As a manager, it can be hard to know what to prioritise to maximise your team’s development.
Fortunately, prominent leaders sometimes ask their thousands of twitter followers and we sift through the hundreds of replies to let you know!
We’ve done this once already with Neha Batra, and a couple of weeks ago, Hiten Shah gave us another opportunity to find out what our team members appreciate the most when he asked his 240,000 followers this.
We categorised and analysed all the responses to give you some insight into what your team may want from you as a manager.
You can read the full article here.
The last two weeks have seen the release of a series of reports into high-profile tech companies, including Amazon, Google, Salesforce and Mailchimp, variously alleging racism and sexism, and critiquing the inadequacy of companies’ responses.
These stories represent a combination of outstanding journalism and great courage on behalf of those employees who spoke out, no doubt under intense professional, personal (and potentially legal) pressure.
The various corporate responses to these pieces all roughly approximate to, ‘we’re trying to improve, we dispute these accounts from a small number of people which do not represent our culture as a whole, and have conducted any relevant investigations.’ Even if you’re being exceptionally generous and accept that at face value, the stories in the articles are still invaluable reading for any manager looking to learn how toxic, discriminatory, non-inclusive environments can develop in workplaces and teams (even if you’re confident they don’t currently exist in your place of work…).
There isn’t the space in this newsletter to do justice to all the individual accounts, so the first thing we would encourage any reader to do is check them out in full yourselves (Vox’s Amazon piece is particularly wide-ranging). But for the purposes of the newsletter, we’ve picked out some points from this recent slate of reporting.
Whether it’s Salesforce employees being referred to Warmline (the company’s advocacy program for BIPOC employees) or Google workers being offered mental health services and time-off, there are repeat examples of companies responding to complaints of racism and sexism with solutions focussed on the individual rather than dealing with the root cause.
In addition to perpetuating the original wrong, these solutions fall so palpably short of what’s required to help the individual manage their specific situation, it’s almost farcical. In one incident, an employee was told to try ‘mindfulness techniques’ after being demoted by their manager for protesting the company’s response to handling sexual harassment.
When Vivianne Castillo and Cynthia Perry left Salesforce, they both respectively referred to a “litany” of “countless” microaggressions. The recent reporting is peppered with examples which remind us of the toxic impact on someone’s work.
In January 2020, at a Q&A session with Beth Galetti, Amazon’s Head of HR, Galetti was reportedly asked why D&I employees at Amazon who work outside of the HR department don’t have access to more granular data about the demographics of the workforce. According to three sources, her approximate response was:
“You don’t need the data to do your job.”
The company was effectively not equipping the people charged with making meaningful change with the tools to do so (reportedly the comment “left everybody in the room aghast”).
If your organisation has made commitments to improving DEI, do those with the responsibility have the tools to achieve their goals? If not, what does that say about the extent of the commitment?
Galetti’s comment above is all the more surprising because it seems clear that the most powerful way to reveal the extent of the issue, and track the pace of improvement, is to measure things.
For example, despite efforts to improve diverse hiring practices, from 2014 to 2019, Google increased its Black hires across its workforce by only 2 percent. It increased its Latino hires by 0.7 percent from 2014 to 2019.
During performance reviews at Amazon Web Services (AWS):
“12.7 percent of Black employees received the lowest rating — dubbed “least effective” — for 2018, compared to just 6.6 percent of white employees. The overall internal goal for this tier is 5 percent of employees. Similarly, only 14.5 percent of Black employees were given a “top-tier” rating in AWS that year, compared to 21.8 percent of white employees. Amazon’s internal target for this tier is 20 percent.”
2019 ratings also showed disparities, although smaller.
These statistics are important both in that they reveal where issues of bias and discrimination exist, but also the power of collecting this information. Without organisations tracking this data, and holding themselves accountable, it would be impossible to recognise the extent of the problem and fix it.
When Vivianne Castillo left Salesforce, she specifically called out ‘the overdependence on the free mental and emotional labor of underrepresented folks to drive initiatives that should have been owned and led by the Office of Equality’.
As a recent Wired article on ‘diversity theatre’ pointed out, in cases of a negative employee experience this double life can be perverse: ‘Workers have to represent the company publicly while feeling victimized by it privately’.
It’s a reminder that efforts to improve DEI should be led by those who have been empowered with the capacity, authority, accountability (and compensation) to achieve meaningful change.
As a manager, you may have experienced the moment where a coworker comes to tell you they’ve decided to leave your team.
In the moment, the initial question that you naturally want to know the answer to is ‘why?’. But actually this one’s the easy part - your coworker will have rehearsed a positive, clear response to that question. There’s a second element that you’ll learn far more from as a manager.
When did you start looking?
Michael Lopp, an engineering leader at Apple who publishes under ‘Rands’, calls this moment ‘Shields Down’. It’s the moment when someone gets a message from a recruiter/friend/contact and instead of automatically batting it away (Shields Up), they pause and decide that a coffee couldn’t hurt or they’ll send off a couple of applications (Shields Down).
As he points out, what precedes the casual acceptance of the invite or the browse of a hiring page is a quick but complex calculation of something like the following variables (although everyone’s preferences will be different).
And whereas previously the answer to that question was a positive one, suddenly the individual finds that they feel different.
It’s learning when that moment was which can be so vital to a manager.
Chances are, you contributed to it.
By asking coworkers when they started looking, you’ll learn far more about why people leave your team/company than actually asking them why. They may initially be reluctant to tell you, or that they can’t remember, but as Rands says, that’s likely:
“Bullshit”
They probably remember that dismissive comment in a meeting, or that project they weren’t assigned to, or the pay raise they didn’t get, or that sexist comment by the COO at the company all-hands.
There will be a moment, and understanding it could be crucial to improving the wellbeing and performance of your team. After a few of these conversations, as Rands says, the fundamental lesson you’ll learn is:
“Every moment as a leader is an opportunity to either strengthen or weaken shields. Every single moment.”
If you’re not familiar with Anne Helen Petersen, she’s an American writer and journalist, and the author of Can’t Even, a book on millennial burnout. She’s also just finished a draft of her latest book on the future of office work and sent it to her editor.
Fortunately for us, she decided to summarise the main points of it in her newsletter, so we don’t have to wait for it. And it is fortunate, because the eight points she raises are pretty much a blueprint for any teams thinking about this subject (including point 7 which specifically focuses on managers!). We’ll summarise, but you can read the whole piece here.
1) What you’re doing now is working from home during a pandemic
The way you’re working now is not what remote (or any) work will look like in the future once the pandemic has subsided. Try not to use this as a baseline.
2) This isn’t about working from home forever. It’s about real flexibility.
The real change over the past year has been breaking down the idea that people are less productive when they’re not in the office. If you’ve established you can get the work done, now the discussion is about where and how you do it.
3) “Boundaries” are meaningless. We need guardrails.
Lots of recent work has made clear that compartmentalizing work and life is key to wellbeing. Petersen says we need to move away from this idea of porous boundaries (which puts the onus on the individual) towards clearer ‘guardrails’ established by organisations.
4) The C-Suite has had “flexibility” for years. If companies don’t expand it to other workers, they’ll find jobs elsewhere.
Previously in some workplaces it was accepted that leadership worked remotely whilst everyone else had to come in. Now that won’t be tolerable.
5) If you’re actually serious about DE&I, you have to be serious about remote work.
Remote work has the potential to remove barriers to new hires (like moving to expensive cities) which should enable firms to create more inclusive, diverse workforces.
6) Resist the urge to screw all of this up with surveillance.
In Petersen’s words: ‘There’s a real eagerness to re-instate the sort of control and ostensible omniscience that managers once had in the office in the form of digital surveillance. It’s all garbage, even if it’s sold as a “productivity monitoring tool,” and will just make workers hate everything about their jobs.’
7) Managers have to figure out how to actually manage.
We’ve written before about how remote work has removed the informal support networks of the office, leaving the manager highlighted as the main point of contact between team members and their firms. The best have thrived, but it has brutally exposed others. Petersen notes that this will force companies to adopt an ‘actual manager strategy’ - just casually promoting people into the role in order to give them a raise or some other bullshit doesn’t cut it anymore.
8) If we get flexibility for knowledge workers and call it good, it’ll be a moral failure.
Finally, she observes that we should develop a labour market where this potential flexibility isn’t restricted to the few, where ‘the already privileged get a nice flexible schedule while the rest of the workforce gets even more constrained, more surveilled, more precarious.’ We should be rethinking the place of work in everyone’s lives.
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