Leading In The Time Of Virus
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 129: Gina Hadley
Hi. I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I coach and advise their leaders to help them maximize their impact.
This episode is part of Season 2 - which we’ve sub-titled, “Leading In The Time Of Virus”.
In these conversations we discover how some of the world’s most innovative and creative leaders are adapting their leadership to our new reality.
These people are among the world’s best problem solvers.
This episode is a conversation with Gina Hadley, the co-founder of The Second Shift. In their words, they are on a mission to connect empowered women with companies who need their skills, their talent, and their voices.
The pandemic is accelerating change across society. I personally hope that The Second Shift will help to bring about one of the most meaningful changes that could come from all this. Namely, the ability to connect companies with talented women who want to work on a more flexible basis.
Gina talked about how to fully understand what your employees need, about the benefits of real empowerment of your employees, and about the personal challenge of living in the moment.
Here’s Gina Hadley.
Charles: (1:18)
Gina, welcome to Fearless. Thank you so much for coming back on the show.
Gina Hadley: (1:21)
My pleasure. It's so nice to be here and see you and get to chat.
Charles: (1:25)
Likewise. Tell us where you are, and who are you in quarantine with?
Gina Hadley: (1:29)
We are in our house on the eastern end of Long Island in a town called Sag Harbor. It's actually the house I grew up in, and I'm here with my husband and my 17 and 14 year old sons.
Charles: (1:41)
What's the state of your business? Tell us a little bit about how your business is doing.
Gina Hadley: (1:45)
We are in an interesting place. We made the decision last year not to raise a round of financing that we had been preparing for, mostly because we did not enjoy many of the people that we had spoken to around the fundraising, what they wanted to turn our business to. Look, we're not a VC-backed business, and I think we had been somehow lulled into thinking that you get to a certain point in your business and you're supposed to go raise money, institutional money. It was a great edification for us. But we had shifted our outlook and the way that we were growing, and so I feel actually really grateful that I'm not on the hook for millions of dollars at this moment, but also, right now it's giving us the opportunity to really dig into the reasons that we started the company, which were to create flexible work opportunities for our members, these extraordinarily professional women who've spent their entire lives building their careers, and we're a small and mighty team, so we haven't laid anybody off, we haven't furloughed anybody. We're just trying to be as pragmatic and thoughtful with every dollar that we have.
Charles: (3:06)
How has your leadership adapted over the last few weeks? How are you keeping the team together, practically and emotionally?
Gina Hadley: (3:16)
Well, for us, it's not that new. Part of our team is in San Francisco, so we don't ever work with them in the office. We are built on flexibility, that's the whole thesis of our business. So we have an office, and a lot of the times we'll sit together, but there has never been any kind of assumption that everybody has to be in the office from nine o'clock in the morning until five o'clock in the evening.
I think at the beginning of this my co-founder, Jenny and I, and our management team, we were super anxious. Like everybody else, we didn't know what was going to happen next. About two weeks into it, we had a meeting with the entire team, and I think what we did successfully is let everybody take the time to be anxious and freak out. No matter how many times you press refresh or you redo the Excel spreadsheet, you can't make business happen if it's not happening.
So we're all going about being in touch with clients, Jenny's in touch with members, we're talking on panels, I'm talking to you, I'm having sales teams meetings, but I think everybody's in this moment of uncertainty, so Jenny and I wanted to let the team know we're not expecting anything Herculean from anybody at this moment, and this isn't normal, this isn't remote working. We're all working under house arrest. We all have our families here, we all have anxiety, we're all worried about getting sick, we're all worried about the supply chain, we’re worried about the planet. So I think being able to take the time to breathe ... You and I were talking before this about taking the time to exercise. This is a very strange moment, and I'm okay with leaning into the strangeness of it. I'm not going to sit on Zoom calls all day long just because we usually would be in a meeting.
Charles: (5:22)
You have always been a very forward looking business. What’s your time frame now? Have you accelerated the way you’re looking at the company’s development?
Gina Hadley: (5:30)
No. We were waiting for the world to catch up with us anyway. We were very early into this whole idea of flexible work and remote work and the idea of engaging with experts when you needed them on demand, and this whole world that we're living in now where we have to communicate in different ways, we can't rely on the old ways of doing business. So I think we are perfectly positioned to enable our existing employer partners to continue to reap the benefits of working with our extraordinary membership, but we're also beginning to engage in conversations with companies and leaders who hadn't, who had been reticent, I would say, to embrace this kind of way of doing business.
I really believe that this is a tool in an arsenal. We're going to have full-time employees, we're going to have employees go back to the office, we're going to have teams that need to collaborate in the same room. All of these things are going to come back, but what I am cautiously optimistic about now is those stakeholders and companies who had always leaned out and talked about the "future", because it's been here. If you keep talking about the future of something, it just means that you're putting it off and you don't want to deal with it, but we're in it now, and I'm hoping that the lessons that we learned from this will stick when we get out of it.
Charles: (7:07)
Are you seeing evidence of that? Are you seeing companies beginning to be more open to the possibilities of how you put workforces together?
Gina Hadley: (7:14)
Okay. My theory in all of this, it's not just companies, this all comes down to individuals. Because we all know that almost every company has extraordinary benefits. They want to retain their employees. They have the best efforts when they put together their policies and their procedures, but what it really comes down to are those managers and those stakeholders being able to implement all of these tools. And right now, under duress, many of those stakeholders and decision makers are having to trust the employees that they hired to do jobs without being monitored at all times.
One of the bright spots, I believe, in all of this, is we are seeing employees be so incredibly efficient without commuting into the office, without sitting in endless meetings. We are seeing collaboration in different, more creative ways. I'm hoping that those folks that are doing this against their will at this point, as many are, will understand that, okay, so maybe Charles isn't going to come into the office on Thursdays and Fridays, because it would make his life much easier and to make him a happier employee, then I will retain him and I'm still getting the best out of him, but I as a manager have to be buttoned up and understand what I need from Charles, because if he's not sitting down the hall, it's harder for me if I haven't told him what I really need and what I'm thinking. It really comes down to trust.
Charles: (9:00)
Are people beginning to codify that in any way, or are we still too early in the process for that to happen? Are people are still just reacting?
Gina Hadley: (9:07)
I believe we are still pretty early. I think there's still this shock. I think that we are still also ... I keep coming back to the fact that the underlying anxiety in all of this ... I don't know if in your house, but we had to stop looking at the stock market every time it opened. There are these things that I think everybody is dealing with, but as we lean into these moments, I hope that there are going to be policies and procedures, and the way that we look at talent is going to change forever for good, and I mean good as in better for employees and for employers.
One of the things that is very interesting to us at this point is watching these huge hiring freezes across so many, whether it's agency networks or holding companies or big companies, but it doesn't mean that the work doesn't have to get done. So how do these talent and HR officers begin to look at what I assumed was going to be a full time hire of the person sitting at that desk right there? I may never get that person, so how do I start to incorporate different strategies and get the right person to get the work done? Because, as you know better than anybody, so much of the world is “I had that person before, and that's the way that we've always done it,“ which is probably the least creative way to think about it, but if you have to start to get creative in your thinking, then you begin to open up an entire world of opportunities, and this is where we really believe the second shift fits in to this whole mix.
Charles: (10:51)
I’m sure there are suddenly even more people interested in being part of your network. Are you adapting your vetting process? Are you becoming more rigorous?
Gina Hadley: (11:00)
Our vetting process is pretty rigorous, as you know, and so we take about 10% of applicants at this point, so we don't feel that we need to be any more rigorous. What I would like to see is the opportunity to onboard even more members and engage with companies not just in this super senior specified category in which we have always worked. What I would love to, as we move forward on this journey and we begin to integrate these tools on remote and flexibility and a different way of looking at careers, we can then bring in maybe some more junior people who are the best at what they do, but maybe they're at the moment in their career where they haven't had the chance to have 15 years experience.
I would like to see more senior, whether they be on the verge of retired members, being able to come in and take board seats and be more active than they had been before. “I was going to retire, but now there's this opportunity for me to make a huge difference in the small company and use my expertise.” That, for us, is interesting, trying to figure out, how do we expand our membership? For us, in some ways, it's an embarrassment of riches, the members that we have. These women are the best at what they do, and they are the most connected. As we've talked about, I get one, I get Mary and I get everybody she went to HBS with. It's that kind of ... I get Susie and it's everybody that she worked at Viacom with. So our membership is probably ... Last week, we were up 250% for requests for membership applications. So we're staying true to the path. We're also not going to make that many different decisions in this moment.
Charles: (13:01)
As you said, working from home is different than working remotely. But there are still things that we’re learning from this experience. What are you seeing that you think will be valuable and sustainable for businesses going forward?
Gina Hadley: (13:13)
I believe ... To go back to the statement that we said before, I really believe that this all comes down to management and the way that ... Whether you're managing up or managing down, no matter where you are on the food chain, you're requiring ... Unless you're real consultant who's just coming in, you've got a very specific ... But that's different. Our members are used to setting KPIs and milestones on very specific projects. What I'm seeing from full time employees that are having to work this way to manage teams and then manage up, it really is about communication. It all comes down to …
In order to work this way, you have to put the work in at the beginning. We know that this is a discipline. It's way easier to just all be sitting in an office and be able to throw things out when you need to. If we still look at the org chart and the way that we manage people, it's from the beginning of the Industrial Era that we had to make sure that this guy was turning that cog so this guy could put the screw and they could attach the bolts, and that's still the way we work.
So in this moment now, we're being asked to re-imagine what it is to be a team, what it is to be responsible for your piece of the business, and all of that has to be a give and take. Unfortunately, the way that the hierarchy in so many companies works is the more headcount, the more information you have, the more indispensable you are, then the higher up you move in the food chain, but that's kind of antithetically opposed to what it is to managing this way. What you really want to do is empower everybody that works for you and be extremely transparent with the folks that you work with, because so much is unsaid in these moments. We're all on Slack and we're on Zoom and we're in emails back and forth, but if you don't have that human interaction, then you have to make sure that there's nothing left unsaid, if possible. That's a whole different way of managing workflow as well.
Charles: (15:29)
Empowerment is such a powerful concept from a leadership standpoint. What are you seeing gets in the way of it?
Gina Hadley: (15:35)
Distrust. From our viewpoint, what we hear some times, and all anybody has to do is engage with The Second Shift and these myths are quickly cleared up, is how can anybody care as much about my work if they don't work ... How can they care as much about my company if they don't work here full time? The idea that nobody knows my business as well as I do, which we all know leads to a myopic view of things, and sometimes it's great to have somebody come in who doesn't know your business, because then they bring you a different point of view.
I think that those are some of the myths that need to be cleared up. I think we don't do an awesome job teaching managers how to manage. That's a different skill. I always come back to the agency model when I worked at Ogilvy, it always confounded me that if you are an amazing art director or copywriter or producer, you got produced and then you had to manage people. That's not what you're really good at. What you're really good is what you're really good at. There were some people that are extraordinary managers because they just understand how to look at the entire field and call plays, but they may not have a specific skill that would have ... That's not rewarded most of the time.
So I believe that we've got to look at the way that we create and manage teams differently, and leaders have to be able to be transparent as much as they can.
Charles: (17:07)
As you work with different companies, are you conscious that some companies do that better than others, from a cultural and organizational practices standpoint?
Gina Hadley: (17:16)
Everyone has the best intentions. Once again, I know I keep repeating this, but it really does come down to individual managers and stakeholders. When you understand... This is something that I've long held and I don't think I've said it out loud that many times, but when employees understand that it's not their work and it's not their job and it's not their company, that it's all a collective, they're far more successful in being able to articulate and translate what they need from the people that they work with.
Charles: (17:51)
It reminds me of your earlier point. What are we doing here, why is that important, is so fundamental. Now more than ever. If you have that common belief, you create commitment and community whether you’re in the office or a 100 miles away. If you have that connection, it works. If you don’t, it doesn’t matter if you're sitting next to each other, you’re just not engaged, or as invested or innovative or creative.
Gina Hadley: (18:17)
I think in this moment, especially, I think that everyone has to ... Look, we're a mission-founded company, we're a mission-driven company, but I think your mission, even where you work, no matter what you do, is you can create an atmosphere in which everyone feels safe, everyone feels supported, and it's not going to happen all the time, and I'm not being a Pollyanna that we're going to create this utopian world and workplace and stuff has to get done, sometimes people don't cut it, things happen, but I also believe that what we're seeing right now, even in this moment, if I can get a little meta on all of this, somehow we've lost the thread of what it is to be connected.
The fact that we're all alone in our homes and feeling so disconnected, when in the majority of the times, we're out in the world and not making eye contact and on our phones and not actually communicating with anybody. If we can press the reset, even within our own teams, even if you're making a widget that has nothing to do with anything mission-driven, it's the widget that does this, your mission is to take care of the people that work for you, to create an environment where everybody feels safe to come to work. Not everybody's going to be happy all the time, not everybody's going to be completely fulfilled, but it's also the idea that, once again, the whole ownership idea, we don't actually own any of our employees either. They are there, they act ...
We're in this relationship together, so it's also the idea that if you're not happy with me and I'm not happy with you, then go with God and find another job. I'm not going to hold onto you because I trained you and I put all this money into you. So the idea that all of this is fluid and that we're all looking for opportunities to find some kind of satisfaction and be gratified with the work that we do every day, because it is where we spend the majority of our time, we have to look at this as more of an ecosystem than, "This is the way we do things."
Charles: (20:15)
Yeah, I agree with that, totally. I learnt early on in running one of our early businesses that the most important thing I could do many days was just to say, “Thank you,” to everybody that chose to work there, because to your point, people don't have to come back to work tomorrow. They make a choice to come back to work tomorrow.
Gina Hadley: (20:32)
We're lucky that we're all being able to be quarantined and that we're not out on the front lines, but it is. It's the choice. There's a tenant in Lean & Agile, our COO, is also a product person, and some of the way that we run our company is based on how you run Lean & Agile development teams. One of the whole tenants is, if you're a manager, when you ask somebody how they are, you actually want to know how they are, because there's not that much time. If you're in disparate teams and you're coding and you're not even speaking, when you do have the opportunity to connect, it's real. It's a real connection.
If I'm your manager and I ask you, "Charles, how are you doing today?", it should not just be an offhanded thing. I should actually want to know if I asked you that. The idea that we thank the people that work for us, so much of it is, "Oh, you should be lucky he's working here," all of these kinds of things, and maybe it's just because I work in a company that's run by women and we’re the majority women. There's just some kinder, gentler ways to look at how we interact with each other. For us, it's the basis of how we come to work every day.
Charles: (21:54)
Everyone that I’ve talked to over the last few weeks of this has raised some version of the point that says, we’re more interested in each other, legitimately and genuinely and authentically interested in each other than we used to be. And the first few minutes of every Zoom or Webex meeting are about exactly what you’ve just described, which is “how are you?” And they’re genuinely interested in the answer to that question. It’s not the cursory question they used to ask when they walked in the conference room for that meeting. And I hope that will be one of the lasting things that come out of this.
What are you learning about yourself?
Gina Hadley: (22:27)
I think that I'm more calmer than I thought I would be in this moment. I'm giving myself some more room than I would have expected. The past five years, founding a company and running a company, and as you know, I'm on a plane every three weeks, I'm in meetings, I'm at conferences. I thought that I would feel really agitated to not be doing that, and I'm learning to live in this moment. I think it also comes to the fact that I am the age that I am and my children are the age that they are, and I never thought I would get to spend this much time with them before they went off to college and high school and all of these things. I also feel extremely unsettled, but I'm okay with that. I feel like I'm in some kind of 12 step program where I'm in the moment right now, where I can only handle what I can handle every day, and I'm not actually sure what else to do.
Charles: (23:35)
It is an extraordinary time of self reflection, isn’t it? I’m not sure I’ve ever found people more open and available to explore new possibilities about how they show up and to think about what really matters to them..
Gina Hadley: (23:48)
That's my question. As we have these conversations, how do we ... Because right now, we're in this petri dish. How do we not forget these lessons once we're all back to “normal” ... If normal life, when it does, if it ever comes back again. How do we create these actual interactions that mean something? How do we take into account what somebody else is feeling or thinking? How do we continue to be thankful for what we have? I think that for us, that also has to do with the way that we look at our employees and the way that we look at our clients, and the way that we look at our members, is we can't take any of this for granted, because we are luckily in the position where we built an entire company around the future of work. So if we don't find some way to be grateful and thankful for that at this moment, then I don't know when we will.
Charles: (24:51)
I think that’s true. From my perspective, what really matters is being clearer than ever about what really matters to us. Because we’ve suddenly discovered that the predictability and certainty we used to rely on were illusions. And the frames of reference by which we decided what was important can all be taken away from us literally overnight. There’s almost a form of death about this, in that the lives we had two months ago are dead.
Those lives aren’t coming back. We’re going to have create new lives. And to your point, we’ve got to make sure those lives are built on things that really matter. Because when we are finally dead, all the material stuff we were chasing—
Gina Hadley: (25:32)
Means nothing.
Charles: (25:32)
Right. Means nothing. I think it’s so important that we build businesses and in fact lives that are based on things that really matter to us - that we are making the difference we want to make.
Gina Hadley: (25:44)
Just to kind of come back to when you asked me what I'm seeing in this moment from our clients, I believe that if we can continue to iterate on this idea of everything of what everything you do is a cause and effect, and not that it has to ... Every decision that you make, but when you think about how you're building your teams or how you're building your companies or how you're getting your work done, and you keep saying that you want more women in leadership positions, and you keep saying that you want a more diverse candidate slate when you're looking for jobs.
If that's really true and if it's not just something that you have in your mission statement or something that came from your holding company, then try to think about different ways of working, try and take the lessons from these moments that we have and realize that maybe the reason I keep hiring the same person is because I just keep expecting the same thing. For me, that's how we may come out of this and we make some real changes that, for us, will echo, because if we can get disadvantaged groups at this point to become more a part of how we work every day, maybe we wouldn't also see in this moment of that there's a certain bunch of us that are working from home and safe and quarantined and many of us that are going out onto the front line, and it does divide across lines.
Charles: (27:08)
If I had a 100 percent emoji I would type it here. Gina, thank you so much. We will come out of this stronger.
Gina Hadley: (27:15)
I think so too.
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