Do not lick this email

Photo by Anna Shvets.

We're not even a month into 2020 and so far everyone on team RSG has had the plague.

In 2019 the word of the year for Raw Signal Group was "Bold." We made some big moves, tried some scary things. We stocked the office with Doritos Bold chips. It was a good word. When people ask us what it is for 2020 we say "Plague." They all make a face and say we're not allowed to choose that.

Okay so it's not the most inspiring intention word.

Back in 2010, we both worked for Mozilla. It was a summit year, which meant that all Mozilla employees, and many members of the community, were invited to a week-long event in Whistler, BC. Hundreds of Mozillians descending on this ski town in the middle of summer. It was all coordinated by one woman who arranged travel and accommodation for nearly a thousand people, and ran herself ragged in the process.

Near the end of the event, I remember walking up to our CEO, John, and saying, "You have to tell her to take a vacation. She's gonna collapse, she needs one, this event wouldn't have happened without her."

And he said, "No. I'm not going to do that."

He said, "She should take one. She's entitled to and I'd approve it. But I'm not her parent. I'm not going to force her to do things. And if she shows up at work on Monday I have work for her to do."

In the years since I've gone back and forth on that interaction a lot. John, like all of us, was a flawed human but I never thought of him as exploitative in that way. Was I being overly paternal in suggesting that he order a vacation? Was it more right to respect her agency as an adult instead of imposing rest after a heroic couple of months?

So here we are, 10 years on from that conversation, and everyone in the company we run has had the plague in 2020. Not only the adults, but the RSG children have had it, too. We're all on the mend (thank you for asking), but the counter at home has a line of prescription bottles.

And it's making us think a lot about rest. About the flexibility we have as bosses to clear our calendar so that we can work from home, or take our kid to the doctor, or take a nap. And it makes us think about how others don't have that flexibility. Even when we say they do.

I didn't have words 10 years ago for why I disagreed with John. I do now. And it's this: work is coercive. Bosses send mixed signals about what's technically okay and what's actually okay. And the less sure we are of our position, the less willing we are to take things, even when we need them.

I wasn't asking John to override this person's free will. I was asking John to send a clear signal as a leader about the importance of rest. And taking care of yourself. To a person who'd been getting signals instead about how she shouldn't drop any balls. A person whose role at work was precarious. A person who, like most of us do when we're in a precarious position, was indexing a lot off of pleasing other people and being seen as a hero.

Our hope for each of you is that it doesn't take a plague to get you to rest, this year. And that you'll create healthy conditions for your people. So that it doesn't take a plague for them to get some rest, either.

I don't think we'll keep "Plague" as our word for 2020. But it sums up January pretty well.

Suggestions welcome for February onward.

— Melissa & Johnathan