Transcript
Foxwell: I am going to talk about being a bad influence. Most days, I think I'm a pretty good manager, but I know that I've made mistakes. I know that I can be a bad influence. I'm going to share some of those mistakes with you. This is a very personal talk. I'm going to share some of the things I've learned from the mistakes I've made, in the hope that my lessons learned will help you do better as a people manager.
Learning how to manage people is by far the most difficult, and also the most rewarding part of the work that I do. Sometimes the hardest things are the ones that are most worth doing. We don't have enough time to talk about absolutely everything you need to know to be a good people manager. I filtered it down, and I've decided to talk about the really difficult stuff. The really hard stuff that we don't talk about very often. The really hard stuff that makes the biggest difference.
I'm going to give you a quick overview just to set your expectations about the type of things that I won't be talking about. I'm not going to be talking about hiring or interviewing, and how you do that. There's lots of other talks on those topics. I'm not going to be talking about how you do a good one-to-one with your direct reports, or even how to run a team meeting. I'm also not even going to touch on how we get shit done. How do we do delivery management as managers? I'm not going to talk about org design either. The things that I'm going to cover, again, are the areas where my first attempts to do these things have been wrong.
I've learned some lessons. I'm going to talk about my understanding of the job of a manager. I'm going to talk about how to build inclusive teams. I'm going to talk about equality, equity, and equal opportunities for everyone in your teams, and how you make that happen in a practical way. I'm going to talk about money. We don't talk about money often enough, I don't think. I'm going to talk about the reality of performance, pay, and promotions. I'm also going to talk about what it's like to be a manager on a really bad day. I've been through two rounds of layoffs in the past 18 months. We are having to manage through a lot of really bad days at the moment. I'm going to share my experience and some of my advice of how to do that well.
The Job of a Manager
I'm going to start with a relatively easy topic, what is the job of a manager? I'm going to start by talking about your three teams, as a manager. When you're an individual contributor, your role is usually relatively well defined. You understand the expectations of you. Your manager deals with a lot, if not all of the stuff that's happening outside of your team. What you see from your manager is very finite. You see the activities your manager is doing in order to manage your team successfully. You might not necessarily see the other work your manager is doing.
When I started managing people, this is what I did. I said, I am managing this team and this is my priority, and this is all that I care about. Actually, to be a successful manager you have to do an awful lot more than that. Your second team is your leadership team. If you are one of those people here who's a manager of managers, you want to build a really cohesive leadership team because together you are better, together you are stronger, together you are more effective. I've seen it happen so often that actually the channels of communication through the organization follow the org design.
Communication flows top to bottom, and there's not enough of this collaboration at a team level. A really cohesive leadership team that works well together will make a huge difference for the teams that report into them. Think to yourself, actually, am I a part of a leadership team, or do I just share a manager with these other people? If you just feel like you share a manager with these other people, why not try and build those bridges? Why not ask them to partner with you? Why not try and uncover some of the shared problems that you're all experiencing, and try and build that sense of team and that shared ownership in your leadership team?
Of course, there are other people involved in getting work done. This is the only bit of the talk where I will talk about how we get shit done. Because, quite often, if you're engineering or if you're in engineering leadership, you will have peers in product, in product leadership. You'll have peers in design. You might have peers in infrastructure. We rarely get things done in isolation, we have to act as a team. Actually, for the most part, I don't see these groups of people behaving as a cohesive team towards a common goal. That's a problem. That creates a problem for their teams who have misaligned expectations. That creates friction. That creates conflict.
It creates a bad atmosphere in terms of the blame game, "My team did everything they were supposed to do. It was your team that missed the deadline." It's just not helpful for anyone. I've heard this talked about in terms of stakeholder management, or how you build your network, and who are your allies. It's much more simple than that. These are your team. This is a team of people who need to work together to get something done. If that group of people isn't behaving as a team, you're going to have problems in delivery. These are the three teams that I try to build when I take on a new management role. I know, it's easy almost to find out and figure out who your team is, who report to you, and how to lead them effectively. It's sometimes worth investing in building a more cohesive leadership team. It is very often neglected to build that team spirit with your peers in other areas of the business.
I really highly recommend, "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team." This is the book that actually gave me that light bulb moment of realizing that I was thinking about my team all wrong. "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team," says that the absence of trust is the number one dysfunction. It also says that that group of peers, that leadership team is your first team. That's your priority, actually.
That's where you should be spending a lot of your time. Behaving as though your team of direct reports is your one and only team is actually a dysfunction. This was the book that gave me that light bulb moment that made me see that my job as a manager wasn't just my team, get things done, and not taking responsibility of everything that was happening around us.
To summarize, hopefully, this is a really practical thing you can take away from here. Reflect on those three teams, in your context. Who are on those teams? Are you acting as a team, the people you manage, your leadership team, and your group of peers? Common mistakes I've seen people make are neglecting those second and third teams that can lead to office politics and the blame game, "It's not my fault. It's your fault."
Actually, we should be working together, we've got a common goal. Another thing that can happen is you can take it too far. If you have a very tight leadership team, it can sometimes feel like a bit of an exclusive club. Have a think about who you might be unintentionally excluding. I've seen a lot of organizations where people like customer support aren't in the room. They aren't in the room to help inform decision making. I've seen other organizations where design is neglected and product act as the interface into design. How can you bring people together towards that shared goal that you have?
Inclusive Teams
I'm going to move on to my next topic now, and my next light bulb moment as a people manager. I'm going to take a little detour and tell you a story about a work night out in Austin, Texas. We were in Austin, Texas, and there's this really infamous party street called Sixth Street. They are really generous with the bourbon. I'm having a great time. I'm wearing my new cowboy boots. I'm catching up with lots of people. I'm drinking all of the bourbon, all of it, so much bourbon. Those cowboy boots, they were really slippery. Those cocktails were really slippery, and I fell over. I fell over on a work night out. I fell over on a work night out because I drank way too much.
This is a picture of me from the emergency room where I had to get a CT scan and five stitches on my lip. There is an important message behind this story. Getting drunk isn't a team building activity. Alcohol is fine in moderation at social events, but it's not the social event. This was a mistake I made time and again when I first started managing teams in my 20s, because I wanted to have team building activities that I thought were an awesome and great time. I wanted everybody to come into central London and go on a big night out with me. That's what I wanted. I can see now how problematic that was. How I was accidentally excluding people whose idea of a good time was absolutely the opposite of going on a rampage with Hannah Foxwell.
That's the lesson I learned about building inclusive teams and inclusive team building activities. It's got to be fun for everyone. Now I've changed my approach. It should be fun for people who don't drink. It should be in working hours wherever possible. I actually took a team out for a meal. This was a customer I was working with at the time when I was consulting. I took a team out for a meal and I let the sales guy book the restaurant. We took a vegan engineer to the best steak restaurant in town. These are really easy things to get right, and so often, we get it so wrong. How did that person feel a team building dinner that was supposed to be a celebration of what we'd done together, and there was nothing on the menu that they could eat?
I learned these lessons, not as a manager. My managers have never taught me about this. I learned these lessons by being a conference organizer. I'm one of the organizers at DevOpsDays London. We put a lot of effort into creating an inclusive and accessible event, or a nonprofit event, and so we think it's really important that we run an event that's for the benefit of the community. We try to remove all of the barriers that we possibly can for everybody to participate in that community should they want to. We've been doing this since 2017.
I'm really thrilled to see so many conferences now are following our example, and they're adopting some of these more inclusive and accessible practices. This is taken directly from the welcome talk that I gave at DevOpsDays London. These are some of the ways that we try to create an inclusive and accessible space for the community. You can imagine using the same mindset at work, how am I going to create an inclusive and accessible environment for my team to do their best work?
Some of the mistakes I've made as a manager reveal some of my blind spots, and some of these things that you just learn through experience and you get better, and I hope that I have. To create an inclusive team, I always try to make sure that everybody has a voice. I make sure that team building activities are things that everyone can enjoy. More importantly than that, I try to create enough unstructured social time that team building just happens organically within the team.
Sometimes team meetings can be overly formal. Where is that unstructured time? Where are the team talking to each other about things that matter outside of work? Common mistakes I see people make as I did when I was starting to manage people is imposing your own preferences, likes and dislikes on your team. Having team building events outside of working hours, which really excludes people who maybe have young children or have caring responsibilities at home with their family, or even traveling greater distances. You're accidentally excluding people by taking events outside of working hours. Also, it's easy to bias towards the needs of the majority. Maybe you only have one vegan on your team. It's like, they'll be fine. Maybe you only have a small number of women on your team. Maybe you only have one person who doesn't drink. I still believe that the best team building events are ones where everyone can enjoy them equally.
Equity and Equal Opportunities
I've talked about inclusion. I'm about to talk about equity. This isn't a talk about DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. This is a talk about managing people. I've talked about inclusion because as a manager, I think it's my job to make sure that nobody in my team feels excluded. I'm going to talk about equity, because as a manager, I think it's my job to make sure everyone in my team has an equal opportunity to succeed in their career. For me, equity is at the core of people management. Equality is treating everyone the same but equity is taking differences into account so everyone has a chance to succeed.
This is an everyday practice. This isn't some special initiative. This is about acknowledging where your direct reports are at in their life and in their careers, and adjusting your management style and your techniques and your practices to what that person needs at this moment in time. This is how you make sure everyone has a chance to succeed. Again, when I started managing people, I had blind spots. This is another story about Hannah sat in a bar, unfortunately. I was at an off-site. I was the last person in the hotel bar at 9 p.m., and I couldn't understand it.
I was like, where is everybody? Where are the expenses? Can we have a couple of cocktails, maybe? Actually, everybody I was with had young children at home. The idea of going to bed at 9 p.m. for them was absolutely luxurious, and that's what they did. They left me on my own in a hotel bar. That was a blind spot that I had earlier in my career about what the reality for parents was at work.
This is a visualization of a baby's sleeping patterns for the first year of their life. It's absolutely brutal. This is what the reality of home life might look like for the new parents, who you manage. As a manager, if your team get woken up in the middle of the night by PagerDuty, I bet you have processes and practices and policies around recovery time. I bet you have awareness of who in your team have been disturbed during the night, and you would be inquiring with them to see if they're ok. There's a lot of other reasons that people might be waking up during the night, and you are blind to them, for the most part, as a manager.
One of my colleagues once said to me, having kids is basically like giving up sleep for 5 years. I was like, don't be silly. Then my sister had some kids, and I met some babies. They're really difficult. Babies are hard. Indirectly, my niece and my nephew have taught me some really important lessons about managing new parents. Unfortunately, I can't talk about managing new mothers, because I haven't had that opportunity in my career, but I have managed a lot of new fathers. What I always try to make sure I do is to make sure that they are able to participate in their home life. Personally, I do not like this idea that mom is always doing the night shift because dad has to log in and work 8 hours tomorrow morning. That's something that bothers me. I want to make sure that the people in my team can show up for their family whenever their family need them.
Although I can't influence the paternity leave policies, or at least I can try to, what I can do is I can be flexible. I can have awareness. I can be kind. I can make sure that project assignments and expectations of new parents and working hours are as flexible as possible knowing that not every day will be the same. I can have conversations at the start of potentially a high-pressure project about whether this person feels like it might impact their home life or whether or not they would like to take on a different role on the project than maybe what they normally would.
Working at home has obviously made a huge difference to so many of us. The blurring of the boundaries between our home lives and our family lives and our work lives is brilliant. In the teams that I manage, I celebrate every time a baby or a child shows up at one of our team meetings. I absolutely love it, because they should be there. They are welcome. As long as it's the right balance for you in your home life, taking a call with your baby on your lap is absolutely fine. I welcome that.
Here's the other graph. This one is a proper horror story for anyone who's experienced it. Anyone know what it is? I'll give you a clue with my next story. I'm going to call this, Hannah's years of denial, because this is what I used to say, "I'm not a woman in tech. I don't want to be treated differently. I'm just a person in tech." My eyes were closed for a long time to the ways in which my gender would influence and shape my career prospects in tech, as a member of a minority. That's what this is. It's a menstrual cycle, of course. Unfortunately, it's an incredibly taboo subject. This is the reality. This is the monthly roller coaster that some of us are on.
I think it's really important. I know that I have very open conversations about women's health issues, fertility, family planning with the women that I manage, but I don't think it's as common with the men. I definitely don't see it happening when I have male managers. I think just acknowledging that there are days where there will be physical symptoms from this hormonal roller coaster that a lot of us are going on is really important. If you haven't educated yourself on what that looks like, maybe read a few blog posts and find out. I am not saying that you go into your one-to-one and you say, "Hannah, you seem a little bit overwhelmed today. Is it that time of the month?" Don't do that. Having an awareness that there will be really bad days is useful information to have. You can be flexible, and you can be kind. You can think about how you build an environment where those things matter less.
A recent study found that one of the key reasons that women don't advance as far in their careers as men is a lack of sponsorship. This is one of those unconscious biases that once someone pointed out to you, you start to see it everywhere. Women are over-mentored and under-sponsored. This leads me really nicely in to talk about how you adjust your management style to the needs of the person that you're managing. Mentoring, coaching, and sponsorship, they are not the same. I'll talk about the differences between them.
When you go back into the office, have a think about what your direct reports need from you. Do they need a mentor? Someone who supports you in learning new skills by sharing their knowledge and advice. Or, do they need a coach? Do they need someone who's going to teach them new skills by helping them think through solutions by themselves, asking good questions, allowing the person to find the answer on their own in their own time? Or, do you need a sponsor? Do you need someone who supports you in learning new skills by creating opportunities for you to do new things? Someone who's going to trust that you can do something that you've never done before. This is so important to people's careers. That moment that someone decides to trust you to accelerate your career, to let you do something that you've not done before so that you can learn how to do it well.
I recently had the privilege of sponsoring a young woman into her first management position. I was told by her current manager that she wasn't ready, that she hadn't had enough years of experience under her belt. I said, I started managing people at this age, and I did all right. I was like, "I'm plus, like I'm here. I'm going to make sure that she's successful." I did that. I created an opportunity for her to do something that her current manager wasn't allowing her to do, because he thought she needed more years of experience as an individual contributor to do it well.
You can probably guess where this story ends. She absolutely smashed it. I'm so happy that I was able to do that for her. I'm so grateful for all of the people throughout my career who have done that for me, who have been sponsors for me. When you're thinking about your direct reports, and what help they need, think about whether they need you to be their mentor, their coach, or their sponsor, and adjust your approach accordingly. Because, as I said at the beginning of this section, the right answer isn't to treat everybody exactly the same. Equality is not the same as equity. We want to create an environment where everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed. Everyone's definition of success will be different. The help you need to provide to get them there will be different.
Striving for equity means that you need to understand the different needs of each person, understand their personal goals and aspirations. Then adjust and understand what support they need right now at this moment in time in their career to get them there. It's also really important to challenge your own biases, because as we've seen, some of these unconscious biases towards women can mean that we are over-mentored and under-sponsored in a work context.
Common mistakes when striving for equality and treating everybody exactly the same, means that you might have an unintended impact on their home life. Someone might not be able to give you 150% right now, like the other members of the team. It can result in a lack of stretch goals and growth opportunities for your high performers. It can lead to attrition. In a worst-case scenario, if you're not really consciously matching the work with the person and their current situation, it can lead to stress and burnout. You don't necessarily want to throw somebody overboard and see if they swim. You need to provide the right support when you're giving people new challenges and stretch opportunities. Be really mindful about the right opportunity for that person at that moment in time in the context of their career, and in their life.
Performance, Pay, and Promotions
Next, I'm going to talk about the vulgar topic of money, because again, it's an area where equality isn't always the right answer. I'm going to be trying to be as generic as possible about this. I've worked in moderate to large companies for a while, and so I'm trying to generalize based on my experience of how pay and promotions happen. If you're in a very small company, it's likely to look very different. When I started managing people, no one sat me down and explained it. No one sat me down and explained how pay and promotions actually worked in the real world. It was all done behind closed doors.
I learned through experience how to run this process and how to run this process well. What will usually happen is, once or twice a year, there will be budget set aside to allocate to pay rises and promotions. The budgets will be agreed right at the top of the company, and then it will be chopped up, and they will cascade down through the org chart. Your VP will have a big pot of money. They'll take a little bit to the side for their management team. Then they will allocate budgets to each of their leaders. Those leaders will do the same with their leaders. Then they will do it for their managers.
Those budgets will cascade top-down. Then, managers of individual contributors will make recommendations about what they think their team deserve. The problem with this process is that talent isn't always evenly distributed across the teams. When budget is equally distributed across the teams, you need to do a secondary step to this process, you need to do the rebalancing and the calibration. This can't happen unless you're working really closely with your peers. That's why I talked about team 2 at the beginning of this talk because you all need to be aligned. You need to be aligned about what a senior engineer looks like in your organization. Because if a manager is imposing their own personal opinions on what a senior engineer looks like, if one manager is setting the bar up here, and the people who report to them aren't getting promoted as quickly as the people over here, you've got inequality, and that's not ok.
As an individual contributor, you won't see any of this process, but as a manager you may not see any of this process either, because you might not actually be talking about it. What I would encourage you to do is talk about it. You need to be working with your leadership team and your peers to make sure that the budgets are allocated to the right people based on the impact that they have on the organization, but also about the potential they're showing for growth.
This is something that I see go wrong time and again, because managers believe that once they have their budget, they don't want to release a single penny of it, even if it's the right thing to do. Even if there are three people who are deserving or that need promoting in team 1, no one will release their budget to make sure that they do the right thing for the people who are ready for promotion. They will use up their budget on the team that they have reporting to them. I don't think that's fair. I don't think that's right. I think a collaborative process is much more effective to get the result you want.
Another thing that you're going to want to do is check for systemic inequality and biases. We all know that minorities will be generally paid less. Because of the various barriers to entry in our industry, they might have less years of experience, they might have been held back from promotions due to biases. You may need to correct for some of the wrongs that were done to these people earlier in their career. This has happened. If you take on a new team, and you stack rank them by salary, and you find that all the women are at the bottom, you've got a problem. It's this process that allows you to correct for that.
Again, because I would always encourage a collaborative process as part of your leadership team to make sure that you're being fair and consistent across everybody who has the same role and job, use that opportunity to check that other people are doing these checks and balances as well. Another aspect of this is obviously the individual themselves. When I was a new manager, nobody explained to me how pay and promotion works, and how to do it well. No one taught me that. I think there's an amount of knowledge that you need as an individual contributor as well.
At the very least, you need to know what the timeline is. It's no good going to your manager in August and saying, I'd like a promotion in the next round, if in July, all of the promotion recommendations have already been submitted and the budgets have been allocated. Timing is everything. You have to have the right conversations with your team at the right time. If you don't know the rules of the game, you're not going to be able to play the game. Being open and transparent about how decisions get made, who the decisionmakers are, what people are looking for and assessing for in these promotion conversations, and how to set yourself up for success, is incredibly valuable. Be transparent about it. There's absolutely no reason not to be. This is a reality, and it doesn't have to happen behind closed doors.
As I said, there's nothing worse than getting to the end of a process for pay rises and promotions and having a very upset employee on your hands because they didn't get what they expected. If you end up in that situation, chances are, you haven't asked them what they expected, or they didn't know that the time to have those conversations was probably weeks ago and not today, in this room. The decision's already been made.
Again, as I said about that transparency, if you have someone who is expecting a promotion, be really transparent with them about their chances of success in getting that promotion as well. To manage their expectations, you first need to know their expectations. You do this not in an annual process. If you're only doing this once a year, you're getting it wrong. You're going to be providing them with continuous feedback. You're going to be encouraging them to continuously improve. You're going to be really aligned on expectations.
I will put you forward for promotion in 6 months' time, but I don't think you've got a high chance of success now, so I won't be putting you forward this time. You can have that conversation. It's not an easy conversation, but you can have that conversation. It avoids some of that upset that happens when someone's expectations are up here and you have to deliver bad news, or you have to deliver bad news that you didn't expect was bad news. One of the things that I tell all of my teams, is that everyone's career path is different, and so you shouldn't try and compare yourself to others.
Figure out who you are, and then do it on purpose. When we're talking about continuous feedback, make sure you really understand the strengths and weaknesses of the person you're managing, and build a plan to get to that promotion with them, that plays to their strengths. Don't throw them into a situation where you're going to reveal all of their weaknesses. Absolutely customize it and play to their strengths. Figure out who they are, and help them to do more of that.
One of the things that I've found through managing people, is, quite often, the things that make us stand out, are the things that make us stand out. Sometimes your greatest strength, the things that makes you amazing, can also manifest as your greatest weakness. To give an example about myself. Some of the feedback I was given early in my career was, "I'm a bit silly. I can be a bit too fun. I don't take things too seriously." In the same breath, someone would say, "You bring great energy for the team. I love how fun it is to work in your team." I think sometimes you have to take feedback in that context.
You have to think, these are the things that stand out about me, how can I get myself into a situation where this is considered a strength, and it's not a weakness? In those situations where I need to adjust and I need to adapt, how do I make sure that I'm mindful of the ways that I stand out and the ways that I am different? How can I make sure that it's not perceived as a weakness? Because treating everyone the same is impossible, because we are all gloriously different human beings. We're not striving for equality in a pay, performance, and review process. We are striving for equity. We are striving to build an environment and a team where everyone has an equal chance of success, and that will look different for every single person.
To summarize some of my lessons learned about running multiple pay promotion and performance management processes. I reward based on impact. I reward people who make those around them better, who share their knowledge, and who are team players. I also reward for potential, people who I want to see grow in the team, people I want to keep around. I am transparent with the timetable, and I share it with everyone including individual contributors.
Performance management doesn't happen as part of a formal process once or twice a year. It's continuously managed, and you continuously manage expectations throughout that process as well. Also, if you can, seek to match the person and the job. Figure out who you are, and do it on purpose, with the help of your manager who can create opportunities that are right for you. They may not be right for everyone. Common mistakes I've seen in these processes is where decision making happens behind closed doors or by a single person, maybe a senior manager, and not even the managers who report to them.
When that happens, there's very little chance for collaboration or consistency or rebalancing in the process. When it happens behind closed doors, there's little opportunity to challenge for systemic bias and inequality that is not related to the person's performance. One of the other mistakes that you can make is actually just trying to reward employees equally in the pursuit of fairness. One of my old managers called that peanut butter spreading. "We just chop up the budget and share it equally because that's the right thing to do." It's very rarely the right thing to do. Also, during performance review processes, it's really easy to focus on people's weaknesses. Try to remember that the weaknesses might actually just be different manifestations of this person's strength. Figure out what those strengths are and find a way to use them.
The Bad Days
I've been through two rounds of layoffs recently as a manager. Those are bad days. Those are really horrible bad days. I've been through acquisitions. Those can also be really difficult emotional days if the acquisition is not something your team wants, or if they're worried about how the acquisition might impact you. Even things like reorgs can create anxiety within your team, and uncertainty. I'm going to talk very briefly about what your role as a manager might look like, on those very bad days. I've had Barbra Streisand. I've had Dolly Parton. Now I've got Rihanna. All thought leaders.
I think the most important piece of advice I can give you about the bad days is, just be present. Be present for your team. Make it ok not to be ok. What I've done in the past, even though I've been upset, and I've been angry, and I've been worried during these times, is I've just tried to create a space where we can be together and feel all those feelings and talk about it. I absolutely make sure the team know that today is just not a day to keep calm and carry on. It's ok. If you need to take a break from your desk, if you need to log off for a while to process this news, or if you want to be together, here's a Zoom that I'm going to open up and we can just use it as a drop-in for today. We can just drop in and be together and share these feelings and these thoughts and these worries, and do it together.
Unfortunately, we have to be that shit umbrella, quite often. It's really difficult because during these bad days, there's often ambiguity, there's often uncertainty. You can't share answers with your team, because the answers simply don't exist yet. Decisions haven't been made. It's really difficult to be in that room, as the leader and the representative of the company with absolutely no information. It's really hard. All you can do is to be authentic, and to be honest about what is going on, what you know.
You can try to discourage gossiping. You can try and discourage people from catastrophizing the event. In reality, you're going through this with them. My only piece of advice there that I have found works for me is just to literally be there, go through it with them. Another thing that is slightly more structured, and I've used this during acquisitions and reorgs and times of big change, is just create space to voice all your irrational fears. Throw an anxiety party. Just be like, we're just going to spend half an hour right now just venting.
We're just going to do that. This is the time where we're going to vent. We all know. We're all smart people, we're going to rationalize some of these fears away. For just a moment, we're going to voice that fear, and we're going to point at it, and we're going to look at it. I find that a really powerful activity to do as a group during times of large change and uncertainty.
On those bad days, what advice can I give you? Just make it ok not to be ok. Create space to share your thoughts and feelings, however raw they may be. Be patient. No one is going to bounce back in a matter of hours or days. Everyone's going to take their time to process whatever news you're processing. It's also incredibly powerful to reflect on that worst-case scenario, and figure out what you would do. What would I do if I lost my job tomorrow? Once you've written down what your plan would be, you can stop worrying about it. You're like, if I get laid off tomorrow, this is my plan, this is what I'm going to do. It takes the power away from it. Also, as a manager, it's really important that you have a safe space to vent. Your words have a lot more impact on your team.
Be really mindful about how you share your stress and anxiety, and who you share it with. This is one of the areas which is terribly conflicting because I've just said, make it ok not to be ok, but not for you. You're the manager. Just be really mindful about that. Be mindful about maybe bleeding your own stress and anxiety into your team because they'll take their cues from you and how you're feeling, and you could make a bad situation worse.
Power
I want to talk about power, the power that we have and how we can be intentional about how we use that power as managers. A great manager can genuinely change your life. I've talked about equity and inclusion, because it's something I care deeply about. I wasn't always active in pursuit of those goals. I was passive. I would say things like, "I'm not racist," but I wasn't actively doing anything to combat racism. I would say, "I'm definitely not sexist," but I wasn't doing anything to help the women in my organization. I'm going to share a quote with you that changed how I think about going from passive to active in my pursuit of diversity, equity, and inclusion. This is a quote by Banksy that was shared shortly after the murder of George Floyd. "At first I thought I should just shut up and listen to black people about this issue.
Why would I do that? It's not their problem. It's mine. People of color are being failed by the system. The white system. Like a broken pipe flooding the apartment of the people living downstairs. This faulty system is making their lives a misery, but it's not their job to fix it. They can't, no one will let them in the apartment upstairs. This is a white problem. If white people don't fix it, someone will have to come upstairs and kick the door in." The leaky pipe flooding the apartment downstairs is such a simple and powerful metaphor for me. It was genuinely one of those light bulb moments.
Life is simply harder in the apartment downstairs. Life is easier in the apartment upstairs. I know that I have privilege as a white person, as a British person, as a person from a loving, stable family. I also know that I'm a minority. I'm a woman trying to succeed in a man's world. Racism is a white problem to fix. Sexism is a man's problem to fix. Homophobia is a straight problem to fix. Are you sat in the apartment upstairs, and are you ignoring that leaky pipe, or are you trying to fix it?
With whatever privilege and power that I have, I choose to do something. I choose to try and make things easier for people who through no fault of their own, have less power than I do. There are really simple ways that you can be active about this in your work life. I'm not talking about doing big things. You don't have to stand up on a stage and talk about it. As a woman, I will get interrupted really frequently. This is a thing that a lot of women will experience in the workplace, we get interrupted. When a woman in your team is interrupted, what will you do? Will you say something? Will you direct the conversation back to her so she has an equal voice?
Also, as women, we take on a disproportionate amount of menial work. It's often assumed that the woman in the room will schedule the meeting, or take the meeting notes, or organize the team social, and do a lot of the facilitation and peacekeeping that make this a great team to be on. As a manager, will you make sure that that menial work is distributed equally between the men and the women in your team? Perhaps there are no gay people in your organization, and someone's made a homophobic joke. Is it still a problem if there's no one in the room to get offended? Will you say something, or will you let it go? Although these sound like small things, I want to remind you that in those moments, it's so tempting and it's so easy to do absolutely nothing, to be passive.
This is the difference between being active in pursuit of the things that you care about, and being passive. That leaky pipe will never get fixed if the people in the apartment upstairs continue to do nothing. Here's the thought I want to leave with you, "Perhaps the measure of a manager is what they do with power." What will you try to change?
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