Are Flat Organizations More Efficient? Kim and Jason Weigh In 7 | 37

Chasing efficiency by flattening your organization can sound appealing, but true innovation and collaboration often thrive in a different kind of structure. Kim and Jason discuss how a thoughtful hierarchy — built on trust, clarity, and collaboration — helps teams do their best work.

Watch the episode: 

Episode at a Glance: The Flat Org Myth

Kim and Jason explore the myth of flat organizations and explain why a well-designed hierarchy can actually boost efficiency, trust, and teamwork. Drawing on lessons from companies like Google, Apple, and Khan Academy, they reveal how empowered managers, clear decision-making processes, and open communication create healthier and more effective organizational structures.

You’ll learn practical strategies for building a collaboration-focused hierarchy that supports managers, strengthens relationships, and allows the best ideas to rise to the top. If you want to understand when flat organizations fail — and how to design a structure that drives sustainable efficiency and innovation — this conversation offers actionable guidance for leaders, managers, and teams.

Radical Candor Podcast Tips

1. Rethink Power. Strip unilateral management authority from your managers and encourage them to lead by building strong, trusting relationships with their teams. Leadership isn’t about control — it’s about influence and collaboration.
   
   
2. Push Decisions Into the Facts. As organizations flatten, decision-making can get murky. Make sure there’s a clear process so decisions are made efficiently, based on the right information, and by the people who should be involved. When everyone knows how and why decisions are made, collaboration improves.
   
   
3. Keep Communication Open. Great ideas come from everywhere — so make sure your communication doesn’t get stuck in a hierarchy. Managers should know information three levels deep, and everyone should feel free to talk to anyone. Open, cross-level communication fuels innovation and trust.

Radical Candor Podcast Resources

• Transcript
• Middle Managers: Dinosaurs or Essential Glue? 7 | 4
• Get Shit Done Step 4 — Push Decisions Into the Facts 4 | 10

The TLDR Radical Candor Podcast Transcript

[00:00:00] Kim Scott: Hello everybody and welcome to the Radical Candor podcast. I'm Kim Scott. 

[00:00:08] Jason Rosoff: And I'm Jason Rosoff. And before we get started today, I wanted to ask for your help. If you're listening or watching this podcast and you like it, please subscribe, like, follow, rate, review, wherever you happen to be listening or watching, it really does help us. Uh, and even better. If you love what you're listening to or watching, please share it with a friend. Our video podcast is available on both Spotify and YouTube. Kim, I wanted to follow up on something. On the podcast, we've touched on this idea that, there's a term for it, the great flattening. There's a push out in the world to flatten organizations, but you sent an email a few weeks ago that really made me wanna revisit it because you were sharing some counterintuitive reasoning about how,

[00:00:52] Kim Scott: I was musing.

[00:00:53] Jason Rosoff: Musing about why that might actually not be the case. And I think this is especially potent right now because a lot of the tech industry is in the middle of reductions in force and layoffs and all this other stuff. And there's a lot of conversation about how this is being done in the name of efficiency and the reducing hierarchy, reducing redundancy. And as a result, they're gonna be able to do everything that they were able to do before, but better. And I think that for anybody who's been near a layoff or a reduction in force, like we objectively know that that's not true. It's not like everything just gets better after a layoff. But I think that the people who are doing this are smart, and I think they actually believe, there's a narrative that fuels this belief. And I wanted to start by exploring that a little bit, which is why is it that people think that reducing organizational layers is, by definition, going to improve efficiency or the converse. Why do folks believe that organizational hierarchy is inefficient?

[00:01:56] Kim Scott: And I think there's, you're kind of touching on two different things, and I, so I wanna tease them apart. One is the sort of, the promise of the layoff will make things more efficient. Just fewer people are better than more people. And the other argument is that fewer layers in an organization is better than more. And, and the problem with the flat, so let's not talk about layoffs at first. Let's talk about the flat, the myth of the flat organization. And I really do believe that it's a myth. The myth of the flat organization is that the fewer layers there are between the most junior employee and the CEO, the better.

[00:02:37] And if you just kind of play with the math. That means that every manager has to have too many direct reports and that no manager is actually able to do the things that good managers do. So for example, when I worked at Google, there was a rule of seven, which meant that if you're a manager, you have to have at least seven direct reports because they wanted to shrink the number of layers between the CEO and the most junior person. But I had a different rule. My rule was the rule of 5. And the rule of 5 says that if you're gonna be a manager, you shouldn't have more than 5 direct reports. Because if you do, then you're not gonna be able to have the kinds of one-on-ones that you need to have.

[00:03:22] You're not gonna be able to do the things that managers need to do. And, and luckily there was enough wiggle room at Google I was able to, we were able to pretend that 5 and seven were the same number, and I had 5 direct reports and that went on for several years. So what do you think about the like, why do people believe that, that loading up managers and why did Google believe that? Because they tried, they tried an extreme version of loading up managers for a while. Every manager had like 65 or 70 direct reports, which meant that they weren't, they, there were no managers and that did not work. 

[00:04:03] Jason Rosoff: I think part of the problem that people are trying to solve is that they're treating managers as information gatekeepers. If you think of a manager as a gatekeeper for information, as a primary responsibility, or sort of like a flow control for information, as a primary responsibility, then I think the layering thing starts to make you nervous, right? Because you're like, well, if it has to flow through all these layers, it's sort of like a game of telephone. By the time you get to the most junior employee, what are they hearing? I think people have experienced that. I think the other thing that drives people to think about this is that as much as organizations wanna say that they're highly collaborative, I find that there's more command and control that remains than people maybe want to believe about themselves.

[00:04:51] Like important decisions that probably shouldn't involve the executive team or the CEO are bubbling all the way up to that level in order to be made. When you combine those two things, like information dissemination and decision making, and if you don't have quite the right communication plan for disseminating information and you don't have quite the right decision-making process, I could see why there's a desire to try to flatten the organization. But as you say, the necessary consequence of that is that you functionally eliminate manager, like you make it impossible for managers to do their job. 

[00:05:27] Kim Scott: Or all they're doing is managing and then they're not able to keep the dirt under their fingernails and then they're not managing well 'cause they don't really know what's going on. Um, I think part of the desire for the flat organization is not to have hierarchy, and that's, I totally am philosophically aligned with that desire. I don't like hierarchy either, and yet I think some hierarchy is absolutely necessary if we are going to collaborate at scale, if we're gonna achieve what we wanna achieve collectively. The real question is not, is it a flat organization or do, are there a lot of layers? But is the hierarchy a collaboration hierarchy or is it a dominance hierarchy? Or a command and control hierarchy. We can reshift that argument maybe that helps get to a better place. What do you think? 

[00:06:22] Jason Rosoff: I think it does help. Like if we, one of the reasons why I, like, I've happened to read a whole bunch of articles that are talking about organizational efficiencies. Like they keep using this word efficient, efficient, efficient. And I was thinking about that and it reminded me of one of my favorite Buddhist teachers who had this great thing where he showed the audience an empty glass, and he asked, you know, what do you think is, is this cup full or empty? And then the question, the answer was empty, but he said, but empty of what?

[00:06:56] Like there's still air in the cup, even though the cup, it's not in a vacuum. So there's still something in there. And the same feeling struck me as, I felt like all these articles were referring to an empty glass and acting like there was nothing still inside of it. So efficient for what? Like what are they efficiently accomplishing? Are they innovating? Are they making decisions efficiently? Are they distributing work effectively? When you're not clear about the problems that you're solving, it's really easy to oversimplify. And to believe that the problem must be the manager communication. 

[00:07:28] Kim Scott: Or not just hierarchy in general.

[00:07:31] Jason Rosoff: Right, right. So that was my reaction, like reading these stories recently, it was basically, I feel like we're talking in abstraction and when we talk in abstraction, it's really easy to lose the plot of what's really going on. So you said a couple of times like what managers are supposed to do. Managers keeping the dirt under their fingernails. I think you are describing in your mind, I, I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but like what is it that managers should be doing on a regular basis? 

[00:08:02] Kim Scott: I mean, at one point when I wrote Radical Candor, I calculated if you do everything I recommend that you do as a manager in this book, what percentage of your time every week is spent managing versus doing the other things that you need to do? And it's, the answer was 10 hours. So you, and 5 of that is one-on-ones with your direct reports, because if you have 5, and the 10 hours is assuming you have 5 direct reports. So, if you do everything and you have 10 direct reports, then you're spending 20 hours just on management stuff. And for most people, that will result in burnout because you're not spending enough time on the other things that you wanna accomplish. And because even like, I really like people and I really liked my team, but if I had more than one one-on-one per day, I did not do a good job on the second one. A big part of it is you need to spend some time with your team, but these are not your children and your spouse.

[00:09:01] You need to care, but not so much that you can't take care of yourself. If you're trying to do all the things that you should do as a manager and you have more than 5, you're gonna burn out, is my theory. One of the things that I learned and, and then I started thinking about, okay, so what does that mean theoretically for an organization, if all managers have 5 direct reports, or fewer than 5 direct reports, but now more than 5 direct reports. And it turns out you can have a giant organization with, I think you can have a couple hundred thousand people with nine layers of management. And in many ways that expands the opportunities for innovation, for getting things done, if you believe that collaboration is our superpower as human beings, but how does that land for you? Do you believe that an organization can be a hundred thousand people big and still have nine layers, great managers, and feel cool and entrepreneurial?

[00:10:02] Jason Rosoff: The big difference between how an organization feels sort of nimble and entrepreneurial has a lot more to do with what managers are spending their time doing and how decisions are made in the organization. Going back to why are people in this position, like, or in the position of defending the flat organization, even though like they know that it's really hard or makes the job of management very difficult. Like if you add up the hours, like imagine you have 20, 30 direct reports, like now you're spending 60 hours a week just managing, in theory. Like, because after three months you're burnt out and so you're in under time perpetually. 

[00:10:42] Kim Scott: And also you really can't do it.

[00:10:45] Jason Rosoff: Right, like that's what I'm saying, it's not possible. 

[00:10:48] Kim Scott: So basically what it means if you give someone, you know, 30 direct reports, 20 direct reports, is you're setting them up to fail. You're setting them up not to do a good job, and that's upsetting, you know? 

[00:11:03] Jason Rosoff: Right. And I think that the problem is that you wind up in a position where you feel like you can't really go to your manager for help because they never have the time to actually help you, which leads to a whole bunch of other bad things happening in organizations. So I think you can, like, here's my thing. If each team, each of those groups of people has a clear purview, like a mandate of some kind, a thing that they're clearly responsible for and that, you know, except to the extent that the things that they're doing impact other stakeholders in the organization can operate pretty independently. Then I think that there's a lot that can happen. I think there's a lot of really good, you don't have to, and that communication from the other layers of management is good, clear, I should say not, not positive, but clear, then I think there's a lot that, that you can do.

[00:11:55] Khan Academy was never that big. It was a few hundred people at the most, but we had these sort of like tiger team style, like our approach to organizing was sort of like tiger teams, which is like these small groups of people that come together for a particular purpose and then split up again, and it was really amazing, like what 5 people could accomplish when they were given the ability to make decisions and move relatively independently. I don't think you need huge teams to get a lot done, to the extent that collaboration across these teams was important. We had processes in place to help the teams coordinate with one another, which made it easy. So people weren't guessing like, what do I do? They knew what to do if they needed the input or help from another team. 

[00:12:44] Kim Scott: You know, it's interesting, the early part of my career was very much invested in thinking of myself as an entrepreneurial person, and I co-founded a startup, and then I took a job at Google. At the time, Google was 2000 people, which to me felt like a big company, you know, now that seems quaint. But, but anyway, I thought, oh, I'm no longer an entrepreneur. I'm joining this big company. When I got to Google, I realized that I could be more entrepreneurial in that context than I had been at my own company that I had started myself, because they had really focused on setting up a hierarchy that was very collaborative. This was designed by Shona Brown. Shona Brown led business operations at Google at the time, and she systematically stripped away power from managers and said, you've gotta get stuff done by building good relationships with your team. And that was kind of eye-opening.

[00:13:48] The reason why I felt like I could be more entrepreneurial is that when I was co-founder of my own startup, I spent a lot of time setting up the furniture, like choosing, doing things that were not core to the product. Whereas when I was at Google, I was really focused on, you know, at first, when I first got there, on the AdSense business, and also because I had access to all these other people, like my team, I had 5 direct reports. Each of them had, you know, so my team was big-ish, but not huge. But because the way that we collaborated, cross-functionally worked very well and was also didn't feel hierarchical. I felt like my ability to get shit done was I, it was like I suddenly had bionic arms and legs. It was awesome.

[00:14:35] Jason Rosoff: I experienced something very similar. I think the hard part is that many organizations don't systematically strip power away from manager, because they don't do those things you, I mean, a lot of people that have a very different experience in a large organization, which is for example, you know, a thing that friends of mine have complained about who are in these big a hundred thousand plus person companies is that they'll make a decision and their decision will be overridden by someone they don't even know.

[00:15:05] Like, it's like some layer of management, like two layers, like they don't, they, they, they've never even talked to this person, but like, and often not in the like, it would be one thing if that was like immediate, but it's often the case that they're like, wait, they're like partially down a path of like doing something about it and then all of a sudden someone swoops in and changes it. And, and that that feeling is demoralizing. This other person being late to the game or a group of people being late to the game. And often I think because of the hierarchy, they're not necessarily motivated or incented to really explain what went wrong or why they made this particular decision.

[00:15:45] And so it feels like everyone starts to become afraid of making the next decision. 'Cause they're like, is someone gonna swoop in and, you know, cut, cut us off at the knees. I think that because this sort of, the idea of, of even if like, stripping away sounds like it goes to zero, that wasn't the intent. The intent was to give managers exactly the power that they needed in order to help their team accomplish their goals, right? They had enough authority. 

[00:16:13] Kim Scott: Authority is different from power. So when I say strip away to power, it meant that no manager could unilaterally hire, fire, pay bonuses, that there were some checks and balances that were put in place on a person's power. And yet you did have, uh, all kinds of authority to try things, to do things, to innovate. And so you had a lot of degrees of freedom, but not that many degrees of power. I think that, that was what was sort of magical about it at that moment in time. 

[00:16:46] Jason Rosoff: And I think this is like another part of the myth, is that people believe, to some extent, that there's an inextricable link between power and the ability to influence one's team, like the power to hire and fire, the power to determine bonuses and, and to influence a team. And so that, a lot of people who are building these flat organizations are not doing these other, right? 

[00:17:15] Kim Scott: They're giving up too much power to the, to the managers, usually. They're like, I don't wanna deal with this. You deal with it and don't bother me. And that's not collaboration. That's like over delegation.

[00:17:28] Jason Rosoff: And, and the way that this winds up playing out in organizations is not dissimilar from the experiment at Google, which is like that you wind up increasing span the number of people who report into every manager, and that goes horribly. And then you reduce the number of people that report to managers, and that doesn't go that much, maybe it goes a little better, but it doesn't go that much better. And so part of the problem is like, to some extent they're not optimizing for the right thing. Instead of optimizing for making sure that managers and teams are as effective as they possibly can be, uh, they're treating the number of direct reports as the only dependent variable. And, and so that is really confusing 'cause you can get better or worse results by changing the number, uh, of direct reports, in some cases, decreasing or increasing the number might have an effect. But it doesn't solve the underlying problem if there isn't a good process for decision making. If managers have unilateral authority to hire and fire people, you're not going to get a highly collaborative team that communicates fluidly across levels because you're not building a system that rewards those behaviors.

[00:18:48] Kim Scott: I think, uh, in particular, it's decision making that you kind of hit on that is important. In one of my favorite books by James March, A Primer on Decision Making, he talks about how when decisions that impact us are taken out of our hands, like in the situation you described where your friend made a decision and then it got unmade, probably by someone who had more authority than he did in the organization, or she, I'm guessing. Then what happens is it, it feels, it's psychologically damaging. It feels like a loss of personhood. I think that a big thing that went well at Google was that decision making was very transparent. Decisions were pushed for the most part into the facts. That meant that I felt like if somebody was gonna make a decision that impacted me, I felt great confidence that it wouldn't get made without me. I was in the room. And that was really important.

[00:19:54] Jason Rosoff: I think there, I'd like to bring back in the, actually, before we do that, I wanna just punctuate that. I think that there's some essential benefit in my mind to the smaller ratio of manager to direct report and the ability to have confidence that if something's happening that's going to affect you, you're gonna know about it. I would have a very hard time believing it is possible for a manager with 20, 30, 50 direct reports, how could they possibly involve, you know what I'm saying? Like there's so many things that are happening that are affecting people. Like how do you possibly stay on top of that? So I think there is something essential about the fidelity of the relationship with your manager that, I think, is related to the number of people that they're managing that would increase my confidence significantly. If like my manager is managing 5 people instead of 10 or 20, I'd feel much more confident. 

[00:20:44] Kim Scott: And I think also about decisions. It's the other thing that, that James March describes in, in that book is the extent to which if you give too much power to people they grab decisions before they have the facts. They grab decisions that they shouldn't grab because they don't know enough. And this is like, not because people are evil, but you know, even a powerful person feels that loss of personhood if they're excluded from a decision. And so the temptation is overwhelming to make a decision you have no business making. And that was why it was so important to systematically strip power away from managers so they wouldn't have the ability to grab decisions that impacted other people without involving those other people. I mean, look, I'm not saying it never happened, but to minimize the number of times when that would happen was really important.

[00:21:44] Jason Rosoff: I think what we've been sharing is like our rationale for why it's not sufficient just to talk about the number of direct reports people have. It's also important to understand how decisions get made, how information is shared inside of an organization.

[00:21:59] Kim Scott: To make that explicit and inclusive. 

[00:22:01] Jason Rosoff: Right. Once you strip away the power, the only thing that a manager has left is the relationship with the people that report to them to build shared understanding and influence people. You can't do that if you have 50 direct reports, like you can't have the relationship you need and, and accomplish that. I, I wanna turn back to the question of like, I think there are many people who are listening who probably agree with us, but may find themselves in another situation. We touched on this a couple of weeks ago on the podcast. You find yourself with a bunch of direct reports. Now what do you do? 

[00:22:37] Kim Scott: You have 30 direct reports now 

[00:22:39] Jason Rosoff: I think you can want, so go, this is back to the sort of the, the, the layoffs, like some of what is happening, there's both cost cutting and organization flattening, like both of those things are happening at the same, 

[00:22:50] Kim Scott: They're firing more managers than individual contributors, which means that the managers who are left behind are gonna have too many direct reports.

[00:22:58] Jason Rosoff: Right. So we talked in that episode to the, the manager and said, here's some things that you can do. But I want, I wanna talk for a moment to the, like, to, to the organizers and help them think about the costs or the impact that they might start to see, see if we have any advice for them about ways to mitigate it other than, you know, they may not have an option, right? There may not be enough managers to shrink the number of direct reports that people have after a change like that goes into place. 

[00:23:27] Kim Scott: I mean, so I think if you are a decider of some sort, maybe you're the COO or whatever your job is at a company, and you've just done layoffs, and now all the managers who you have left are managing 20, 30 people, what do you do? What might start to happen? Managers in such a situation where they have too many direct reports, are likely to start playing favorites and not to know enough about the work that's happening to know who to promote, who's really doing the best work. The person who is going to get ahead is the person who's better, you've created a more political situation, because the managers can't know what's going on. The people who are best at painting a rosy picture for that manager often get ahead. In his book, Loonshot, Safi Bahcall talks a lot about this, about the return on politics. In theory, flattening an organization should reduce the return on politics, but in reality, it actually increases the return on politics.

[00:24:32] Because managers can't know enough in order to make good decisions to even know to whom to delegate. So they just start doing things. So that's one thing that's likely to happen. Once that starts to happen, you're gonna lose some of your best people and you're not even gonna know it's regretted attrition. Some people who are great at their jobs are gonna say, this is a bunch of hooey, and they're gonna leave. I wonder where that expression came from. I hope it's not offensive. Should have just said bullshit. Uh, um, anyway, they're gonna leave. Uh, so, so those are some of the things that will happen, and those will be almost like silent failures. You won't realize that those things are starting to hurt your organization's ability to innovate and to attract and retain the best talent.

[00:25:25] Jason Rosoff: Those two symptoms make sense to me. I think the other thing that I've observed in situations where people have large numbers of direct reports is that there, this might be more observable, is that often there's like one of two reactions to this that I've seen. One of them is, you mentioned, is over delegation. So like the manager starts deferring to their team on everything. So like if you have a meeting where you're bringing managers together, one of the things that I noticed when I had a manager reporting to me who had too many direct reports is he would start saying something like, you know, I'm not sure about that. You need to ask this person. Which is not a bad thing in the abstract.

[00:26:04] But when that's everything, they're very aware of personnel issues, but they're not aware of what the work is that is happening. So that's one thing. And I think you, you can also have the inverse, which is that the manager tries to clamp down to control what, what is happening, and that might come as a silent failure. It may take a while for you to realize that this is happening. The other symptom that I noticed, when they behaved in that way, was I gave them the feedback of like, hey, you need to be more aware of what's going on in your team. You can't defer everything to them. They swung to the other direction, which was, they made a meeting where they were involved and each decision was bubbled up to them and that was also not, not the right.

[00:26:45] Kim Scott: Yes. They're either, you'll have more absentee managers and, and more micromanagers. And that, I think there's also another point that is really important there. You were talking about communication, so this is observable and this is a problem. If you're in a meeting. Let's say you're in a staff meeting and you all need to make a decision and somebody says, well, I have to check with so and so on my team. That's a big, that is a big red flag. When I was at Apple, Scott Forstall, who at the time led the iOS team, always said, you have to know information three levels deep at least in your organization. So even though there were nine layers at Apple at that time, it was a big company. He didn't only know about his manager's projects, he knew about his manager's, manager's projects, and then some projects below that.

[00:27:35] And that, I think that, you wanna make sure that hierarchy, communication is not hierarchical. Anyone can talk to anyone. And you know, one saying at Google was great ideas come from everywhere. And so I think you wanna make sure that if you have just fired a bunch of your managers, that you make sure that the managers you have left have some way of being able to continue to know information three levels deep. And if they're spending all their time managing 30 people, they can't know what they need to know in order to make decisions quickly. 

[00:28:17] Jason Rosoff: So I think the advice we're trying to get to for these folks is something like, if you have made this decision, you, you want to start to pay attention to the places where either decisions or information is getting, uh, snagged on the new organizational structure. And the only way you're gonna find this out is if you're looking for it, because a lot of the failures are gonna be sort of silent or take a long time for the problem to become exposed. And you don't even necessarily have to be the COO, like maybe you're a director and you know, you went from having, you know, 5, 6, 7 managers that reported to you, to having 3 managers that report to you, who, who are now managing all the people on your team. You should be like, you should be asking where, where, in this new world, like where are, what are the problems making decisions? What are the problems communicating? What's going on? What are the problems with you? What don't you know? Or what are you afraid of? What are you afraid that you're missing because you now have 20 direct reports? Because there may be other solutions, right? It may not be perfect, but maybe a new pattern in communication would actually help understanding something that you weren't doing before because you had the hierarchy in place to support it.

[00:29:31] Kim Scott: I think the other thing I would say, if you've just done this, take a deep breath. It's okay. Here's what you can do to start to fix the mistake, which is to tell your managers, if you're managing more than 5 people, which now everybody is. Feel free to begin to train people. So let's say I have 20 managers. I want to create a world in which 5 of those 20 are, you know, not officially, but unofficially managing others so that I can have 5 one-on-ones. So you wanna recreate the, um, you wanna recreate an org structure. I pause 'cause I don't wanna call it a shadow org structure, but you want, you want to pitch it as you are training new managers and people should do the job before they get the job. If you're managing 20 people, one of your jobs is to figure out which 5 of those should be promoted to manager in the next 2 years and start putting a collaboration hierarchy into place. 

[00:30:40] Jason Rosoff: I like that idea. I guess I would say there's an interesting opportunity here, which is there are some people who are maybe hesitant, meaning like they're interested, but they're unsure if management might be right for them. One of the interesting side effects of creating this collaboration hierarchy is, I think you can give people a good taste of what it's like to be a manager without officially transitioning the reporting structure and some of the bonus promotion decisions and stuff off to a person. You can take their guidance into account, but you don't necessarily have to transition the decision. I think that's really interesting, actually.

[00:31:15] Kim Scott: Um, this is a, yeah , I agree with you. Sorry, I interrupted.

[00:31:19] Jason Rosoff: No, no. That's the, I'm curious what you had to say. 

[00:31:21] Kim Scott: The, so one of the things that I have experimented with, and people are uncomfortable about this, so feel free to push back, but one thing you could do, there's a whole theory around power that says if you pass it around, like if it's something that everybody's gonna have, everybody's gonna have to be the boss sometime. You could, let's say you have, you've appointed these 5 team leads and you say you're gonna do it for a quarter, and then someone else on the team is gonna do it for a quarter, and then someone else is gonna do it for a quarter, and then someone else is gonna do it for a quarter. One of the problems with becoming a manager is that everyone starts to project their unresolved authority issues onto you. When you become the boss people don't have a lot of compassion for, they don't feel your pain anymore. But if you're in a situation where being the boss is a rotating role amongst a team of 4 or 5 people, then all of a sudden people can try it and people are less likely to be a jerk to the new boss because they know they're gonna be in the hot seat next quarter.

[00:32:27] Jason Rosoff: Uh, sort of tiger team structure that we had at Khan like, this was a thing like we rotate, like there was somebody who became, there was a position on each of these teams, which was. Somewhere between like manager and liaison with the rest of the organization. And that responsibility rotated in part because it wasn't always the case that there was someone who has like management training or official management responsibility on the team. And so someone had to step up. And often what would happen is, to your point, people would not volunteer for that. They would get the experience. So they'd have built some compassion and they would say, I'd really like someone else to do this, because it's important work, but I don't necessarily wanna be the one who's doing it.

[00:33:10] Kim Scott: Sometimes greatness is thrust upon you, and in this kind of organizational structure, a team knows that once a quarter, greatness will be thrust upon them. 

[00:33:19] Jason Rosoff: Right. So it not only builds compassion, but it also builds a deeper understanding of what it takes to collaborate effectively across the organization. And regardless of whether you're sitting in the seat anymore, I think that gives people better ideas of like how to get ahead of or around a potential, to see potential roadblocks in whatever it is that they're doing. Because they understand like what it takes to manage a stakeholder in another part of the team, or they understand what it means when someone else on the team gets sick and they have to figure out how to redistribute the tasks. Like they start to anticipate those things in a different way. So I know this is, to your point, it's like the people probably feel uncomfortable about this for good reason, but I think there's a lot of wisdom in giving people the experience of, of leadership without either forcing them into it or, you know, making it drag on so long if they don't like it that they feel,

[00:34:17] Kim Scott: That, that they quit or something.

[00:34:18] Jason Rosoff: Yeah, they suffer as a, as a result. I think there's something really compelling about that, and it's probably in the control of someone who finds themselves with too many direct reports to put some structure like this into place. Like they probably wouldn't even be stepping out of bounds as long as they're not transferring the, the reporting relationship over to somebody else.

[00:34:38] Kim Scott: When I have advised people who have too many direct reports, I suggest that they do this, and I've seen it work really well. So you have 20 direct reports. Find 5 people who you think are likely managers and ask them to lead, you know, 3 people depending on how many are in the whole organization. And then, tell those teams that this sort of liaison role or team lead role is gonna rotate once a quarter, and that way you're having your one-on-ones with whoever happens to be the liaison on the back quarter and they're having one-on-ones with that, that can scale. Doesn't have too many downsides in terms of having to pay people more. It does have. The downside, it, it's a little chaotic, like, you know? 

[00:35:24] Jason Rosoff: I think you and I both have a high tolerance for chaos.

[00:35:27] Kim Scott: Yes. Not, not everybody does. Um, but, but it's, it's usually a good kind of chaos. 

[00:35:35] Jason Rosoff: That's certainly what I found. There, there are definitely where there were people who are put in the seat who were really struggling with the responsibility. But then you knew, and there was also an end. And so it wasn't this thing where it was like everybody felt like terrible. The goal was instead to offer, so that person needs some extra support. What I found was like even the people who struggled with this responsibility weren't universally bad at it or something. There were some things that were good at in the role, so sharing the burden of leadership was still valuable, even if it wasn't a slam dunk where all of a sudden I was getting all this extra time back because this person was clearly a really effective manager in the making. 

[00:36:17] Kim Scott: And I think often when I talk to people about doing this, their fear is that somebody's gonna say, well, when do I get to rotate into your role? And that has never happened. Once people kind of get a glimpse, they're like, oh, thank you for doing, you get a little more compassion. 

[00:36:34] Jason Rosoff: Well, should we transition to our tips? 

[00:36:36] Kim Scott: All right. Now it's time for the Radical Candor checklist. Tips you can use to put radical candor into practice right away. Tip number one is about power. Strip unilateral management authority from all the managers in your organization force people to lead by building great relationships with their team. 

[00:37:01] Jason Rosoff: Tip number two. Make sure that you're pushing decisions into the facts. One of the things that goes wrong as organizations flatten is that it, it becomes unclear the, how exactly decisions should be made. And so if you have to increase the, the number of people who report to a manager, make sure there's a good process in place to ensure that decisions are being made as efficiently and by the people who need to make them, who need to be involved in them, as possible. 

[00:37:34] Kim Scott: A little addendum to that one. We have a podcast episode on big decisions meetings, which we'll drop into the show notes. Tip number three is around communication. Every manager who manages managers, they know information three levels deep, that great ideas come from everywhere, and that communication should not follow any kind of hierarchical path, that anybody can talk to anybody. 

[00:38:01] Jason Rosoff: Love it. 

[00:38:02] Kim Scott: You can join the Radical Candor Community to get realtime peer support. Go to RadicalCandor.com/community to sign up. 

[00:38:12] Jason Rosoff: And you can always head to RadicalCandor.com/podcast to see the show notes for this episode. If you're a visual person, don't forget you can watch our podcast on YouTube and Spotify. Praise in public, criticize in private. If you like what you see, please rate, review, follow, like, wherever you happen to be listening or watching, and share the episode with a friend. If you do have, uh, feedback for us, if you have some criticism for us, or a question for us.

[00:38:36] Kim Scott: We wanna hear it. We wanna hear it.

[00:38:37] Jason Rosoff: We do wanna hear it.

[00:38:38] Kim Scott: First of all, we will reward the candor. 

[00:38:40] Jason Rosoff: We will indeed reward the candor. Please email us at podcast@RadicalCandor.com and we'll get back to you. 

[00:38:47] Kim Scott: Thanks everyone.

[00:38:48] Jason Rosoff: Take care. 

[00:38:49] Amy Sandler: The Radical Candor Podcast is based on the book, Radical Candor: Be a Kick Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, by Kim Scott. Episodes are written and produced by Brandi Neal, with script editing by me, Amy Sandler. The show features Radical Candor co-founders Kim Scott and Jason Rosoff, and is hosted by me, still Amy Sandler. Nick Carissimi is our audio engineer. The Radical Candor podcasting music was composed by Cliff Goldmacher. Follow us on LinkedIn, Radical Candor, the Company, and visit us RadicalCandor.com.

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The Radical Candor Podcast is based on the book Radical Candor: Be A Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott.

Episodes are written and produced by Brandi Neal with script editing by Amy Sandler. The show features Radical Candor co-founders Kim Scott and Jason Rosoff and is hosted by Amy Sandler. Nick Carissimi is our audio engineer.

The Radical Candor Podcast theme music was composed by Cliff Goldmacher. Order his book: The Reason For The Rhymes: Mastering the Seven Essential Skills of Innovation by Learning to Write Songs.

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