Category Archives: Leadership and Management

Google’s Project Aristotle and psychological safety

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After 18 months, the team was still struggling with the project. Lots of work had been done, but most of it was unfocused, and even at this late date, no one could articulate a clear set of requirements. Hitting the deadline, an aggressive goal from the start, was starting to feel like an impossible task. The team knew they were in trouble.

As the team started to miss internal deadlines, the rest of the company began to get concerned too. Meetings were called, presentations were given, and more deadlines were set. Unsurprisingly, these new deadlines – piled on top of old deadlines that were already being missed – were missed too.

People from across the company offered to help the team in any way they could – time, expertise, snacks – but the team politely declined. They knew that failure was not an option, but they didn’t know how to accept the help that was being offered. Worse, they were scared. In order to avoid painful conversations, they pretended they had a plan. What the team really needed was to talk with the customer, to establish a definitive set of requirements to deliver. But how could they tell the customer 18 months into a 2 year project that they still didn’t know what they were supposed to be building? They decided they couldn’t. Better to keep their jobs for the next six months than to risk being fired immediately.

The Emperor has no clothes

Everything changed when a new Product Manager came into the mix. On day one, he said the emperor had no clothes. On day two, he said we were back at square one. Then he started working with the team to gather a definitive set of requirements.

“How is it possible you’re just doing that now?” stakeholders asked, “this should have happened months ago.”

“You’re right, the new Product Manager said, “it should have. But since it didn’t, we’re going to do it now.” On day five, we had a meeting scheduled with our customer to make sure we had the requirements right.

One week after our new Product Manager was hired, we had a plan. Somehow, throughout the interview process and his first week, nobody told our new Product Manager he was supposed to be too scared to do his job. As a result, he wasn’t.

Google’s Project Aristotle

I recently re-read Charles Duhigg’s terrific 2016 New York Times article, What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build The Perfect Team. Here’s the setup:

Five years ago, Google — one of the most public proselytizers of how studying workers can transform productivity — became focused on building the perfect team. In the last decade, the tech giant has spent untold millions of dollars measuring nearly every aspect of its employees’ lives. Google’s People Operations department has scrutinized everything from how frequently particular people eat together to which traits the best managers share.

The company’s top executives long believed that building the best teams meant combining the best people. They embraced other bits of conventional wisdom as well, like ‘‘It’s better to put introverts together,’’ or ‘‘Teams are more effective when everyone is friends away from work.’’ But, ‘‘it turned out no one had really studied which of those were true.’’

In 2012, the company embarked on an initiative — code-named Project Aristotle — to study hundreds of Google’s teams and figure out why some stumbled while others soared.

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The article goes on to describe how the test was constructed and how challenging it was for researchers to identify which group norms consistently characterized successful teams. After studying hundreds of groups over several years, however, researchers made a breakthrough:

They noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’

Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. 

Within psychology, researchers sometimes colloquially refer to traits like ‘‘conversational turn-taking’’ and ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ as aspects of what’s known as psychological safety, or ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up. It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’’

This finding is both intuitive and incredible. The highest performing teams, it tells us, may not have the smartest people, or the clearest goals, or the most inspiring leaders, or the clearest focus. The highest performing teams are those in which people feel “comfortable being themselves.”

Learning from failure

Psychological safety is not the only thing that makes a team great – according to the Times article, “there were other behaviors that seemed important as well – like making sure teams had clear goals and creating a culture of dependability.” But can a team be great if they don’t have each other’s backs? Can a team be great if they’re afraid to take chances? Can a team be great if they blame each other when things go wrong?

Google’s research is aligned with lots of great writing about learning from failure. Great teams take big swings, and when they miss (which all teams do), they learn from their mistakes and move on together. The conclusion is clear: as leaders, our job is to make sure our people feel safe enough to take chances, to challenge each other in productive ways, and to bring their very best ideas to work without the fear of being wrong. That’s the way we’ll build high performing teams, and the way our high performing teams will do amazing things.

If at first you don’t succeed, consider a different approach

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See this brick wall? It’s not a political statement. It’s a realistic view of what you can expect to see when you start your new job by telling your co-workers that everything they’ve built is crap, that their babies are ugly. But you’ve been hired to make a difference, and acknowledging that things are broken is the best way to do it fast, right?

Not necessarily.

You catch more flies with honey 

To illustrate my point, here’s a quick story most parents can relate to:

When my kids were younger, they loved mac and cheese (they were very unusual, I know). I wanted them to like sushi (I don’t remember why), and I knew I’d need to be both strategic and patient to make it happen. As many parents do, I started my kids with Japanese foods that looked familiar, like rice and noodles. After that, we worked our way to California rolls, tamago (sweet cooked eggs), and crunchy shrimp. Eventually, after many months, we were enjoying hirame and uni. This year, for my daughter’s birthday, we’re looking forward to making sushi as a family. Over time, I went from buying $4 pasta dinners to $25 sushi dinners. Mission accomplished! See how smart I am?

Your new co-workers are similar to my kids, at least in one respect: if you want to move them from mac and cheese to sushi, you’ll need to be strategic and patient. Chances are good they’ve been working in a particular way for a while, and most of them aren’t eager to change their thinking just because somebody new comes along – especially somebody who doesn’t know the history behind the decisions that were made. I know from experience that, if your new co-workers are talented and smart, the “brilliant new ideas” you share your first week on the job may well be ones they’ve had before, and there are reasons they haven’t been implemented. Assuming your new team hasn’t considered these things in the past can come across as condescending. You were hired to make the company better, but you can’t do that without respecting your co-workers enough to try and understand the decisions they made in the past – even the ones you think are wrong.

Of course, the fact that the team has tried similar approaches in the past doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try again. New people, org structures, and business challenges mean new opportunity, and it’d be crazy not to take another run at making things better. At a previous job, I gave all new employees a letter, effectively telling them not to be deterred by “we’ve already tried that” thinking, not to drink so much company Kool Aid that they lost their objectivity – and especially their passion. We need you to bring new ideas, new energy, and new approaches to your new job, the note said – that’s why we hired you.

A real world example

I used to work with a super-smart, extremely entrepreneurial technical architect. He was hired to help our technology team move forward, to create a compelling vision for the future, one that would support the growth of our business for years to come. I’ll call him Tom.

When Tom arrived at the company, he was eager to make a difference, fast. He assessed the situation and realized it was bleak. When Tom had his first meeting with the CTO (his boss), he gave it to him straight. Our technology was crap, antiquated and brittle. If we ever wanted to move forward, we’d have to start over from scratch. Tom had discussed this with key team members, and they hadn’t embraced his perspective. They needed to ship up or shape out. Time was a-wasting.

Tom was surprised when the CTO got defensive, but he shouldn’t have been. The CTO had been with the company for several years, which meant he’d contributed to the “crap” Tom was disparaging. Tom was calling the CTO’s baby ugly, and it didn’t go over well. But here’s the thing: Tom was right. The baby was ugly, and it needed parenting. What’s more, the company knew it – that’s why they hired him. Still, the medicine Tom was offering was bitter. If he was going to affect change, he’d need to find a way to help it go down.

That’s not what happened. Tom was a brilliant technologist, but he lacked the patience, savvy, and stamina to get the job done. His job wasn’t to be smarter than everyone else, or to be right. Tom’s job was to improve the company, and at that he failed miserably. He was gone in months.

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Try something different

Tom didn’t fail because he was honest and direct; lots of companies thrive on direct feedback and communication, and it can be a great way to get things done quickly. Tom failed because, when it was obvious his first approach wasn’t working, he refused – or was unable – to try something different.

Very few goals can be achieved in just one way. If I’d had the chance, I might have coached Tom to focus on his goal, and to engage the team in finding new ways to achieve it. If Tom saw the shortcomings in our technology within days, others on the team probably saw them too. And if the team was resistant to the idea of scrapping our technology and starting from scratch, maybe they had ideas of their own.

You can apply this kind of thinking to any problem, of course, not just technology. Even if you’ve been hired to be a “change agent,” your company is full of smart people who’ve made the best decisions they could over time. If they fail to see the genius of your first approach, try another.

It’s a marathon, not a race

The problem with trying lots of different things is this: it’s really hard, and it takes a long time.

Coming up with various approaches means having a great attitude in the face of failure, and showing up at work each day determined to make a difference. It means challenging yourself and your team, building trust, listening, and taking partners. It means creating presentations, collaborating, and jumping through hoops. It means being creative, resilient, humble, and optimistic. It means taking chances, being open to new ideas, and risking failure. This should sound hard, because it is.

All this takes time, of course, but it’s well worth the investment. The top-down approach may seem efficient, but when the team buys into the change you’re proposing, it’s much more likely to stick. If it takes six months to get where you need to be instead of three, that’s okay; you’re in it for the long haul. And when you get it right, the rewards can be amazing.

Before going down with the ship, make sure you’re the captain

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It was 2005, but I remember it clearly. I was working for a company that was quickly making its way up the Fortune 500, and its desire to extend the business internationally was causing us to stretch in new, uncomfortable ways. A large consulting company that had “done this kind of thing before” was now running the show, and our CIO was leaving in the midst of lots of rumor and turmoil. On his last day, the CIO, who had capably led us through many other challenges in his eight years with the company, stood before us with tears in his eyes. We were a Technology team of 1000 people.

“I’ve failed you,” he said, “and now I’m leaving.”

The consultants had convinced my company that outsourcing its Technology department would both improve performance and save money. Our CIO had fought the decision with all he had, but in the end, it wasn’t enough. As we watched him leave, the reality of the situation sunk in: the rest of us weren’t going anywhere, at least for the time being. Was our CIO leaving because he was outvoted on the outsourcing decision? Was he leaving because his ego couldn’t take the hit?

Had our captain abandoned our ship, jumping into a small lifeboat and leaving us to drown?

The writing on the wall

Last December, after more than five years at my previous company, I left to join SportsEngine as VP of Product and User Experience. Leaving my job was one of the hardest decisions of my career – in partnership with some of my favorite co-workers ever, I’d built an amazing team from the ground up. If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you know the team I was leaving was forward-thinking and creative, that we were lean and Agile, and that we were high performing.

When I started exploring other options, I knew that the reasons to stay were significant and plentiful: my co-workers were great, I was respected, and I had the opportunity to make a meaningful impact. For months before I left I would meet up with friends and float the idea of finding a new gig. They looked at me like I had two heads. “How could you leave?,” they asked, “it sounds perfect.” From the outside looking in, I was in an ideal spot. Each time I met with a friend I returned to my office determined to make it work. What was I thinking?

But the writing was on the wall. The company was struggling, and I was struggling to grow there. I had all sorts of ideas about how to make things better – org changes, new hires, process changes, new focus areas, and more – but my suggestions went nowhere. I’ve written in the past about people who have the wrong attitude and how toxic that can be, and I did my best to address those situations when they arose in myself and in others. I looked for new angles, different ways to approach our problems, short- and long-term solutions. Over the course of almost a year, I exhausted every path I could identify. My frustration grew. I didn’t – and I don’t – blame my boss or the company for failing to see how “brilliant” my suggestions were. My knowledge was limited in some ways, and my ideas were rooted in my own biases. It’s very possible that some of my ideas were uninformed, impossible, or just plain bad.

Through it all, my team continued to perform terrifically. At our annual offsite, the CEO told the group we were among the company’s highest performers, and the team grew as other areas in the business were consolidated and moved. Our team was highly motivated, delivering great work and usually feeling both valuable and valued. But if I couldn’t extend my influence beyond my team, I knew the honeymoon wouldn’t last. And I knew I wouldn’t last either.

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Who’s the captain?

All of which brings us back to the CIO at the start of this post – the man who left his large team at sea. Did he do the right thing?

Of all the reasons to stay at my company, the biggest was guilt. As I mentioned above, I’d built my team from scratch, and I’d played a role in the hiring of nearly everyone on it. My closest coworkers were also close friends. How could I abandon them? To make matters worse, the company wasn’t doing well. As a leader, wasn’t my job to rally the troops? If the ship was sinking, shouldn’t I be sinking with it?

I questioned my own motives for wanting to leave. For the most part, I felt listened to and valued, even as my best ideas languished on the sidelines. My relationships were strong, and I was assured that my future at the company was bright. I was frustrated, but not angry. Was my ego getting in the way of my desire to stand by my team? After some reflection, I decided it wasn’t. I was just getting my head around something I’d realized before but hadn’t really accepted: I might have been the captain of my team, but I was clearly not the captain of the company.

Months ago, in a blog post about getting fired, I wrote:

After we’ve said our piece, when the dust has settled and we didn’t get our way, our choices are clear: we can change our attitude, or we can change our scenery.

It was time.

Leaving can create opportunity 

There were lots of good reasons for me to leave my company, including career growth, opportunity, interesting new challenges, general well-being, and more. Several people on my team saw that it was also an opportunity for them. If I felt like I was stagnating in my role, looking for ways to extend my influence, there were others who felt that way too. The last thing I wanted to do was hold good people back.

When I eventually left the company, several people had the opportunity to grow in their roles, to lead bigger teams and to drive bigger decisions. The team I’d helped create continued to evolve, and was, in lots of ways, self-sustaining. It was ready for new leadership and ideas. Despite my best efforts, I had to acknowledge that my own ideas and approach weren’t working.

The CIO at the start of this post knew the same thing about his Technology team. He knew we had to become what the company needed now, rather than the thing he’d built. His leaving was an acknowledgment that the company was changing, that he was not the captain, and that he understood his own limits. He was stepping aside – at least partly – so that new leaders could emerge, and so the group could evolve and grow without being constrained by the “old guard.” I like to think that I was doing that too.

Fortune favors the bold

Maybe I’m rationalizing in order to make myself feel better. I’ve spent some time with my previous team members these past few weeks and things have been hard. The company’s going through lots of change, and the new leaders who are learning to step up are doing it in extraordinary circumstances. For some, it’s the opportunity of a lifetime, a crash course in business and leadership. It’s not easy, but that’s okay.

The decision to leave a job is a very personal one, with lots of professional, practical, and emotional considerations. The idea of a captain (or worse, rats!) abandoning a sinking ship has been so ingrained in our culture that it can be impossible to see beyond. But this is an unfair over-simplification. There’s a difference between abandoning ship and knowing when moving on is the right call for yourself and your team.

A company will do what it needs to in order to survive and thrive, and that’s a good thing; that’s what it’s supposed to do. Still, despite certain Supreme Court decisions, companies are not people, and they don’t have feelings. We need to be able to understand this, and to make decisions about our careers accordingly. Too many of us are afraid to be perceived as captains abandoning ship when we should be embracing a more relevant, empowering truth: fortune favors the bold.

The importance of being present

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Whatever you’re doing, right now, learn to focus completely on doing that one thing. Pay attention: to every aspect of what you’re doing, to your body, to the sensations, to your thoughts. (Source: Zen Habits)

Being completely, totally present is an incredibly important – and often difficult – task. My spouse and kids (and yours too, I’m guessing) will tell you it’s nearly impossible to keep my attention when work’s busy and my phone’s buzzing, and that it’s only slightly less challenging when work’s not busy and my phone’s not buzzing, because who knows what fascinating information might be delivered to me or my Facebook stream at any moment. I’d tell you the same thing about them, of course, and they’d agree.

Being present may be more challenging than ever, but distractions were not invented by Apple. I don’t know what my parents did when I was on the playground as a little boy, but I know it wasn’t giving me their undivided attention. Maybe it was reading magazines, or etching words into stone tablets.

What in the world did people used to do when they were waiting in line – just wait?

At work, being present for our co-workers requires a similar focus. I’ve gotten good at asking co-workers to “wait just a second while I finish this email so I can give you my full attention,” and it’s helped a lot. But as a leader, being present means something a little bit different, a little bit more, which I want to explore.

What does it mean for a leader to be present?

Did you ever notice how easy it is to say negative things about someone who’s not around? “My boss is completely disconnected from the business,” you might say, or “she wouldn’t make those decisions if she wasn’t so clueless.” When the object of our scorn is in another office – or on vacation, or in a board meeting – it’s easy to assume the worst. Things are different – and more complicated – when our target is around, because it’s much harder to dislike a real person than it is to dislike a caricature of one.

When leaders are hidden away in their offices, teams start talking. They assume their leaders are focused on spreadsheets or board decks or expensive trips or golf. They assume their leaders are uninterested in the day-to-day workings of their business, or in the people on their teams. They assume their leaders are clueless.

When times are good, this can be just a minor annoyance: the people in the trenches tend to feel supported, empowered, and comfortable in the knowledge that they’re working towards a larger goal. They’re less concerned about their work being recognized because they know they’re part of a winning, growing team, and trust isn’t that big a deal. They’re also likely to get better raises and bonuses, which tend make people feel better, even if just for a little while.

When times are bad and leaders are not present, it’s a recipe for disaster. Without context, workers tend to assume the worst about their company and its leaders. They assume management is clueless, focused on all the wrong things and making bad decisions. They assume their own excellent work is not being noticed, and the message that “we need to do more with less” falls on frustrated ears. They may even assume their jobs are at risk.

Did you ever notice how easy it is to say negative things about someone who’s not around?

Bad news doesn’t have to be bad

I give my team bad news all the time. Here’s why:

Context helps teams make better decisions
When business is bad, I may need my team to think differently, reprioritize work, be more creative, or collaborate with others throughout the company. Without the overall business context, they might not know how or why.

Sharing bad news builds trust 
Every company has its ups and down – pretending yours doesn’t won’t fool anybody. When we trust employees enough to give them bad news, they trust that we’re telling the truth when things are good. They may ask hard questions, and we should want them to. Hard questions give us an opportunity to address real concerns.

People rise to the occasion
Every company I’ve been at, from those with 100K+ employees to those with only 4, has had a “rise above” moment. Adversity can bring out the best in people and teams, but only if they understand the context, the goal, and what needs to be done. Most people want to help, and will work much harder when they’ve been challenged appropriately.

Get out of your office!

Being present means being seen, and that means leaders need to get out of their offices, especially when work is hard. When we’re physically present, our teams know we’re mentally present too. Even if our jobs require us to travel often, we can – and must – make our presence felt.

This is hard to do! When things are bad, we don’t want to go on a “world tour” to tell people about it. We don’t want to tell our teams that we might have layoffs, or that we might not get our bonuses. We want to retreat to our offices and avoid hard conversations that will make people unhappy. What if they’re demotivated? What if our best people get freaked out and quit?

But the alternative is much worse. If we don’t tell our teams what’s really happening in our business, they’ll assume the worst, and they’ll make things up. When we miss plan, they’ll think it means that the company is going out of business. When we go on business trips, they’ll think we’re flying on private jets and drinking champagne. When a board meeting lasts an extra hour, they’ll assume layoffs are coming.

Worst of all, our teams won’t keep these thoughts to themselves. They’ll share their negative thoughts with others on the team, and with their friends at other companies. They’ll share their negative thoughts with recruiters, and at networking events, and with their buddies and their families. They’ll post their feelings on Facebook, and Twitter, and Glass Door. Complaining can be cathartic, but a workforce of people out airing their dirty laundry in public can be disastrous.

Notice when people do good work

Finally, being present isn’t just about being there physically, it’s about truly understanding what’s going on. Sometimes that means ignoring the big picture and focusing on great work that’s happening within the teams. I used to have a boss who got so distracted when overall business was bad that he couldn’t even see they great work my team was delivering. This was extremely demotivating. Hey! Over here! We just climbed Mount Everest! We increased conversion by 20 basis points! (Mom, get off of your iPhone! I lost a tooth!)

It’s a marathon, not a race

When we’re present for our teams, we acknowledge their problems, clear roadblocks, and celebrate their successes. We’re honest about business challenges that lay ahead, even if we’re selective when sharing specifics. We trust our teams to understand and to rally around our goals. We pay close attention to the specific work our teams are doing. When the work is great, we tell them, and we connect their success to the success of the company. We make sure they know it matters.

Business is a marathon, not a race. Most employees can’t (and don’t want to) change jobs each time things get hard. They’ve already bought houses and organized their schedules, so they’re placing a bet on the company – and it’s leaders – for the long haul. The best thing you can do to honor that commitment is to show your face. That way your team knows that you’ve placed the same bet.

We need to talk about locker room talk

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Just a few weeks ago, more than 62 million Americans voted for the presidential candidate who said this:

When you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.

I don’t believe that most people think it’s okay to “grab them by the pussy,” at work or anyplace else. And yet, 62 million is a lot of votes, so there are things we need to talk about. Here’s the above quote with a small tweak that’s more real than we’d like to think:

When you’re the boss they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.

Make no mistake: “the boss” I’m referring to is a man. In today’s Fortune 500, only 4% of the CEOs are female. According to Fortune, “for women at the top levels of American business, it can sometimes feel like every step forward is followed by two steps back.”

No kidding! I recently had the pleasure of meeting with Nancy Lyons, the amazing CEO at Clockwork in Minneapolis. “I’m so sick of hearing about the glass ceiling,” Nancy said, “it’s not glass, it’s concrete.”

Grabbing them by the whatever 

As the “you can do anything” comment traveled through the media this past October, Trump was forced to explain himself:

“This was locker room talk. I am not proud of it. I apologized to my family and the American people,” Trump said. “I am embarrassed by it and I hate it, but it’s locker room talk and one of those things.”

“For the record, are you saying that what you said on the bus 11 years ago, that you did not kiss women without consent or grope women?” Cooper said.

“Nobody has more respect for women than I do,” Trump replied.

For the sake of discussion, I’m going give our president-elect the benefit of the doubt and take his comments as crass, rather than predatory. But I’ve still got questions. Can someone both respect women and say these kinds of things at the same time? And does saying these things, even as a joke, sometimes lead to doing them? In Malcom Gladwell’s terrific 2015 New Yorker article “Thresholds of Violence,” the author writes: 

What explains a person or a group of people doing things that seem at odds with who they are or what they think is right? […] Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which [Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter] defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them.

In other words, we might not jump off a bridge just because one friend is doing it, but if lots of friends are doing it, that bridge might not look so bad after all.

Consider “locker room talk” in this context. One man saying crass things is an anomaly. A group of men in a locker room saying crass things creates an environment in which people start to say things “that seem at odds with who they are.” A locker room like that would not be a safe place for a woman.

And this kind of behavior is not confined to the locker room. According to the Trades Union Congress (TUC):

More than half (52%) of women, and nearly two-thirds (63%) of women aged 18-24 years old, said they have experienced sexual harassment at work, according to a new research from the TUC in collaboration with the Everyday Sexism Project published today [August 10, 2016].

In the vast majority of cases (88%), the perpetrator of the sexual harassment was male, and nearly one in five (17%) women reported that it was their line manager, or someone with direct authority over them.

The survey says that:

  • nearly one in three (32%) of women have been subject to unwelcome jokes of a sexual nature while at work
  • more than one in four (28%) of women have been the subject of comments of a sexual nature about their body or clothes at work
  • nearly a quarter (23%) of women have experienced unwanted touching – like a hand on the knee or lower back at work
  • a fifth (20%) of women have experienced unwanted verbal sexual advances at work
  • around one in eight (12%) women have experienced unwanted sexual touching or attempts to kiss them at work.

I don’t need to find additional sources to confirm what the TUC has found; these results will surprise nobody. The show “Mad Men” is not a time capsule, it’s a mirror.

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A few more words about locker room talk

Lots of men who spend lots of time in locker rooms have responded to Trump’s claim that his comments were just the usual “locker room talk.” From Time Magazine:

Many athletes condemned Trump’s caricature of the locker room. For example Robbie Rogers, a midfielder for the Los Angeles Galaxy, wrote on Twitter: “I’m offended as an athlete that @realDonaldTrump keeps using this “locker room talk” as an excuse.” Former NBA star Grant Hill wrote, “I’ve been in a lot of locker rooms, and what Trump said is not locker room banter.” Cleveland Cavaliers guard Dahntay Jones wrote, “Claiming Trump’s comments are “locker room banter” is to suggest they are somehow acceptable. They aren’t.”

This gives me hope, especially the part about this kind of talk not being acceptable. But even if these athletes have never heard this kind of talk in a locker room, it’s not enough, because a locker room is really just a proxy for lots of other places where men behave this way: bars, clubs, man-caves, and other places we’d rather not acknowledge – including offices.

The thing about these kinds of places is that women aren’t welcome, comfortable, or safe in them. So while we need to make sure we don’t treat our businesses like lockehemanwomanhatersclubr rooms, I’m not sure why we need to treat our locker rooms like locker rooms either. If we’re serious about equity and safety, we can’t.

Here’s what we can do, for a start: We can refuse to put up with people objectifying women or making crass jokes at work. We can stop saying things we wouldn’t want our wives to hear when we’re with “the guys.” We can refuse to look the other way, even when things are uncomfortable.

If this all sounds like yet another person arguing for political correctness, I’m okay with that. I’m not naive, and I know I have my own biases and behaviors. But I’m working on these things, and I’m going to fake it until I make it. I hope you will too.

The C-suite is largely reserved for men

So far, I’ve written about women feeling safe in the office, but this is a low bar – what we really want is for the office to be fair. A fair office is safe, of course, and includes gender equality in both career opportunities and pay. According to USA Today:

A survey by consultancy McKinsey and Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s LeanIn.org group found that men are 30% more likely than women to be promoted from entry level to manager.

At the entry level, 54% are men and 46% are women. But at the manager level, 63% are men and 37% are women, and at the vice-president level 71% are men and 29% are women.

By the time they reach the C-suite — which includes positions like chief financial officer and chief operating officer — 81% are men and 19% are women. Representation is even worse for women of color, according to the study.

The fact that women are more likely to be sexually harassed at work and the fact that women are less likely to be promoted than their male counterparts may not be directly related. But these facts together help tell the story of a culture in which women are treated unfairly at work, and we need to do better.

There’s so much more!

I haven’t even scratched the surface of this issue. More stats:

A woman has a right to work in a safe place, free of harassment. She has a right to be treated fairly, to have opportunities to advance her career. She has a right to equal pay for equal work.

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Equal pay for equal work

Here are a few ideas to help ensure that our businesses promote equal pay for equal work:

  • If you’re a people manager or in HR, review the salaries of your employees, their skills, and their experiences, and fix any disparities you see. If the disparity is due to poor salary negotiation, fix it anyway.
  • When it comes to promotions, go out of your way to make sure qualified women get the chance to prove their worth.
  • Consider replacing your company’s maternity leave policy with a parental leave policy. Maternity leave suggests that caring for the family is a woman’s job. Parental leaves evens the playing field, and implies no judgement.

This Quartz article  has a few more good ideas, specifically related to pay:

What the law could do
The law can mandate equal pay. For instance, in the US, equal pay regardless of gender was signed into a law by president John F. Kennedy in 1963, with the Equal Pay Act. It will be a while before equal pay for all is a reality.

What employers should do
Employers can adopt strict rules to ensure fairness, and effectively run businesses that guarantee equality of treatment. But, this is something society can’t count on. The obvious reason is that employers often perceive increasing wages beyond the minimum they have to pay someone to be against their economic self-interest, even though such a view is short-sighted at best.

What employees must do
Salary transparency is knowledge, and knowledge is the ultimate weapon to address pay inequalities from the inside. Do you know if your company pays you fairly? In that knowledge–knowing how much everyone around you makes–lies the key to know your value, and the fairness of your treatment. 

Will it cost companies more to compensate people equally for equal work? Absolutely. But what’s the alternative? Working for a company that relies on a gender discount to turn a profit? One more time:

When you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.

This kind of talk is not okay, whether it’s shared in the locker room or the board room. But it’s not just the talk that needs to stop. Whether we like it or not, we have institutionalized discrimination in the workplace. We can do better.

Encouraging people to stop the line with both carrots and sticks

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2012-02-10-Carrot-and-stickIn my last post, I described a work challenge around delivering high quality products, noting that despite repeated encouragement, members of my team were reluctant to stop the line, even if that meant sacrificing quality for speed. I offered a few thoughts on why this was the case, including mixed messages from leadership, aggressive deadlines, our tendency to fall in love with technology, and peer pressure.

In this post, I’ll describe a few things we’re doing to try and correct the situation. Some of these things are what I’d call “carrots,” or rewards that come with stopping the line to focus on quality. Others are “sticks,” or penalties.

Carrots

Celebrating line stoppers
If someone stops the line, we celebrate it publicly. At our all eCommerce team standup this week, we discussed a project that didn’t go as planned, thanking the person on our team who stopped the line and slowed it down, helping us avoid a big mistake.

Using numbers
Products that are well-designed and well-executed tend to outperform those that aren’t. Regular KPI reviews encourage our product teams to do their best work. Sometimes this requires stopping the line.

Holding design review meetings
Last month, we instituted design review meetings with our team’s leaders (it’s a riff on Ed Catmull’s “Braintrust” idea). At first, our teams were afraid they’d be micromanaged.  But a month into the new process, they see the value and appreciate the attention. And they’re quickly becoming more detail oriented.

Showcasing great design
When something is designed well, we share it, far and wide. Being a team that focuses on quality products is becoming a point of pride for all of us. Building “good” things is boring – our products should be great. We want our people to be able to tell the difference between good design and great design, and to aspire to create the latter.

Finding evangelists within the team
I’m actively recruiting people on the team to promote the value of stopping the line. I started with our UX people, who seized the opportunity to get the rest of the team focused on the user experience. (As you’d expect, it was easy to get them on my side.) By now, the entire team has heard the message, and we’ve got lots of evangelists – and converts.

Sticks

Requiring rework
One great way to ensure someone on the team stops the line is to make it clear that the whole team will be starting over from square one if they don’t. When faced with the prospect of removing functionality from our sites and rebuilding it from scratch, stopping the line starts to feel like the much faster option.

Public shaming
This is a route we haven’t really gone down, since one of our core principles is to celebrate failure. Still, when we see poor customer experience, sloppy design, or performance issues, we let the team know. We favor blameless postmortems, but we also favor paying attention to details.

Instituting sign-offs
Our team knows that when they release code into the wild, they’re implicitly saying it’s ready to go. If we need to, we can make this explicit. This would be a last resort – sign-offs aren’t part of the culture we’re nurturing – but it’s an option if we need it.

These are just ideas, of course. If stopping the line and focusing on quality are important to you, you’ll need to work with your team to figure out how to make it happen, and you’ll likely need to revisit the conversation over time.

As leaders, we also need to model this behavior. This means there are times we need to stop the line ourselves, even when it’s our own work we’re doing and our own deadlines we’re missing. We need to make the same trade-offs we ask our teams to make, and have the same tough conversations we ask them to have with stakeholders.

What do you think? Have you had similar experiences as it relates to stopping the line to focus on quality? How have you addressed them? I’d love to hear from you.

 

8 reasons my team is great (and keeps getting better)

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My current eCommerce team is among the best I’ve ever worked with. In the past year, we’ve launched four mobile apps, re-platformed three eCommerce sites without any downtime at all, made major strides towards continuous deployment, and much, much more. (Even if you don’t know what any of these things are, you’re impressed by now, right?) Much has been written about building great teams, of course, and this is in no way meant to be definitive. Still, I want to share a few of the reasons my team has succeed so far (in no particular order), and why we’ll continue to get better:

1: Everyone on the team is a business owner

It would be an exaggeration to say that everyone on the team is motivated by our KPIs in the same way, or that each developer, user experience engineer, and Product Owner feels the same passion for driving revenue. Still, we do a lot of work to make sure each person on our team understands what drives our business, and the items on our product roadmap can come from any person or team. We understand both what we have to do and why.

2: We define our own priorities

Continuing on the above theme, our product roadmap is largely driven by the team. Because we understand what drives the business, we have the flexibility to work on the projects that are most impactful, in the order that makes the most sense. There are times we have to justify our priorities – and we review them with our senior executives each month – but we own the roadmap, no question about it.

3: We like to solve hard problems

Being intellectually curious is a big deal. Our team is smart, and intensely focused when it comes to finding sustainable solutions to big, hairy business and/or technical problems. Sometimes this leads to frustration – we don’t always have time to do things right, and we all despise increasing technical debt – but, by and large, our team strives to do things right, and we’re up for any challenge that comes our way.

4: We persist!

We like solving hard problems, and we don’t give up. When we can’t figure something out, we keep at it. Sometimes we wrestle with a problem for weeks – or months – before finding the answer we were looking for. Sometimes we need to try a lot of things before getting something right.

5: Our leaders push us in the right ways

When we need a kick in the pants, we get one. When we need some space, we get that too. From top to bottom, our company and team leaders understand that empowering the teams to do our best work is critical to our success.

6: We test and measure everything we do

Measuring allows everyone to see where we meet expectations and where we don’t. New functionality is AB tested until it “wins” and we’re confident we haven’t introduced new problems into the system. We’ve got dedicated testing and analytics teams, and our Agile development teams wouldn’t even think of introducing new functionality without their involvement. Of course, we still make mistakes, but when we do…

7: We learn from our mistakes

You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Building and running our own web platform is hard, and despite all the great testing and measuring we do, mistakes are inevitable. Because we encourage continuous improvement and innovation, we also favor blameless post-mortems and retrospectives during and after all projects. These allow us to truly understand where we’re most effective and where we still have opportunity to improve. We’re going to make mistakes, but we really don’t want to make the same ones twice.

8: We genuinely like each other

Who wants to spend all week, every week, with people they don’t know or like? Not me. Work is a big part of our lives, but it’s not everything. People go on vacations, have babies, experience loss, and root for baseball teams (they often do those last two at the same time). And people who like each other are there for each other when they need support – in their work and in their lives.

We’re not perfect

If some of this sounds a bit aspirational, it is. My team is far from perfect, and we don’t always get these things right. We get crabby, and frustrated, and annoyed by each other. We argue, we have egos, and we break more things than we’d like. Sometimes we focus on the wrong things, and we’ve been accused of moving too fast. But the foundation of our team is strong, and our core philosophies don’t change.

Do any of these ideas resonate with you? Are you part of a high performing team? If so, what makes your team great? If not, how can you get there? I’d love to hear from you.

Five rules for letting someone go without being a jerk

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debbie

Debbie Fischer

In March, I wrote about the time I was fired. In April, I wrote about the kinds of behavior that can lead to getting fired. In May, I wrote about how to fire someone badly. It’s not that I’m obsessed with the firing process, it’s just that I’ve seen it done badly, and it turns out a lot of my friends have relevant experience in this area. Plus, it’s a part of work, like it or not. And it’s important.

Continuing on the theme, I recently had the chance to sit down with my super-smart friend Debbie Fischer, current therapist and former HR executive with 20 years of experience (Target, Disney, Campbell Mithun). Debbie’s got lots of experience letting people go, both for performance reasons and for layoffs, so I was especially interested in her thoughts on how to do it well. Here are a few tips from someone who knows:

Rule #1: Be efficient, but fair

Nobody in the history of the world has ever said they wished they would have waited longer to fire someone. And yet, when it comes to letting someone go, efficiency doesn’t have to be the primary goal. Debbie shared several examples of situations in which a firing manager was desperate to make a move immediately, but hadn’t ever taken the time to communicate issues or set expectations with their employee. Nobody likes performance improvement plans, but that doesn’t mean people don’t need a heads up when they’re not performing. Take the time to communicate with your employee. Let them know that things are not going well before you let them go.

Rule #2: If your company’s big enough to have an HR team, let them do their job

Yes, sometimes working with HR means extra paperwork, extra process, extra time, and what can feel like jumping through hoops. But HR plays a critical role in letting people go, and can help the situation go much more smoothly by providing guidance, coaching, structure, and experience. If the HR team is good, they can do it efficiently. They can also keep you and the company out of legal trouble.

There’s another good reason to include HR: professional courtesy. If you don’t keep your HR team in the loop, you’re telling them their expertise doesn’t matter, and you’re creating a lot more work for them, after-the-fact. Nobody likes being left out, and if your HR team has to clean up the mess you made, they won’t be happy. And – trust me – you want HR on your side.

Rule #3: Acknowledge that the situation sucks

Whether you’re laying people off or firing someone for performance-related reasons, letting someone go is a drag for everyone involved. In some ways, letting someone go is an acknowledgement of failure – failure to grow or develop an employee, failure to acquire new skills, failure to hire effectively, failure to keep a business unit afloat, failure to stop making racist jokes (you get the idea) – and acknowledging the reality of the situation can be a good thing. We may all find perspective over time, but getting fired is a major life upheaval that impacts people’s families, friends, and finances. We don’t have to pretend it’s easy.

Rule #4: Shut up!

People who are good at letting employees go are good at saying only what they need to say, nothing more. Debbie’s seen lots of managers drone on and on about their own experience, trying to provide perspective to someone who can barely hear the words. The best way to let someone go, according to Debbie, is directly. (In fact, she’s often coached managers to read their part from a script and then leave the room, leaving the tactical parts to HR.) Managers who keep the conversation going after letting someone go may be trying to make themselves feel better, but they often end up making the situation worse.

Rule #5: Remember that this is a small town

This is true in Minneapolis, and it’s also true in New York City: your town, your industry, and your network are smaller than you think. While I have conflicting thoughts on whether or not it’s okay to burn bridges, I have no conflicting thoughts about being kind and respectful at work and in life. Naturally, this includes letting people go. If you do it humanely, you stand a chance of saving a relationship. And in your town, your industry, and your network, there’s no guarantee you won’t be on the other side of the table next time around.

What do you think?

Do these rules match your own experience and ideas? Did I leave anything out? Have you got pointers based on your experience on either side of the table? Please let me know – I’d love to hear from you.

How to fire someone badly

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File photo of Republican presidential candidate Drumpf gesturing and declaring "You're fired!" at a rally in Manchester

A few weeks ago, I posted about getting fired and why I deserved it. (I followed that up with a post about the need to complain at work, and how it can go sour.) In this post, a couple of smart friends share their experiences related to letting people go – and how it can go horribly wrong.

Laura Zabel, Executive Director at Springboard for the Arts, recounts a particularly challenging experience – her first firing:

It was a disaster. I let the person stay way too long and even convinced them to stay when they wanted to leave because they had been a great, engaged, high capacity staff person and I was certain they could get back to that place. I learned that just because a person was great at their job once doesn’t mean they are great at their job now, especially when it’s affecting other staff.

I ended up having to fire this person in the moment – I realized that they had been interfering with other people’s work, unloading a lot of unhealthy emotional weight on other staff members and disrupting partnerships and meetings with emotional outbursts. I had absolutely let things get out of control and the rest of the staff was suffering for it. So I had to ask the person to leave in the middle of our conversation. It was really hard, but I honestly felt in the moment like I didn’t have any other choice.

As I read Laura’s comments, I’m struck by her explanation of the “disaster” and why she chose to classify it that way. “I let the person stay too long.” “The rest of the staff was suffering.” “I didn’t have any other choice.” The disaster, as it turns out, was waiting too long, letting things get out of hand, and firing someone “in the moment.” The firing itself? Not a disaster at all. It was absolutely necessary. In fact, Laura continues:

What finally pushed me to realize I needed to fire someone was seeing clearly how detrimental the person was to the health, satisfaction, and engagement of the rest of the staff. I was really worried other staff wouldn’t understand or would think I hadn’t tried hard enough to find a workable situation, but the staff was relieved in a way that made me feel like I should have taken care of the problem sooner.

Anna Peterson, Director of the STEP-UP Youth Employment Program in Minneapolis, had very different experience, also bad:

The employee had made some really egregious errors over a few months that could no longer be coached through or ignored. I remember coming into the organization as a new managing director. They waited until I arrived and then asked me to fire her. That was wrong and lame. 

I had a similar experience several years ago, inheriting a problem that had existed for ages and was ignored. As in Laura’s example, the most difficult thing about the situation was that it had gone on for so long.

Letting these things linger can cause several problems. When behavior issues aren’t addressed, teams suffer in a variety of ways – productivity slows, frustration mounts, and a sense of hopelessness creeps in. And for the person being fired, the experience can be genuinely baffling, because the very same behaviors that were tolerated in the past are suddenly unacceptable.

Opportunity?

It’s hard to let an employee go. Even the worst leaders know it’s a big deal, not to be taken lightly. But nobody ever says they wished they waited longer to do it.

The first time I let someone go, I was a mess. After I’d made the decision, I revisited it frequently, wondering if I could somehow make things work. But I had no choice – my employee was having a negative impact on the team and the company, and the current situation couldn’t continue.

When I finally let the employee go, my team’s attitude and performance improved immediately (I felt much better too). Eventually, even the employee in question acknowledged that he needed a change, and that I’d made the right call. Turns out that what seemed like a terrible situation turned out to be a great opportunity for all involved.

Better late than never.

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08-411072+26PAISLEYrjs042216Like lots of other people on LinkedIn, I hear from a good number of recruiters. All over the world, amazing job opportunities exist for me – well-established companies and start-ups, hugely profitable companies and those that hope to be. Apparently, there’s a big need out there for people who do what I do. And, although my current gig is fantastic, it’s hard not to be intrigued sometimes. (When I say “me” and “my,” I really mean “us” and “our” – I know I’m not all that special.)

Whether the new opportunity is local or not, it’s important for recruiters to know if I’m open to relocation, because if I am, the number of potential opportunities expands exponentially. If I’m serious about my career, which I am, I know that my answer should be yes.

I’m thinking about this while staring at the photo above, from an all night gathering/party in Minneapolis last night outside First Avenue, where Prince went from local phenomenon to national star. Prince traveled the world, and you could argue that New York or L.A. would have provided more opportunity for him – more producers, more gigs, more talent to surround himself with. Prince had recruiters calling, no doubt, and he dabbled in other locations over the years, but he kept coming back to Paisley Park, to Chanhassen, MN – to Minneapolis.

There are other artists and bands that are tightly linked to their hometowns – Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Jon Bon Jovi, and X come to mind – but this kind of connection is becoming more and more unusual, as music “scenes” are replaced with digital music and YouTube videos. Lots of professionals – musicians, TV anchors, eCommerce professionals – wonder whether being associated with a particular place is a good thing, dropping their accents and answering yes when a recruiter asks if they’re open to relocation.

There’s nothing wrong with this! I left my hometown, and I may leave Minneapolis at some point too. If I worked in certain industries, in fact, I’d have to. But when I look at the photo above, at all the people gathered overnight to celebrate a local hero, it reminds me that there’s no shame in being rooted to a community, surrounding yourself with people you love and who love you, and feeling connected to where you’re from. Prince left home, sharing his immense talent and joy with people all over the world for more than 30 years. I, like many people here in Minneapolis, are happy, grateful, and proud that he always came back.