True power lies elsewhere
Photo by Pixabay.
You'll need paper for this. Not a lot but some. Back of an envelope is plenty. If you fill a blank notebook, you've gone too far.
We want you to think of a moment that a boss had impact on you. Could be something small from this week. Could be something massive anywhere from your very first job all the way to whatever role you're in now. But whatever comes to mind, that's what we want you to capture.
We've done this exercise in small rooms and in giant conference halls. And the stories are all over the place. Some are highlights. Bosses who took a shot on someone early in their career and that changed everything to the upside. And some are lowlights. Bosses who made life a waking nightmare for their entire team.
And then there are the boss stories that are about work and not work all at the same time. Many stories about bosses who gave people the space and time to recover from major health scares. Even when it meant adjusting corporate policy. Stories about caretaking for family members. And everything you can imagine around parental leave and bereavement leave.
This is about work and this is not about work
A lot of stuff lives in the "about work and not about work at the same time" bucket. Turns out that organizing humans around complex tasks is messy. Made messier by the humanity of those humans. Just a few years ago, the screaming Future of Work headlines were about support and care for the humans doing the work. Today, those headlines are about how quickly we can make the humans and their messiness irrelevant. Or, at the very least, get them to stop bringing that shit to work.
If we view corporate needs and individual worker needs on a continuum, the balance has lurched toward corporate needs. The message to employees seems to be some version of, "Sure, sure, bring your whole self to work. But also, it would be super great if you could leave a lot at home, too."
We should note that this swing was underway well before last week's US election. Defunding DEI. Mandating RTO. And using RIFs as a blunt force reset of comp strategies. All part of an effort to remind knowledge workers that regardless of how special, needed, and valued they may feel, true power lies elsewhere.
This idea, that true power lies elsewhere, is an insidious one. Insidious the moment you shrug and say things are above your pay grade. Or not your problem. Or not in your sphere of fucking influence. Insidious because that causes you to shrink your influence. To shrink your impact. And to also cap your pay grade massively. Insidious because you are a person with true power and you have chosen not to act. And that makes the statement not only insidious but self-fulfilling.
This is new and this is not new
The joke on the internet is about these unprecedented times and how much we all want to go back to the precedented ones. Or "wouldn't it be nice to live in an era of monocrisis for a change?" It's not, like, a ha-ha joke. Anyway that's not where we are and, in important ways, what's happening right now is different than what has come before.
But that doesn't mean we can't learn from what has come before. We have been through the fog together before, in this newsletter, more than once. And that's what it feels like again. Waiting to see what 2025 will be is less like preparing for a set of policy changes and more like preparing for a hurricane. Because while the risk of harm is searingly clear, the details of when and how and in which order are still emerging chaotically. That doesn't make planning pointless, it just means a different kind of planning. When you see people you care about in the path, despair takes a back seat to necessity.
But like, how? Right? How do you prepare for what is coming, and protect the people you care about who are clearly in the path of whatever happens next?
Praxis
Molly White's always-excellent newsletter this week was about some concrete steps you can take as individuals to channel your despair into action. At one point she writes,
"Many of us have looked back on historic events where people have bravely stood up against powerful adversaries and wondered, “what would I have done?” Now is your chance to find out. It did not just start with this election; it has been that time for a long time. If you’re just realizing it now, get your ass in gear."
We have hundreds of CEOs who read this and thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of people in management. The thing you all have going for you is that you have a say in how your organization operates. This is a far more powerful tool for material support than most leaders realize. Because in an extremely business-focused political climate, business decisions are largely left alone.
What kind of business decisions?
Benefits — you can get crisp with your benefits providers about the kind of support you'd like to offer to employees needing abortions, trans-affirming care, and mental health supports across the board. Don't assume that the default packages (often built to hit a target premium) match your values, or your team's needs.
Leave — we have worked with orgs who have no concept of leave, and those with no-questions-asked leave, and everything in between. Get educated on your org's policies, or get the right people together to write new ones. Parental leave and bereavement leave are a great start, but the rolling horrorshow of the global political climate is not likely to get better in the next little bit. Is there any ability for your employees to take time when their world outside of work is on fire, or when they need to recover from medical care that couldn't happen near home? Should there be?
Mobility — do you have offices in different jurisdictions? Are you very clear on how your team members can or cannot move between them? Businesses get a surprising amount of global leeway to sponsor work visas, relocation costs, and temporary transfers. Your people should not have to flee their home or country in order to feel safe. We hope they won't have to. But if they do, you'll want to already know what's possible.
The work itself — does your organization have clear lines around who you won't do business with? A business is allowed to hang up a sign that says "No shirt, no shoes, no service." Does yours? Because before the parable of the nazi bar was a story about social media platforms, it was a story about a business owner making concrete policy. With a baseball bat.
Having a conversation about better benefits and leave with your HR team doesn't mean you're done. But it does mean you're doing something. You're putting your management title to some good use in that moment, and getting your ass in gear. True power lies wherever you can make change happen. For someone in your org, this will matter.
When people are contemplating a career in management, they often say something like, "I don't want to approve vacation all day long." This is bizarre. We've never met an organization that has enough vacation underway at any given moment to attach a full-time manager to that task. But it's a common way to dunk on managers when you don't know, and aren't even a little bit curious, about what they do all day.
The glimmer of truth in the dunk is that sometimes approving leave or vacation or a transfer to a different office is more than a thing you have to do. It's a thing you get to do. It's where, for many leaders, the honor and grace and service shows up in the role. It's where approving a thing is not administrative overhead but it's changing someone's whole fucking life. Forever. And years later, when asked in a room full of strangers to think of a moment that had lasting impact, it's the thing they will scribble down.
— Melissa & Johnathan