manage the whole song, or only the chorus?
“I can’t manage this without you… and I can’t read you in…”
Project ONE.
…fall of 2006, at VeriSign. 26 vice presidents called into a mandatory meeting nobody would explain. I signed the NDA, and for weeks after that a spreadsheet of 1,765 engineers around the globe changed every single day, all of it pointed at a January 1 reorganization, and I was never quite sure what the real objective was. Nobody was.
Deb was one of my direct reports through all of it, one of several very strong women in technology on that team. They sadly had to be – tech bro’s are real and not easy to work with… In a reorganization where nobody could say where the finish line was, the only thing I could do was put whole pieces of it in the hands of people who could run them. Deb was one of them. And after that…
Who already runs a whole piece of the work… with your name still on the top of it?
Jane wrote it… and let the band carry it
Jane Wiedlin started The Go-Go’s with Belinda Carlisle in 1978, and she brought the lyrics and the writing. She co-wrote Our Lips Are Sealed with Terry Hall of The Specials, then finished the words and made the music herself. It came out in June 1981 and became their first hit, peaking at 20 on the Hot 100. And a lot of radio stations would not play an all-girl band. So the song went where it could be seen… MTV carried it, and a band a lot of radio would not touch had a hit anyway. To manage is to marshal what you have, route around what you do not, and get the whole song out the door.
Jane was never the one out front. She worked closely with outside writers, shaped the sound, and then did the thing managers find hardest. She built the song, handed it to the whole band, and did not take it back. The Go-Go’s turned up in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and became MTV staples, proof that an all-female band could own the radio and the screen once somebody routed around the gatekeepers.
…and managing is handing over the whole thing
The Signpost for manage is the leader who gets things done through everything available. People, money, material, support, process. Great at delegation, at setting goals, at running a meeting and reporting out of it. The Roadblock is the one most of us live in. You delegate pieces and parts. You take things back. And after a while nobody, you included, has a clear idea where anything actually is.
Pieces and parts is not delegation. The whole song is.
The first rung is yours…
…because it is the one a manager controls. For every 100 men promoted to manager, 93 women were promoted in the latest numbers, and 81 the year before. That first step is where women fall out of the pipeline, and it is decided by people like you and me, one assignment at a time. Who gets the whole piece. Whose name goes on the plan. Who gets taken back from.
And more mentoring does not fix it. The same research that found women more mentored than men found them promoted less. If she works mostly remote, the odds get worse again: only about a third of women who work mostly remotely have been promoted in the last 2 years, or have a sponsor at all. Out of sight is out of the plan.
And do not wait for her to ask. Even among people who already had a sponsor, 44% of the women said they were likely to ask their manager for a stretch assignment, against 56% of the men. Fewer than 1 in 4 companies run any formal sponsorship program at all. So the whole piece usually goes to whoever asks first. Hand it to her anyway.
empower stops being a poster right here, and starts being a management decision.
Deb got the whole song
Deb being a rule follower would not have stepped into the NDA world… but me not, I asked her to ‘simply run this meeting that I was hosting.’ And… of course… soon because it was run so well, it became the focal point for all the people who would be most affected by our work… and had the ideas that would actually work. I eventually stopped coming – to my meeting 😉 She had it I knew it would be better without me…
Deb went on to become a very powerful senior vice president and CIO. And yes, I played a part in not just mentoring, but also sponsoring her to my peers and my boss. And of course, once they got to know her, like Beth, everyone liked her better. She was ready long before the title said so… and long before she THOUGHT she was. My part was to hand her the whole piece and keep my hands off it, then say her name in the rooms she was not in yet.
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: pick 1 woman you are developing as a manager. Write her name at the top of a whole piece of work, as its owner, where everyone can see it. Then do not take it back… empowering a manager actually looks like that.
Helping leaders hand over the whole song and keep their hands off it is a big part of my week. Schedule time with me here.
Project ONE came with an NDA, so there are parts of 2006 that Deb and I still keep to ourselves… Our Lips Are Sealed
