Patty McCord 4 lessons the pandemic taught us about work life and balance TED
Transcriber:
I’ve spent the last couple of years
traveling around the world
giving talks to big corporations
and little bitty start-ups
and lots of leadership teams
and women’s groups,
and what I’ve been talking
to people about,
I’ve been trying really hard
to convince people
that we can change the way we work.
But every time I do a talk,
somebody comes backstage
or follows me offstage
and says, “You know,
I’m so inspired by what you say.
It’s so great, it makes so much sense.
But we can’t.”
“We can’t because we’re regulated.”
“We can’t because our CFO says
we can’t do it.”
“We can’t because we’re in Europe.”
“We can’t because
we’re a service industry.”
“We can’t because we’re a nonprofit.”
And then last year came the pandemic.
And the pandemic changed everything
all over the world.
Service people started realizing
that they had to suit up and wear masks
and take temperatures
and wash their hands.
We had to start standing
six feet apart in lines.
We started working from home.
We started working virtually.
And we started learning
all kinds of things because we had to.
All that muscle around innovation
and flexibility and creativity
that we didn’t think we had,
we had all along.
And we now have realized that we can.
So what have we learned?
I mean, what did we learn right away?
First of all, we learned we’re not family.
The family is the toddler
walking around behind you
in the Zoom call with the pet.
The family is somebody
needing their diaper changed.
The family is making sure
you’re taking care of your mom.
That’s your family.
This is your team.
And we’ve also learned
that that separation
between family and work
has become this balancing act.
And that when we used to say,
“Well, this is my work home
and this is my family home,
and those are two
completely different things,”
for many of us, it’s exactly
the same thing.
You’re no longer at home and at work.
For many of us, work is at home
and the home is –
and it’s confusing,
and it’s creating a whole different level
of complexity and coordination
so that we understand
that it’s easier actually to work
when we can separate
the work that we do as a team
from the work that we do in our family.
Furthermore, in order
to be able to do all that,
we have to recognize
that we’re all adults.
And here’s the deal about adults.
Adults have responsibilities,
adults have obligations.
Adults have things
that they have to commit to.
And do you know that every
single person that works for you,
from the shop floor
to the executive suite,
is a grown-up?
But we have been operating
as if they aren’t.
We operate as if only the smart adults
are the people who are at the C Suite.
And as we move through the organization,
everybody sort of gets
a little dumbed down
and the rules get a lot stricter
and we have to have more control.
And the truth is, everybody’s a grown-up,
we can see it now.
Everybody has all of these things
to figure out and coordinate.
And so now we’re expecting
from people adult behavior.
We’re now focusing on the results
that matter, not the work.
And the way we track it now
is we don’t walk by and see who’s working.
We pay attention to what people are doing.
And I think that that’s always
been the best metric.
And you know what?
For the first time in my life,
the concept of best practices
is out the window.
And you know what?
We don’t care what Google’s doing
because we’re not Google.
We don’t care what some
other company is doing.
Nobody’s doing it best.
We’re all figuring it out as we go along
and we’re figuring it out
for our organizations
in our teams at this time.
So in order for people to deliver
the right results,
in order for people’s hard work to matter,
it has to be in the context
of what success looks like
for your organization.
So if we start to think about context,
it’s really important that we think
about how we teach that.
If we can teach everybody in the company
how to read a profit and loss statement,
if we can teach them
what the different teams do,
and what they’re setting out
to accomplish,
then people within their own small teams,
and within themselves,
can figure out what excellence
looks like for them.
And so then we can start operating
relatively independently
as a whole organization
because we’re all moving
in the same direction,
trying to do the same thing.
And there’s a really critically important
part of making that work,
and that’s communication.
And everything about
communication has changed.
We tend to think
that communication is this waterfall
from the top to the bottom.
The executives would tell somebody
and the next level would tell somebody
and we’d go all the way down
to the shop floor
and everybody would understand
what’s going on.
Well, it may not have worked
that well then,
but it certainly doesn’t
work that well now.
So now we have to recognize
it’s a different heartbeat.
What has it been before
and what should it be now?
How do we make sure that the messages
are clear and consistent?
Because that’s how people operate.
That’s how those adults
who get the freedom
and the responsibility to produce
great results operate best
is when they understand
what they need to know
in order to make the best decisions.
So that communication,
that skill around being
a great communicator
is something that each of us
needs to get better at.
One of the things we have to do
is think about what
the right discipline is for that.
If you used to communicate
to your team by walking by
and asking how they’re doing
or if they had heard something,
you’re going to have to schedule that now,
it’s going to have to have discipline.
We’ve got to check in
with the people on the shop floor
to make sure they’re hearing
what they need to hear
because it’s not going
to automatically happen.
One of the ideas I have
is just jot down at the end of every day
a sentence of what worked
and what didn’t work.
And you don’t have to look
at it for a month.
But when you look back, over a month,
you want to look for,
“Wow, that was surprising.
I didn’t really think
that would be as effective as it is.”
Or maybe it would be, like,
“We keep trying to have
this in-person meeting in Zoom,
and it turns out
that there’s 14 people on the call
and only two of them are talking.
Maybe it’s an email.”
So we have to rethink all of the ways,
not just the work we’re doing,
but the ways we’re doing it.
So now I’m starting to hear
a lot of nostalgia
around the way it used to be.
There are things we aren’t doing
now that don’t matter.
Maybe we don’t need to go back
for five levels of approval.
Maybe we don’t need to go back
and do that annual performance review.
Maybe we don’t need to do
a whole bunch of things
that were part of the way we do business
that just aren’t making a difference.
You know what?
The way we used to do it
not only is not the way of the future,
but we’re discovering
so many wonderful things right now.
Let’s not lose it.
We want to create
a new organization, new workforce,
that’s excited about taking
all of the things that we’ve learned
using that muscle, going forward.
One of the most important
things that we can do
is realize the things
that we aren’t doing now.
The stuff that we’ve stopped doing
and not go back and do it again.
What if we don’t go back?
What if we go forward
and rethink the way we work?
Thank you.