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How To Piss Off Your Employees the Yahoo! Way

by on February 25, 2013 in Organizations, Work

Let’s hope not.

Hot off a media scolding for selecting The Today Show instead of Good Morning America to announce the new Yahoo! home page redesign, Marissa Mayer is now going to have to deal with fallout of a very different nature. Apparently, it’s no longer acceptable for Yahoo! employees to work remote. Everyone is being called back to work in the office with no exceptions – even if your prior work arrangement allowed for a work-at-home situation.

When I first read the details from Kara Swisher at All Things D, my initial reaction was, “WTF is going on at Yahoo!?” A Silicon Valley-based tech company mandating an end to flexible work arrangements is like spotting a white elk…and then watch it charge you, ready to gore you on its antlers. It doesn’t happen very often and it when it does, it usually ends with a bloody struggle. We’ve entered an age when the old ways of working are no longer valid, where productivity and effectiveness are not measured by whether you’re sitting at your assigned desk, in your building.

Which is why there is a very real possibility this isn’t at all about flexible work arrangements at all. It’s about a most pernicious form of a corporate lie. This is a layoff in disguise. By forcing remote employees to return to the office – it’s worth noting that many remote workers will have to uproot and move to make this happen – Yahoo! is effectively telling their folks to either love it or leave it. I hope I’m wrong about this, but I can’t help having a nagging suspicion that something very dodgy is happening here that will do nothing but ratchet up skepticism and cynicism among their employees. Maybe there’s open and honest dialogue taking place within Yahoo! that’s more truthful as to the real objective behind this new HR policy. I hope so, but judging by the employee anger reported by Swisher, I’m betting against it. How can there not be a sense of broken trust between management and employees? And even if you’re not a remote worker, wouldn’t you question what else is coming that will impact you? <href=”http://allthingsd.com/20130222/yahoo-ceo-mayer-now-requiring-all-remote-employees-to-not-be-remote/?mod=tweet#comment-809029317 “>Matt Mullenweg of Automattic won’t be the only one trying to poach smart talent from this mess…and I’d say he’ll get quite a few resumes this week.

And yet, it gets more interesting when we read the original internal email from Executive Vice President of People and Development, Jackie Reses, announcing the policy. Never mind that it’s marked as “YAHOO! PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION — DO NOT FORWARD”. It was forwarded to Swisher and she shares it at the bottom of her follow-up post.

What really fascinates me is the second paragraph of the email:

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.

Note the implications. That collaboration and communication only happens when sharing the same physical space. That working outside of the office space leads to less-than-optimal performance. That “speed” and “quality” can only be managed when the boss is sitting down the hall. That Yahoo!’s employees don’t know how the hell to work independently, achieve objectives without constant management oversight, and share ideas using technologies like the phone, IM, web-conferencing, and the like. To which, I call bullshit. That’s lazy, backward, and potentially business-suicidal thinking. And that’s not an employee problem. It’s a management problem that will further sink the company, no matter how many times they try to redesign their home page.

So, which is it? Is Yahoo! just trying to surreptitiously lay off a portion of its workforce? Or admitting it doesn’t have a clue about how people can work together to solve real business problems in 2013? Or is Yahoo! just rotting from the head down?

Photo credit: Thomas Hawk

Three Myths Of Corporate Culture

by on January 13, 2013 in Organizations

Messy CordsOne of the reasons I chose to pursue a post-grad degree in anthropology was to better understand something that most businesses fail to fully comprehend: organizational culture. There are countless posts out there by otherwise well-intended people trying to describe “corporate” culture. Trying to clarify how this concept of culture works. Trying to explain how we can create culture that gets results.

These posts are all very nice. And most of them are dead wrong, at least in terms of trying to convince us that culture is this narrowly-defined concept bereft of nuance and appreciation for complexity.

In a blogpost last week, Rand Fishkin wrote about what company culture is and is not. On whole, it’s one of the better and more eloquent attempts by a business leader…but it still simplifies culture down to what are very limiting ideas. Yes, culture can encompass shared beliefs and values. Yes, it can include how people act and behave together. But too many organizations use culture to control their people and institute a false sense of order. When this happens, they are perverting culture to be just another management tool.

Business leaders do this based on what I have found to be three interrelated myths of organizational culture:

Myth #1. Culture can be built, top-down.
Yes, it’s important for leadership to clearly articulate goals, values, and mission. But these elements merely provide direction and structure, the expectations of management. They are not the culture themselves. The problem is that management has come to see culture as one more way to institute controls over employees. If you read, “This is the [insert company name] way” when discussing culture, then you’re reading a top-down, executive mandate for what management wants the culture to be…but likely not what actually is. And just because the CEO says, “This is our culture” doesn’t make it true. It’s way bigger than that.

Myth #2. There is just one culture.
No matter how many people call an organization their professional home, there is not just one culture in play. Actually, there are multiple cultures and subcultures that often get overlooked. Even in a small start-up, think about the differences between accounting and sales teams. Yes, they may adhere to the same shared norms and values of the company, but how they work and interact are very different.

This isn’t even including the cultures we bring with us from our own outside lives. Think of the large, multi-national companies with work teams spanning the globe. We don’t shelve our personal lives when we enter the front door of the office, why then would we expect folks to shelve their respective cultures?

Again, by emphasizing one monolithic culture, management can feel like it’s exerting control over the organization. This also ignores the next myth, which is…

Myth #3. Culture is tame and structured.
This is the most pernicious lie that business leaders tell each other. Instead, here’s something closer to the truth: Culture is messy. It’s constantly evolving. It can be fragile and bewildering. This is what happens when people come together. We’re not programmable robots. We’re extraordinarily complex creatures with emotions, dreams, fears, and ambitions.

Corporate culture isn’t a highly conformed and stable melting pot. Instead, think of it more as a dynamic mixed bag of goodies of all shapes, sizes, and flavors.

It pains me to see culture get thrown around like so many other management buzzwords. This is when it gets stripped of its meaning, its vitality, and its power to convey something that is truly beautiful in its complexity.

Photo credit: otkuda via Flickr

Three Things I Learned In 2012

by on January 4, 2013 in Life

pathway into woodsHow was your 2012? Now that we’re on the 2013 side of things, I find it makes it easier to reflect on the year that was. Personally, 2012 was both hellish and magical. It was a year when I got my ass kicked…A LOT. But it was also when I discovered some important things about myself. About the direction of my life. About what it means to live, love, dream, and fail. Through it all, what I have come to know is that a year in our lives isn’t all bad or all good. It’s a complex and messy mashup of wonder and loss, where each experience offers learning if we choose to accept it.

Throughout December, I started to write down some of the things I learned (or relearned) in 2012. The list was long, but here are some of the highlights:

Find your rock.
I simply do not know what I would have done without my wife, Carrie, last year. When I had my bad days, she was there. And when I had my REALLY bad, curl-up-in-a-ball-in-the-corner days, her strength and presence helped me stand back up. See, we can’t do this thing called Life alone. I discovered a new level of gratitude for her that I may never have known without living through 2012. (I’ll say the same thing about my absolutely wonderful parents, Linda and Dennis.) If you have a similar rock in your life, stop reading and tell them right now how much they mean to you and that you’re glad to have them in your life.

Failing is an act of courage.
I left a well-paying job to start a solo business in 2012. Actually, I started two of them when counting the venture I started with Carrie called BabbleRousers. And neither of them took off. We sunk a huge amount of money into these ventures and the whole process nearly bankrupted the family (Access to Capital is now my new entrepreneurial mantra). And if there’s one thing that I am not able to handle very well, it’s the idea of bankruptcy and losing everything. A couple of times, I was visited by panic attacks where it felt like Jabba the Hutt was lounging on my chest.

It took a few weeks for this struggling perfectionist to start to relearn something important: failing takes guts. There are plenty of really good blogposts that speak to the necessity of failing in order to succeed. I don’t plan on launching any new business ventures anytime soon, but I’m grateful for the experience and wisdom I gained from the process. Namely, learning and failure must co-exist together if we are going to grow into who we were meant to be.

Dare greatly.
Related to failing, is the act of daring. And no one influenced me to dare greatly more than Brené Brown. Her book, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead was a tough yet welcome read for someone with an undiagnosed vulnerability phobia. Prior to mid-2012, I was doing a bang-up job of extracting as much uncertainty and emotional vulnerability from my life. However, that came with a cost to my creativity, sense of adventure, and desire to leave a powerful legacy. I’m still not where I want to be in terms of living a more daring life…but I’m again moving in the right direction.

What Greatness is ahead…in 2013 and beyond?
It’s a terrific question, isn’t it? It acknowledges that the very best we can achieve is directly in front of us. It offers hope when we feel stuck in neutral or (worse) wondering if we’re traveling down the wrong path.

Here’s the truth: this path each of us are on is exactly where we need to be. If we feel like we’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere in the past, we can take comfort knowing there are no “right” or “wrong” turns. They are just choices we’ve made. Every choice offers an opportunity to embrace the totality of life’s experiences, both good and bad. I’m very grateful for everything I am and have. I know I wouldn’t be where I am right now without encountering the magic and pain of life in 2012.

So, here’s to a 2013 full of inspired thinking, bold action, and personal evolution. I look forward to walking it with you.

The Importance Of The Father And Daughter Relationship

by on November 4, 2012 in Life

Bailey Family + Sophia - Summer 2012Yesterday, our whole family attended the We Are Girls Conference hosted by GENaustin. If you’re a parent living in Central Texas and don’t know much about either the conference or GENaustin, I highly recommend you check out their website for more information.

We have two girls who are 13 and 10 and the kinds of issues they’re currently dealing with are intimidating: healthy body images, healthy friendships, improved self-confidence, being safe online, and the list goes on. It’s tough being a kid right now, but it’s particularly daunting to be a girl. As a parent, there are days when we feel completely overwhelmed by our responsibilities to be their guides and inspiration; to know when to give gentle comfort and to administer tough love. It’s made even more formidable when we – as parents – are struggling with our own feelings of self-worth, hopefulness, security…how are we supposed to give to our children what we sometimes can’t adequately give to ourselves? Okay, so I guess being a parent is pretty tough these days, as well.

I vividly remember the day when we first talked about attending the We Are Girls Conference. When Carrie, my wife, mentioned the conference, I thought (maybe even said), “Well, that sounds like a good thing for you to do with the girls.” I heard that whole “girls” thing and instantly figured that as a “boy” I didn’t have a part to play, that I could get a free pass out of spending a day learning about issues affecting the lives and well-being of my daughters, that moms are uniquely qualified to deal with all this tough stuff. Yep, nice try Dad…you dumbass.

Here’s the problem with that whole way of thinking: We fathers are a critical factor in the health and happiness in the lives of our daughters. To disregard this role is to ignore our own gifts and do our girls a disservice. In this blogpost by Elizabeth Weiss McGolerick at SheKnows Parenting called How Fathers Influence Daughters, she writes:

A dad’s involvement in his daughter’s life is a crucial ingredient in the development of a young woman’s self-esteem. [Professor Michael] Austin identifies positive elements of ‘common sense’ parenting for dads so they can help support their daughter’s self-image and curb any possibility of low self-esteem: Verbal encouragement, being consistently present in her life, being alert and sensitive to her feelings, taking time to listen to her thoughts and taking an active interest in her hobbies. ‘It’s important to actually do these things, which can sometimes be quite challenging,’ Austin adds. Direct involvement and encouragement by her father will help diminish a girl’s insecurity and increase her confidence in her own abilities.

Yes, we fathers are pretty damned important and we need to step up in the lives of our girls.

If I have one challenge to make to GENaustin and the We Are Girls Conference, it’s that there must be more for fathers. There were no sessions that addressed the crucial role of the father in a girl’s life. Each of the breakouts that involved parents were primarily devoted to the mother/daughter dynamic. For the handful of us fathers who did show up, we found our way through sessions on how girls interact online and in social media, how today’s media culture is impacting their self-images, how to help them find their own sense of empowerment. Don’t get me wrong, I got a lot of insight through these sessions. It was equally important for my daughters to see me there and trying to better understand the issues they face every day. But, we dads need to be a visible presence at conferences like these and in order to attract more of us, there must be programming that speaks to our own questions and aspirations.

So, here’s what I’m doing: I’m making an open, public commitment to advocate for more father and daughter sessions at next year’s conference. I believe I’m not alone in looking for help, for resources, for networks in order to be a better father. Because here’s what I know: the father/daughter dynamic is special. We dads can offer their girls things that will contribute to their success in life.

Other Father/Daughter Resources:
5 Ways Fathers Influence Their Daughters
Daughters Need Fathers, Too
Supportive Fathers Help Reduce Stress in Daughters

PS. The above photo includes my daughters – Leah (far left) and Katie (far right) – along with my wife, Carrie. The little gal in the middle is my niece, Sophia. This raises the positive role that uncles can play in the lives of their nieces, too. So even if you don’t have daughters of your own, but you do have nieces, you can still be a strong male role model in a young girl’s life.

An Ode To Fellow Late Bloomers

by on May 13, 2012 in Career, Life

One of my favorite children’s books that I fondly remember reading to my two daughters is called Leo the Late Bloomer. It’s the story of a young tiger cub who learns to do things on his own timetable. When all his other young animal friends are reading, talking, and writing, Leo feels sad and frustrated because he can’t do any of those things well. His dad is concerned and asks Leo’s mom, “Are you sure Leo’s a bloomer?” She lovingly replies, “Patience. Leo is just a late bloomer.”

While written for children (and their worried parents) who struggle to bloom while their peers seem to pass them by, the book’s message speaks to all of us who are still uncertain of our purpose in life.

Now I’m getting pretty close to 40 and the ticking I hear isn’t the oft-discussed biological clock. It’s more like the drumbeat of societal (possibly personal) expectations compelling me to finally figure out my place in this world. When given voice, it’s a critical one questioning why I’m not further along on a career path, not more renowned in a chosen field, not closer to the top of my game. It should’ve all happened by now…right? Is this a sign that marketing/branding/customer experience just isn’t the right place for me? I confess I often feel like Leo: when all his peers are able to write eloquently and eat without making a mess, he’s undoubtedly wondering if his time will ever come.

And yet…

A completely different way of looking at it might be that those of us who are on this journey are the lucky ones. Our longer-than-intended quest for professional meaning and self-discovery can help us to be even brighter and shinier than if we had it laid out for us in black and white.

I do take comfort knowing I’m not the only one who took time to figure out the meaning of their lives in their work. Several creative geniuses showed us that success comes at any age.

Julia Child didn’t achieve culinary acclaim until her late forties.
Alfred Hitchcock directed his finest achievements between the ages of 54 and 61.
Paul Cézanne’s greatest works were painted in his sixties.

And here are a few more curated posts:
Late Bloomers: 7 Authors Who Prove It’s Never Too Late To Start A Writing Career
The Late Bloomer from Forbes Magazine
Late Bloomers from Malcom Gladwell

As Leo’s mom would lovingly advise, perhaps all we need to do is remind ourselves to be patient. Our blooming is just coming a bit later.

PS. Thanks for reading. This post – more than others I’ve written lately – did not come easy at all. I wrestled with vulnerability and tried my damnedest to keep the whininess to a minimum. My hope is that something here resonated with you. If that did happen, then I am honored in knowing it was worth all the effort to write.