Hey everyone,
It's Josh, and I hope you and your family are feeling well. On Friday, we learned that Microsoft did something few think a corporation, especially one as large as Microsoft, can do. It behaved ... compassionately.
The tech giant sent a memo on April 6 to its 144,000-person staff saying that parents can take a 12-week paid leave to be with their kids. This is, in a word, huge.
Many parents right now are caught between taking care of their children while also expected to perform their jobs at the same level in the Before Times. Seeing a company like Microsoft lead with compassion, explicitly telling their staff, “Don’t worry about work, your family comes first” is the kind of leadership all companies can follow.
The CEO of a media company with more than 300 employees told me on Friday that he has weekly “town halls” but also also has directed his top lieutenants to make sure they are doing at least two video conferences with their teams each day.
“These aren’t for directives,” he said, “but instead, I want to make sure managers are looking into their direct reports' eyes at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. It’s about connection. Look, everyone is struggling right now, depressed. We have to let staff know that we put them first. The business will come.”
Even as the coronavirus has upended our notions of “work,” leadership still falls into a Churchillian model: crisis emphasizes the difference between good and bad leadership.
The idea of compassionate leadership, it seems, deeply resonates with workers.
Take this viral tweet, for instance:
Many of the replies say the same thing: I want to work for your boss.
I took to Twitter to see how companies’ leadership were leaning into compassion, and the responses had a common thread: transparency and communication.
Of course, that stems from leadership’s actions before we all worked remotely. Many execs say they have an open door policy, but fail to realize that it’s a two-way street. Saying you have an open-door policy is not the same of actually having one. They need to make an effort to talk with staff, not wait for staff to come to them. And if you haven’t already established yourself as someone who is empathetic with your staff, all of a sudden flipping on that switch in a crisis can come off as disingenuous.
“The difference between mere management and true leadership is communication,” Churchill once said.
Here are some examples of true leadership.
Horizon Media’s CEO sends a daily note "reassuring that he is in this too. thanking teams. calling out birthdays. his wife gives daily wellness ideas. one employee replied all and said ‘Thank you and stay encouraged. I appreciated your transparency today.’ the teams/agency feels closer."
McKinsey’s leadership holds weekly AMAs addressing concerns. But also has introduced “special PTO if you’re in a situation where you truly can’t work from home temporarily (connectivity, etc), free subscription to headspace app, subsidized emergency childcare... the list goes on and on. I feel cherished at work.”
Salesforce has a “90 day no lay off pledge, putting family and health before work, flexible work schedule and time off, benefits for working parents, offering virtual workouts and meditations.”
Let me know how your manager and/or leadership team has shown compassion during these exhausting times. Be healthy, be safe, be smart. See you next week.
Josh Sternberg
Media and Tech Editor, Adweek
