Photo by Chris F.
Our big kid is wearing chokers. The other day, someone left a scrunchie on our front step. I saw a parent at school pickup today in Doc Martens. New doc martens. The 90s are back in all their grungy glory. And while I love me some flannel shirts, there are parts of the 90s that we should definitely leave there.
Women At Ernst & Young Instructed On How To Dress, Act Nicely Around Men
Where do you even begin? No, women’s minds are not more pancake-like than men’s. No, women do not ramble more than men in meetings. No, women are not more gullible and “flatterable.” And also no, being athletic and acting as a leader does not make you masculine.
The woman running this course came up in the 80s and 90s in Texas. In a moment of empathy, you can imagine what her professional life must have been like. The shit she’d have to endure. The jokes she’d have to smile at, and the improprieties she’d have to pretend were jokes. We can have empathy about that. We can even imagine that the things she’s telling these women are lessons she had to learn just to endure.
But it’s still steaming hot garbage. No one should be subjected to this at all, much less in the guise of leadership training. Professor Robin Ely spends the second half of the article dissecting it all and she does a good job. It’s worth reading, but you don’t need to be an HBS prof to see why this content is a problem.
And that’s what really grinds our gears. We’re in the business of leadership training, too. We go into the same rooms. Rooms with a bunch of leaders, some of them confident, some of them very unsure of themselves. All of them hoping that we’re going to give them things they can use. Things that make them, and their teams, more effective. Someone paid our fee. Someone put their names on a list as leaders we’re going to invest in. And here they are, trying to figure out if we’re full of shit.
Imagine the betrayal they must feel. To sit in that room, and hear that the key to leadership success as a woman is:
“If you’re having a conversation with a man, cross your legs and sit at an angle to him. Don’t talk to a man face-to-face. Men see that as threatening.”
We said it and we meant it. You don’t have to hire us if we’re not right for you. There are other folks out there doing a good job. But please stop putting your people through this garbage. We believe in leadership development more than just about anyone else you’ll meet, but if this is the program you’re looking at, we’d rather you did nothing at all.
— Melissa & Johnathan
What Melissa’s reading
Half of millennials and 75% of Gen Zers have left their job for mental health reasons
You don’t need to click on the link to know why this matters to bosses. I mean, you should click on the link. I put the link in here so you’d read it. Everyone, every boss, every employee, every person on planet earth should read this article.
I want to underscore the headline. Take a moment to let this really sink in.
Half of Millennials have left a job for mental health reasons
75% of Gen-Zers have left a job for mental health reasons
This should be a massive wake up call to anyone in a position of leadership. Millennials are the single largest segment of the modern workforce and have been since 2016. One can be literate about the relationship between work and mental health and still not see it that clearly. Good on the CNBC folks for pulling the most jaw-dropping stat to the top.
By contrast, a few weeks earlier, HBR ran a triple-bylined piece by the researching organizations under this headline. Research: People Want Their Employers to Talk About Mental Health.
No shit. There’s nothing about that headline that feels like an imperative. But the authors eventually get there in the piece and provide a set of really good, concrete recommendations. Including this one:
We’re not advocating for managers to become therapists. However, they should have baseline knowledge of tools they can use during difficult conversations and actions they can take to reduce the stigma, in addition to an understanding of mental health conditions, their prevalence and impact at work, and ways to recognize and respond to employees who may be struggling.
If you are managing people, it’s likely you’re under-equipped on this front. Many of you know we’ve been hosting Mental Health First Aid trainings in our space this year. The training is affordable, accessible, and incredibly valuable, especially for bosses.
If you want to know more about running Mental Health First Aid at your office, send us an email and we’ll share everything we learned about the process. And if you don’t think your work will host it but you want to attend, there are sessions going on all over, all the time (CAN, USA). And if you happen to live in New York City, there’s an amazing program you can access for free.
What Johnathan’s reading
I am a big fan of checklists. Not in the “organize my life” sense, although those are good too. But checklists like the kind that pilots use for aircraft inspection. Checklists that make you smarter. Checklists that capture wisdom and learnings from a thousand past incidents. Checklists that remember so that you don’t have to start from scratch every time.
I want to tell you about one of those checklists. But first, I will let you all in on a secret. We’re trying to get Raw Signal Group certified as a B corp. If you haven’t encountered the idea before, the very short pitch goes like this:
There oughta be a better way to build companies. It should be possible to build a company that cares about making a profit, but cares about other things, too. That doesn’t need to prioritize Shareholder Value above all else. You should be able to add some language to your articles of incorporation to lock in that ability, or incorporate as a different kind of… thing. Not a not-for-profit. A not-just-for-profit.
A B corporation is that thing. And there are a few jurisdictions that let you just incorporate as one of these from the start. But for most of the world (including Canada, where we’re based) these aren’t a fully realized thing yet. And so there’s a certification process to give us all a consistent standard and thing to call ourselves.
And that certification process has a hell of a checklist.
You can do the impact assessment for free, even if you never plan to seek certification. It’s a tool they released to make the world better. And it’s very good.
It runs you through everything from Governance (“How many independent board members do you have?”, “Do employees get access to, and education on, the company’s financials?”), to Workers (“What percentage of your workers are paid a living wage?”, “What kind of professional development and cross training is available?”, “What’s the ratio of highest executive pay to lowest worker pay?”), to Community and Environmental responsibility (“Do you have a policy that gives preference to local suppliers?”, “Is there a way for remote employees to deal with e-waste?”).
Governance can seem dry, but what happens as you complete this survey is really cool. You read a question, realize that you don’t have an answer but should. And then you send an email. You do another one, and you post something in slack about it. You find another and make a mental note to talk to HR.
Running through the checklist is an education. Every question has supplemental information and examples of how you could put it into practice. The score you get is secondary to the insights you accumulate. Insights, and concrete steps you can take to make your company better. It’s just a good thing to know about, and you can probably do it in about an hour.
There are about 3,000 companies that have actually made it through the certification. And I will tell you something. Once you go through the assessment, you look at those companies very differently.
