Navigating Workplace Change

Vanessa Gennarelli Transcript

Intro - 00: 00:01: Welcome to Beyond The Screen: An IONOS Podcast, where we share insights and tips to help you scale your business's online presence. Hosting genuine conversations with the best in the web and IT industry and exploring how the IONOS brand can help professionals and customers with their hosting and cloud issues. I'm your host, Joe Nash.

Joe - 00: 00:22: Welcome to another episode of Beyond The Screen: An IONOS Podcast. Joining us today is Vanessa Gennarelli, principal of Fortuna, a consultancy firm that helps business teams align with change quickly and easily, and chief operating officer at Workbrew. An instructional designer by training, Vanessa has worked with names including Mozilla, Stellar, and P2P University before joining GitHub, where as senior director, she guided GitHub education through the acquisition by Microsoft. In October 2023, Vanessa released Surviving Change at Work, a book that aims to offer expertise and tips to those who are experiencing any kind of change or work. Product pivots, staff turnover, software transfers, and so on. When she's not doing that, she's a member of the board of directors at CIRCADIUM, the first state-licensed higher education program teaching circus skills in the United States, and invests in small Philadelphia businesses through the Circle of Aunts and Uncles, a group dedicated to supporting local entrepreneurs. Vanessa, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me today.

Vanessa - 00: 01:14: Thank you so much for having me, Joe. I'm thrilled to be here.

Joe - 00: 01:16: Yes, let's kick off talking about your career. You know, whenever we do these bios, we have this huge list of amazing accolades and titles, and yours is no different. So, you know, I'd like to start by talking about your work as a consultant with Fortuna. You help companies navigate change, and we'll be talking about your book soon. But what does that mean? What do you primarily do for these folks?

Vanessa - 00: 01:34: Absolutely. So usually companies bring me in when there's been significant change in the organization. There's been a reduction in force. There has been, as you mentioned, leadership turnover or even some frustration and morale issues, you know, being told to do more with less, fear and anxiety around AI. Any time where an organization needs to align with change quickly and what I do through my workshops and through my coaching is help employees understand what it is that they want with their careers and also understand where the company is going at a high level and seeing where there's overlap and what I call alignment. And that helps the employee see where they want to go with their next step, whether it's with the company or not. And it also helps managers build empathy towards direct reports who may be dealing with a lot of change. And managers aren't super equipped in the tech industry with a lot of these strategies and tools.

Joe - 00: 02:37: Right. Yeah, that makes total sense. You know, you mentioned various personas of worker there, you know, managers and employees and people who may encounter this change. What's been your journey with that change? What has led you to these experiences to be in the position you are to, you know, share these insights and wisdoms? Can you walk us a bit through your professional history to date?

Vanessa - 00: 02:53: Absolutely. Well, you mentioned that I am a trained instructional designer. And what happened around 2007, 2008, I was working as a textbook editor. And I thought to myself, you know, I'm editing these workbooks. I'm editing these multiple choice tests. Is this actually helping anyone learn anything? So I decided to start teaching courses online in my spare time to just figure out how these dynamics worked. And that's when I started partnering with Peer-to-Peer University. And Mozilla, this was part of the big sort of open everything movement that happened around 2008 to 2010, which was really my sort of entree into the tech world was through what at that time felt like a kind of activism, getting rid of gatekeepers, democratizing information, raising up voices that hadn't been heard before. So it was really motivating time. And then through that journey, I decided to actually learn how people learn. And I started doing a lot of research on how people learn new things. And so I ended up going to Harvard and doing my study around motivation engagement. I did my research at the MIT Media Lab with Scratch. And there in particular, I worked on features that helped children share because kids don't want to share. Someone is stealing their ideas. You know, I don't know with your friends and siblings, if you ever split a cookie in half and made them choose which one, right? Like it's sort of, it's fantastic to help kids understand sharing. And we know that that's such important open source behavior. So I worked on features to help promote that sort of behavior and thinking. And now if you use Scratch, you can actually see derivatives of your project. So you can see what other people do with it and how that inspired them. So that was really fun research. From there, I did a stint in the world. I did a lot of digital money and went to Nigeria to see how financial inclusion works and doesn't. Learned a lot about how financial systems work. And eventually, a friend of ours tapped me to come teach to teachers. And eventually, he moved on. Joe and I worked together at GitHub. And I became his manager. I presented myself. I gave my plan for my vision for the team to the CEO. And he responded, that's the best presentation I've ever seen at GitHub. But we need to level up your business acumen. And I was like, that is accurate. That is a true statement. And so they sent me to Stanford Business School. And so I got that more sort of financial understanding and operational understanding. And also shepherding that team through the transition of GitHub, young and scrappy and very DIY. And we were this mighty team. We were this mighty team of four people. And seeing all the different ways that being part of a larger organization could help the mission of that organization meant that I had to get on board with change real quickly. And notice also what breaks as a company goes through its life cycle. So, you know, we went from a very sort of ad hoc, I think you and I did like performance reviews, whatever. And to a more formalized process where there are processes. There are promotion packets and there is a promotion committee and salary bans that are very strict. All these sort of formal processes that get implemented as an organization grows up. And so I put all those lessons together and stuck them in a book, which is out from a book of partner. And my hope is that it really helps employees at the line level, line manager level, even director level, get a sense of what they can expect from an organization as it changes.

Joe - 00: 06:56: Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, one thing I want to call out on is I'd known you'd worked on Scratch. Hearing you describe having to encourage children to share, especially in the context of Scratch, is one of those things you hear about and you're like, oh, of course, that's not a solved problem initially. But when you think of Scratch now, the remixing and the sharing of projects is so core to it. It's so fascinating to hear that journey. But to come back to the book you just mentioned and that whole journey, in the developing of your own expertise and having those experiences, at what point did you go, oh, wait a minute, I need to share this. I need to start a fortune. I need to write a book. When did that fall into place for you?

Vanessa - 00: 07:28: In the sort of challenging time of the pandemic, taking a step back and thinking like, what do I want to do with my energy? What do I want to do with my time to serve others? I sort of reflected on three patterns that came up during our time working together in general, 15 years of experience working in early stage organizations, product market fit organizations. And the first pattern is that for millennials, are you a millennial, Joe, or do you kind of-

Joe - 00: 07:58: I am technically a millennial, yeah.

Vanessa - 00: 08:00: Okay. So for millennials and actually even more for Gen Z, there's this big tension between money and mission in our work lives, right? Previous generations didn't have that tension because they weren't expected to be bucketed together. If your dad did 30 years at GE, he might get to work on a project or two that had a mission component. But that wasn't sort of the core focus of work. So our expectations of work have shifted. And Deloitte says that two out of five millennials and Gen Z folks have rejected a job assignment because it did not align with their values. We want to work on projects that have a positive impact in the world. But in practice, holding that expectation can result in a lot of heartbreak when the company doesn't live up to those ideals. And I noticed that folks would get really attached and react emotionally any time the company changed because of that mission drift that can happen as a company grows up. As an industry, we needed tools to navigate that heartbreak when companies have to make hard choices and choices that conflict with our values. We don't have any tools. We didn't. Pattern two is that change really hurts. And what do I mean by that? Tech moves super fast. But no one teaches us how to do it gracefully, how to adapt gracefully. And in the book, I build on the work of Harvard School business, Rosabeth Moss Kanter. And she has dedicated her life's work to studying the married way as employees feel pain through change. And there are 10 different reasons, everywhere from surprise to loss of face to loss of control. For a lot of folks, autonomy. Autonomy is their primary driver. And I know that autonomy is important to you. It's definitely important to me. So changes in autonomy can rattle your sense of control. Excess uncertainty. Nobody likes to be left on read. We're getting for more details to firm up. Surprise, loss of face, concerns about future competence, ripple effect. And so I think that's a really important thing. Concerns about more work, right? Because whenever there's change, you got to learn how to do it. And some of us are motivated to burn the midnight oil and like innovate, but it's so large, right? So any change is like, oh, I got to learn how to do something different. And then there's past resentment. And I think you and I have both had experiences where for whatever reason, one change breaks the camel's back, the sort of cumulative effect of past changes. And then all of a sudden you've got an eruption in a Slack channel or gossip or trying to go above someone's head. So yeah, I build on the work of Rosabeth Moss Kanter. And the last pattern that I reflect on is that as tech employees, we are hired in a specific domain. You do developer outreach in this amazing way, and it helps that you're very online, Joe. Like that's your domain, right?

Joe - 00: 11:10: Right.

Vanessa - 00: 11:10: But like some folks, you know, it's marketing, product design, engineering. Right. And you're hired because you're a badass at that thing. But then to succeed in an org, you've got to know all this other stuff. You've got to know how to get folks to invest in your ideas, how promotions work. You're just expected to know how to advocate for yourself. And I wanted to write a book that was like the missing manual for tech employees so they could get a quick overview of the things that they would need to know to fill in that gap.

Joe - 00: 11:43: Right. That makes a lot of sense. So to go back to some points you said there, so you brought up some aspects in which the tech industry or workers in the tech industry may feel slightly differently about change than other workplaces, other form of workers. You know, the pace is a big one, pace of change, innovation, tech. I think autonomy, you mentioned autonomy, and I think that's actually, you know, just from my observation that there's a higher degree of expectations about having autonomy in tech, I think, in other industries. Do you think that the prospect of change for tech employee is fundamentally different than other workers? Do you think that's something that makes change particularly scary to tech workers?

Vanessa - 00: 12:16: I don't know about particularly scary. I think particularly frequent, as you observed. Also, something that's different when I talk to my friends in other industries, there is a lot of tension between the sort of line workers and management. And I think the power differentials are a bit different in tech because everyone is so smart. They know they can take their business elsewhere. Any employee at any given time in a tech role, their skills could be very much in demand somewhere else. So I think a better way to think about it as an employee and also as a manager, even at the C-suite, is you know that you can't get things done if the employees aren't on board. And they were likely going to be smart people. So if you want things done at a high level, you're going to need to socialize your ideas with the rank and file. And employees can decide whether they want to take a step forward with that vision or not and take their business elsewhere. And so that's a power that I think is unique to this industry that isn't, say, if you're a film scholar with tenure at like Bryn Mawr or Imperial, that's a very narrow focus. And because capitalism being what it is, there's a different demand for those particular skills and expertise. Yes. Also, earlier stage organizations haven't ossified their policies yet. So there's a lot of slack in it. And I think a lot of younger employees may want clarity where there is none or a process where there is none. And the upside is you can totally shape it. You know, when you and I worked together, I was like, what should our policy on this be? I'm taking ideas. Because it's so much easier also to build with all the smart people on your team than just roll out a policy and have a smart person like Joan Ash just rail against it in a public channel.

Joe - 00: 14:16: Not that I had ever done that, of course. I've seen that.

Vanessa - 00: 14:21: Feel free to edit that out, Joe.

Joe - 00: 14:24: No, we're good. I think the point about the balance of power, the extent to which the worker has other options and supply and demand, that's really interesting. And I think one of the ways or one of the big things that has changed for the industry as a whole in recent years, obviously with the pandemic, has been that balance seems to be shifting or has shifted a bit. You know, we're seeing this play out in, we're remote now, everyone's being called back to work and, you know, there's various conflicts about that and various businesses, you know, businesses are navigating that. How do you think the pandemic has altered how businesses communicate change to employees and how they address the substantial changes everyone's had to go through to their workforces?

Vanessa - 00: 15:01: Yeah. So in the book, I introduced my own change framework for leaders who will need to roll out change to their organizations. And it's kind of like agile change management because, Joe, I don't know if you ever worked at an organization that had like change management and scare quotes from like a big four consulting firm.

Joe - 00: 15:25: My NGO time.

Vanessa - 00: 15:26: Oh, your NGO time. Okay. So that's like hundreds of thousands of dollars contract and it takes forever and that's not going to work for our industry, tech industry. So I introduced this framework. It's called Amicus and it's about assessing the variables that you're trying to move metrics timeline. Incremental change is easier to implement. Comms putting together a communication plan, us integrating employees with the change and show once the change is over again in scare quotes. Showing employees the impact of the changes had. And what I will say about the pandemic and change is that there's definitely been a ton of it. And let me point to some examples of folks who have done it well, at least the communications part well. And Brian Chesky at Airbnb wrote this blog post that really clearly articulated why he chose to have a reduction in force. And it was because bookings dropped this much. So revenue dropped this much. So they needed to go back into the black. So they were pulling all of their sort of growth verticals, experimental verticals, just really doubling back down on the host experience and the guest experience. And I'm happy to put that blog post in the show notes for you. But it's really, I think, an amazing case study in connecting how leaders should connect the dots. Like, hey, this thing happened that it was out the economic conditions, change in market demand. Here are the inputs that I think are going to make a change. And then here is what I expect to see as a result. And the Collison brothers did something similar when they had a reduction in force at Stripe, where they really clearly articulated, we thought we were going to grow and that didn't happen. And that's on us. But here is what we're going to do at Stripe and what we're going to focus on. And here is the profitability that we expect to see in the coming quarters. So those would be some of the patterns that I've noticed. I also think that, unfortunately, during this time, HR tends to be an under-resourced function in organizations that are early stage or product market fit or even at scale. And a lot of these tools aren't necessarily available because when you're cutting budgets, HR is kind of one of the things that tends to be called back and on the chopping block. So that's why I wanted to put together something that was low cost, easy, agile to give folks these tools, because I feel like a lot of folks in these orgs need them. But it might not be the smartest business strategy to have that like massive L&D right now. So that's what I sort of offer. And I think that's what I offer to businesses is like, hey, there's this problem going on. I can give you these tools and I promise you it's going to be so much, so much more affordable and culturally aligned with you as opposed to something from the big four consulting firms.

Joe - 00: 18:31: Right. That makes sense. So this may end up leading back to that framework. But, you know, speaking of when these companies come to you and they're like, hey, we're about to navigate a change. Vanessa, we need your help to get through this. Like, what are the main things that they are after from you? Like, what do they expect? What do they expect to get from support in going for a change?

Vanessa - 00: 18:51: So when I give workshops to managers, I point to four variables that will improve for those managers. The question is, I'm dreading upcoming changes at my company. And before a workshop and after, people feel way closer to know I feel okay about them. So they dread change less. Second is, I feel prepared for company changes. They feel more prepared. They know how to measure the impact of changes that they make to their team. And probably the variable that improves the most consistently after I've been doing these workshops with folks like Pluralsight and Netlify is, I know how to message change to my team. And the pre-workshop mean is usually six-ish, and the post-workshop mean is 8.5-ish. So if those are the ability to approach change with less dread, prepare your managers, measure change. If those are business outcomes that your organization needs, that is something that the workshops provide. But I also assist companies one-on-one with one-on-one coaching of their managers during this time. So your team is going to know they're going to prepare for a reduction in force. This is if they need help scoping it, making a plan and a timeline. If they need help messaging that change, that is also a service I provide.

Joe - 00: 20:17: Excellent. So throughout your professional history, and the, even now at Workbrew, you've worked on remote and distributed teams, which is obviously this current moment, as it discusses things a lot of people are navigating. What advice would you give folks who are either currently leading the teams or looking to accommodate the push towards flexible working and remote working in creating a successful work environment, but also culture within those very distributed spaces?

Vanessa - 00: 20:44: Yeah, so I think expectations are really important when it comes to remote work. And a lot of folks focus on like the sort of fun, make the team have emojis or send them sparkles or swag or whatever. And I'm not going to poo poo on those, like I'm not going to yuck that yum. But I feel like that's more frosting or icing on the cake versus the structure that you should build with teams. And especially for new team members, as a manager, it is extremely beneficial to both you and the direct report to come up with a 30, 60, 90 day plan. And I think that this is on the manager's responsibility to do the first one because they know what people they should meet in the first 30 days, the projects they should work on. And the structure of the 30, 60, 90 is see one, do one, try one. Right. And at 30 days, it's really about imbibing information. And at 60 days, you are analyzing that information, formulating a plan. And at 90 days, you're implementing that plan. And after every quarter, rinse and repeat. Just keep doing that. There are only four quarters in the year. It's not that intense. But if the direct report looks at it and says that seems reasonable because both parties need to handshake on the 30, 60, 90 day plan as far as like the commitments that are made. At 30 days, you're going to have a sense of whether. That's going well or not. 60 days. And you will definitely know at 90 days if this person needs more support. But I hear a lot from individuals who say, you know, I feel alone. I don't know what to work on. I don't know who to talk to. And so many problems can be addressed with just a little clarity. The second piece is folks got to see each other in person. And there's a reason why in so many cultures, breaking bread is the. You know, ritual. And I made it a point whenever someone new would come onto the team, especially if they were a manager or a leader is I would fly out and see how they lived. Right. Like the folks who live in Amsterdam have a different pace of life and pattern of life and expectations. Then the folks to live in San Francisco, different cultural touch points, their relationships, their family may be a bit different. I recommend making that effort. Rolling into a team off site. Just figure out how to get those folks together. And three, never skip your one-on-ones. Just don't skip them. Maybe number four, and you're not going to like this, Joe, is get aligned with your team members about where they want to go in their career. So ask every team member together their career plan. It's very, very quick and dirty. You have to name three people whose careers you admire, reverse engineer it, set some gaps that you want to fill. And that way, it's another way of aligning the manager and the direct report. So when that person wants to make a move, no one's surprised. And it builds a tie of trust. So there are these solid communication and expectation mechanisms that all the other sort of fringe benefits are decorative. But I think that if you get these fundamentals right, that'll take you pretty far.

Joe - 00: 23:58: That last one's especially interesting, where you said they're about preparing for them to make a change. I guess it's kind of like internal change management to the team. As well as stuff coming down from them. Having worked on teams, you've exercised those things. I think I would agree with all those points, including the one that gave me a life crisis when at the age of 25, you're like, what do you want to do in the future, Joe? And I'm like, so yeah, totally understand and agree. So as we get to the end of our time here, we have a bit of a tradition here on the show, especially with our guests who have such illustrious careers. So I should ask, if you could give some advice to yourself at the start of your career, what would that advice be?

Vanessa - 00: 24:29: Following your intuition. I'm very fortunate in that I have led a life where I could follow ideas and follow the question that seemed most alive to me at the time. And whenever I've had an intuition that like, hey, this doesn't feel right, it's usually been correct. And also, if you see an opportunity, just try it because you don't know what you're going to be super good at in the work world yet early in your career. You could be really persuasive in front of an audience. You just don't know. You could be excellent at navigating hacker news. Try a lot of different things and then step into roles that might be uncomfortable for you because you can always move back. Always roll it back. If we could only just like have gift for our careers.

Joe - 00: 25:14: What a dream. Branching every day. Perfect. I think that is a wonderful point to put a full stop on it. Thank you so much for your time today, Vanessa. It's been wonderful to have your insights during the show.

Vanessa - 00: 25:25: It has been my pleasure.

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