Archives for category: Workplace Culture

A little guide to working with online communities

March 21, 2016 //

About a decade ago I migrated into community work [1] from a non-community background. This is the guide I wish I had read back then.

[1] When I say community work, I am talking about stuff like Wikipedia: large distributed groups of people doing something together, usually online, often unpaid. Usually international, often nerdy, often (but not always) FLOSS or FLOSS-adjacent.

You are going to be doing a lot of writing. Do it well. Phone calls and Hangouts don’t scale. Face-to-face is expensive for distributed groups and therefore rare. Real-time tools like IRC and Slack disadvantage people in minority timezones. And so, in an online community, your main way to communicate is likely going to be email. Which means you need to be good at it. Take the time to write carefully, fully and precisely. And since text is going to do so much of your communicative heavy lifting, consider being a little more explicit about emotional signal-sending than you might be otherwise. (“I am happy…”, “it is sad…”, “I am grateful.”)

In all your communications, be conscious of your group’s diversity. The group you’re speaking with is likely more diverse than what you’re used to. There may be children and teenagers as well as adults. For many or most, English won’t be their first language. They probably live in multiple countries, have had a broad diversity of experiences, and and hold a wide array of beliefs. This creates a bunch of potential pitfalls. Your jokes may fall flat or offend people. Cultural references (sports, movies, history) may be meaningless. Even for those of us who aren’t American, it’s easy to come across as U.S.-centric. Metaphors, allusions and convoluted sentence structures may not be worth the time they’d take readers to untangle, and make translations much more difficult. High diversity argues for a style that’s literal, straightforward, and well-structured.

Be cautious about creating an insider culture. This is a tough one, because inside jokes and shared history and assumptions foster a sense of belonging. But every in-group requires an out-group, and having a lot of shared lore is unavoidably exclusionary: it makes it harder for new people to join. A strong culture will also inevitably move you towards demographic/attitudinal narrowing, rather than the reverse.

Publish early, publish often. If you are building a plan or a proposal, don’t wait until it’s flawless and polished to publish: release it while it’s still raw and half-baked. For folks from a non-community background this will feel dangerous, like you’re leaving yourself vulnerable to criticism. But in a community context it builds trust and empathy, and will be understood as an invitation to collaborate. Do tons of signposting. Explain what you’re trying to do, and why. Sketch out how you imagine it may work.

Be aware that volunteer time is different from paid time. Staff need to begin their public work as soon as they possibly can (sooner!), and to build in lots of elapsed time for community discussion. Community members have other priorities: school, jobs, families. You can’t expect them to make your work their top priority, so you need to give them the biggest-possible window in which to contribute.

Write (and publish) a greater volume of stuff than you think you should. This feels counter-intuitive for people who’ve been execs in traditional contexts, because in an ordinary executive context the scarcest resource is time, and so we get used to providing summaries, bullet points, upshots, and key takeaways. Succinct=good. In a community context though, comprehensive beats succinct. This is only logical: if you’re writing for a wide diversity of stakeholders, they’re going to want to know a wide variety of stuff. Manually asking and answering questions is slow and laborious and splinters the information so you can’t get it all in one place: it’s faster and better, as much as possible, to anticipate questions and answer them in your original communication.

Assume good faith. This is so easier said than done ;/ But for real, assume good faith. When someone asks a question and you think they are trolling, it’s entirely possible they are not. (Maybe they are 15 years old, or their English is imperfect, or they have an impairment of some kind.) Even if they are trolling: there will always be onlookers who don’t know it, and who, whatever the provocation, will recoil if you are curt or unkind. Trolling also gives you an opportunity to equip onlookers with reasonable arguments that they can go on to use themselves.

Bias towards transparency. Way, way, way more than you think you should. I remember being taught change management back in the early 2000s. Our instructor beat into us that wherever there is a communications vacuum, it will be filled by gossip and fear. That is a million percent true, and even more so in online communities. Gossip and fear grow out of power imbalances and information asymmetry which are to some degree unavoidable in distributed and voluntary groups, and you need to compensate for that. Publishing everything also scales well, because it equips everybody, not just you and your inner circle, to help explain what’s going on.

Note that if you’re the boss it’s insufficient to ask your staff to be transparent, because as long as there is any risk of penalty for over-publishing, they will do the opposite. You need to make it clear that nobody will ever be punished or shamed for being transparent, then you need somebody to publish something they shouldn’t have, and then you need to not punish them. Only then will people begin to take you seriously about transparency.

When you change your mind, say it publicly, and explain why. This is another one that’s tough for execs from a non-community context, where we got trained to express more confidence than we felt. But for real: in a community context, changing your mind and explaining why will not erode your credibility; it will earn you more.

Pay attention to people you disagree with. In an ordinary work environment executives get insulated and protected from honest disagreement. This is bad for them and for their company. Community work is different: there is no shortage of people who will disagree with you, loudly and repeatedly, in public. It’s natural to avoid or ignore those people, but if you do, you’re wasting an opportunity. Consider instead that they may, occasionally, be right.

Categories Collaboration, Consensus Decisionmaking, Leadership, Social Movements, Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia, Workplace Culture

Why speaking for effect is a bad idea

September 4, 2010 //
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I read a book recently called Authentic Conversations, which is essentially an argument for honesty at work. That may not sound too radical, but it actually is. I’ve managed people for more than a decade, and the book made me think about how much conventional management theory and training is designed to replace authenticity with calculation, and how damaging that can be.

The book opens with a great story, in which the publisher of a struggling newspaper is doing a newsroom walkaround. [1]

It’s tough times for newspapers, so his staff ask him lots of anxious questions — is the company okay, what’s he doing about the advertising slump, has he figured out the pension issue. He talks confidently about how things are going to be okay. There’s a plan. The board is optimistic. And so forth. The authors (who were with the publisher that day, presumably starting a consulting engagement), say he clearly felt he was doing good work – creating an atmosphere of calm and confidence, so that his staff could focus on doing their jobs well.

And I have to say, I have definitely been there. I’ve never lied to anyone who works for me, but I worked for a long time in a troubled industry, and I certainly expressed optimism more strongly than I felt it, many many many times, and for the same reason the poor publisher was probably doing it.

The twist to the story is that back in the guy’s office, the consultants rip into him and tell him what he did was horrible. They persuade him to call a special meeting and tell his staff he’d been lying — that the company is indeed in trouble, and that neither he nor anyone can give them the reassurance they want. And that he’s not their father, and isn’t responsible for their security or for their happiness.

The story ends triumphantly, with applause all around.

I’d be surprised if things actually played out that way, because I don’t think that people necessarily value truth that much. But I do think that even when people don’t want the truth, or aren’t comforted by it, they deserve it.

The authors go on to decry that they call “speaking for effect.” Which again struck me as pretty radical. As a young manager, I was trained –over and over again, explicitly and by modelled behaviour– to carefully manage my words and tone in order to create the response I wanted.

  • A mentor of mine was well-known for using silence to increase his authority. In big meetings, he’d be perfectly watchful, and would say nothing.  Throughout the meeting, the other participants would get more and more nervous, wondering what he was thinking. They’d start second-guessing themselves and poking holes in their own arguments. Eventually they’d start actively soliciting his opinion, and by the time he finally spoke, whatever he said carried enormous weight. [2]
  • Two friends of mine, who were also friends of each other and who ran competitive TV shows inside our organization, used to stage yelling matches in front of their newsroooms in which they’d argue over whose show warranted more resources from the shared services pool (like, edit suite time or PR support). They did it so their teams would feel valued and defended, and afterwards they’d go out for beer.
  • I had a boss who was famous for his terrible temper. He’d shout, hang up on people, send all-caps e-mails, and storm around the office slamming doors and throwing things. But his capacity for anger –and his reputation for it– was mostly calculated — he’d slam down the phone and start laughing.
  • A colleague was proud of her ability to shame her staff into doing better work. Her magic words, she told me, were “I am disappointed in you.” I once watched her role-play a performance assessment, and I found her acting ability pretty remarkable. She’d sigh, put down her pencil, make prolonged eye contact, and say something like “Jim. You’re really letting down the team.”
  • And then there’s a very common use of speaking for effect: the deliberate expression of trivial agreement. This is particularly done, I think, in big, old companies where responsibility is diffused and group buy-in is critical. In those contexts, expressing trivial agreement (“sounds interesting!”, “good point!”, “great feedback!”) is the small coin of the realm. If you do it well, it costs you nothing, wins you allies, and puts money in the favour bank.

I’m not trying to argue that all these tactics are necessarily bad. It’s obviously true that managers need to be in control of their emotions, and need to be conscious of their effects on others. Undisciplined and reckless bosses can cause all kinds of problems.

But I think a little calculation goes a long way. And I also think there’s a cost, which sometimes goes unnoticed.  People who are very studied, whose words and responses are calculated for effect more so than being spontaneous and natural — they’re behaving inauthentically.  To a degree, they’re treating other people as means to an end rather than as human beings, and their behaviour also suggests that their minds are totally made up: they are not actually open to new information, they’ve figured out the correct end state, and the only work that needs to be done is persuading you to go there. Which means they run the risk that the people around them will learn over time to distrust them. It also means they miss the opportunity to engage authentically — to have real conversations, to stretch themselves, to learn.

[1] I don’t have the book with me, so I may have butchered specifics a little. But the gist of the story’s accurate.
[2] Warning to women who might consider trying this tactic: it doesn’t work for women. Truly. I liked a lot of things about that guy, and I tried modelling my own behaviour on his for a while, but it didn’t take long to realize that a silent woman is perceived totally differently from a silent man. Suffice to say that a silent woman is easily mistaken for a person without authority, regardless of how much she may actually have. Too bad :-(

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Categories Leadership, Workplace Culture

If You Have These Five Characteristics Wikimedia Wants to Hire You

July 25, 2010 //
23

Since joining the Wikimedia Foundation, I’ve hired about 25 people. That means I’ve read thousands of CVs, done hundreds of pre-interview e-mail exchanges and phone calls, and participated in about 150 formal interviews.

With each hire I’ve –and the Wikimedia Foundation as a whole has– gotten smarter about what kinds of people flourish at Wikimedia, and why. The purpose of this post is to share some of what we’ve learned, particularly for people who may be thinking about applying for open positions with us, or participating in our open hiring call.

Let me start with this: The Wikimedia Foundation’s not a typical workplace.

Every CEO believes his or her organization is a special snowflake: it’s essential that we believe it, whether or not it’s true.  And when I first joined Wikimedia, my board of trustees would tell me how unusual we were, and I would nod and smile.  But really.  Once I worked through some initial skepticism, it became obvious that yeah, Wikimedia is utterly unique.

Viewed through one lens, the Wikimedia Foundation is a scrappy start-up with all the experimentation and chaos that implies. But, it’s also a non-profit, which means we have an obligation to donors to behave responsibly and frugally, and to be accountable and transparent about what we’re doing. We’re a top five, super-famous website, which brings additional scrutiny and responsibility. We work closely with Wikimedia volunteers around the world, many of whom are hyper-intelligent, opinionated, and fiercely protective of what they have created.   And, our role is to make information freely available to everyone around the world — which means we are more radical than, at first glance, we might appear.

None of those characteristics is, by itself, all that unusual.  (Except the super-smart volunteers. They are pretty rare.)   But our particular combination is unique, which means that the combination of traits that makes someone a perfect employee for us is unique as well.   Here’s what I look for.

Passion for the Wikimedia mission. This is obvious. We’re facilitating the work of millions of ordinary people from around the world —helping them come together to freely, easily, share what they know.  We’re responsible for the largest repository of information in human history: more than 16 million articles in 270 languages, accessible to people all over the world.   If people aren’t super-excited about that, they have no business working with us.

Self-sufficiency and independence. The Wikimedia Foundation is not a smoothly-sailing ship: we’re building our ship. That means roles-and-responsibilities aren’t always clear, systems and procedures haven’t been tested and refined over time, and there isn’t going to be somebody standing over people’s shoulders telling them what to do. People who work for the Wikimedia Foundation need to be able to get stuff done without a fixed rulebook or a lot of prodding.

That’s normal for all young organizations.

But we’re looking for more than just self-sufficiency.  We have found that a streak of iconoclasm is a really strong predictor of success at Wikimedia.

Wikipedia is edited by everyone: contributors represent a dizzying array of socio-political values and beliefs and experiences, as well as different ages, religions, sexualities, geographies, and so forth.  In our hiring, we tell people that it isn’t a question of whether working at Wikimedia will push their buttons; it’s just a question of how they will respond once it happens. People who’ve never examined their own assumptions, who embrace received wisdom, who place their trust in credentials and authority: they will not thrive at Wikimedia. And people who are motivated by conventional status indicators: a big office, a big salary, a lot of deference — they won’t either.

An inventive spirit. People who fit in well at Wikimedia tend to like new ideas, to be curious, and driven towards continual improvement. This manifests in simple, obvious ways – they read widely; they like gadgets and puzzles; they make stuff for fun. They are optimists and tinkerers.

Openness. At Wikimedia, we look for evidence that applicants have deliberately stretched themselves and sought out new experiences – maybe they’ve lived outside their home country, they read outside their comfort zone, they’ve explored other belief systems.

Openness means people like to be challenged. They like kicking around ideas, they naturally share and communicate, they’re not defensive or unhealthily competitive. They’re comfortable interacting with a wide range of people, and people are comfortable with them.

Lastly, we look for orientation towards scalability. The Wikimedia Foundation is a very small group of people.   It achieves impact by working through and with large numbers of volunteers – the millions of people around the world who create 99.9% of the value in the Wikimedia projects.   So in our hiring, we look for people who are oriented towards scale: who reflexively document and share information, who write easily and fluently, who take advantage of channels for mass communication and who instinctively organize and support the work of others.

If I ran Der Spiegel or Yelp or the ACLU, the traits I’d be looking for would be different. (When I worked at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the people I hired were quite different from the ones I hire today.)  And this list will change over time, as the organization changes. This is the list that works for the Wikimedia Foundation, today.

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Categories Hiring, Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia, Workplace Culture