Photo by Naimish Verma.
There’s a lot of advice out there of the form, “Stop saying yes to requests for coffee, to brain-picking, to the endless requests for help from semi-strangers.” If you struggle to remember that your time is your own, if boundaries are a thing you’re working on, well, that advice is out there. Sometimes it’s the advice you need. But you won’t hear it from us.
We are firmly pro-coffee. Or tea. Or water. Or meeting along the waterfront to talk on a bench while the gulls and the squirrels fight over hot dog buns. Whatever the side is that says you should say yes to people on the come up, we are on that side.
There was a lovely pair of threads last week that put such a nice point on it. The first one, from Mason Hartman starts:
“Creating a serendipitous connection, freely offering a good idea, telling someone you see their potential & you’ll be in their corner… these are both cheap & costly, the currency of trust in the human project”
Isn’t that swell? And then Patrick McKenzie boosted and elaborated on it in the weird, nerdy way that he does. He has a line partway down the thread that captures how we feel about this perfectly,
“If you gave a choice ‘Would you rather have 100 CEOs in your network or 100 college students?’ assuming low levels of investment in each relationship I think almost everyone picks wrong.”
The work we do means that we have 100s of CEOs in our network. Almost without exception they are wonderful, giving, humble humans who try their best. We don’t need to take anything away from them. But we also get to meet a lot of people on the come up. Through our paid work. Through our pro bono work. Through people asking us for a coffee, or brain pickings, or advice. And everything those threads say is true.
We feel very lucky to do the work we do. But never moreso than when we find out that someone we spoke to did the thing, got the job, grew the thing, quit the job, figured the hard thing out.
You are 100% within your rights to set boundaries and take care of yourself. No one is owed your time just because they have your email address. These things are true and good to be reminded of if you forget. But you can remember that your time is yours, and still choose to share it with others. And, as both threads put it, the returns on those investments are joyous and immense.
— Melissa & Johnathan
What Melissa’s watching
Maybe you’ve already seen the ad. It’s been making the rounds on Twitter and in mainstream media. Huffington Post did a piece about it. CNN covered it. USA Today. The Washington Post. And nearly every mama I know has talked about it privately with their friends or family.
I’m talking about the Frida Mom postpartum ad that was banned from the Oscars. There is brilliance in a marketing campaign that generated more buzz as a banned ad than they would have as a legitimately aired one. Turning your campaign into contraband is a surefire way to get folks curious.
Whether they meant to get banned or not, this one is touching a nerve for parents everywhere. The academy rejected the ad for being too graphic. Though it’s quite tame compared to anything you saw on Game of Thrones. There’s a new mom and a crying baby. And there’s the raw, real, and complex pain of coming home after birthing a baby. And there’s nothing graphic in that video for anyone who’s lived it.
OK but what does all this have to do with bosses and leadership?
A lot. Especially in the US where one in four women are back at work less than two weeks after giving birth. Go watch the video. Then you tell me if anyone in that situation should be back in an office or an assembly line or anywhere other than recovering at home.
Far too many bosses pressure their people to come back to work as swiftly as possible after delivering a baby. The half-joking offer to set up a nursery at the office. The wink at the end of “take all the time you need but not a minute more, ok?” And the present but unsaid shove in “I don’t know how we’ll ever manage without you.”
When we make the aftermath of birthing a human invisible, we make our policies from a place of ignorance. And worse, we subvert the minimal leave we offer by subtly telling people not to take it. I don’t need you to be an expert in childbirth or in anatomy. But if you’re applying that kind of pressure to your people, you ought to at least know what kind of ask you’re making.
What Johnathan’s reading
I mean, more twitter threads, of course.
- This general train-wreck thread of the worst questions people have been asked in an interview
- This very specific train-wreck thread about a company’s background check process. (It reviews every tweet you’ve ever liked and, well, just read it.)
Of all the abusive power games that companies play in the workplace, some of the absolute worst happen during hiring.
It should be a time when companies are putting their best on display. They should be working to attract the talented folks that will help them thrive. For smart companies with skilled managers, that’s very much what it is, regardless of the seniority of the role.
If you’ve ever watched a well-run company recruit, there’s a humility to it. Their bar may be very high, they may pass on many strong candidates. But at every step and with every candidate they work to earn that person’s continued interest. I’ve run interview processes like this, they’re not even that hard to set up. I’ve had rejected candidates refer others to us, because our process treated them well.
When you let unskilled managers run a hiring process, though, they get the frame wrong. Instead of a focus on attracting the right candidates, they focus on filtering out the wrong ones. That frame is poison. You start to see each of your candidates as a wrong-candidate in hiding. And instead of enticing them, you build an interview process designed to catch them in a lie.
Once you’ve decided that your candidates are all lying to you, it doesn’t go well. That background check nonsense up there will never help you build a world class team of anything but mayonnaise. The brain teaser questions you ask them might make you feel smart, but are entirely useless. Abusive take-home assignments. Group rapid-fire interviews. IQ tests. More and more gauntlets to try to flush out liars. Hell, half the responses in that “worst interview” thread are literally illegal and still they get asked.
There’s this old advice that I’m sure you’ve heard. “Remember that you’re interviewing the company just as much as they’re interviewing you.” It’s still true, of course, but only sometimes. Work is more precarious for many people than it used to be. Maybe work with your company won’t be precarious. But some of your candidates will be carrying in scars, or actual trauma, from places they’ve worked before. It’s tough out there for a lot of folks. They may really need this. And they might not feel like they’ve got a lot of agency to interview the company back.
If you’re a boss running a hiring process, all I want to ask is that you centre the dignity of each candidate. Start from a place of assessing fit and attracting them to the role, instead of trying to catch them in a lie. Have a high bar for skills, for fit, for experience – whatever’s appropriate. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be selective – you should. But in a situation where you have so much of the power, humility goes a long way.
