Sick Kid Flexibility | The Toxic Culture Gap | The Madness Of March

Welcome back to another version of This Week in Culture. I hope you all are doing great and having the right conversations in your workplaces.?

Flexibility: My daughter was sick this past week. She had to be out of school for a few days. (She’s 5.) If you’ve done the “parent of a sick kid” thing (many of us have), you know it can be a real dance with work and some bosses. It was underscored again to me this week about the value of my team at Culture Partners, who can afford me space and grace when I need it, with the understanding that stuff will still get done. This should be normative in workplaces by now. Unfortunately this dynamic is often only for the privileged. Many frontline workers do not get the option to stay home when their child is sick. So many of our hot takes and discussions about WFH and RTO and hybrid are tied up in the need for managers to normalize flexibility. But we also need to have conversations about equity. Unfortunately, that isn’t at-scale yet.

Speaking of busy vs. productive: I wrote about that on Wednesday, while also hopefully helping to introduce the term “responsibility ping pong” into the cultural zeitgeist.?

New demo reel: CULTURE PARTNERS cut together some new demo reels for our keynoters who speak on culture, organizational design, maximizing productivity, employee appreciation, etc. Here’s a look at it:

The Toxic Culture Gap: This is new-ish from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and it has some interesting insights, including these two graphics:

Unfortunately, we know this isn’t anything new. We’ve recently done some research about it too. The question is: what now??(cc: 美国麻省理工学院 - 斯隆管理学院 )

I think we need to be a bit more nuanced here and realize that both men and women are struggling around work, and have been for years – but the reasons are different. I’m actually writing an op-ed about this at present, which I hope to share in the next two weeks. But in short we are seeing middle-aged men, of peak earning years, leaving work at rates we haven’t seen in 45 years. That is concerning. Meanwhile, women are still not being treated as equals financially, and more caregiving falls on them as Boomer parents age in place. The “pregnancy tax” hasn’t gone away.?

If you scroll back up to the top of this newsletter, I think managerial flexibility is the greatest gift, and the simplest micro-solution, that we can give to the gender schisms at work right now. I know people want to go on Twitter and demand sweeping macro changes, and while those might happen over time (we absolutely need better maternity and paternity coverage, for example), it’s easier to enact change at the micro level. That means cultivating more managers who understand that deadlines are important, but family is more important. (Obviously.)

A lesson in the NCAA Tournament: The NCAA Tournament (“March Madness”) is in the Elite Eight round starting today. I am not a big basketball person, although some of the first two rounds were played in Sacramento, where I live. As in any year, you had some upsets, including a 16-seed beating a 1-seed, which has only happened twice in history.

There is actually a work and culture lesson in some of these upsets. Usually, the team that was supposed to win has a lot of elite talent (great high school recruits), but the team that does win has often played together for years (more college juniors and seniors). Sometimes an upset is pure luck, but most of the time it’s about a team that has been built together and had 100 games of shared experiences (bus rides, plane rides, TikTok shares, inside jokes) gelling together. That’s powerful, and a connected team can beat a bunch of elite performers. Remember that in how you hire and build teams. We worry a lot about “A-Players” but a good, well-developed team with a strong culture behind it wins as much as any “A-Player.”

This is actually the first Elite Eight in history with no Number-1 seeds, so maybe the "team and culture" narrative is truly beating the "A-Player" narrative.

Ghost Postings: This came up in The Wall Street Journal and other places this week -- it's when a company posts a fake job to "test the market" or figure out expected compensation, etc. It's a trend among a lot of big companies, even though it means we now have to worry about ghosting in our personal lives and our professional lives. I had the chance to talk about this on CNN early Friday morning:

Multiculturalism vs. Interculturalism: This is “Diversity 2.0.” We’re working on an eBook about it right now.

Let me know in the comments: What do you know about each of these terms? What do they mean to you in terms of corporate diversity?

OK, now go and enjoy your weekend or early week. We’ll be back as April (wow) starts next week.