Hello and welcome to Radical Kander, a podcast from Panoply and Gretchen Rubin's Onward Project about how not to hate the boss you have or be the boss you hate.

I'm Russ Larraway, co-founder of Kander, Inc., and career-long operational manager

across the Marines, Google, and Twitter. And I'm Kim Scott, co-founder of Kander Inc., former executive

at Google and Apple. I'm also the author of Radical Kander, Be a kick-ass boss without losing

your humanity. Before we jump into this week's episode, we want to quickly go back to some of the advice we gave in episode five career conversations.

We introduced the idea of the life story conversation where you get to know your employee by saying something like starting with kindergarten, tell me about your life.

A listener pointed out to us that we had failed to remind managers that not everyone feels comfortable talking about their childhood.

So this listener pointed out to us that a lot of people have really unhappy childhoods and they really don't want to talk about them. This particular listener had actually

been abused as a child. So the last thing she wanted to do was have a manager who was going to ask

intrusive questions. Her recommendation to us was really useful. Basically, what she suggested

was to be very sensitive to the signals that somebody is sending you. And if they seem the slightest bit

uncomfortable, say, well, let's start with grad school. And the advice for the person facilitating

this conversation is people that don't want to talk about an aspect of their life will drop a

boundary. They might drop it subtly. They might drop it very clearly. But when they do, you need to honor that boundary and just move on. You can get a lot of sort of quality insight about what people care about by skipping even a very large chapter of their life. For some, it's their childhood. For some, it might have been a dark period in their career where things did not go the way they wanted.

Maybe they're embarrassed about a choice that they made, et cetera, et cetera.

There are a lot of things that maybe someone wouldn't want to talk about in sort of this intimate setting.

Listen carefully for the boundary being drawn and honor that boundary every single time.

For folks that might be on the receiving end of this conversation,

just drop the boundary and just something very simple. Like, you know, this is a period of my life

I don't want to share and talk about. Can we move on? And hopefully the other person skilled

enough to say, Roger that, let's move on. We'll pick this up in college or we'll pick this up in

grad school, whatever. Or wherever you're comfortable.

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