Lead by Example

An executive in a real estate firm once described to us how, during an important meeting, most participants dialed in, but all the senior executives could clearly be seen on one tile, indicating that they were together in the boardroom. They assumed no one would notice, but everyone did. It sent a signal that the office was where people needed to be, even though that wasn't their intention. The company wanted to promote flexibility, but the behavior of their leaders undermined the concept. This is an example of failing to lead by example.

Leading by example is a concept you have surely heard before because it's simply good practice in any circumstance. When it comes to flexible work specifically, leading by example means that if you, as a leader, are still coming into the office on a typical 9-to-5 schedule every day, then you're sabotaging the strategy and undermining its principles (even if you don't mean to). No matter what you say, no matter what your official policy states, if employees see you in the office regularly, they will believe they need to do the same if they want access to growth and opportunities.

At Australia-originated software company, Atlassian, leading by example meant “stricter rules” for the executive team. Chief Operating Officer, Anu Bharadwaj, explains: “Even after it was deemed safe to return to the office, we decided executives would not go in for more than one day each week and would not hold in-person meetings, without our extended teams, more than once a quarter, with the exception of social events.” Slack did something similar when adopting what we call our “executive speed limits.” CEO, Stewart Butterfield, went around the room and asked each of his direct reports what commitments they would make to set an example. One that emerged was everyone committing to leaders to spending three days a week or fewer in the office. There was further guidance on how that limited time should be spent: on team events and customer interactions. In other words, the office is for those things that really require people to be present. That was the message Butterfield wanted leaders to communicate through their actions.

Take Symbolic Actions

A great way to lead by example is to take symbolic actions. Find ways to highlight flexible work across your organization. They can be simple actions, like when all executive team members at Telstra, Australia's leading telecommunications company, changed their public profile pictures to show them working from home.³ Or they can send a broader message. At IBM, CEO Arvind Krishna, shared the IBM “Work From Home Pledge” early in the pandemic—not just to the organization, but on social media for all the world to see. The Pledge grew out of the experience an IBM consultant was having as she tried to balance working from home with having a 10-month-old baby who couldn't go to daycare. One day her baby fell just before she had to get on a video call. Her child was okay, but her team could tell she was flustered with everything she had to manage. That got them talking about their new work situation and the new set of needs that came with it. They started challenging the usual norms of doing business and asking questions like, “If we're working from home, do we really have to be camera ready for every meeting?”

That conversation resulted in the team coming up with a list of new norms for the work-from-home, lockdown era. (See sidebar on the following page for the list.) They started sharing the list with others, and word about it spread quickly. Within about a week it came to the attention of senior leadership, and that's when Krishna put it out on social media, to signal his support. This was early in the pandemic, when the company was navigating the sudden switch to working remotely for nearly all of their more than 250,000 employees. Since then, IBM has broadened its definition of flexible work to well beyond just working from home, encompassing schedule flexibility and hybrid (sometimes in, sometimes out of office) arrangements. As a result, team members are working on a new pledge to support their new style of work.

Show Vulnerability

That example highlights another way leaders can reinforce their flexible work principles: by showing vulnerability. Change can be uncomfortable, and it can make people feel like they're on shaky ground. In those early days of the pandemic, Chief Human Resources Officer, Nickle LaMoreaux, remembers Krishna saying often to their leadership team: “Remember, every day you are now being invited into somebody's home. It's important to act as guests with the kind of courtesy that's expected from them.” It was a great way to frame the sort of attitude leaders can bring to everyday situations to normalize flexibility and help people feel more comfortable with it. You can do this by saying hi to the kid who accidentally interrupts a video call—or, better yet, by bringing your own family on to wave a quick hello. When taking time in your flexible schedule for an exercise class or to see your daughter's school play, let people know not just when you will be unavailable, but why. Spell it out in your status message—spending time with mom for her birthday!—or however you communicate with your team.

Slack's then Chief Marketing Officer, Julie Liegl, brought her kids—just eight and five years old—into one of the first company-wide meetings during the pandemic, and the gesture communicated to the more than 2,000 people attending via video conference that she was a real human being who was juggling things too. Feedback was immediately positive. As Senior Customer Success Manager, Christine McHone, said, “When Julie Liegl's daughters climbed on her lap during a company all-hands meeting, it set the tone for the support we'd receive.”

Shared Space Is for Teamwork First

In our Digital-First culture at Slack, showing up to the office is no longer the default; it's the exception. As our CEO Stewart Butterfield explained, “Getting teams together in person should have a purpose, such as team building, project kick offs and other events that are planned in advance, pairing flexibility with predictability.”⁴ Being intentional about the role of the office in this way creates a more structured view of what flexible work can be.

We also got rid of the “executive floor.” Before moving to a Digital-First strategy, Slack's corporate headquarters in San Francisco had a tenth floor that was tricked out with a large boardroom and executive briefing center and a ninth floor C-suite where the CEO and other executives had offices. If there was an important meeting happening at Slack, it was always on one of those two floors. They were known as the place to hang out to show you were around. To get people to think differently about the use of office space, we dismantled that and don't believe there will ever again be a need for an executive floor. Per our new guardrails, when leaders are in the office, they'll most likely be there to meet with their teams. For other interactions, as Brevoort said, “Slack is our headquarters.”

It's likely that you, too, will need to redesign the way you use your office space (a concept we will talk more about in Step 5). Instead of plans for cubicles and corner offices, companies like MillerKnoll have focused on thoughtfully designed social commons that foster collaboration and connection. There may be more emphasis on creating zones for different kinds of work—quiet floors for concentrated work, for example, paired with social floors for team gatherings. If your “workplace” is no longer a building, that opens up a whole range of new possibilities for how you use your physical space.

Keep a Level Playing Field

In order to level the playing field, leaders need to drive a consistent experience and avoid “in-person favoritism.” Outside of intentional time together, meetings should be structured to enable remote participants to be equally present and part of the discussion. To ensure that was happening at Slack, we adopted the guardrail of “one dials in, all dial in,” meaning that either everyone gets together in a room for a meeting or everyone participates remotely, even if that means logging on to a video conference from a desk in the office.

Guardrails like this one aren't always easy to make work, especially when they go against ingrained habits. It took quite a bit of experimentation and practice to get this right (a process we'll tell you more about in Step 4), and ensure that executives were modeling the behavior. For example, by holding product review meetings where everyone dials in (and, in fact, there's not even a conference room booked), the pressure to come in to “the room where it happens” is lowered, and the playing field is leveled for employees who get the opportunity to present to an executive only a few times in a year.

It's also important to think about the variety of methods you can use to encourage participation. Not everything requires a calendared meeting via video conference, which can disadvantage some groups, like those in different time zones, parents who are wrangling kids, or introverts who are unlikely to speak up on a crowded video chat. Don't get us wrong: video conferencing is a great tool, one that has been a lifeline for so many, but it's not the only tool you have. Sometimes communications platforms, chat, voice, and even asynchronous video—pre-recorded videos that people can watch on their own schedules—can work even better. There are a wide variety of tools out there for things like virtual whiteboarding, asynchronous brainstorming, or collaborating virtually on written documents. Be conscious of which tools you use and don't just default to yet another meeting that crowds people's schedules (more on this later in the step).

Rethink the Role of Offsites

Instead of just focusing on which days of the week people should come into the office—which is the approach many companies have taken—companies should be thinking about enabling teams to organize regular events that meet their own needs for team-building and productivity. That will likely mean equipping team leaders with new insights and tools to help them do this.

For example, in a flexible model where team members are working from different places and at different times, people need to be given sufficient advance notice of events. Team leaders also need to be intentional about how their offsites are run. Priya Parker writes convincingly on this subject in her book, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters: “Gatherings crackle and flourish when real thought goes into them, when (often invisible) structure is baked into them, and when a host has the curiosity, willingness, and generosity of spirit to try.”⁶ Leaders can answer four key questions to make sure they are being intentional about making their gatherings effective:

1. How can I be sure attendees will be comfortable and motivated?
2. What's the topic and what do we need to achieve and produce?
3. Who will facilitate the event and how?
4. What tools will we need?

Executives need to think about how they can support team leaders in creating more effective gatherings, ones that are not only productive, but foster a sense of belonging. In the past, many companies have focused on in-office perks like free meals, coffee bars, or massages to do this, but those things won't work for a flexible, distributed team. Instead leaders need to give people better tools for both in-person and digital “offsites,” like team-level budgets for events, as well as a menu of options (pre-approved items like food and swag and pre-approved vendors to provide them), they can easily pick from. Leaders also need to provide people to support these kinds of efforts, like facilitators who can help team leaders conceive of and plan the right sort of gatherings to meet their needs.

Move beyond Meeting-driven Culture

It's a ubiquitous complaint in corporate culture: practically everyone is overwhelmed by meetings. And there are real questions about whether meetings are necessary to get things done, or if they are getting in our way far too often. In a survey of managers across a wide range of industries, researchers Leslie Perlow, Constance Hadley, and Eunice Eun found that more than 70% of people believed meetings were unproductive and inefficient, and 65% said meetings keep them from completing their work.⁷

It's time to rethink the meeting. At Slack our executives led by example on this by declaring “calendar bankruptcy.” They removed all recurring meetings and one-on-ones from their calendars so that they could consider each one and add back only what was truly necessary. In a message sent out to the entire company, the purpose was explained this way:

• “We're in a new distributed world and gotta change the way we work!”
• “There are lots of legacy meetings that have changed owner, purpose, scope—let's start with a blank slate to determine what's really important!”

This doesn't mean there were no more meetings. It just means that leaders got a lot more intentional about the time they were taking up on people's calendars. We found that so many meetings could be eliminated or broken up into parts. For example, your monthly sales meeting might start with a status update. Why not send that out beforehand? Presentations can be shared as decks or asynchronous video so people can review them in their own time. Tactics like these can lessen your meeting time considerably, and then time together can be more meaningfully spent on meaty discussions or team building. For this to happen, however, leaders have to be more intentional about meetings and employ some forethought and planning. As Priya Parker wrote in The Art of the Gathering, “90% of what makes a gathering successful is put in place beforehand.”

Dropbox uses what they call their “3D” model for planning meetings: debate, discuss, decide. We would add a fourth D for “develop”—time spent focused on honing individual skills or other professional development opportunities. If a meeting doesn't achieve at least one of those four objectives, then it doesn't need to be a meeting. (See our “Do We Need a Meeting?” tool in the toolkit at the back of this book for more on this.) Other tools can be used to disseminate information or get a status check, freeing up much more time in your schedule, and the schedules of your team members, to do the kind of work that really moves things forward.

Guardrails can also be put in place to counter the assumption that people need to be available eight hours a day, five days a week for meetings. Tactics that we've seen work include Levi Strauss & Co.'s “No Meetings Fridays,” which aims to reduce internal meeting load and provide a day dedicated to focus time. Google adopted “No Meeting Weeks” years ago for some teams, and similarly Salesforce has adopted “Async Weeks” as a way to not only give people a respite, but also get meeting owners to think about whether each meeting is needed or could be cut in terms of frequency, attendance, or both. Slack's Product, Design and Engineering team has “Maker Weeks” and “Maker Hours”—two-hour blocks, three days a week, where people can turn off notifications and do focused work. (This is a great area to make use of some of the experiment-and-learn tactics we'll cover in Step 4 to see what works for your organization.)

Challenge the Role of the Brainstorm

One of the common concerns about flexible work is that it will stifle creativity and innovation. After all, how can we come up with new ideas and solve tricky problems unless we gather together in a room and hash it out on a whiteboard? People often have trouble imagining other ways because they simply haven't tried them. And in fact, there's good evidence to suggest that they should. Numerous studies show that the often lauded brainstorming session is a waste of time, at best; at worst it can lead to the dreaded groupthink and even harm productivity.

So-called “brainwriting” has been shown to be a better way to generate new ideas, and it requires a kind of hybrid approach that flexible work is particularly well suited for. In fact, the best known way for groups of people to generate new ideas is to work individually before working together.

Brainwriting starts with individual work, allowing time and space for people to think deeply and freely about ideas without fear of judgment or the influence of louder or more senior voices in the room. You ask everyone to commit their ideas to paper, and only then are they shared and debated—an approach that has been shown to elicit better results. According to the Harvard Business Review: “A meta-analytic review of over 800 teams indicated that individuals are more likely to generate a higher number of original ideas when they don't interact with others.” By contrast, the old way of brainstorming “is particularly likely to harm productivity in large teams, when teams are closely supervised, and when performance is oral rather than written.”⁸, ⁹

One of the reasons the brainwriting approach works so well is because it gets more people involved. By allowing ideas to be generated ahead of review, you help create psychological safety for diverse teams and involve more voices that might normally go unheard in rooms where senior and more extroverted voices tend to dominate. It also helps guard against remote workers becoming alienated from such processes. Remember that one of the main reasons that Mike Brevoort ended up traveling to headquarters more than 20 times in a year was because he didn't feel like he could fully participate if he dialed in from Denver. He was able to find a solution, albeit a highly imperfect one, in traveling back and forth, but a lot of employees won't have that option or may feel less comfortable contributing ideas in a large meeting or brainstorming format. It's worth thinking about how much insight, creativity, and expertise you are missing out on by making it harder for all people to participate.

Challenge Your Own Thinking

Practically all of us have “grown up” professionally in a 9-to-5 culture, and inherent in that culture are ways of thinking that we may never have examined very closely. Sheela remembers early in her career working until the wee hours of the morning and being lauded for her “selfless” and “relentless” behavior as a result. Some of the most memorable advice she got in business school was to “burn the candle at both ends until you're in your forties and then reacquaint yourself with your friends and family.”

“No pain, no gain” had always been Helen's family motto until she ended up burning out while still in her twenties from a job that entailed 100-hour workweeks, frequent travel, and a long commute. During a discussion about work-life balance with a partner in her firm, the woman casually mentioned that her personal goal was to see her kids twice a week—not day, but week.

Brian was taught early on that an attitude of “seldom wrong, never in doubt” was key to success, meaning few around him willingly admitted when there were gaps in their knowledge or they didn't have all the answers. This approach proved to be a real liability at his first startup, where there was a whole lot he didn't know—that, in fact, no one knew. He had to get past that ingrained way of thinking fast in order to enlist the help of others in finding solutions to complex issues—otherwise the venture could have failed.

We're hardly anomalies in the corporate world. So many of us have internalized lessons over the years that we've had to unlearn for the sake of our own success as well as that of the businesses we work for. It's time to challenge some of our old notions about what makes someone good at what they do. Like, working more = working better. Or, employees can't be trusted to get stuff done on their own. These are default ways of thinking in most corporate cultures, but what makes us so sure they're right? After all, have we ever really tested them?

In fact, there's lots of evidence to suggest that they aren't right. Evidence showing that stress and burnout make us worse at what we do, not better. That lack of trust demotivates employees rather than motivating them. If we really want to unlock the potential in people, then we need to keep our eyes trained on what really delivers results and stop rewarding behaviors that undermine them. Think about that the next time you praise someone for answering emails late at night or being in the office first thing in the morning before anyone else. Because it's the quality of work and the results it drives that matter most, not when or where you do it.