To Glass Cliff Walkers With Love
Today, on 11/1/2018 at 11:10 am in their local time zones, Google staffers around the world are off to a massive protest action — dubbed #googlewalkout — against handling of sexual harassment at their company. It looks and is a big move. For years Google has posed as a paragon of culture that proclaims gender equality, inclusion, and diversity — until the time has come to wash the dirty laundry. Well, if people who work there have chosen to protest, something must have gone seriously wrong. And, not only with Google. And, the way I see it, it’s far from being only about sexual harassment, albeit the mainstream narrative of mishandling women at work usually focuses on exactly that. I want to offer a different perspective, the one that is detached from sex/gender-based mistreatment. What we deal with — in a broader sense — is a kind of a default disrespect to the female archetype wisdom.
Female archetype wisdom, someone might ask? What you are talking about? Well, let me turn on the harsh-speak mode then. The disrespect, in plain words, stands for ignoring and not giving credit to the many subtle yet immensely valuable contributions to organizational successes that come from the qualities generally viewed as inherent to females. As I offered in an earlier article:
“Intuitive vs. linear thinking brings us to the dichotomy of the left-brain/right-brain, the male-female balance, the organizational yin-yang. They write a lot about gender inequality in the tech industry, telling stories of harassment. It sounds weird to me, because as a female in software industry I’ve never encountered any harassment of that kind. It’s ridiculous that such things still happen in the corporate world of the 21st century. I’ve always worked with professionals, and the issue of gender never came up, it was always about professional qualities. However, it goes much deeper than the mere gender issues. It’s the disrespect to the wisdom of female archetype, and the values that are traditionally cared for by females in life, such as empathy, intuitiveness, care, and listening.”
Empathy, care, and listening.. Does it ring any bells now? The qualities of the female archetype stand as the watch guards registering whether an organization lives by its proclaimed values or not. It’s through empathy and care that we are able to exercise certain practices which are vital for people’s well-being (see Non-Violent Communication)and for the well-being of organizations in general. To put it bluntly, empathy, listening and care are assets, not liabilities. I kind of imagine how someone might think to themselves: “Hmm.. They now speak a lot about women in tech, inclusion, and gender equality. This might be just another buzzword, and we have business to do”. I’ve got a story for the owners of such thinking.
Throughout 2012–2016 there was a lot of buzz around Marissa Meyer, who stepped in as Yahoo’s CEO in times of crisis. The media churn would spew and spew the content that seemed to tie Yahoo’s troubles to her. I can’t tell whether it was intentional or not, but the churn produced much finger pointing at Meyer as a female who gets paid extremely well for doing poor job. The media dwelt and dwelt on the size of her compensation, but little has been said of … what exactly the situation was about. The glass cliff. Here’s the definition from Wikipedia: “ The glass cliff is the phenomenon of women in leadership roles, such as executives in the corporate world and female political election candidates, being likelier than men to achieve leadership roles during periods of crisis or downturn, when the chance of failure is highest.” The definition offers a smoothed out version. In human speak, here’s what the boy talk might get down to: “Uff… We kinda made a big mess here, and we have no idea how to sort this mess out. Let’s now hire a cleaning lady, and if she fails, we will then move the blame from ourselves and sign it all off as her fault”. The glass cliff phenomenon has been thoroughly researched, and there’s a selection of articles below for further reading.
Do you by any chance happen to recall a motto at Facebook? Move fast and break things. It appears that there have been many such fast movers and thing breakers who… needed a mom to clean after them, and who never cared to acknowledge her input. They mostly speak about glass cliff in relation to higher managerial positions, but … there are many kinds of glass cliff walkers out there. A QA manager who continuously points out a crucial root failure which produces more and more bugs with each new release, and her male colleagues just shrug her off, until one day… she is labelled as someone who hasn’t attended to the core issue. A product manager who puts all her heart and care into a product, neglected by a frat boy founder, who has lost interest in the product and proceeded to some other toys. Or, a certain multi-billionaire — the original “fast mover” and “things breaker” — whose toy is now in need of legions of moms for the mess to be cleaned. Guess what? There’s nothing easier than moving fast and breaking things. Any toddler can do that. And — back to serious talk — women, by their gender imprint, if you will, are better fit for attending to things put into their care in the long term. Moms will clean the mess, no worries. All they need to do their work is respect and support. The organizational environment and culture that acknowledges their input.
What about, well, sexual harassment? I’m certain we will live up to the times when the very idea of it would become unthinkable. To many of us this sounds like a stone age even now. But, we are only as strong as our weakest link is, and … I’m giving hearty claps to the Googlers who chose to be the harbingers of change.
