Photo by Esther.
Everyone is asking what we think about the Away thing.
If you missed it, Zoe Schiffer at The Verge published an article about Away, and how the CEO treated their employees. And then things started to go very fast. 4 days later Away announced that Steph Korey, their CEO, would step down. A lot can happen between newsletters.
So what do we think? I mean, it’s complicated.
First and foremost, what’s described in that article is abusive. It’s manipulative, it’s insulting, it is what it looks like when a person has lost control of their shit. We made our position on that piece clear up front.
But the coverage and the response is also deeply gendered. That’s no excuse, to be clear. When you call your employees “brain dead” and patronize them about what a great professional development opportunity it will be for you to suspend all PTO, you’re being an asshole. No matter what. But plennnnty of male CEOs run companies this badly and worse. Plenty of men don’t manage their shit. And they cultivate toxic behaviours. And they talk down to their teams. And they get away with it. And so it’s complicated to signal boost and honour the employees trying to tell their story, without becoming part of the problem of media cycles attacking women leaders.
It’s also been a real Rorschach test, for the tech/startup industry at large. Many people are anonymously terrible, of course. No one who reads this newsletter is surprised about this. But some of the “old guard that are still sometimes cool” have been pretty uncool, too. Michael Dearing calls it a “torch and pitchfork” mob, which is quite a thing coming from someone who teaches management. Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway have spent a couple recent podcasts on the sentiment, “who cares if she’s tough?“
Tough is high standards. Tough is “this isn’t nearly good enough.” This story is not about tough. And it’s complicated to see people who should get that just … not get that.
— Melissa & Johnathan
What Melissa’s reading
“People are getting soft”: How the Away scandal exposed a Silicon Valley culture war
Yes, i need a whole other section on the Away stuff. I know. I know. But there’s still a bunch left to unpack.
(get it?)
Many of tech’s thought leaders are successful investors, but have never operated. It’s not that they don’t say smart things. Some of them do. They also miss a lot of what it’s like to lead and manage and work inside one of these fast-growth orgs.
The investors racing to see who can run up and then die on the founder friendly hill the fastest? It’s nearly 2020. We need to find a new look.
But! I channeled my moop into something more productive. And wrote a thread about what it’s like to manage CX teams within a venture-baked business. And why many of the things Steph is trying to get the CX team to take accountability for are cross-org systems failures. Not an individual failure due to lack of grit, hustle, or commitment to the team.
Then a Fast Company writer reached out and asked if he could grab part of my thread for a piece he was writing. I said sure. Nice of him to ask but also, already out there in public.
And then my Twitter friend turned actual real life friend Keith said OK, so we have a clearly articulated problem. That’s not the same telling folks what to do about it.
This one is for Keith and for anyone else who is wondering the same thing. What do we do about?
We start by recognizing that:
Everyone shows up to work wanting to do a good job. That needs to be our touchstone as leaders because it reminds that even when people are failing, they are still people. Publicly berating someone who showed up to do a good job in your organization is you failing at your job.
Founders and CEOs have an outsized impact on the culture within their organizations. Culture flows downhill. It’s useful to clearly articulate the parts of the org that aren’t working. The next step is understanding your role in getting to this point. If you built something you don’t like. If you hired the wrong team. If you dislike the culture. If you feel like you’re shouldering the whole thing and your senior team just shrugs. The good news is it’s fixable. The bad news is you gotta own your part. And that’s really uncomfortable.
All the interesting work in your organization happens at the intersections of more than one department. One of the most striking parts of the Verge piece is the total lack of communication between teams. Anything that showed up at the intersection of more than one team was a game of hot potato for who was most likely to get reamed on Slack. This is not an environment that bred collaboration and ultimately, it created an incompetence loop. That loop is of the CEO’s own making.
If people feel like they are one mistake away from being raked over the coals, they don’t take big swings. They make small, safe moves. Instead of fixing the system problems that caused the massive backlog of tickets, they get into pjs, tuck into bed, and try to answer a few more tickets before they fall asleep.
That’s where we start. They are small paragraphs but I swear, it took me more than a decade to understand these things.
And there’s one more…
There was a line on twitter from a venture capitalist and I forgot to grab the link. In it, she was subtweeting the Away stuff. The gist of the tweet was that if you haven’t been a founder, you should shut up because you don’t get how hard it is. I think the people who occupy this argument have a hard time with the two of us. I’m a founder. I’ve been a boss. I’ve been an employee. And I say this one definitively. Don’t be an asshole.
What Johnathan’s reading
Speaking of CEOs…
Turvo Fired Its CEO, Eric Gilmore, for Expensing $76,120 at Strip Clubs
I mean. Where to begin.
Okay so first things first. Sex work is work. In this house we don’t stigmatize sex workers, and we believe they deserve the same things as any other worker. Fair pay. Safe working conditions. Dignity and respect. If you’re careful to work with businesses that safeguard these things, what you do in your own adult time with consenting adults is up to you.
But dropping $76,120 of corporate spending account entertaining clients as the CEO is just… I mean it’s a different thing, Eric, and I sort of can’t believe I have to explain that. It’s barely been a year since Under Armour did this loop. It’s not as though there hasn’t been opportunity for reflection.
And still many men in positions of power do this shit and fail to see why it’s a problem. If you know someone failing to connect the dots in that way, Dr. Kim Elsesser at UCLA wrote a clear, concise piece last year about it. It even has a convenient title: Under Armour, Here’s The Problem With Expensing Visits To Strip Clubs
Again, one would hope this is self-evident but she breaks it down into its component, research-backed pieces:
1. These events tend to be exclusioanary to non-men. It’s a no-win. Either they aren’t invited, and miss out on bonding time with the team and senior leaders. Or they are invited, but made to feel uncomfortable, and are often teased or harassed themselves.
2. These events tend to encourage the objectification of female colleagues. This has a completely predictable set of Very Bad Effects on how they are treated, evaluated, and respected by their coworkers.
That’s it. It’s not a hard argument to grasp. Stop using corporate funds to exclude and diminish your own employees.
Post-script
People keep talking about how 2019 has seen a lot more CEOs resigning or being pushed out. I keep seeing pieces like, “Is the Media Out To Get Tech Founders?” I understand that CEOs are spooked because they’re seeing their peers dragged out into the street.
But I also think that on a fundamental level they don’t get it. I feel like I want to grab them and point their faces towards it and say, “Look. Look. Work isn’t working for people. More people than ever are struggling with work-related mental health issues. With abuse, anxiety, burnout, exhaustion. Work is robbing these people of their dignity in an invisible, insidious, death-by-a-thousand-cuts grind. And as bosses you can make that grind better or worse in a hundred invisible ways. But if you get caught. If someone brings out into the light a display of you actively, personally, cruelly taking people’s dignity away. It’s not a fucking mystery. If that day comes, life is going to come at you very, very fast.”
I don’t think leaders like that read this newsletter. I’ll find other ways to tell them, but in the meantime thanks for listening. ❤️
