A Call for Courage

Last year, we chose empathy in action as the theme for Microsoft US. Why? Because our cultural aspirations are to be customer obsessed, diverse and inclusive, and to operate as one team…and if there’s one common skill required to achieve success across all three, it’s empathy. As I’ve talked about before, empathy is the critical skill of leaning-in and opening your mind to the opinions and perspectives of others, of listening so intently that you can begin to feel the other person’s emotions.  

Focusing on building empathic muscle and exercising it at scale turned out to be good preparation for the year 2020. Being part of a 10,000-person business where everyone is working remotely, amid a pandemic, enduring social unrest and economic uncertainty, requires patience, agility, resilience…and a whole lot of empathy.  

Every person in MSUS has their own story – they might be parents to young children who make constant demands of their time, or caregivers to aging adults where the risk of infection may cause upsetting separation. Or maybe they just miss the pace, friendships and productivity that comes with being in the office with others. We all have a unique situation and taking the time to get close to each other – albeit virtually – to really understand each other’s unique situation is the first step to building empathy. It’s called proximity…and it’s a powerful skill. 

Proximity has helped us begin to create a more inclusive environment in MSUS. From the moment Bryan Stevenson delivered his powerful remarks at our sales kickoff in September, 2019, until January, 2020 when our whole business shared a private viewing of his movie Just Mercy, we have spent thousands of hours talking about race and what an inclusive culture really  looks like. Building on this initial momentum, we created mechanisms that would help create a safe space for people to talk to each other about these complicated, emotional topics.  

So how do we know if this is working? 

We can gauge reaction by listening acutely to an internal daily pulse survey which, among many things, asks how much people agree with the statement that “Microsoft US is diverse and inclusive, is open to each others’ ideas, values, and invites differing perspectives”, and by how much “we believe diversity is critical to success”. Since we began explicitly discussing race, we’ve seen an encouraging 15-point increase in our daily pulse results. 

But what now? How do we take the next step towards building an inclusive environment? When I asked my employees that question, the answer became obvious. 

We must help our people build courage so that we can create more trust. Specifically, we need to teach people HOW to have tough conversations so that they can speak up. We need to give our people – both managers and individual contributors alike– the courage to tell the truth…the courage to ask for help… and the tools to build trust.  

We need these skills every day in everything we do – talking to our customers about their business challenges, giving feedback to engineering on product truth, speaking up when we see unethical behavior, having tough performance conversations, and of course, talking to each other about diversity and inclusion. Systemic courage will accelerate our quest to put empathy into action, and ultimately, will help us perform better.  

And the great news is this: As Brené Brown has shown us, courageous leadership is something that we can learn how to do.  

So, for this new fiscal year at Microsoft US, I’m happy to share that we’ll continue focusing on putting empathy into action, by working to build courage, starting by training our entire extended leadership team using Brené’s Dare to Lead methodology.  

I’ll be sure to keep you posted on our journey!