Shonda Rhimes on saying yes to what scares you (transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Shonda Rhimes: I meet so many young women who went into science because of that show. So many young women who went to medical school because of that show. Which was completely unintended. Like that wasn't what I thought when I was writing about McDreamy and McSteamy and all this.

Adam Grant: Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to ReThinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is Shonda Rhimes, one of the most influential dreamers and doers of our time. She's the Golden Globe winning creator, writer, and executive producer behind so many of our favorite TV shows, from Grey's Anatomy and Scandal to Bridgerton and How To Get Away With Murder. Shonda's the founder of a hugely successful production company, Shondaland, and she wrote a bestselling memoir about taking risks called Year of Yes.

Shonda Rhimes: I just was a person who always said no if I felt like no was the answer, and that really threw a lot of people. But it also, I gained a lot of respect from people because of it as well, that I wasn't even sort of looking towards. 

Adam Grant: I was thrilled to interview Shonda live on stage at Uplift, BetterUp's flagship summit on leadership, growth and performance, and I'm excited to share that conversation with you today.

Shonda Rhimes, welcome to Uplift! 

Shonda Rhimes: Thank you. Hello everybody. 

Adam Grant: I love the standing ovation before the conversation. Does it take the pressure off? 

Shonda Rhimes: Uh, the pressure's always on. You wanna deliver. 

Adam Grant: Okay, so I, I was trying to think about how to describe your impact on the world and on culture, and here's what I came up with. Tell me if it's right or wrong. I think that many of us have our greatest daily moments of joy in front of a TV screen, and you are responsible for more of those moments than anyone on earth alive. And therefore, you might be the greatest joy creator on earth.

Shonda Rhimes: I, I like that. I've never heard it described that way. When my kids are ribbing me, I'm gonna be like, I'm a joy creator.

Adam Grant: How would you describe what you do? 

Shonda Rhimes: I always say I'm a storyteller, first and foremost. That's my job. No matter what medium we're talking about, I feel like we're sort of fearlessly entertaining through storytelling and really celebrating everybody with it. Our goal is to just reflect life and to reflect humanity the way either we want it to be or it should be, or it is.

And so to me, storyteller is the perfect title. 

Adam Grant: If you could go back to your life story, when you were a kid, what did you wanna be when you grew up? 

Shonda Rhimes: I wanted to be Toni Morrison, and I'm not joking. I wanted to be Toni Morrison. I loved her work. I thought being a writer sounded amazing. She was a professor at Princeton.

I was like, that's a, like the perfect life. And then she won the Nobel Prize. So it felt like, yeah, I wanna be Toni Morrison when I grow up. You can't be Toni Morrison when you grow up, 'cause Toni Morrison was already Toni Morrison, but it really was my aspiration. But I also had all these other things that I didn't realize what they added up to.

I wanted to be a lawyer for a long time. I wanted to be a doctor for a long time. I wanted to be a CIA agent for a long time. What I realized is I don't actually wanna do those things, but I wanna write about them and pretend and live in that world. And that became really fun for me once I understood that I didn't have to go to medical school or I didn't have to actually like be a spy, that I could imagine.

Adam Grant: That's so fascinating, 'cause this is exactly why I became an organizational psychologist. I thought I can study all the jobs that I think I wanna do. I like your version better. 

Shonda Rhimes: It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. 

Adam Grant: Okay. So you figure out that you want to be a storyteller. It's hard to imagine like graduating college and saying, okay, I'm gonna build Shondaland.

Did you have that vision at 21 or how did it evolve? 

Shonda Rhimes: No, no, it did not work that way at all. I flailed for a long time. I worked in nonprofit world for a while to sort of pay my bills. Then I went to film school. And the only reason I went to film school was because my parents are professors and I read that it was harder to get into USC film school than it is to get into Harvard Law School, and I thought, if I do that, they can't say that I'm not doing something. So that's why I went to film school really, 'cause I needed something to do and I liked watching TV and movies. It wasn't until I got there that I realized how comfortable I was there and how much I enjoyed what I was learning, and I enjoyed what I was doing.

Adam Grant: And then?

Shonda Rhimes: Oh.

Adam Grant: What happened next? 

Shonda Rhimes: I was lucky, like I graduated film school with an agent. I, I won like a writing contest and got an agent, but you don't really generally graduate that way. It did not help me in any way. Back in the day when people had CDs for music, I would sell my CDs to buy gas for my car.

So like, it, it wasn't helping anyway. I had a, a job that I was going to, that I did not like. Plenty of that stuff. But then I wrote a script and I said to myself, I'm gonna write this movie script. I'm gonna write something I just like, and if it sells, I'll stay in Hollywood. And if it doesn't, I'll go do a post-baccalaureate year so that I can then go to medical school and become a doctor. And I was dead serious. And the script sold luckily, so I didn't have to go. And it never got made. But in Hollywood, like, things get sold and then they get sold again, and they get sold again. It got sold enough that like I could survive. And then I was hired to write Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, which starred Halle Berry and it was my first real job in the business.

Adam Grant: Wow. So are you saying that, like, McDreamy and Meredith Grey, the whole cast hung in the balance of one script being sold? 

Shonda Rhimes: Yes, definitely. 

Adam Grant: And you would've otherwise gone to med school? 

Shonda Rhimes: I was a really nerdy academic student who loved being in school. And while I didn't love science, I did love the idea of helping people and being a doctor.

Adam Grant: Well, I think it's safe to say that you've done more to inspire people to become doctors than you would've if you had gone to med school. 

Shonda Rhimes: I think that to me is the most exciting piece of a legacy. I meet so many young women who went into science because of that show, so many young women who went to medical school because of that show. Which was completely unintended, like that wasn't what I thought when I was writing about McDreamy and McSteamy and all this. But in it, you know, Christina Yang and Meredith Grey, Dr. Bailey set this example, I think, that made a lot of young women see themselves and that was really exciting. 

Adam Grant: It was such a different time then, and we had so little representation on TV.

Was that an uphill battle? What was it like to, to, to write characters who we weren't used to seeing? 

Shonda Rhimes: It was, and it wasn't, and here's what I mean. There hadn't been a show that wasn't a sitcom that had two characters of color in a room discussing something alone without a white character. Literally that hadn't happened.

There were very few shows where there were women who had both families and jobs where women were competitive, where women slept around. I think it was Sex in the City, but that was it. And so when I wrote that show, which felt to me like it was about women my age at the time, I remember the network saying like, we're really worried that no one's gonna wanna watch this because that woman is not the kind of woman you wanna be.

And I was like, but that's all the women I know. Nobody came at me because of diversity, because of the color of the cast. They really didn't, and I don't even think it occurred to them that they should. ABC was really great about that. But when it aired, what I thought was simply a show about people turned out to be revolutionary. Because people of color had not been portrayed as people on television. They were most likely put on television to talk about being a person of color. Like that was generally what happened in a show. And I'm not bragging, but Grey's Anatomy literally changed the face of television, you know? Who you see on TV.

Okay. I am bragging a little bit. 

Adam Grant: No, no. There's a difference between a brag and a fact. Okay, so Shonda, this goes to one of our major themes of the discussion today, which is the idea of reinvention. You have reinvented the way that stories are told, and you've done it repeatedly throughout your career. I wonder if you could talk to us about some of your early and boldest moves where you had to try something that had never been attempted and what you learned from that experience.

Shonda Rhimes: Grey's Anatomy is the first television show I'd ever written, so, and that's really a weird experience to write a show and then have it, like, become lightning like that where, you know, it's still going. So I was in a position where I did not often understand what the actual rules were because I had never worked in television before.

So I was making my own rules and quite often encountering people who sort of like, well, you can't do that that way, or that doesn't work that way. And I always felt like, well, I'm the person telling the story, so it has to work that way because I'm telling the story. Like, how do you know how it happens? You didn't write the story. And it seems really simple, but what it did in a way that I don't know if I was completely aware of in the very beginning, but I began to be aware of it, I would say no. And so many people in that town were so desperate for their shot and for a job and for an opportunity that they would never say no.

They'd get crazy notes and they'd say yes. They'd be told something about who they could be on television or what a story could be told or all kinds of things, and they'd say, okay. Also, not for nothing, but most showrunners were white men. So I would walk into a room with like one of my writers and they would only talk to him because he was a white man, and I became really good at sort of allowing people to make fools of themselves without insulting them, to sort of make the point of a leader comes in all kinds of packages.

You can't say that this is what a leader looks like because the leader's over here. 

Adam Grant: What's an example of how you would do that? 

Shonda Rhimes: I would always let them talk for a while and I wouldn't say much and then they'd ask a real question and then my writer who knew this was coming, 'cause they're very used to it, would say, you shouldn't be asking me. You should have been asking her over there. And there's a moment of realization there them, and sometimes they knew I was the head writer, but they assumed that someone was in charge of me. That happens to women and people of color all the time. Don't gasp. It really does. And so this idea that like they, I brought someone who was in charge of me instead of someone to take notes was really annoying to me, but I also just always was able to clarify that very clearly.

Adam Grant: Yeah. I'm just imagining the train of thought when they, when the realization washes over them, like they have to grapple with both are, am I sexist and am I racist all at once? 

Shonda Rhimes: That, maybe that's true. There were a lot of people who didn't grapple. They just felt like they'd made a mistake and didn't even think about what it meant.

But they never made the mistake again. 

Adam Grant: You mentioned saying no when other people said yes. You have a complicated relationship with the words no and yes, and I want to dig into that because I think that both of them have been really important in your leadership and your career. 

Shonda Rhimes: I agree. Grey's had been out and Scandal had come out, and I was pretty successful and... 

Adam Grant: Pretty successful?

Shonda Rhimes: It took a long time for me to actually decide that I was successful. A long time. But I was pretty successful at that point and my sister was at home with me and I would tell her all the invitations, well, I got invited here and England wanted me to come and do this, and this person wanted to come do this and Time Magazine.

And she goes, are you ever gonna do any of these things? And I looked at her and she was crazy, and I was like, no. And she said, why not? And I had all kinds of excuses, but the reality of it was is I was a deep introvert and I was afraid. And she said to me, you never say yes to anything. And that made me embark on a year where I decided to say yes to everything that scared me. And I ended up writing a book about it. But it was an amazing experience because I was a person who was comfortable saying no, because it meant that I could stay home in my pajamas, in my cocooned life and not have to worry about anything. But I said yes to everything and I, the first thing I said yes to was giving a commencement speech in front of 15,000 people and I said yes to going on television.

I did a guest spot on Mindy Kaling's television show, and it went on and on. I started saying yes to things I didn't even think I needed to say yes to. Things that hadn't even occurred to me that they would be in my wheelhouse. And, and it really changed everything for me. What I learned most of all is that the thing you're afraid of, doing the thing undoes the fear. It truly does. One of those things I said yes to was difficult conversations, because I used to avoid them like the plague. I always feel like peace is now on the other side of a difficult conversation, so you have to say yes to having the difficult conversation no matter what that conversation is. If it's you are underperforming and this is not working for me, if it's you are in the wrong business, like you shouldn't be doing this job that you think you wanna do, if it's, you know, telling somebody that something doesn't work or something is hard, or if it's me telling some people I'm not gonna do this, and here's why. It was really revolutionary to me to do that. 

Adam Grant: When I first saw you in person at TED, and I think you, you might've just released your book at that point. 

Shonda Rhimes: Yes, I think so.

Adam Grant: And I was so shocked. Because I was coming at this from the backdrop of organizational psychology research showing that women face way more cultural and organizational pressure to say yes than men do. And then when they do say yes, it gets taken for granted. Like she's caring, of course she wants to help. And if they say no, they get penalized for it. Like, how dare she not? And meanwhile, like men get away with saying no. Like I never would've expected him to care. And they get celebrated for, for, for saying yes because like, wow, what a great guy. And so I, I guess my, my starting assumption was like, oh, this was gonna be a book about the need to say no, and you went the opposite way.

Shonda Rhimes: There is a chapter called Say Yes to Saying No because really learning when to say no and how to say no efficiently, which is, I always say the sentence is, I'm sorry, I can't do that. And you never give any other information. You don't have to explain yourself. But the reason why I sort of went the other way or why my brain went the other way, I didn't like claw my way to the top. I found myself in a position that nobody else had been in before, and I was protecting my space and my sanity a lot of the time by saying no, because I was like, I'm doing this one thing that I'm terrified to do badly, making this show. If I mess up, will there ever be anybody who looks like me who does it again?

So I spent time saying no, really trying to protect my own peace. I didn't really care if other people were unhappy that I said no because it was the thing keeping me sane and happy and going. So there was that. And I do know that most women are expected to say yes to things, and I think because I had been so determinedly saying no, saying yes meant something. But also the book is not about saying, whether or not you can say yes.

It's about saying yes to the right things and saying no to the right things, and really defining that for yourself and letting go of other people's expectations of what that means. 

Adam Grant: You live in a world of infinite opportunity. You could literally do anything you want. How do you decide what's worth saying yes to and what to say no to?

Shonda Rhimes: Oh, wow. I say yes to things that feel exciting to me or that I can bring something to. If I can bring something to the table, then I'm gonna say yes. If I never even imagined doing it before, sometimes I'll say yes because you should always do the things that freak you out and scare you at some point in time. I'm not gonna jump out of a plane 'cause I'm not stupid, but other things. 

People always talk about work-life balance and I believe there's no such thing as work-life balance. But I say no to things based on like my kids and what we're doing at the time. What feels important to me at the time too. You can say yes to almost anything, but if you have no fences, that doesn't mean you should just run free.

It means you should figure out what your own fences are. 

Adam Grant: You talk about saying yes when you have something to add. I wonder if it matters that you have something unique to add. 

Shonda Rhimes: Oh, I definitely think having something unique to add matters. Still, be careful who you say yes to. Because somebody will discover that you can do something unique and then they will try to make you do it again and again and again for them.

So to me, it's only if I'm contributing to something that's sort of unique to my talents, but also is something I want to do. I never say yes to something I just don't wanna do. That's not a way to live your life. 

Adam Grant: Okay, so this reminds me of a moment in your career when Oprah told you that you didn't look like you were having fun.

Shonda Rhimes: Yes. Grey's Anatomy had become this enormous hit, and the first sign that you're an enormous hit is Oprah wants to come and talk to you. And everybody was like insane about the fact that she was coming. I went home the night before and I came back the next day and they had planted like 4,000 roses or flat tulips so that Oprah would see something beautiful when she drove in.

It was crazy. It felt like God might be coming, like get, get it together. And so she came and I was so stressed out by it that I remember not a lot of it, but it, she was warm and it was lovely and it was this sort of far ranging interview. She and Gail sat across the room and I sort of sat in a corner sort of answering questions, like, terrified. And we took a photo and we did this whole thing. And as she was leaving, Oprah grabbed my hand and said, you are not enjoying any of this. And she was right. And it made me feel really seen, because at that point I was so shy that the idea that I was doing this and supposed to be natural edit it and funny and casual, that wasn't even possible. But I also wasn't enjoying it because I still wasn't sure that the success was gonna last. I was still operating in a very fearful place of, they're gonna take this away from me any minute if I don't protect it. And she said, you have to start finding ways to enjoy this. And I started to try.

Adam Grant: How?

Shonda Rhimes: A lot of it was, I never even celebrated our successes ever. I never went like, oh, we're the number one show. I'd edit the episodes and then I wouldn't even like really watch them to go like, we made this. And so I really started to try to enjoy myself more. I started going down to the sound stage more to watch people act, to sort of see my words coming to life. 'Cause usually I was like, that's not my job. And I just started trying to also find moments in life to enjoy more. 

Adam Grant: You must've been the only person in America not watching. 

Shonda Rhimes: Yeah. My daughters have never seen it either, and one of them's 22. But I get that. I think that's really healthy in a lot of ways.

Like it's all your mom's feelings about romance and sex and competitiveness and business. Like they have to hear that stuff anyway at home. Like why do you wanna watch a show about it? 

Adam Grant: I wonder if you belong to the, the breed of creators who can't watch their own content without nitpicking and critiquing. Like, can you sit back and feel proud of it and enjoy it? 

Shonda Rhimes: Yes. 

Adam Grant: How? Because I would really like to learn that skill, and I know there are others who would too. 

Shonda Rhimes: By the time we hit Scandal, I was really able to sit back and just be proud of the work and enjoy it and, and find things that were funny. Because it's not just me, you know, there are 300 people who make that show.

So you're looking at the work of all of these other people, all kinds of people. You're appreciating the work of the actors. You're appreciating the director, the cinematography, the other writers, the crew, costumes. To me, it wasn't me that I'm watching. I'm getting to watch something put together by a whole group of people.

I imagined something, it went on a page, but 300 people made it. 

Adam Grant: This is clearly a virtue of making shows as opposed to writing books. 

Shonda Rhimes: Yeah, I agree with that too. 

Adam Grant: You've alluded to being an introvert and reference it at least once. First of all, full disclosure, I'm also an introvert. I think we've both overcome a lot of shyness to be on this stage.

Shonda Rhimes: I agree. I agree. 

Adam Grant: Some colleagues and I did research years ago where we studied introverted and extroverted leaders, and we found that if you had a really reactive passive team that was looking for direction, the extroverts were more effective. They were bringing the energy and they were engaging everyone.

But if you had a proactive team with tons of ideas and suggestions, the introverts actually led greater success. 

Shonda Rhimes: No, I like that. I think my philosophy has always been for at least 20 years, if you hired people to do a job, you should let them do that job. Like it's not my job to micromanage you. And if I've hired you and I don't have faith in you enough to do that job, then why have I hired you?

So I hire people and I don't question their aspects of a job. I ask a lot of questions. I try to learn a lot, but I don't tell anybody how to do their job. The company has grown. It used to be just like me and another person, but now it's, it's a whole bunch of people. Now that we've grown, it is a company full of people who feel empowered to do their jobs and feel trusted to do their jobs.

And it is a much more productive workplace than anything else. When people are sitting around waiting for you to tell them what to do, it's painful for them and for you. And I say that as somebody who, my scripts will be late and the crew will be like waiting for pages. But in the office, it's always moving. People are always having ideas, they're always building, and that's exciting to me. Like I want that to happen. I don't need to be the person who has my finger on everything.

Adam Grant: I'm so fascinated by the work that you do as a creator who then chose to become a leader and lead other creators, but also have to teach some, can I call them suits? Bean counters. Some traditional executives. 

Shonda Rhimes: Yes, traditional executives is the best word. 

Adam Grant: How to engage with creative work. You have spoken so insightfully about how to coach executives to judge creative work and give feedback.

Can you talk to us about that? 

Shonda Rhimes: Writers think that they're making magical plays and stories that work and the executives think you're making us money. Right? They're, they're coming from a completely different world. What, what's hard to remember with a creative job, you can't actually say, well, we did this, this, this before. So if you do this, this, and this, again, it'll work. That's not gonna work. And you can't talk to a creative that way. But what I learned is that instead of railing against any notes I had that they gave or railing against anything that they told me, it would be better if I just said, you know what works for me? Like, you know how you can give me a note that I'm really gonna understand? If you do this. And it was always, don't tell me the solution. The solution is my problem as the creative. Tell me what your problem is. Tell me what's not working for you. And that really changed my relationship with a bunch of suits, because it allowed them to feel empowered to give notes and feel like they were gonna be heard without being on a phone with me while I made very loud sighs and other passive aggressive things about their, the things that they were pitching to me that they wanted me to do. 

Adam Grant: It reminds me of feedback I've given to my own teams, which is like sometimes they will jump to solutions to problems they pointed out and they think they're being helpful and taking ownership. And what I have to say to them is, you're not close enough to the work that I created to know whether this solution you're offering me is gonna cause other problems.

Shonda Rhimes: Yes. 

Adam Grant: Why I need you is you have distance that I don't, and that gives you perspective to hold up a mirror and see the problems more clearly. 

Shonda Rhimes: Yeah. And I always presented it as, what would make me perform best? 

Adam Grant: That's very Jerry Maguire. Help me help you. 

Shonda Rhimes: Exactly. 

Adam Grant: I wanna talk a little bit about failure. It's amazing your failures have not been very visible compared to your successes.

Shonda Rhimes: Yeah. 

Adam Grant: At all. 

Shonda Rhimes: I haven't had that many of them. 

Adam Grant: You've had shockingly few. 

Shonda Rhimes: Yeah. 

Adam Grant: I actually had to dig pretty deep into Google to find any. I think at some point there was a, there was a war correspondent pilot that didn't get picked up. 

Shonda Rhimes: I didn't look at that like a failure. So my very first, think foray, into television was they hire you to write a script, and if they like that script, they'll turn it into a television pilot.

If they like the pilot, it'll becomes a series. So I wrote a script about war correspondents. Four women who were covering wars who were really tough and really competitive about their jobs. And we were at war. And so nobody, ABC was like, you've lost your mind. Like, we're not making this. And it taught me a valuable lesson because the next question I asked is, well, Bob Iger runs this company, what does Bob Iger wanna see?

And they said, Bob Iger wants to see a medical show. So I wrote Grey's Anatomy. So for me it wasn't a failure as much as it was, I'm testing out my, my theories of how to get this done. 

Adam Grant: Wow. So that was just feedback for you and then you pivoted? 

Shonda Rhimes: Exactly. 

Adam Grant: Now when something you were excited about didn't get adopted or didn't get the immediate Yes that you were looking for, is that just feedback? Is that how you dealt with it? 

Shonda Rhimes: I sometimes it was feedback, sometimes it was, they're absolutely wrong, so I'm gonna go around and figure out how to make that happen anyway. I was really raised with a philosophy and, and, I really am grateful that I was raised with the philosophy 'cause I wish everybody had it, that there are no such thing as obstacles.

There are no walls. There are hills to be climbed, there are objects to go around, but they're not stopping you in any way. So that belief for me always made me think, well, there's another way. 

Adam Grant: I think you were way ahead of the curve in terms of going to streaming. And I think there were a lot of people who were like, okay, you've been that successful on ABC, like network is your bread and butter. Stay there. And you chose to say, no, I wanna go to Netflix. How did you know? 

Shonda Rhimes: ABC had done great by me. We'd had all these shows. We were doing Scandal and Grey's and How to Get Away With Murder at the time, things were going fine, but things were going fine. Like in the beginning there would be problems that would happen with our crew or our cast or our set or something production. And my producing partner, Betsy Beers, and I would sit and it would take us weeks to figure out like the best way to fix it and do it correctly. And we'd be really proud of ourselves when we solved the problem. By the end, that same problem could come up and Betsy and I could have that problem solved in five minutes because we had all the experience we'd learned. And I felt like I wasn't learning anything new. I know exactly how to make network television. I know exactly what will work and what they respond to, in terms of the executives, not the audience. And I felt like I was looking at how people were watching television. I wasn't watching network television at the time. I was watching cable. I was obsessed with Netflix.

So to me, I thought, this is moving someplace else. And I was watching what Netflix was doing and they were, they were doing things like making The Crown for like $12 million an episode, which was twice the budget you'd have in television, and just beautiful work. And I thought, I wanna go over there and do what I do there.

And I remember my agent said I was crazy. And that was a terrible idea. But then when I said, I really, really wanna do this, he went and found and created a model for me to do it because it hadn't been done before. Nobody had had a deal like that at a streamer. Streamers didn't make deals like that, so he built the deal that I needed to go there, and it was the first one. I remember the very big splash it made when it was announced, but I also felt really good about it. I'd become to peace with it. My biggest issue or concern was my team, the people who worked on our shows, make sure that they understood and felt like your lives are going to remain the same. Like, I'm not gone. That's not how this works. And then for the people in the office, we're all making this leap together. Like it's, it's a scary leap because it hasn't been done and you're suddenly thinking to yourselves, maybe I should go get a job someplace else, but we're gonna make this leap together. And, you know, I recognize that this is stressful for all of you. 

Adam Grant: It's so fascinating to see just how willing you are to, to follow your own attention and interest as opposed to just deferring to what other people think might be good. 

Shonda Rhimes: It truly thinks, a real leader goes forward when they know that it's sort of the right north star.

It is very easy to sit back and just keep doing what you're doing. I could have been making network television for another 20 years, but that wasn't exciting to me. It also didn't feel like where the wind was blowing in terms of innovation, and to me, I feel like you have to seize those moments. You have to ask yourself if you're gonna stay, why am I staying?

And if the reason is 'cause it's comfortable, that might not be the right reason. And you ask yourself why I'm going. And when you can say your why for going you, you know, you're right. 

Adam Grant: So it seems like the pace of change is accelerating, and with that, crisis is happening more often than ever before. You created Scandal. Is there a lesson from writing Olivia Pope for crisis management that we can all take away? 

Shonda Rhimes: Olivia Pope is based on a real life crisis manager named Judy Smith, who then consulted on our show. One thing that she always said that was really important was never lie. In the middle of a crisis, don't lie and say it's gonna be all right, or that didn't happen, or, you know, we're all gonna definitely do this. Don't lie.

The second is, no matter how bad the truth is, you have to stand in that truth. You have to be ready to own that truth, 'cause it's gonna come out eventually and then the crisis gets worse. Right? So you have to be ready to own your truth and stand in it. The other thing was she would always say some version of, don't try to hide it or spin it in a way that just makes you look good.

If you're gonna spin it, spin it towards a way that makes you look like you're truthful. Or that you have integrity or those sorts of things, but you can't pretend a crisis isn't happening. And you can't think it's just gonna blow over either. That's the worst. That's when the rumor mill starts because in the absence of information, they're gonna come up with information.

Right? Do you know what I'm talking about? 

Adam Grant: I'm hearing a lot of, uh, ohs right now. Yeah. 

Shonda Rhimes: But it's so true. They come up with information and then you're dealing with a group of people who, much like the world right now, who have created their own truth and believe it. And then whatever you say, then they feel like you're trying to gaslight them or you're trying to get them to be quiet, and that never works.

I mean, obviously that becomes a nightmare. 

Adam Grant: This reminds me of some recent evidence that leaders are on average nine times more likely to be criticized for under-communicating than over-communicating. 

Shonda Rhimes: If what you know has to be a secret, right? You have to be really careful about how you're maintaining that. Because the reality of it is, is 90% of the things you think like, we shouldn't tell the employees this. A lot of the time you can tell them. And then they feel a part of it, and it's helpful for people to feel like they're getting a steady flow of information. And when you can't tell them, tell them you can't tell them, as opposed to sort of pretending that nothing's going on. 

Adam Grant: Okay, so we got a crisis lesson from Scandal.

From Grey's, do you have a favorite leadership or collaboration takeaway? 

Shonda Rhimes: Yes. I mean, Greys is based on young interns coming in and learning how to do surgery. And, you know, there's, there's a very clear learning curve, which is see one, do one, teach one. So first you see it done, then you do it yourself, and then you have to know it well enough to be able to teach it to somebody else.

That works for almost everything in terms of training people. And in terms of even stuff for me, like public speaking and things that made me nervous, you know, the see one, do one, teach one takes that nervousness away. It allows people to feel qualified. 

Adam Grant: I think so many people say like, I need a coach to get better. Like, yeah, you want that. You also wanna be a coach because when you teach someone else a skill, you remember it better after you explain it, and you also understand it better after having to unpack it. 

Shonda Rhimes: Absolutely. 

Adam Grant: I am not gonna ask you for a work lesson from Bridgeton. I have a wonderful question that Sally Calwell submitted. She's full of creative ideas, and this is no exception. She wants to know, what have you learned about leadership from being a creative writer? And then on the flip side, is there something that writers should learn from leaders? 

Shonda Rhimes: I think there's a ton that writers can learn from leaders. When it became clear that I wanted my company to be more than just me running different shows, when I wanted it to be a storytelling company where we did more things, where we were involved in merchandise, where we were involved in podcasts. When we became bigger in that way, it became really clear that I needed to understand leadership on a higher level. I did a lot of reading.

Everybody thinks they need a mentor. I didn't have any mentors and I didn't know anybody when I entered Hollywood. So my mentors were books. I would read people's biographies. I would read people's memoirs. I would read people's leadership books. And that to me was enough, because a lot of people don't have access to a mentor.

I think creative writers really come from a place where there's not just one way things can happen. I always say like I'm the best worst case scenario builder that you will ever meet because I can think of 5,000 ways something's gonna go wrong because it makes good story, right? But I think a lot of leaders really have their idea that I, I've learned what I'm doing. I know what I'm doing. This has always worked for me. But they're not thinking creatively about other ways that they can either take what they know and apply it or take what they know and add stuff that they don't know to make themselves better.

Adam Grant: You're speaking to the fact that every leader in the room is a storyteller. 

Shonda Rhimes: I absolutely think so. I think that if you can't tell the story of your company, your department, your, your time there, the story of who you are, you're not really communicating the way you should. 

Adam Grant: It's not every day that we get to sit down with a master storyteller and ask, how do we get better at it?

What are your favorite lessons and principles of storytelling? 

Shonda Rhimes: The one that I adhere to the most is, is if you've seen it before, don't do it again. You don't wanna sort of take somebody else's story and try to make it your own because it's easy and it's good and you know that it works. Truly, what is your story? Like what is your unique story? So one, I always say don't copy. Two, I always say people love to have stories where like there's a surprise at the end and that's great, but don't bury the lede ever. You know, you watch Scandal, two seconds in, you know exactly who Olivia Pope is and what kind of person she's gonna be, right?

And also paint a picture. You know, people talk and they say lots of words, but they don't necessarily say something that holds somebody's imagination. 'Cause you're not painting a picture, you're not saying, you know, who you are in that, in that context. 

Adam Grant: It speaks to some research led by Drew Carton, which showed that as, as people climb up a hierarchy, we tend to select people on the basis of their abstract thinking skills. And so basically the closer you get to the C-suite, the worse you are at painting a picture. 

Shonda Rhimes: Mm, yeah. That's interesting. 

Adam Grant: Uh, so I think we need your skills at the top more than anywhere else. 

Shonda Rhimes: Everybody at the company has to understand why we tell the stories we tell in order to do their jobs. So there's a lot of me explaining what makes a Shondaland story a Shondaland story, and a lot of my team sort of using observations and building out that to then move forward with something.

Like you say there's no leadership lessons to be learned from Bridgeton, but Bridgerton is a show set in Regency England. We have sold and created more merchandise for that show than any, any other show. We innovated sort of amazing, interesting ways to make it a global brand. My favorite is that we did a commercial for Flonase. There was the the couple, Penelope and Colin, and they called them #Pollen. So we did a commercial about Pollen season and Flonase, and it was incredibly successful. It's won awards, been nominated for awards, but more importantly what that was was us innovating ways in which to take things like advertising dollars, which are very hard to integrate into a show that's set in Regency England. We've become really good at looking at what our show is about, which is romance and love, and then innovating that into, we have a line of wedding gowns that people are, are really excited about. We have, you know, everybody talks about the tea that served on Bridgeton or the tea that's served up on Bridgerton.

Um, we have teas, we have tea pots, we have a line of things at Williams Sonoma, so we innovated a lot of merchandise, a huge global brand out of that. Just thinking about how we can bring more of that to the audience. 

Adam Grant: And it's not just products, it's live experiences too. 

Shonda Rhimes: Yes. 

Adam Grant: People go to Bridgerton balls now. 

Shonda Rhimes: We have bridgeton balls.

And it's funny because I, when it was first thought up, I thought like, this is crazy. But my team's smart and they wanted to do it, so they did it. And then they brought me to see one and it's magical. Apparently it's a great date night. 

Adam Grant: I'll report back. 

Shonda Rhimes: Okay.

Adam Grant: You ready for a lightning round? 

Shonda Rhimes: Okay. Lightning round. 

Adam Grant: Okay. First question, worst career advice you've ever gotten? 

Shonda Rhimes: To be quiet. If you wanna get ahead, like you have to not make waves. The worst career advice I've ever gotten, and it was about being really quiet on social media. We were really loud on social media, and then we created a whole brand of social media where you live tweet the shows and things like that.

So that was terrible advice. But the best advice I've ever been given is never enter a negotiation you're not willing to walk away from. For anything. If you walk into that room without knowing what your bottom line is, then you've already lost. Because if you're like, I just really want this job, but you haven't set any boundaries for yourself, they are going to take you for all you're worth.

Adam Grant: So great to have you teaching negotiation lessons. Yes, Shonda just nailed the BATNA. The best alternative to negotiated agreement. Favorite character you've created? 

Shonda Rhimes: It's a tie between Christina Yang, right? Olivia Pope, and Queen Charlotte, the young Queen Charlotte. 

Adam Grant: People are showing their allegiances right now.

Shonda Rhimes: Yes, I know, but I love those women and I, I think that creating them, in creating all of those women and writing them, I learned stuff about myself and I grew. 

Adam Grant: Which character is most and least like you? 

Shonda Rhimes: I don't wanna say Olivia Pope's most like me because, you know, at the end she goes kind of mad. But maybe in the beginning. I'm very much like Olivia Pope now. The character that's least like me? Meredith Grey, and I think she's least like me in ways that I admire her for.

She's emotionally available constantly. She's, you know, not afraid to be bad at her job. Did I say too much? Yeah. But I think I'm least like her. 

Adam Grant: What's a question for me that you have about organizational psychology? 

Shonda Rhimes: Oh wow. What is the one thing you wish people would stop doing? 

Adam Grant: Stop doing? 

Shonda Rhimes: Stop doing. 

Adam Grant: Mass layoffs.

Shonda Rhimes: There you go.

I think that's a good one. 

Adam Grant: It's an easy one. There was a paper published in one of our top journals that literally called layoffs Dumb and Dumber. 

Shonda Rhimes: Oh wow. Can I ask you one more? 

Adam Grant: If you insist. 

Shonda Rhimes: What do you understand to be the best leadership environment for creative people? 

Adam Grant: Tell me what a leadership environment means to you.

Shonda Rhimes: It means you're the person running things and you're running things with a lot of creative people under you, and you are trying to cultivate a corporate environment or a company environment where people feel free to create, but also free to fail. 

Adam Grant: I think the single thing that matters most is a leader who's willing to fall flat on her face.

Shonda Rhimes: Excellent. I like that. 

Adam Grant: I think that kind of humility and role modeling of experimentation and risk taking cascades very quickly down the organization. 

Shonda Rhimes: I agree. Yeah, that's good. 

Adam Grant: You have spoken very publicly about how you're always trying to get better, so what are you trying to get better at right now? 

Shonda Rhimes: At work, I think I'm really trying to get better at understanding the needs of people. Like I was very much a person who felt like, you know how you're doing at your job. You're doing great, and you know how you know that? You have a job. That was sort of my attitude. If you're here, I obviously value and trust you, and now I'm trying to get better at understanding sort of the people and what they need from me versus what I need to share with them to make them successful.

Adam Grant: It sounds like you're working on evolving from being primarily task oriented to being a little bit more relationship oriented. 

Shonda Rhimes: Yes. Oh, that's a nice way of putting it. 

Adam Grant: How, how do you think about working on that? Do you have a coach? Do you have a practice around developing that skill? 

Shonda Rhimes: I don't have time for a coach.

I have to be honest like that. I would Oh, am I, am I about to get schooled by all of you? I need a coach? Okay. I like that. 

Adam Grant: They can even watch you while you're working so it doesn't take that much time. 

Shonda Rhimes: Okay. I'm really trying more to connect with the stories of the people who work here and what they can bring.

I'm really trying to understand sort of what brought them to the company. We just had a big leadership change where I just named co-presidents of the company, and they've been spectacular at sort of pointing out the things that they think I'm lacking in, in a way that's been really helpful for me to allow them to do their job.

Adam Grant: I, I love how you've just figured out all these things that our whole community of researchers has taken decades to, to produce. I'm like, oh, you're describing don't wait for the exit interview. Do the entry interview to find out why did you join and what would keep you. 

Shonda Rhimes: Oh yeah. That, that's what I'm doing exactly. Based on research. 

Adam Grant: I think one of the best things about having a real role model on stage is we get to see your superpower in action. So I have a quick TV show idea that I want to pitch you. Are you ready? 

Shonda Rhimes: I'm ready. 

Adam Grant: Okay. So my pitch is what if we colonize the Moon or Mars, and somebody who studies the kinds of things that we all love in this room around leadership and talent and culture gets sent to try to clean up that mess?

Is that a show worth making? 

Shonda Rhimes: Oh, that's interesting. Any show about a fixer is a good show. I don't know what your conflict is, so you gotta tell me what the conflict is. What's the problem you're trying to solve? You say clean up that mess. What's the mess? What's going on? 

Adam Grant: Those are great notes that I will pass along.

Okay, Shonda, last question for you. 

Shonda Rhimes: Okay. 

Adam Grant: If you could leave all the amazing leaders in the room with us today with one piece of advice, what would it be? 

Shonda Rhimes: I think it's really about being free to question yourself and the processes. Like I always say that the most important thing I've learned is to admit when I don't know something, but also to ask why.

Like if we're gonna make a big change as a company, if we're gonna innovate a product, my question is, yes, I know we can do it, but why are we doing it? If we're gonna change a job description, if we're gonna move somebody from one area to another, why are we doing this? So to me, like, the questioning the why of everything is really important to me.

I have to know that in order to move forward, because you have to know that for your characters in order to tell a story. 

Adam Grant: Shonda, I just wanna say thank you. Your work is a gift to the world. 

Shonda Rhimes: Oh, thank you. 

Adam Grant: And... 

Shonda Rhimes: I've really, I've really loved talking this. This was fun. 

Adam Grant: You all know how they say never meet your heroes?

This is a hero worth meeting. 

Shonda Rhimes: Oh, thank you. Oh my God.

Adam Grant: ReThinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is part of the TED Audio Collective, and this episode was produced in mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley Ma and Aja Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hahnsdale Hsu and Allison Layton Brown.

Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Samaya Adams, Roxanne Hai Lash, Banban Cheng, Julia Dickerson, Tansica Sunkamaneevongse, and Whitney Pennington Rogers.

Shonda Rhimes: When she stepped outta the car, you could tell from just her foot that it was Oprah. It was crazy. 

Adam Grant: Well, that, that's 'cause she said, "And you get a car!" No.