Top 35 Kim Malone Scott Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

— Kim Malone Scott

2. “Listen, Challenge, Commit. A strong leader has the humility to listen, the confidence to challenge, and the wisdom to know when to quit arguing and to get on board.”

— Kim Malone Scott

3. “The way you ask for criticism and react when you get it goes a long way toward building trust – or destroying it.”

— Kim Malone Scott

4. “Managers often devote more time to those who are struggling than to those who are succeeding. But that’s not fair to those who are succeeding – nor is it good for the team as a whole. Moving from great to stunningly great is more inspiring for everyone than moving from bad to mediocre.”

— Kim Malone Scott

5. “There’s no worse way to make a group of people feel excluded than to use language that pretends they are simply not in the room.”

— Kim Malone Scott

6. “Make sure that you are seeing each person on your team with fresh eyes every day. People evolve, and so your relationships must evolve with them. Care personally; don’t put people in boxes and leave them there.”

— Kim Malone Scott

7. “Georgia O’Keeffe said, “It is only by selection, by elimination, and by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.” Choosing what to select, what to eliminate, and what to emphasize depends not only on the idea but on the audience.”

— Kim Malone Scott

8. “The best way to keep superstars happy is to challenge them and make sure they are constantly learning.”

— Kim Malone Scott

9. “What could I do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?”

— Kim Malone Scott

10. “We learn more from our mistakes than our successes, more from criticism than from praise. Why, then, is it important to give more praise than criticism? Several reasons. First, it guides people in the right direction. It’s just as important to let people know what to do more of as what to do less of. Second, it encourages people to keep improving. In other words, the best praise does a lot more than just make people feel good. It can actually challenge them directly.”

— Kim Malone Scott

11. “A good rule of thumb for any relationship is to leave three unimportant things unsaid each day.”

— Kim Malone Scott

12. “Randy Nelson, the dean of Pixar University and a faculty member at Apple University, captured this when he said of Steve Jobs, “He’s a lion. If he roars at you, you’d better roar back just as loudly – but only if you really are a lion, too. Otherwise he’ll eat you for lunch.”

— Kim Malone Scott

13. “If you lead a big organization, you can’t have a relationship with everybody. But the relationships you have with your direct reports will impact the relationships they have with their direct reports. The ripple effect will go a long way toward creating – or destroying – a positive culture. Relationships may not scale, but culture does.”

— Kim Malone Scott

14. “Probably the most important thing you can do to build trust is to spend a little time alone with each of your direct reports on a regular basis.”

— Kim Malone Scott

15. “It’s brutally hard to tell people when they are screwing up. You don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings; that’s because you’re not a sadist. You don’t want that person or the rest of the team to think you’re a jerk. Plus, you’ve been told since you learned to talk, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Now all of a sudden it’s your job to say it. You’ve got to undo a lifetime of training. Management is hard.”

— Kim Malone Scott

16. “Sometimes, the greatest gift you can give your team is to let them go home.”

— Kim Malone Scott

17. “When management is the only path to higher compensation, the quality of management suffers, and the lives of the people who work for these reluctant managers become miserable.”

— Kim Malone Scott

18. “There’s nothing like emotional bondage to create the conditions for Ruinous Empathy.”

— Kim Malone Scott

19. “As you probably know, for every piece of subpar work you accept, for every missed deadline you let slip, you begin to feel resentment and then anger. You no longer just think the work is bad: you think the person is bad. This makes it harder to have an even-keeled conversation. You start to avoid talking to the person at all.”

— Kim Malone Scott

20. “When bosses are too invested in everyone getting along they also fail to encourage the people on their team to criticize one another other for fear of sowing discord. They create the kind of work environment where being “nice” is prioritized at the expense of critiquing and therefore improving actual performance.”

— Kim Malone Scott

21. “The essence of leadership is not getting overwhelmed by circumstances.”

— Kim Malone Scott

22. “I used to keep a box of tissues in my office in case of tears. Then a person I worked with made a habit of coming into my office and crying every Friday afternoon.”

— Kim Malone Scott

23. “When you do organize a social event at work, bear these warnings in mind: even non-mandatory events can feel mandatory.”

— Kim Malone Scott

24. “Loud listening – stating a point of view strongly – offers a quick way to expose opposing points of view or flaws in reasoning. It also prevents people from wasting a lot of time trying to figure out what the boss thinks. Assuming that you are surrounded with people who don’t hesitate to challenge what you say, stating it clearly can be the fastest way to get to the best answer.”

— Kim Malone Scott

25. “If you find you cannot be Radically Candid with your boss, I recommend that you consider finding a new job with a new boss.”

— Kim Malone Scott

26. “An effective staff meeting has three goals: it reviews how things have gone the previous week, allows people to share important updates, and forces the team to clarify the most important decisions and debates for the coming week. That’s it. It shouldn’t be the place to have debates or make decisions.”

— Kim Malone Scott

27. “JOBS: I don’t mind being wrong. And I’ll admit that I’m wrong a lot. It doesn’t really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing. In my experience, people who are more concerned with getting to the right answer than with being right make the best bosses.”

— Kim Malone Scott

28. “Steve would later say that when a team debated, both the ideas and the people came out more beautiful – results well worth all the friction and noise.5 Your job as a boss is to turn on that “rock tumbler.”

— Kim Malone Scott

29. “At Apple, as at Google, a boss’s ability to achieve results had a lot more to do with listening and seeking to understand than it did with telling people what to do; more to do with debating than directing; more to do with pushing people to decide than with being the decider; more to do with persuading than with giving orders; more to do with learning than with knowing.”

— Kim Malone Scott

30. “Here’s what to do: make a list of how the person’s role can change to help them learn the skills needed to achieve each dream; whom they can learn from; and classes they could take or books they could read. Then, next to each item, note who does what by when – and make sure you have some action items.”

— Kim Malone Scott

31. “Those who find work they can continue to love for five or ten or thirty years, even if it doesn’t lead to some sort of advancement, are damn lucky. And their teams and their bosses are lucky to have them. Kick-ass bosses never judge people doing great work as having “capped out.” Instead, they treat them with the honor that they are due and retain the individuals who will keep their team stable, cohesive, and productive.”

— Kim Malone Scott

32. “I do not believe there is any such thing as a “B-player” or a mediocre human being. Everyone can be excellent at something.”

— Kim Malone Scott

33. “Focusing on the future discourages people who did well from resting on their laurels and prevents people who did badly from wallowing in despair. Focusing on what each person plans to do differently as a result of the review is also a great way to check for understanding.”

— Kim Malone Scott

34. “Ultimately, though, bosses are responsible for results. They achieve these results not by doing all the work themselves but by guiding the people on their teams. Bosses guide a team to achieve results. The questions I get asked next are clustered around each of these three areas of responsibility that managers do have: guidance, team-building, and results.”

— Kim Malone Scott

35. “Richard Tedlow’s biography of Andy Grove, Intel’s legendary CEO, asserts that management and leadership are like forehand and backhand. You have to be good at both to win.”

— Kim Malone Scott

36. “You already know how to be Radically Candid because you know how to care personally and to challenge directly.”

— Kim Malone Scott

37. “You may be worried about earning their respect, and that’s natural. Unfortunately, though, being overly focused on respect can backfire because it’ll make you feel extra defensive when criticized. If, on the other hand, you can listen to the criticism and react well to it, both trust and respect will follow.”

— Kim Malone Scott