually harassed. Not surprisingly, she seems stressed, reinforcing his bias.
What can we do to disrupt these dynamics and set in place a virtuous cycle that leads to systemic justice, instead of a vicious cycle that creates systemic injustice? What moves us away from collaboration and respect. Partly it’s the discrete attitudes and behaviors already discussed. But it’s also the dynamics between them.
Let’s look at how coercion and conformity moves us away from collaboration and respect.
Be One of Us or Make Way for Us
The Harmful Effects of Conformity Culture
The Conformity Dynamic drags us away from respecting individuality, usually offering a pretense of being rational, civilized, polite. But this dynamic excludes some people in a way that is not at all rational and can cause as much or even more harm in the long run as outright violence.
The Conformity Dynamic implicitly conveys an ancient message: Be one of us, or make way for us. And for many employees, of course, conforming to that “us” is not desirable or even possible.
There are many things about myself I don’t want to change—my gender, for example; and others I couldn’t change even if I wanted to, like my age or my height. And when people are excluded from opportunity or subjected to unjust policies because they can’t or won’t conform with an arbitrary norm, it leaves them vulnerable to abuse, both emotional and physical.
The Conformity Dynamic often masquerades as “polite” or “professional.” This is BS. The fact that it’s not overtly violent doesn’t mean that it isn’t destructive.
Shortly after I joined Google, a colleague told me not to wear a pink sweater to a meeting with the executives. The basic message, offered in the guise of helpful advice, was this: Try not to look too much like a woman in this meeting. He thought he was being helpful, but he was reinforcing gender bias. A white colleague told a Black colleague to cut off his locs before an important meeting. The basic message, offered in the guise of helpful advice, was this: Try not to look too Black in this meeting.
If either of these people had wanted to be truly helpful, they would at the very least have acknowledged that in a more just world, they would have offered feedback to the leaders in these meetings to focus on the real work and not the sweaters or hair of their employees.
The Conformity Dynamic is reflected in the polite racism that Martin Luther King Jr. decried in his liberal allies in the North. People use the absence of explicit violence in their behavior to deny the harm that their attitudes and behaviors cause, to ignore the systemic injustice that results. The Conformity Dynamic plays out in different ways for different people. Here is a story about how it played out in my life.
The Conformity Dynamic: The Effects of Erasure
When I was 7 years old, my parents were playing tennis at their club as I amused myself by picking wild blackberries along the fence. Suddenly, two men approached the court. I was nervous because I knew the club’s rules. Women were not allowed to be members; my mother and I were there as my father’s guests.
This translated to the following hierarchy for the tennis courts: If two women were playing, a man and a woman could take their court. Once the man and woman started playing, if two men walked up, the men could boot the man and the woman off the court. This, I feared, was about to happen to my parents.
But then my mother, who was seven months pregnant, pointed at her belly and said to the two men, “I have a man-child inside of me. So there are two men on the court.” The two men accepted this logic and went off to find another court.
I was astonished. My embryonic brother’s penis had carried the day in a way that my brilliant, creative, strong adult mother could not have. I was outraged by the injustice of it. At school, we would never have been allowed to invent such ridiculous rules to exclude kids we didn’t want to play with. But this was the sexist hierarchy that governed our existence.
When I got my first summer job at a bank in Memphis, an executive said to me, “Why, I didn’t know they let us hire pretty girls!” I was eighteen, and I had no idea what an “I” statement was or how to respond. So I said nothing. I just felt deflated.
This kind of erasure wore down all but the toughest women. And while I was getting underestimated as a result of my gender, I was getting overestimated as a result of my race. I was in denial about both dynamics for much of my life.
It was conversations with women who weren’t white that helped me notice what was really going on. This speaks to the importance of solidarity between people of different identities to challenge all the behaviors that contribute to a vicious cycle. United, we can create a virtuous cycle.
The Coercion Dynamic
How Words Can Reflect and Reinforce Patterns of Violence
The Coercion Dynamic, which drags us away from collaboration and makes no pretense at being polite—it is brutal.
The Coercion Dynamic, which happens when people use their power to coerce others rather than creating a collaborative environment, is an equally ancient, well-worn path that leads from bias to bullying to harassment to violence. If you aren’t aware of that path from bias to violence, you might give unconscious bias a “pass.”
Simon himself wasn’t overtly threatening me, but he was normalizing a sinister, criminal notion—that people think that having sex with someone too drunk to give consent is just a “party foul.”
But because bias can give way to violence, acknowledging that it matters is important, and we must take bias seriously. My lived experience of the Coercion Dynamic has been of a privileged sort. I have rarely had to fear for my physical safety. But here is a story that illuminates why it’s vital to recognize it, not to deny it.
The Coercion Dynamic at the Holiday Party
I went to a holiday party a few months into a new job. The company’s employees were predominantly (over 70%) men, so just walking in the door, I was a little intimidated. I was greeted by women, mostly naked, dancing in cages. That didn’t help. As I did too often in my career, I tried to ignore what was happening around me. Women dancing in cages?Someone’s terrible idea of a joke, I reasoned. I tried to ignore how uncomfortable I felt.
I looked around for a familiar face. A colleague, Simon, was headed my way. He handed me a beer. At first, I was glad to see him. Then Simon ruined everything by asking, “Do you know what a Southern girl’s mating call is?” I said I didn’t want to know, but Simon told me anyway: “Y’all, I’m so drunk.”
I didn’t feel physically threatened by Simon, exactly, but this brief exchange tripped all my sensors. The context of the party mattered—predominantly men. At college, at business school, and throughout my career, I’d been in male-dominated environments. I’d had enough good experiences to know that 99 out of 100 men posed me no harm. And I’d had enough bad experiences to intuit that one out of a hundred would sexually assault me in some way if he got a chance. I just didn’t know who that one man was. I didn’t think it was Simon.
But at the very least, Simon was signaling that he was not an upstander. He was reminding me—even if he didn’t realize it—that it would not be wise for me to let my guard down that evening.
If we lived in a world where the Coercion Dynamic did not create a well-worn path from bias to sexual violence, his behavior would have been “only” bias. He was unconscious of the implications of what he was saying. He didn’t mean it. A discrete event.
But given the world we did live in, he was reflecting and reinforcing rape culture. Even if he wasn’t aware of it, ignorance was no excuse.
Discrete Incidents Vs. Dynamics
It’s important to understand the difference between a discrete incident and an incident that is a part of a dynamic that leads from bias to violence and contributes to systemic injustice. A discrete incident is bad but is far less threatening than the dynamic that carries with it the threat or past experience of violence.
A man in tech can experience gender bias, but not sexism or misogyny. Sexism describes the dynamic between gender bias and discrimination, and misogyny describes the dynamic between gender bias and violence. A white person in the United States can certainly experience racial bias, but not racism. Racism describes the dynamic between racial bias and both discrimination and violence.
When I hazed my colleague Russ during the podcast recording, saying that he was “born doing the power pose,” he experienced a discrete incident of bullying. He was in no way concerned that my behavior, while admittedly bad, posed any threat to his physical safety, nor did this incident trigger past experiences he’d had where a woman’s bullying of him became violent—because he hadn’t had any such experiences, nor had anyone he knew.
My behavior was not part of a pattern in which women committed acts of violence against men. It did not play into the Coercion Dynamic, that well-worn slippery slope from bias to violence. It was bullying, but it wasn’t misogyny (the dynamic that leads from bias to violence against women) or misandry (a theoretical but rarely seen dynamic that leads from bias to violence against men).
However, when Simon told me the rape joke, it was both bias and misogyny. I felt a menacing undercurrent. Simon himself wasn’t overtly threatening me, but he was normalizing a sinister, criminal notion—that people think that having sex with someone too drunk to give consent is just a “party foul.”
Whether he intended to or not, he was reminding me that I wasn’t physically safe—especially if I had a drink. I’m not saying intentions don’t matter. At the same time, impact also matters.
I don’t think it’s too much to expect Simon to be aware of this dynamic or to hold him accountable for not playing into it. I knew Simon well enough to be pretty sure he did not think of himself as a person who would rape a woman or condone rape.
However, if he wanted to show up to others as the kind of person he envisioned himself to be, he needed to understand the context in which he was making this joke and the impact it had. If we are going to cultivate Radical Respect, we must be aware of the dynamics that can lead us from bias to discrimination to abuse or from bias to bullying to violence.
Even if we ourselves have never committed an act of violence and don’t think of ourselves as the kind of people who ever would, we need to be willing to notice the ways our words can reflect and reinforce patterns of violence.
Beyond Command and Control: The Collaboration Hierarchy
The work environment at Google during my time there was no accident. SVP for business operations Shona Brown had optimized its organizational design to maximize effectiveness and innovation.
Shona believed that in the modern economy, command-and-control management just doesn’t work that well. Bureaucracy is inefficient and kills innovation. Her insight was that top-down leadership, where worker bees are told what to do and how to think, stifles productivity and creativity. But you still need hierarchy.
Early on, Google’s founders had experimented with getting rid of managers altogether. That didn’t work. Shona’s insight was that while dominance hierarchies are bad for innovation, a collaboration hierarchy can work.
“If this were an ordinary company, I’d make you all do it my way!”
There was still an organizational chart with a CEO, VPs, directors, managers, and so on. But in this model, leaders at all levels were subject to real checks and balances that were baked into the company’s management systems, processes, and organizational design.
The idea was to strip managers of traditional sources of power, such as hiring, promotion, and salary decisions. This authority was given instead to teams, which were likelier to make better decisions. No leader at the company, not even the CEO, could hire people without putting them through a hiring process or promote people without putting them through a promotion process.
Managers couldn’t just pay bonuses or decide salaries unilaterally. Nobody could coerce employees to do something they didn’t want to do. I’ll never forget watching an argument between one of the three most senior leaders at the company and a group of engineers working on a project.
The executive proposed one approach. The team had a different idea. The executive couldn’t convince them, so he suggested taking three or four of the hundreds of engineers working on the project to do a small Skunk Works proof of concept for his idea. The team demurred.
“If this were an ordinary company, I’d make you all do it my way!” exclaimed the executive. “I just want to try this idea out.”
The team explained again why the executive’s idea wouldn’t work and why it would be disruptive to have even three or four people pursuing it. He allowed himself to be overruled. This kind of behavior requires a high level of trust going both ways. That’s what a good system does: it allows trust to thrive.
“Having a bully for a boss was an asshole tax that Google felt nobody should have to pay.”
Across the board, processes at Google optimized for collaboration and discouraged coercion. When performance reviews came around, managers were rated by their employees as well as vice versa.
When people did behave badly at Google, they usually got extremely quick and clear feedback from their peers and their manager. And when the person behaving badly was the manager? Even before the manager’s boss found out about and corrected this behavior, team members would abandon the manager.
Google made it easy for employees to switch teams without their manager’s approval. Having a bully for a boss was an asshole tax that Google felt nobody should have to pay.
The purpose of the management hierarchy was twofold: one, to ensure accountability; two, to provide a coaching and mentoring service to help employees grow. Managers were held accountable, but they were not given much “control” to get things done.
Building Better Relationships Beats Command and Control
They had to rely on building real relationships with each of their employees and on inspiring or persuading people to get things done. The management structures at Google discouraged a command and control, “tell people what to do” kind of leadership.
In fact, using managerial authority to coerce others without allowing them to challenge you was one of the few ways a manager could get fired. Instead, everyone at Google was expected to work collaboratively, and ideas came from any and all directions.
A workplace that optimizes for collaboration and honors individuality is something you have to strive to achieve and maintain monthly, weekly, even daily, hourly. Think of your workplace as being at the top of a steep hill. You have a spectacular view, but you have to climb that hill every day to enjoy it.
“That’s what a good system does: it allows trust to thrive.”
Or think of it as a building. If you hire good engineers and workers, use quality materials, and build a strong foundation, your building will last longer than if you don’t. But even a well-made building can quickly become uninhabitable if you don’t clean and maintain it.
Life is change. If you don’t revisit and buttress the safeguards in place to make sure that coercion and conformity aren’t creeping into the way people work together, then workplace injustice and the inefficiency that accompanies it will take over your culture.
The aspects of human nature we are least proud of will always be pulling us away from efforts to collaborate and toward the instinct to coerce; away from respecting individuality and toward demanding conformity. Daily attention is needed to resist these forces and keep your workplace just.
This post was adapted from Radical Respect: How to Work Together Better. The book is now available as part of the Spotify Premium audiobook catalog and as a LIT Videobook.