#Weeknotes 77 (7 Jun) — Self advocacy, better layoffs, cat doodles and the added value of subtraction
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Work wise:
This week I’ve been thinking about the necessity of advocating for oneself, especially at work, and the need to be intentionally clear about our needs, aspirations, and boundaries.
While most of us desire to work for companies with a great culture that looks after its employees, the reality is that organisations that fit the bill are few and far in between.
It’s easy to feel valued and supported when things are going well: targets are being hit, the market is stable, and the company is investing in their employees etc. But how does it respond when things aren’t going so well? Tough decisions need to be made for the survival of the business. How do things unfold and get “resolved” in those situations? How transparent is the top-down decision-making process and how are they being communicated? They say you can only know someone’s true colour in moments of crisis, and that certainly applies to organisations as well.
A test of a company’s culture is to observe how it behaves when it hits rough patches.
There’s a naivety, or more of a hope, in thinking that our employers have our backs and interests in mind. But at the end of the day, it’s a professional relationship. There’s an exchange between the work getting done and the associated financial compensation. It’s meant to be mutually beneficial. We work to earn a living and businesses need people to operate and grow.
We can talk about what it means to sustain a strong company culture, to operate more inclusively, and to improve employee satisfaction and benefits. But at the end of the day, when the market shrinks, the profits dwindle, or there are leadership changes, initiatives get cut, benefits get reduced, teams restructure and redundancies often follow suit for the business’s survival. These are the times when businesses may have to liquidate some of their assets. And what greater assets to an organisation than the people, its employees?
One of the things I learned in life is that stability is an illusion. Stability in family, life and work are all things that are hugely dependent on external factors which are out of our control: the behaviours of other people, the market conditions, environmental shifts, laws and policies, the list goes on. There are too many things that can’t predicted. What is within our control is ourselves. Only we can know our individual needs and aspirations based on our accumulated life experience and reflections. This is why it’s so important that we be our own representatives and advocate for things that are important to us: be it social connection, financial stability, purposeful contributions, recognition, autonomy and much more.
When we make clear our needs, even better if we’re willing to be a bit vulnerable at the same time, we’re effectively inviting others for help in meeting these needs… and if lucky, get them to advocate for us too. If we make our needs and stances clear, the “good” employers will try to accommodate…at least while the business can afford to.
Recently, a colleague said they admire me for how well I seem to be able to advocate for myself. I had mixed feelings about this because what’s the alternative? The flip side of not advocating for oneself is enabling others to make decisions for us and letting things happen to us which only enforces a victim situation.
How many change makers can you think of who never advocated for themselves and pursued their beliefs and passions? External pressures are constant and come from everywhere trying to get us to conform, blindly follow rules, and not question what’s collectively considered to be a “normal” way of living, or even being. The harsh truth is, that we’re all guilty of contributing to this great societal expectation in our desire to have a sense of belonging: being accepted in the world we’ve been brought into. We need to learn to dial down those external pressures and tune into how we can find fulfilment and get the best out of our short time in this world. One way to do that my friend, is to be our own advocate and champion.
So I hope we get to a place where advocating for oneself isn’t something to be complemented but rather, the norm.
I listened to a podcast by Adam Grant that was quite timely as I was pondering about what an organisation that truly values and looks after its people is like, and if they even exist.
Key highlights for me:
- On communicating decisions from a leadership position: “Only do things that you can explain” and “Better to say the wrong thing by heart than the right things by committee.” This is around being authentic and how people can relate more to messages that aren’t perfectly crafted
- There’s a difference between agreement and trust. Employees don’t need to agree with all the business decisions. It’s more important to have their trust that decisions are being made in a transparent way and with the collective interests in mind.
- Studies show that 9 out of 10 leaders are criticised for under-communicating compared to over-communicating. When one under-communicates, it can feel that the communicators, AKA leaders of the organisations, don’t care. It signals disengagement.
- There is a better way to do layoffs and it seems Airbnb managed to do just that. They had to lay off a large number of their staff during the Covid pandemic and yet somehow managed to gain more trust from their employees. It all boiled down to how quickly, transparently, and authentically the CEO behaved throughout the process and how he took radical measures to ensure that support was in place for those that are leaving (e.g. looking into individual situations, providing access to healthcare benefits after leaving the job, setting up teams and initiatives to support with securing jobs). If only more organisations modelled after them!
Separately, as a continuation to the last weeknote, I had a nice intro meeting with my line managee. I got to know her family and life situation as well as her aspirations for work. She is a seasoned Business Analyst (BA), a different field to mine, and has been with the organisation much longer than I have. I wasn’t sure how much I could offer as her line manager in terms of organisation processes (which she’d know a fair bit already!) or in the field of BA due to my limited knowledge in that area. While I am her line manager, the relationship I envisage for us is more peer-to-peer in that there is plenty we can learn from each other. In addition, I’ll keep an eye on how she’s fairing with work, be her advocate, create opportunities, and escalate concerns on her behalf. Her response to this proposal was quite positive. Rather than forcing a structure on our relationship in the beginning, it’s better to keep it flexible and shape it over time into a relationship that works and is beneficial for both sides. Thinking about it this way also eases some of the anxieties around certain manager role expectations and rigid processes. This way, we’re more able to tune into each other’s needs rather than abiding by a checkbox exercise relationship dictated by the organisation.
We did a fun activity in a team meeting this week where we got paired up with someone we haven’t met who has a different job than we do. The task was to draw what comes to mind when learning the other person’s job title. I got paired up with my colleague Tara who’s a frontend developer and here’s my drawing. What I know of front-end developers is that they tend to work closely with visual designers to ensure the design vision is achieved. And a lot of that is in the detail: alignment, spacing, font sizing and positioning etc. So that’s what formed my inspiration in this drawing. Plus cats are fun.
Tara also did a great drawing of my role as a service designer which was quite spot on in the kind of work that I do: lots of problem-exploring, solving, sense-making, and working with complexities. ❤
Life wise:
I was quite proud of my homework assigned by my son’s nursery. The task was to take the bear, called Bonnie, on loan from the nursery for the weekend and document the activities that happened. I was able to quickly print out some photos and then put it all together Sunday evening after the toddler went to bed so it would be ready to be ‘handed in’ the next day. It was a bit of a mad rush but I think I did ok. I realise this may give other parents anxiety on the ‘expected quality’ of the task but my design background won’t let me off without putting in some effort so I’ll have to be ok with being cursed by other parents.
Things I came across:
One podcast I loved this week was the one by Hidden Brain on the value of subtracting. It talked about an amazing woman who, amongst achieving many feats of firsts for women, invented the now modern day building block which is hollow and thus reduced the weight and product costs by a large margin. Another example was the Strider (aka balance) bikes for kids that took over a long-standing “kids bike” market simply by removing the pedals of the bike. It’s so crazy when it comes to ideas, we tend to go with addition rather than subtraction. We’re losing out on the potential of reduction. More isn’t always better.
Related is an ad campaign by British airways that removed much of what goes into a typical ad: logo and tagline. It’s interesting how by removing elements and simplifying, we can turn something that often gets ignored into something we’re compelled to engage with.
I love this idea of adding value by subtracting.
I also loved the following excerpt from a newsletter by in the medium blog:
‘AI models are essentially pattern matchers. They’re designed to give you the most typical version of a thing, whether that’s a novel in the style of yourself or a portrait of a cat playing piano in the style of Keith Haring…So, if a model trained on your work spits out something that matches what you’ve already created: Congrats! You’ve done completely average work (for you).
…machines alone can’t produce the kind of storytelling that moves people, the kind that “make[s] you weep or gasp or call your mother.” That’s not because they literally can’t produce the sentences, but because, as Rushkoff says: “We engage with art for a sense of connection to the artist. Someone has to be home.”’
So true. So much of art is about connection and human connections aren’t something to be replaced or ‘solved’ by AI.
I’m ending this week with an amazing video shared by a colleague that led me to discover these young rappers from The Kabin Studio. It’s another reminder of the many untapped potentials of children.
Until next week!
