To modern workers everywhere,
Dealing with doubt in small doses can be constructive, but experiencing too much of it can be paralyzing. So each of us draws on various coping mechanisms for handling overwhelming doubts.
The same can be said of companies, according to André Spicer, who heads the faculty of management at Cass Business School, City University of London. In his latest paper, he theorizes that organizations tend to respond to persistent doubts—the kind that are so abundant that they waste time and create conflict—in one of four ways. They either:
- Cling to existing beliefs, putting a fundamentalist-like faith in the way things have always been done;
- Project a vision of the future that leaves no room for doubt or doubters;
- Become cynical and stop investing in the organization entirely; or
- Begin perpetually experimenting and updating their assumptions.
The downsides to any of these responses to doubt are fairly self-evident. The fundamentalists risk becoming dinosaurs; the futurists may know how to energize a fervent workforce but their denial of present-day doubts is often foolhardy; cynics usually stop innovating; however, too much experimenting can be destabilizing.
But Spicer has some practical advice for dealing with doubt productively, no matter which style comes most naturally to an organization or leader.
First, he says, acknowledge that doubts live within every organization—it is not a pathological condition. People are constantly asking: Is this the right strategy? Are we missing an opportunity? Will this new design work? You might even try deliberately courting doubt in order to reveal where a strategy or operation is weak.
Either way, your next step is to build rituals for dealing with the doubts. It might look like regular problem-solving meetings, pre- or post-mortems, or a prescribed formula for small-scale experimentation.
Remember, too, to give employees time and a sense of stability so they feel they have room to raise questions. Leaders in particular have to ignore any urges to steamroll over doubts because they may be interpreted as a sign of weakness or a lack of vision. “There’s nothing wrong with you for doubting things and it can be useful if it’s handled in the right way,” Spicer says. “Then you have to coordinate around it on a collective level.”
Finally, your approach to doubt must be action-oriented. If you run a test and collect data, don’t let that information go to waste. Says Spicer, “Cycle between doubt and action, rather than keep yourself in a cycle of doubt.”—Lila MacLellan
For a deeper examination of the different methods for handling doubt, and a helpful, hand-drawn matrix for organizing them, click here.
Five things we learned this week
🛂 Paper passports have become instruments of exclusion. Digitizing the documents would better serve migrants and countries facing labor shortages.
💉 Comirnaty, the new brand name for Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine, is intended to evoke “community.” But that’s just one of three ideas squeezed into the weird moniker.
💰 A company’s social impact arm should be aligned with its revenue-generation engine. Funding social projects separately limits their potential.
🇨🇳 China’s regulatory crackdown on tech has its own lingo. “Savage growth” is one of many newer terms in the Communist party’s lexicon of veiled warnings to the industry.
🇲🇽 ​Mexican factory workers are already benefiting from the new US, Mexico, and Canada Agreement. American trade negotiators have twice used a special mechanism to push back against corrupt employee “unions.”
It’s a fact!
​​The hedge fund ​Marshall Wace​ offers employees 26 weeks of paid parental leave, which is more than many of its competitors in the financial services sector.
But job hunters would be hard-pressed to determine that fact by surfing the career pages of major companies. As journalists Mary Childs and Karishma Vanjani ​​​discovered in their dogged attempt to collect and produce a database of benefits information, many large firms do not openly share the details of benefits that cover paid leave, ​gender reassignment, tuition, ​and more, which may mean their offerings are subpar or inconsistent.
Quartz members can see the data for 32 companies​ that do share their benefits in “The best employee benefits at the top US financial firms.”
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30-second case study
On Aug. 18, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that three former Netflix employees and two outsider associates were charged in a multi-year, $3 million scandal that relied on non-public data about the company’s performance. In all, the SEC alleges that the group acquired and took advantage of nonpublic information ahead of 13 separate Netflix earnings announcements.
The apparent ringleader in the scheme is a 49-year-old former Netflix engineer named Sung Mo “Jay” Jun who had access to subscriber information from at least July 2016 through February 2017, when he worked at Netflix. In that time, according to the SEC complaint, he passed along information to his younger brother and a longtime friend who would buy or sell Netflix stock accordingly ahead of quarterly reports. When Jun left Netflix in 2017, he remained in contact with a younger employee named Ayden Lee, an engineer who considered Jun a mentor. Over a two-year period, Jun routinely asked Lee for information about Netflix’s performance. Lee, seeing Jun as a friend, complied. Finally, Jun also is alleged to have solicited insider knowledge from one of his former friends at Netflix, Jae Hyeon Bae, in 2019.
So how did this happen? Were the employees digging through top-secret executive files? Nope. The SEC’s filing made note of the unusual company policy that enabled these crimes: Netflix leadership shares subscriber information with employees at every level. Long ago, CEO Reed Hastings even acknowledged he was tempting fate with this highly unusual practice in his book No Rule Rules. “The financial world sees this as reckless,” he wrote. “But the information has never been leaked. When it does one day leak (I imagine it will), we won’t overreact. We’ll just deal with that one case and continue with transparency.”
The takeaway: Bold company policies around transparency are not for the nervous. For some employees, the temptation to take advantage of a leader’s trust will inevitably become irresistible. But leaders who are prepared to accept that reality about human nature will likely find that an open-book policy brings out the best in people too. It signals respect, motivates staff and boosts morale. “There are risks of sharing, but there’s risks of alienation in not sharing also,” Hastings said in an interview with Financial Review last year. “[M]ost management teams drive to safety because they don’t want to see that leak. But when you run your organization like the security services run theirs, there’s [a] real cost to innovation, buy-in, and understanding.”
Words of wisdom
“Sometimes data is the pill that we take to calm our insecurity about what we intuitively know.”
—Bozoma Saint John, chief marketing officer at Netflix, speaking at a TED conference earlier this month about why we should trust our intuition over data. Read more in Quartz’s coverage of her talk by design reporter Anne Quito.
Incoming
Quartz has a brand new lineup of member-exclusive weekly newsletters. If you’re not yet a member, sign up today and get 50% off your first year. You’ll get access to new emails including:
🔮 The Forecast: a short, sharp look forward at an emerging industry, technology, or trend
🏢 The Company: context on the companies changing (or about to change) the way other businesses work (companies like Coinbase, Discord, Krispy Kreme, and Shein)
💻 How To: specific things you can do to work more effectively and solve problems you care about (from spending too much time with your phone, to managing your team’s return to the office, to shrinking your company’s carbon footprint)
Office nostalgia interlude
Quartz at Work endorses virtual commutes, which may mean stopping by your local coffee shop every morning or tearing down your WFH office set-up in the evening, just to reinforce some psychic boundaries between work and life. Now that many of us are looking ahead to possibly many more months without the escape time afforded by real commutes, we also suggest bookmarking “The Hidden Melodies of Subways Around the World,” a gorgeous interactive feature recently published by The New York Times.
It brings to life subway chimes from transit systems in New York, Hong Kong, London, Paris, Vancouver, Toronto, Berlin, and Gurgaon, India, and analyzes the character of each one. Because your nostalgia for your previous life of urban commuting or jet-set business trips may just need a soundtrack.
ICYMI
Companies have had to grapple with mountains of doubt since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Right now, perhaps the most pressing issue facing some employers is whether or not to introduce a mandatory vaccination policy.
For the record, Quartz has a mandate and there was never any question about whether it was the right thing to do. But organizations that are still weighing their options or need guidance for how to implement a vaccine policy should check out this comprehensive guide for businesses around the globe, by Quartz Talent Lab editor Jackie Bischof. One tip she recommends ought to resonate with doubt-ridden CEOs: “What’s clear is employees want a policy to cut through the uncertainty of this moment,” she writes. So don’t leave them guessing for too long.
You got The Memo!
Our best wishes for a winning week. Please send any workplace news, coded criticisms, or burdensome doubts to work@qz.com. Get the most out of Quartz by downloading our app and becoming a member. This week’s edition of The Memo was produced by Lila MacLellan, Sarah Todd, and Heather Landy.