The Manifesto

Dave Hardwick
Aug 8, 2017 · 4 min read

It would be hard to be working in the software industry on August 8, 2017, and not have heard about the Googler’s manifesto against diversity, the ex-Googler’s response, the on-line backlash, Google’s CEO response, and the employee’s firing. It’s a scene.

First, let’s all agree on the most important thing: We’re having a hard discussion about hiring practices and team building in the tech industry, and it’s high time. Our biasses in these two arenas create huge challenges to our success. By ‘challenges’ I mean our initial perceptions of reality that cause drag, degrading individual, team, and company performance, and impede progress towards desired goals and overall mission.

What’s being missed in the discussion so far is the science behind new approaches to recruiting and building teams that improve trust and the bonds between us. The author of ‘The Manifesto’ points to a number of assertions that I remember hearing at other tech firms back in the later ’90s or early ’00s that were fresh at the time, and might have been interesting places to begin a study to understand better the differences in the work of men and women. Certainly, the authors’s words hint in that direction, but then veer off into conjecture or political rants. This is rather odd given that Google is one of the few companies out there really pushing the boundaries of science in terms of hiring practices, team formation, and team performance. For technologists and people who use scientific approaches to get their jobs done, not applying these learnings, or outright ignoring them seems off-track.

Which all begs the question what are the differences between men and women in the workplace? Here’s an illustrative post on LinkedIn by Adam Grant showing why the differences between Men and Women are exaggerated. Short version: Our biases regarding work-place performance rooted in our views of women and men are likely inaccurate, which is not a surprise if one has any sense of the history of computing and the roles that Ada Lovelace and Rear Admiral Grace Hopper played in its evolution. We all need to be on guard to typifying given work performance as male or female. We need to work harder at identifying behaviors, not sex, race, religion, or other ways in which our brains classify quickly to help us use our brain’s energy efficiently (see Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Kahneman for more on this).

Still, there are those who will ask, are there differences between men and women we should be paying attention to? One area that neither Adam, nor ‘The Manifesto’s’ writer cover are differences in hormone production between Men and Women. Dr. Paul J. Zak is one of the leading theorists in the neuroeconomics research field, and the most significant areas of his research center on the the roles the hormones oxytocin and testosterone play in developing or destroying trust bonds between us. In general, the release of oxytocin improves trust bonds, and testosterone reduces them (stress also reduces oxytocin, and thus trust). Zak’s studies show that testosterone has positive benefits for men and women, especially in producing high motivation and drive. Men have 5x to 10x more testosterone than women, and males start to see testosterone production decline at about age 30 or so. The real challenge is in how to balance out testosterone’s positive benefits in generating high motivation and drive, while also improving trust through pro-social behaviors that release oxytocin. Put another way, you can decide to behave in ways that generally cause the release of oxytocin in others and yourself, improving trust, or you can behave in ways that increase testosterone production in yourself and others and reduce trust. For more on this, suggest Paul’s most recent book, Trust Factor.

At the end, ‘The Manifesto’ situation at Google is all about trust and leadership. Trust between co-workers, trust between execs and staff, trust between a company and the community it works within. There will now be some in the tech community who will be emboldened to push their views, and there will be others who will hold their tongue. It will be important for Google and other companies to establish or re-establish ground rules for the discussions around shared values (and clarify those that are out of bounds), recruiting practices, and team performance.

The key learning for all of us is that we can all pick up a book or two, move our thinking forward, learn about our humanness, and then start working at getting better at creating great things. That’s why we’re all working in the tech field after all!

Dave Hardwick

Written by

Talent, Startups, Leadership, Disruption, Climbing. Posts and pictures are my own unless other attribution.

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