There were 70,000 U.S. internship listings on the professional networking site in February. If historical trends are any indicator, that number will likely jump above six figures during the month of March.
"It is the dead center of internship season; it is a crucial month," says Lauren Berger, founder of Internqueen.com and author of two books on interning, including All Work, No Pay and Welcome to the Real World. "If you don't have those materials ready, sit down this weekend, block out some time, give those materials a facelift, go over your resume and your cover letter, and make sure you've got some references ready to go."
It can feel like a catch-22: Experience is required to get an internship, but an internship is required to gain experience. But Berger says it's not too late for students to beef up their resumes by signing up for some additional school clubs and committees.
"That's one of the best ways to get something on your resume," she says, adding that students should target clubs that are most relevant to the internships they're applying for. "We're not too far off from the beginning of spring semester at a lot of universities, a lot of clubs are only two or three meetings in, so you can still try and sign up."
[Graph: courtesy of LinkedIn]
While those opportunities are still available, they won't be for long, and soon internship opportunities will begin to disappear as well. In 2016, LinkedIn saw relatively flat internship application rates from June through the New Year before a peak in March that fizzled out again by May.
"Through the data, we know they should be looking for internships in metro areas," adds LinkedIn's senior product manager for students, Kylan Nieh. "The top five cities, purely based on the number of internships available, are New York, San Francisco, Minneapolis, San Jose, and Santa Monica."
The professional network's data also reveals a number of ways students can increase their chances of landing a summer gig through their online profile. For example, LinkedIn profiles who list their location receive 19 times more views, and those who list five or more skills are 27 times more likely to be discovered in searches by recruiters.
"Even if you don't have former internship or work experience, if you have club and activity experience, or other leadership experience within your school, make sure you highlight that in your profile," says Nieh. "Highlight the courses you've been taking, highlight the projects that you think would best represent the skills you've acquired through your academic journey, and that employers might get excited about. Those are ways students can help themselves stand out."
Nieh adds that the summary section is more crucial for students than most applicants, as it gives them an opportunity to showcase some of their skills and interests, even if they don't have formal work experience in those areas.
While March can be a very competitive month for internships, Berger says that interns who take the time to follow directions and fill out an application properly are already ahead of the pack.
"While they do get a lot [of applications], if I were to take out all the resumes that aren't done properly—because of formatting, because of spelling errors, because the resumes aren't arranged properly or saved as PDFs, because they didn't add a cover letter when they were supposed to, whatever it might be—they're actually not left with that many," she says.
Berger adds that it is not uncommon for internship coordinators to receive cover letters addressed to the wrong company.
"Print off the internship listing and go through it with a highlighter, because they are giving you the answers to the test," she says. "Connect the dots and let the job listing tell you what you need to focus on on your resume."
Taking the time to follow instructions can have long-lasting benefits, as many students end up landing a full-time gig following graduation through their summer internship. According to data from LinkedIn, accounting interns have the highest likelihood of landing a full-time job, with 55% being hired after completing an internship, and management consulting interns have a 38% chance of getting hired.
While some interns will find a full-time placement through their internship, others will at least finish the summer with additional content on their resume, a deeper understanding of life after college, and perhaps even some clarity on what they want out of their future careers.
"Just getting a really great understanding of what the day-to-day is like is crucial," says Berger. "The truth is you won't know until you're there, which is why internships are so beneficial; you're learning what you want to do and what you don't want to do, so when you graduate from college, you're more likely to go into a career that's the right fit for you."
Should you focus more on building your credibility or on generating leads? Trick question.
At the most basic level, your business needs two marketing strategies: One that increases your credibility and one that generates qualified leads. But it's easier said than done, right?
In fact, it's easier than you might think—whether you're running a startup or working for yourself. As a publicist, my daily efforts center around landing my clients opportunities that achieve both goals simultaneously. The best part? Most of these opportunities are free.
Unfortunately, too many entrepreneurs conflate these two strategies, mistake one type of activity for another, or overdo it on one side of the divide and neglect the other. Here's how to tell credibility building from lead generation, and what it takes to strike the right balance.
First, everyone who's selling something—whether it's an app, a physical product, or their own consulting services—needs to build their market credibility. Lots of potential clients I speak to want to be on television, but most have outsize expectations for what a three-minute segment on a local news channel will do for their business.
"I did it to have content I could share on social media, not because I thought it would increase my followers," Brooke Rash, cofounder of the online entrepreneur community The Social Circle, said of an appearance she made on morning television in Cincinnati last year.
As an entrepreneur who specializes in helping business owners crack social media, you might think that Rash appearing on TV during "National Social Media Day" would have boosted her website traffic or generated new leads. It did neither—but Rash wasn't fazed. She understood that the appearance was a credibility builder. She could post about it on social media, add it to her website, and even share a link in her email newsletter, knowing that the media exposure would subtly improve how her audience perceived her expertise.
Esther Kiss, a fellow publicist, says she uses TV appearances similarly. "These clips help build trust with new prospects because of the credibility that comes with being associated with brands like NBC, CBS, or ABC," says Kiss.
The same goes for contributing as a writer to a well-known publication (like this one). Before I started my publicity firm, I was a corporate attorney who steadily worked to position myself as an expert on the sports industry by writing for Forbes and becoming an analyst for a regional sports network. There's no doubt in my mind that the exposure and credibility I gained that way were instrumental in ESPN hiring me away from my law practice in 2011 to become a sports business analyst full-time.
Guest blogging for a well-known outlet can also be a lead generator—not just a credibility builder—but it's a long-term play.
I'm currently on my second stint with Forbes, and having written for the outlet for over three and a half years, I've been approached with book offers, paid speaking engagements, and lucrative consulting gigs. I would caution, however, that one guest blog isn't going to have that same impact—it's a long-term strategy that requires consistency. For example, this is my fifth piece for Fast Company, and I've seen no noticeable increase in leads or traffic to my website as a result. (Hint: that's not my goal, either.)
But inevitably, when I ask potential clients about their publicity goals, they think the quick fixes are an appearance on a national television show or a feature in a major magazine. But while those things can build your credibility, they're much less likely to be lead generators.
So, what type of publicity does generate leads?
First and foremost, you should look into being interviewed on podcasts in your niche. According to Edison Research, an estimated 98 million people listen to podcasts, and they over-index as affluent and tech-savvy. Plus, "since most podcasts are geared toward niche audiences, for experts with niche offers, doing podcast interviews can be very lucrative," Kiss says.
Kiss and I both advise our clients to have a lead magnet and sales funnel in place in order to convert listeners into leads and, eventually, into clients or customers. At its most basic level, this means offering some kind of free content (a checklist, an ebook, video training, etc.) in exchange for an email address. Then you need a plan in place to follow up with those leads.
"The lead magnet should be answering questions or providing a solution for something that's related to the topic the guest shares their expertise around, so it's perceived as a logical next step," Kiss says. "That way, you have permission to further communicate with them, provide value, build even more trust, and ultimately generate sales."
Kiss was able to add $1.8 million to her client Ryan Levesque's business during the launch of his 2015 best-seller, Ask, and she says it largely came as a result of podcast interviews. On each one, Levesque offered a free copy of the book to the first 50 listeners to claim the offer, only requiring them to pay for shipping.
Orders were tracked with a unique coupon code for each show, and then those purchasers were retargeted with Facebook ads where they were offered paid products and services. Nearly $2 million later, giving away his book for free to podcast listeners turned out to be a pretty good plan for generating quality leads.
This two-part marketing strategy isn't rocket science, and many startup founders, solopreneurs, and business owners already grasp it in principle. But it can be easy to conflate the two sides of this coin, or mistake one type of marketing activity for the other, then scratch your head when your business just isn't scaling. By balancing credibility building with lead generation right from the get-go, you can not only avoid this pitfall but start to raise your profile—and at a lower cost than you'd even budgeted.
It's the biggest technology IPO since 2014 and most investors are giddy with excitement but concerns remain.
It's the biggest technology IPO in two and a half years and Wall Street is giddy with excitement amid a booming stock market, which hit a new high on Wednesday. But when shares of Snap start trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday morning, investors seem divided between those who are extremely enthusiastic about the app's allure and naysayers who remain unconvinced about the company's potential to grow its user base large enough to start turning a profit.
Snap, which will start trading under the symbol "SNAP," will sell 200 million shares for $17 apiece on Thursday, giving it a valuation of almost $24 billion—with executives like CEO Evan Spiegel, cofounder Bobby Murphy, and early investors selling 55 million of their own shares and walking home with $935 million in proceeds. The share price is higher than the $14 to $16 a share previously sought by the company, showing that there is plenty of demand for a piece of the much-anticipated IPO.
"It is 5 times, if not 10 times oversubscribed," Sean Stiefel, portfolio manager at Navy Capital, told Fast Company, adding that he put in a big order to buy shares in advance of the offering.
Not that all of those investors even understand Snap, as the company acknowledged in its IPO registration document filed last month when it included a tutorial full of drawings that show how the app works. One of the ironies of tomorrow's IPO is that while its most active users are younger than 25, many of the professional investors who will be deciding whether to buy shares for their clients have never used the app and hardly understand it.
But they do understand that it could make them a lot of money. "The investors are just looking around to say 'I guess it sounds good because everyone's telling me it is,'" David Menlow, the president of SecondaryRatings.com, which rates IPOs and secondary offerings, told Marketwatch.
"I'm very bullish," says Stiefel, who just got back from a trip to Israel, where he met with film companies. "The way the world is growing—the trend is toward images and not text—Snapchat is an innovator in that space. It's at the edge of the next wave of social media." He says that he's not too concerned about competition from Instagram since "we're very early in this trend" and Snapchat has proven to be an innovator and investors will "give it time to continue to prove that."
Other investors have some concerns about Snap's future. While it stands out by driving higher engagement and offers plenty of opportunities to sell ads to a coveted demographic, Snap needs to really grow in the next few years if it plans on making real money.
"My rule of thumb on such networks is that they need roughly 300 million users to be self-sustaining and to generate positive cash flow," says Fred Baccanello, an investment manager at Dominion Asset Management. "They need to get to 300 million by 2018 and I don't think it will happen—their user growth is slowing. And the market expectation is too high and probably unrealistic.
He also pointed out that international expansion is essential to its user growth, but that its software code doesn't work well on simpler smartphones that are common in the developed world. "Tencent and Facebook have lite versions of their app and that helps them attract users in the rest of the world. I'm not sure if Snap can do that."
As the CEO of Connecting for Good, a nonprofit in Kansas City, Esselman helps several thousand households at low-income housing projects in the city get free access to the internet. "It's so basic," says Esselman, who gave up the corporate life as an innovation executive at Hallmark (he's the one who helped come up with those cards that play music when they're opened). "You're helping extremely low-income people get internet to improve their lives."
His group has provided such services since 2012, in addition to conducting computer training sessions for poor and working-class Kansas City residents. Now it wants to expand its reach, having recently applied for a federal program called Lifeline, which provides a monthly subsidy of $9.25 to low-income Americans to allow them to get online. Nonprofit groups can also apply for the subsidy to help them offer free or low-cost broadband access to the community. Getting the subsidy would allow Connecting for Good to enable thousands more households in the neighborhood to get online for free.
But the Trump administration just made it harder for the new program, which launched in December, to have an impact. Ajit Pai, the newly appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has announced a review of the program and blocked most of the already-vetted companies from participating in Lifeline, which could make it difficult for tens of thousands of low-income Americans to get online. The move shocked broadband access proponents in both parties, who have long argued that helping low-income and rural Americans get internet access is essential to educating young people and training the workforce of the future. Pai and the program's critics have cited isolated cases of waste and fraud in which providers took advantage of the program (it also subsidized wireless phone access) and pocketed subsides while exaggerating the number of subscribers.
But that's no reason to cut back on this essential program. On the contrary, it should be expanded.
Since he first heard the news on February 3, Chike Aguh, CEO of EveryoneOn, an internet access and outreach nonprofit, has heard from everyone from school district leaders to people working in battered women's shelters who worry about the impact of the FCC's action. "There are millions of people in this country who need what this program provides," he says.
Aguh's group works with internet service providers to connect them with over 430,000 people in 48 states who need broadband access. He points out that the FCC's action essentially shuts down the program for now, since the nine companies whose approval was revoked by the agency were some of the only ones offering broadband. Though about 900 providers have been approved over the years to provide Lifeline phone subsides, only a few also offer broadband access.
Instead of revoking the approval of the providers, there are other ways the FCC could have made sure they were effective. "Nobody wants fraud, but there are other ways to get around that—you could do an audit every 60 days or require additional documentation from customers," says Aguh.
Nearly 40 groups, including the American Library Association, Free Press, and the National Hispanic Media Coalition , sent a letter last week to the FCC, asking it to allow the nine companies to participate in the program and to "set aside any further efforts to erode Lifeline's promise." The groups called claims about waste and fraud a "long-discredited argument." There is also concern that the FCC's action will discourage more providers from coming forward to apply for subsidies.
And the FCC's action could doom the program. When Aguh first heard the news, he grew pessimistic. "I thought that this could be the first wave of an assault on this program, which has been around since the Reagan years when it subsidized phone service for rural and poor Americans, to not have it exist one day. And there are millions of people in this country who need what Lifeline provides."
Amazon, Casper, and others are changing the way we shop in 2017.
Retail is in the middle of a major transformation, as the internet continues to change the way we buy everything from mattresses to bananas to hammers. But companies are also reimagining what brick-and-mortar can be, inviting customers to have delightful and unexpected in-person experiences that leave a lasting impression. These companies have come up with the most creative solutions that make shopping easier and more exciting.
Click on a company to learn more about why it made the list.
Trump's proposed childcare and family leave plans has a lot of flaws, according to experts and family advocates.
In Trump's speech to Congress last night he mentioned issues such as childcare and paid leave that advisors say his daughter Ivanka has advocated for.
But some advocacy groups and academics say there are plenty of flaws in these proposals.
For starters, the tax credits for the childcare plan that would be offered to working families favors those who are making more money, even though Trump has said from the time he was on the campaign trail that there would be an expanded benefit to low-income working families.
The Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan industry group, just released analysis of Trump's proposed plan and found "about 70% of benefits go to families with at least $100,000 and 25% of benefits go to families with at least $200,000. Very few benefits go to the lowest income families who are likely to struggle most with paying for child care," the report's authors write.
As one of the largest expenses families face, childcare costs continue to contribute to wage inequality. Recent research from the EPI found that while costs vary by state, it ranges between $344 to $1,472 a month to care for one preschool child, forcing more women to quit their jobs. A recent Department of Agriculture report estimates the cost of raising a child at $233,610 for married, middle-income parents. The cost of childcare is the third largest part of that expense and can be as much as 30% of a parent's annual income.
The Federal Reserve estimated that the average median family income in the U.S. in 2015 was just over $56,000. According to the Tax Policy Center, families making less than $40,000 will get a tax credit of $20 or less. "Those with incomes over $3.7 million would receive an average tax cut of nearly $1.1 million, over 14% of after-tax income," the report's authors write.
Vivien Labaton, cofounder and co-director of Make It Work Action calls this approach a bait and switch. "On one hand, he's proposing childcare and paid leave plans that provide the bare minimum in terms of benefits, while on the other hand he's proposing oppressive budget cuts that will eliminate or drastically cut resources to a range of services that are essential to working families," she said in a statement.
The proposed budget cut of $54 billion is expected to shift spending away from certain agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency which stands to lose as much as a quarter of its budget.
Ellen Bravo, co-executive director of Family Values @ Work pointed out that the proposal for family leave Trump offers is for maternity leave only. That, she said in a statement, leaves out fathers and non-birth parents, as well as "all the other reasons people need leave for their own serious illness or that of a family member." Bravo also noted that the amount of leave is only six weeks, which is half the amount of time afforded by the Family Medical Leave Act (although that time is unpaid) "It would come from an underfunded source, state unemployment insurance funds," she said.
Taryn Morrissey, a scholar of childcare policies at American University and coauthor of Cradle to Kindergarten said, "Six weeks falls short of what research says babies and parents need to support their health and development."
Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families, added that not only should paid family and medical leave be made available to all working people when they have a new child or a serious personal or family illness to address, it must also offer meaningful wage replacement. "It is appalling that the president failed to even mention fair pay," Ness said in a statement, "at this time when the gender-based wage gap punishes women and families."
Learning to speak a second language is a crash course in parsing ambiguity and decoding others' intentions—and that's a good thing.
There's a Czech proverb that says, "As many languages you know, as many times you are a human being." Like other multilingual speakers, I've often thought of myself as a different person whenever I speak a different language.
But this feeling has less to do with the structure of the languages themselves than with the personal associations I have with each one. Until I started working at Waze, my use of Spanish was limited to home. So it's always reminded me of warm meals, family time, soccer, and parties. My use of English, meanwhile, has been the de facto language of my professional life. I may feel like different people, but the reality is that I'm the same me, using different idioms depending on the context, and my associations flow from that experience—but not the other way around.
For decades (centuries, really), scholars and scientists have debated whether and to what extent the language you speak may condition your thought, a concept that's often boiled down to a question like, "Can you entertain an idea about something you don't have a word for?" In more recent years, the prevailing answer among researchers has ranged roughly from, "Of course you can, that's a silly question," to, "Well, for the most part." But even though it's largely accepted that our spoken languages don't completely determine what we think, they do influence how we think (and feel and behave) in subtler ways—including how and when we experience empathy.
If Spanish won't turn you into Lionel Messi, then what's the point? Forget for a second that Spanish will help you work in Latin America, or that Mandarin will make you a better host for your Chinese counterparts. Some researchers now believe that knowing a second language—any second language—can increase your capacity for understanding and empathy.
We tend to think that language, when used well, is quite precise. But as Lane Greene, author of You Are What You Speak, told me, "Language is more of a fuzzy pattern recognition between two people." More often than not, we have to look past what a person said to understand what they mean, even if we don't realize we're doing so.
The theory that multilingualism increases empathy was tested in 2015 by a team of researchers at the University of Chicago. The results from that study suggest multilingual children are better at understanding other people, even when the words they use are imprecise. The researchers presented kids ages 4 to 6 with three toy cars—a small, medium, and large one. Some of the children spoke just one language, others were bilingual, and a third group had been "exposed" to a second language but weren't yet fluent.
At one point in the experiment, the researchers presented the cars so that the smallest one was hidden from their own view, while the children could see all three—then said, "I see a small car" and asked the child to move it. The bilingual and language-"exposed" children, knowing which cars the experimenter could see, moved the medium-sized car—the smallest one from the point of view of the adult giving them the instructions—three out of four times. Their monolingual counterparts did so only half the time. In other words, the children who were familiar with more languages were better at inferring the researchers' intentions, even when their words came up short.
"Early language exposure is essential to developing a formal language system but may not be sufficient for communicating effectively," the researchers wrote. "To understand a speaker's intention, one must take the speaker's perspective. Multilingual exposure may promote effective communication by enhancing perspective taking."
Language learning may encourage empathy in other ways, too. Anyone who's studied a foreign language will remember how challenging it was at first. So when we meet someone who doesn't speak our native tongue fluently, we may be more likely to put ourselves in their shoes and forgive their mistakes. Actually, one would hope this benefit of the doubt would extend to lots of situations, not just those where there's a language barrier.
The "principle of charity" actually has deep roots in the history of philosophy. It's the idea that we should interpret ambiguous claims or sentences in the most positive way possible in order to allow the conversation or debate to continue. As a friend of mine memorably summed it up recently, it means we should "listen to understand, not to respond." After all, we're dealing with imperfect people speaking imprecise languages—no matter how fluently—so ambiguity and uncertainty should be taken for granted.
In fact, "charity" may be a bit of a misnomer since it suggests you're absorbing some kind of cost for another person's benefit. But it's actually in your interest, too, to assume that whoever you're speaking with is rational and competent. The principle of charity encourages you to suspend judgment until you get a deep enough understanding, not just of what the person said, but what they meant.
Of course, you don't need to be multilingual in order to be philosophically charitable. But those who speak another language may understand and accept ambiguity more readily than others. That's valuable these days. Social media has made many of us trigger-happy. We're quicker than ever to retweet, share, or cry outrage. It's never been easier to have (and broadcast) an instant reaction to something rather than to process it, ask questions, and try to get to the bottom of what somebody really means, in between and beneath their actual words.
Learning another language, it seems, may nudge us into territory where we can't help but slow down—where we need to seek understanding and commonalities in order to communicate. Greene points out that the results of studies like the one at the University of Chicago haven't been successfully replicated, but says there's other promising research to suggest that multilingualism promotes empathy and even humility.
"People use words differently, so you learn to attune to the person and situation" when you speak more than one language, he says. And ultimately, the empathy and humility this teaches is language-blind. "The charity economy only works if everyone accepts the same currency."
Eric M. Ruiz is a New York City–based writer from Modesto, California. He helped launch Waze Ads in Latin America and now focuses on exploring and writing about the differences that make us the same. He thinks in English but hugs in Spanish. Follow him on Twitter at @EricMartinRuiz.
Sexual harassment shouldn't be taken lightly. Here's what to do if you are the victim, or if you've witnessed it at work.
In less than a year, two very high-profile cases of sexual harassment have come to light in the U.S. Last year, Fox and Friends host Gretchen Carlson sued Fox chairman Roger Ailes, alleging she was fired because she wouldn't have sex with him. This month, veteran Uber engineer Susan Fowler wrote a Medium post describing her own experience of sexual harassment and her subsequent decision to leave the company. And now, A.J. Vandermeyden, a female engineer at Tesla, is suing her employer for sexual harassment, alleging that not only has she been repeatedly harassed and paid less than her male counterparts, but when she reported her concerns, she was also further mistreated.
Once the first two women came forward, others at their companies followed. Additional reports of harassment and a toxic company culture surfaced from those within Uber. It's not surprising, considering that a survey of more than 200 women who work at Silicon Valley's best-known companies found that 60% have been sexually harassed on the job. A broader study by Cosmopolitan in 2015 found as many as 1 in 3 women reporting being sexually harassed at work.
According to the American Association of University Women, "Very generally, 'sexual harassment' describes unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, or other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature." It's illegal because it is a form of sex discrimination that violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
But it's not always that clear cut, according to Steve Cadigan, founder of Cadigan Talent Ventures, who was former VP of talent at LinkedIn. Cadigan says he's investigated dozens of harassment claims through the years, and has found there are some misunderstandings about the subject.
First, he points out, a sexual harassment claim doesn't have to include behavior that is sexual in nature. "Under the law, sexual harassment is 'creating a hostile work environment' that by definition is fairly broad," Cadigan says. They can also be made against a coworker who is of the same gender.
Cadigan also points out that a company that does business globally often has a code of conduct that supersedes local law in some cases. Cadigan experienced this firsthand while working in the Beijing office of a U.S. company, and an employee reported sexual harassment. "The accused employee accurately told me [for that year], 'Sexual harassment is not recognized as illegal behavior in China,'" Cadigan recalls. "I informed him that when he joined, he signed a company code of conduct that said the U.S. company conduct policies are in place," he says.
In the U.S., even though the law has been in place for over 50 years, harassment persists, says Catherine Tinsley, PhD, because "men have more social status." Tinsley, a professor of management at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business, says that such sexual advances are a power play and a way to put a woman who is being particularly "uppity" in her place. "That's not the way it should be," she underscores. "It's the way it is." Which is why it is important to report any instance of harassment. Of course, sexual harassment doesn't just happen to women, but it does happen to women more often. In 2013, for example, over 10,000 charges involving sexual harassment were brought to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), 82% of them by women.
Tinsley notes, "You can never be fired for raising the issue, but know that when you escalate, [the company's leadership] is compelled to investigate, and they can't necessarily do it anonymously." She understands that escalating a sexual harassment claim can make some people feel uncomfortable. That can be due to having to recount the incident(s) to others, or whether the employee trusts the company's culture and processes or not.
Cadigan says an officer of the company (such as a vice president or C-suite executive) is required to report any claim of sexual harassment brought to their attention. "I have had many women, and some men, come to me over the years and say, 'I want to tell you something, but I don't want anyone to know,' or they say, 'I want to tell you something in confidence, but I don't want you to do anything about it.'" When he's gotten such a request, Cadigan says he's explained that he's required to report and act on two things: "A claim or witnessing of sexual harassment, and a law potentially being broken in the company."
That said, Cadigan offers a series of practical steps a worker should take if they've been sexually harassed.
1. Read your company policy and the law on sexual harassment (if any) in your state or jurisdiction very carefully and print them out. The policy will usually include your rights, protections against retaliation, and an outline of what happens if a claim is reported.
2. Find out if your company has a policy that protects whistleblowers from retaliation. If they have one, read it and print it out.
3. Determine who in your chain of command is the most mature, reasonable, and capable of being objective in handling something as sensitive as your harassment claim.
4. Write down what you plan to say to report the harassment. Have as many specifics as possible. Make sure you clarify how the harassment has affected your ability to do your job. Practice with someone you trust outside the company who will keep this confidential. This will help you to be calm when you make your claim.
5. If you have any witnesses that you trust, ask them for confirmation and support. This is a delicate and risky step that you may not want to take unless you trust that this person will keep the issue confidential until and if they are interviewed as part of a formal investigation.
6. Ask for a meeting with the person you choose in your chain of command and invite the appropriate executive from HR.
7. Explain the situation, give examples, give the names of witnesses, and tell them the impact this has had on you. Let them know that you did your homework: You were subject to what you believe violates the company's sexual harassment policy and/or the law, and show them your printed evidence. Tell them that you want the behavior to stop in order to work in a safe and supportive environment.
8. Once you have laid out your complaint, ask: "Do you think this behavior is acceptable at this company?" If you get them to admit it's wrong, make sure you write it down in your notes.
9. Listen to what they say and write everything down. Let them see you are documenting, and ask them to slow down if necessary.
10. Thank them and ask what the next steps are, who will conduct the investigation, who they will talk to, how long will it take to complete it, etc.
Cadigan adds that the HR leader should explain what they are going to do, which should be a highly confidential investigation to protect you from retaliation. "If the first thing they do is to try to support the offender/accused or to make excuses for that person," he contends, "you should politely tell them that you strongly disagree, and that if they do not conduct a proper investigation, you will be given no choice but to seek justice through an attorney who can represent you properly."
Speaking out can carry a price. "There is no way you cannot assure that you will not be fired or blackballed for making a claim of sexual harassment," Cadigan maintains. The EEOC found that charges of retaliation linked to sexual discrimination claims grew to about 40,000 in 2015, which is more than double the number in 1997.
Cadigan says that while that's unfortunate, "it is not illegal to be a horrific manager, and some people have been fired even though it's wrong and in some cases illegal." That's because most states and companies are "at-will" employers, meaning they have the right to terminate an employee at any time. "While there are some laws that offer protections for minorities, etc.," Cadigan observes, "it will not stop a company from firing someone and claiming another reason."
Tinsley encourages those who have experienced sexual harassment to talk to coworkers about it. It's so easy, she says, for women in particular to internalize. But speaking about it can serve a dual purpose of making a case much stronger if others have had a similar experience, as well as providing a way to heal a damaged psyche.
Keeping it hidden, says Tinsley, can feel shameful. "If you talk about it," she asserts, "you realize it is not about you, it's about the other person." And she adds, "Just as the aggressor is not categorically evil, you didn't do something wrong to invite [the sexual harassment]"—important points to remember when emotions are running high.
At first, I wanted to be a doctor. But I realized that I love the business world, so I majored in finance with a minor in biology. After college I did pharmaceutical sales. But I wanted to learn a bit of more of the technical side, so I went to work for an electronic medical record company (EMR). That's where I spent the majority of my mid-twenties, focusing on how to get hospitals up and running [using their services]. I worked on the pharmacy side, creating a pharmacy product for the company and launching it in the market.
Some of my work at the EMR company was in detention centers and jails, figuring out the best way to get medicine to inmates. My job was to go in and say, "Let's figure out how to get the pharmacy to run more efficiently so that we can get the medication to the right inmates." To figure these things out, it took thinking about all the different steps and strategy behind it to make sure the inmates were safe and also getting the medication they needed.
With the EMR job, we launched a brand-new product. It went to many different markets, including government-sponsored hospitals, private hospitals, and international markets. It was great experience to launch and kick-start and figure out how to get the product out. I got this IBM job because a friend reached out to me and said that IBM was starting a technical team that's built around the partnership program for Watson. I always loved technology—even at the EMR job I used it to create the new program. So I put my resume together and shot it out to him.
Even when it wasn't necessarily AI, I always wanted to be on the cutting edge of technology. With Watson, I could become familiar with the technology just by exploring the developer cloud online. You see it all there, you see all the different APIs (application program interfaces), you see demos to each of the APIs. The nice thing about where we are today is you or I could go on there right now and start playing with it. You don't need a developer to understand the basics and use it.
My first role was to lead our technical team, so I work for the CTO for the Watson ecosystem. The mission was: Let's build out this technical team and create an agile technical process to help consumers and developers use the technology. I did that for about a year, and then had a craving to go back into the client-facing role. So I switched over to the business side of Watson and focused on our digital agencies and created our digital agency program. It works with companies and other marketing organizations to help them help their brand create Watson-related solutions or cognitive solutions.
This role touches so many different industries. I work with companies of all sizes and help them use the Watson technology. These partners embed the technology and essentially create a product for consumers or other companies. For example, one of the companies I love talking about is Meeka. It's a mobile app designed to help with wedding planning. They use a lot of our Watson APIs and Watson Services like dialogue—which essentially helps you have a dialogue with the consumer—natural language classifier, retrieve and rank. This all helps it act as a digital personal assistant to help you figure out your wedding plans and all the logistics behind it.
For my job at Watson, it's about understanding there are two parts: the platform and the APIs. You can think of the APIs as building blocks or Legos—the things you put together in different ways to create products. The other half are the actual products. Separating those two buckets makes everything else a lot clearer—APIs are the building blocks to build your own solution, and there are products you can buy that you can then build on top.
While there's certainly technology involved, my role is more on the business side with technological chops. Once a company has shown interest in it using the Watson technology and cognitive AI, I help them strategize use cases where they could leverage IBM's technology. It requires being able to understand what an API is, and also being able to explain the technology and why they need it to a business executive.
There are companies I work with in the commerce and retail space, and another in marketing and advertising. I like that I'm learning about the sports industry, the hospitality industry, legal, etc.
The same goes for Watson. They bring in a lot of people from different parts of IBM, as well as some folks from outside IBM. Seeing the mix and all these people work together is fun. I get to learn from them.
Also, one of the greatest things about my job is the ability to stay on top of the latest and greatest technology. AI is up and coming; it's exciting to be a part of that moment.
The very first thing to do is familiarize yourself with what AI is. That's very important, because I truly think that AI will change the world. With that, people will say, "Oh, you get it; you get that AI is going to extend your expertise."
Just that one nugget of information [understanding what the new technology is and how it's changing how people do business] will open a lot of doors for you. It personally has for myself.
We asked the experts how you can get an accurate picture of what it's like inside a company beyond checking LinkedIn and Glassdoor.
The first thing I noticed when the elevator doors swept open was that half the lights were out. Two rows of cubicles stretched from one wall to the other, all empty. On a desk to my left sat a lone telephone, its cord a hopeless tangle of black ramen noodles, and to the right was my new office, the door ajar. It was my first day.
"Oh shit," I thought. "I've made a horrible mistake. This place is about to go under, and I'm going to hate working here every single day until it does."
Actually, I wound up really liking working there and was never laid off. But I did jump into the job hastily. I'd interviewed with the hiring manager over coffee, so I hadn't seen the company's offices. Since the website I'd be working on was a tiny B2B outlet, there weren't any Glassdoor reviews I could have read anyway. I was also pretty eager to leave my current role, so it didn't take much for me to accept an offer when I got it.
I lucked out. We moved offices after a few months—the original space had once housed print magazines that had gone digital—and the culture turned out to be a great match. Both of my managers during my time there trusted me to do my own thing, more or less set my own hours, and make significant choices, just as long as we hit our goals. Despite having very few colleagues, I learned a lot and enjoyed the work.
But even had I been more diligent, the typical research methods may not have told me whether the culture would be a fit. So I spoke to some experts to find out other ways to suss that out besides the usual advice to read review sites and ask former employees on LinkedIn. Here's what they said.
At tech companies and startups especially, work cultures tend to be, shall we say, very clearly defined. That's often by design. But Laszlo Bock, who until last year was Google's longstanding and influential HR chief, suggests being "wary of the fine line between pride in a culture and arrogance about it."
"My own bias," he says, is to "seek out organizations where they are both confident in their culture but open to the possibility that they have more to learn and could be wrong." Humility and a little doubt, in other words, are signs of a healthy culture.
You can apply a dose of skepticism in other ways, too, says Bram Daly, senior manager, client operations at the talent management company Alexander Mann Solutions. "There's been a huge push over the last five to 10 years around employer brands," Daly points out. When done right, those branding efforts accurately reflect a company's culture and attract the right candidates. Otherwise they're just another layer of sleek marketing that job seekers need to cut through.
Candidates are often told to dig into publicly available information, Daly explains, but the key is using that extra data to test an employer's brand messaging. An earnings report might say, "'We're buying a building and expanding in Baltimore, and we value XYZ, and we're hiring a bunch of veterans,'" he says, offering a hypothetical example. "Does that align with whatever narrative about the culture they've talked about, that you've read in the reviews on Glassdoor? Is it the same, or is it inconsistent?"
He suggests taking the same approach to interviewing. Most candidates know to ask interviewers to describe their work cultures, but Daly proposes following up with, "How do you exemplify that culture? Can you give me an example?" Pressing for specifics, he says, can reveal whether they "even know what the values and culture are at a higher level" and whether their own experiences match up with it.
You already know to reach out to current and former employees on LinkedIn, right? But which ones? "One way to get a read on a company's culture is to talk to people who aren't in 'core' departments, or are otherwise in the minority," says Bock. "This gives you a better sense of what the culture is like across the firm."
"For example, if you're talking to an engineering-driven company, ask the salespeople or finance people if they feel valued and have freedom, or if they feel like second-class citizens," he suggests. "If you're talking to an investment bank, check in with some of the female employees."
"If you don't like your boss," says Daly, "it doesn't matter what the overall culture is whatsoever" (the data suggests this is true). So, he says, "Whenever I'm interviewing the employer, I ask, 'How long have you been at this company?'"—knowing that it's an easy question to answer. "Then you do the follow-up question: 'Do you like it—and why?'"
"Again," says Daly, "it's sort of easy, and then they're sharing their personal opinion. The real question is why—why do you like it? It becomes personal," upping the likelihood that you'll elicit a firsthand experience—making for another insider take for you to compare with the employer's messaging.
Finally, both Bock and Daly say it's easy to miss what's right in front of you when you're looking for hidden stones to turn over. "Pay attention to how you are treated at every step of the interview process, and by every person, as well as how they treat one another," Bock advises. "I was once interviewed by a partner at a consulting firm who was rude and dismissive to his assistant. I didn't assume I'd be treated any better."
Daly adds that while "culture fit" can feel like an abstraction, it often comes down to the day-to-day experience of the work itself. Maybe the office space is desolate and crappy, but you can work from home half the time—as I found I was able to. So ask about the average hours and remote work. "You need to get a baseline of what you're walking into," he says. "Those things really make a difference when you add them up."
In its S-1 filing Snap Inc. said that diversity is about more than numbers, which is true—but numbers are important too.
With Snap's IPO yesterday, the secretive company has opened itself up to public scrutiny—which involves disclosing its financial statements, legal problems, stock ownership, executive compensation and requires it to hold shareholder meetings. But one aspect of the company remains wrapped in a shroud of mystery—the gender and racial diversity of its workforce. In recent years, under pressure from shareholders and critics, tech giants from Facebook and Apple to Google and Twitter have started issuing diversity reports, and even non-public unicorns like Uber have said they will soon release their own report in a few months.
But not Snap, which is led by cofounders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy and whose executive team is largely male. Its lack of transparency on the issue raises plenty of questions about its true commitment to a diverse workforce.
Buried inside Snap Inc.'s S-1 is an innocuous line about diversity: "We fundamentally believe that having a team of diverse backgrounds and voices working together is our best shot at being able to create innovative products that improve the way people live and communicate." But it also seems to resist the idea of quantifying this diversity: "That's because we believe diversity is about more than numbers. To us, it is really about creating a culture where everyone comes to work knowing that they have a seat at the table and will always be supported both personally and professionally."
Snap's S-1 says that it has invested in inclusion and professional development programs as well as outreach. But it's hard to know how committed it is to diversity without making those numbers public. Data tells us that creating a place where people of different backgrounds, ethnic or otherwise, can convene and collaborate is crucial to retaining a diverse workforce.
"Focusing on improving culture before improving diversity numbers isn't necessarily a bad thing," says Stephanie Lampkin, CEO and founder of blind recruiting software Blendoor. She notes that a review of more than 1,300 Snapchat employee profiles on LinkedIn shows that Snap's diversity is on par with other tech companies in Silicon Valley—which is to say it's not very diverse. And while that may not be surprising within the industry, she says it is surprising for a company that operates in Los Angeles, a city known for having as many varieties of people as it does koi ponds in backyards.
"If Snapchat focuses only on culture, ignoring the fact that their company doesn't reflect the majority of their content creators, they will be the next Twitter," she adds. Despite having a diverse user base, Twitter's employees are largely white and male despite numerous pledges to make Twitter more diverse over the last two years. In 2015, one of the company's engineering managers, Leslie Miley, wrote in a blog post that part of the problem at Twitter stemmed from thinking the problem could be solved with tech rather than through a more complex workplace culture shift. Miley has since left the company. And this year, while Twitter has shown it's capable of growing the number of female workers in its ranks, its percent of minority workers has only slightly increased. Lampkin argues that if Snap doesn't focus on numbers as well as culture, it will suffer the same stagnation Twitter has.
Gauging hiring practices—from the number of minority candidates recruited to how many make it to the final round—and measuring retention of non-white, non-male, non-CIS employees is key to understanding whether your inclusion programs are truly effective.
"Without mile markers so to speak—that is, specific numbers of employees in different demographic groups at different levels—we have no idea how far they've come nor their pace," says Freada Kapor Klein, founding partner of Kapor Capital, says of Snapchat. "A startup would never say that their goal is profitability but they don't track their revenues."
Of course, it is in Snap's best interest to laud diversity. For one, workforces with employees representing a wide spectrum of backgrounds perform better. But secondly, Snapchat aims to reach a wide audience. In order to do that, Snapchat needs employees who together can truly understand a diverse group of users—not all of whom have the same exact needs and interests. For instance, Snapchat has on multiple occasions introduced racially insensitive facial filters— like a Bob Marley filter on April 20th and an East Asian caricature. Plus, some users feel that too many of the face-altering filters lighten skin and prioritize white features.
"If you're only making a product for white guys in their 30s, then only employing white guys in their 30s...seems fine," says Sara Chipps, CEO of Jewelbots. "But that doesn't seem to be what Snapchat wants to do."
And though Snapchat has expressed interest in both attracting and retaining employees that don't fit the typical Silicon Valley sugar-cookie mold, the fact that it hasn't released any information about its workforce makes its talk of creating a diverse culture ring hollow. Especially since the company hasn't publicly outlined diversity goals of any kind. The benefit of disclosing diversity figures at companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest is that job candidates have better insights into whether those tech companies are really for them.
"It's important to know that [as a minority] I'm not going to represent a token for you or I'm not going to be in charge of making your team diverse when you haven't made it a priority in the past," says Chipps. By tracking progress out in the open, a company may actually attract the kind of candidates it wants.
Making the tech industry more reflective of the population it serves isn't an easy task. But the conversation and path to making your workforce more diverse is as important as getting there. Doing so will require intention, commitment, and an openness to failed initiatives as well as successful ones. That means sharing diversity numbers, information about inclusion programs, and facilitating open dialogue on this subject.
"It is difficult to move the needle on the segregation of our industry if we are not actively being open and learning together," says VP of programs at Code2040 Karla Monterroso. "It is important for companies, especially companies like Snap with this level of visibility, to model what it means to lead on the vulnerability and ambition it takes to create inclusion."
Why public health and technology need to start working together.
When things go wrong, like the Zika virus arriving in your city or environmental contaminants ending up in the water supply, public health is the Caped Crusader of the health care industry, working in the shadows to prevent and defend against complex threats that can harm our fair communities.
Americans are largely unaware of the outsized role that public health plays in making their lives better and longer. Researchers from Brigham Young University found that adults believe about 80% of increased life expectancy is due to medical advances and clinical care. The truth is that public health has been a secret success story, providing 25 years of the 30 year increase in life expectancy since 1900.
Amid talk of record funding rounds and valuations in Silicon Valley, it's easy to forget that venture capital is not the only health funding game in town. Despite the lifesaving role that public health serves in our communities, our industry receives only three percent of the health care spending pie. This fact is even more outrageous when you examine the return on investment of clinical care compared to public health: Access to clinical services accounts for 10% to 20% of your health status while 70% to 80% is affected by social, behavioral, and environmental factors shaped by public health efforts.
Public health relies mostly on public sector funding, which has been declining and overburdened due to decades of budget cuts. With the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, our national public health agency, would lose $890 million or 12% of their annual budget and states would lose more than $3 billion over the next five years.
Given the Trump administration's $54 billion in proposed cuts, we're seeing local and state public health departments scramble to enact revenue-generating activities such as fees and fines, which are a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated shortfall in public health spending of $20 to 24 billion. More importantly, these activities don't provide the scale and operational efficiency required to run on lean budgets with the necessary impact on health outcomes. For the first time since 1993, life expectancy in the United States has decreased.
As a result, major stakeholders in health care are feeling the pain from the public sector pinching public health pennies.
Both insurance companies and health systems have been shocked by the high costs of populations with poorly managed, largely preventable chronic conditions such as asthma and heart disease. The Institute of Medicine found that $55 billion in wasteful health care spending was attributable to "missed prevention opportunities." Health disparities cost another $309 billion in direct and indirect costs. Super-utilizers, or patients with complex clinical conditions and typically multiple non-clinical problems such as homelessness also drive up health care costs. Although super-utilizers only comprise five percent of the U.S. population, they contribute to 50% of health care spending.
Clinical care can no longer afford to go it alone. And public health can not afford to not develop more innovative, cost-effective ways to deliver their essential services to high-need populations. As investors in health startups working with these patients, we believe that the adage, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" has never been more true. We think that the best answer to this challenge is to bring the best technology minds and public health experts together as a new field: "Public health technology." Public health tech leverages public health strengths (integrated, systems-level approaches based on evidence) with those of technology startups (aptitude in driving integration and scalability) to prevent disease onset and protect the health of our communities.
These converging trends—diminishing public health funding, increasing costs of care, and growth of value-based care—make this an optimal opportunity to invest in public health technology. The nation's largest insurers, UnitedHealth, Aetna, and Anthem have already reached the point where nearly half of their reimbursements are paid through value-based care models. This trend will continue to accelerate through programs such as Medicare Advantage.
The digital health sector has certainly produced many changes in the health care industry to the tune of $4.2 billion in venture capital investment last year, but hasn't provided the necessary disruption due to concentrating on largely low ROI clinical care. The whispers are starting to grow in volume: Digital health is more new than improved and sorely in need of more significant results rather than facile claims.
The tide is certainly changing. As more entrepreneurs and investors begin to delve into the market opportunity in prevention and protecting health within the most vulnerable of populations, we've already seen a few early breakout successes:
Omada Health (raised $76.5 million) targets high risk individuals, leveraging web design, tech, and health coaches to prevent the onset of diabetes.
Clover Health (raised $295 million) uses data analytics tools to proactively identify and fill gaps in care as a Medicare Advantage for seniors to drive down costs and improve health outcomes.
Studies have shown that investing $10 per person per year, or $2.9 billion, in proven community-based disease prevention could yield net savings of more than $16 billion annually within five years. And 73% of registered voters support public health investments that improve the health of communities. The venture capital community is slowly coming around to asking for cost savings and clinical results before asking for growth.
At our public health-technology fund, "P2Health Ventures," we're starting to invest in this opportunity. The global market for preventive health services alone is projected to hit over $432 billion by 2024. Here are a few examples of entrepreneurs outside of Silicon Valley that we've seen building promising public health tech startups:
Rimidi offers diabetes management for primary care clinics that aims to drive improvement in efficiency for managing hard-to-reach, costly populations with diabetes.
Foodstand helps build good eating habits through community-wide challenges to help people stay healthy without calorie counting.
bosWell's works with community-based organizations, called CBOs, to work with vulnerable individuals and improve care coordination for Medicaid patients, as well as to guide decision-making for their associated health plans. The idea is to triage the highest-risk patients for cost-effective interventions.
In our view, there has never been a better time to invest in the future health of our communities and pioneer the emerging ecosystem of public health tech.
This month's top stories may turn you into an early riser and better negotiator, and help you plan a more efficient workweek.
This month we learned how early risers make it happen (plus what they gain and what they don't), which phrases and expressions to avoid in salary negotiations, and what it takes to wrap up your workweek before Friday rolls around.
Carving out an extra hour or two each morning may sound like a dream productivity hack you've never been able to, well, hack. But one writer gave it a shot, and discovered there are pros and cons to rising early. Here's what she found.
According to one careers expert, a definitive "yes" can be just as perilous as a hard "no" when it come to salary negotiations, which are all about leveraging the gray area. This month we learned which expressions to avoid when you're trying to nail down a number you'll be happy with.
Your company may not be one of the lucky few that have switched to four-day workweeks lately. But there's nothing stopping you from reorganizing your own weekly workload. The Muse's Kat Boogaard explains how some people are figuring that out on their own.
LinkedIn recently launched a big makeover to its web browser version. That means there's no better time to revisit your own profile. And according to one writer, updating it to fit LinkedIn's new look is all about paring down and ditching old info. Here are four cuts you can make right away.
Are your emails coming off as passive-aggressive? Or just unintentionally annoying for other reasons? The Muse's Stacey Lastoe breaks down four of the most common email expressions that get under peoples' skin. For instance, she writes, "There's really never a time that 'whatever you think' is read as a flexible and accepting statement."
A lot of the advice given to new grads, says one talent expert, "still reflects a 'ladder-climbing' mind-set in a world that's looking a lot more like a lattice." In such a world, developing your network may lead to bigger, faster career payoffs than developing your skills might.
You're fidgeting in your swivel chair with an eye impatiently trained on the clock. It's 4 p.m. and you're ready to book it out of the office. Rather than letting that last hour of your workday go to waste, here are a few low-impact "soft projects" you can tackle—one for each day of the week.
The U.S. health care market, estimated at around $3 trillion, is still dominated by enormous legacy companies. Now a growing number of Silicon Valley veterans are aiming to disrupt them. This month Fast Company's Christina Farr set out to learn just how the tech sector thinks it can reinvent American's broken health system—and why now.
One team of researchers found that most narcissists are not only aware that they're
narcissists—they're also willing to admit it. So while simply asking somebody if they think they're a narcissist doesn't exactly help you parse the nuances of the personalty type, it may be a surprisingly helpful shortcut.
You've been told over and over again to smile—and you should. But this week, we learned where the line between "friendly" and "ingratiating" might fall. Here are four other nonverbal cues that hiring managers say can sometimes rub them the wrong way.
Even with a good company culture, most women never report sexual harassment. Why? The odds are stacked against them.
Earlier this year, I found myself in the middle of the Women's March on Washington, darkly joking with two women in their fifties I had never met before, about how the three of us had all faced sexual harassment in our careers.
Only one of us had ever gone to human resources to complain.
She had done it recently, saying that she felt confident about reporting it, in part because of her position in the company. She was very senior and well respected; she knew that addressing it wouldn't present any issues for her. Ultimately the situation was mediated and her harasser was no longer a problem. When I asked the other woman why she hadn't done anything about it, she said she thought she could handle it herself, and didn't want to deal with the potential blowback. A lot of women feel that way.
I have faced inappropriate sexual advances multiple times in my work history. When I graduated from college, I worked for a restaurant owner who thought it permissible to text me requests to wear certain outfits during my shift. Within the media industry, I've had managers who eye my body rather than my face during conversations, and a colleague who once handed me a manila envelope with two 8-by-11-inch photographs of me that he had taken. "I have one on my fridge," he said. I mentioned the incident to another producer who had been at the outlet for a while to try to gauge what my other colleagues might think. "Oh, that's just him," the producer laughed. That reaction, effectively an endorsement for old men to flirt with the young women they worked with, made me really uncomfortable. But I was inexperienced and a contractor, so I knew I was easily replaceable.
The worst offense was when a coworker tried to trick me into a weekend getaway with him. He told me he was supposed to cover a story in New Orleans, but he couldn't do it because he had another commitment in the city that weekend. He asked if I wanted the assignment. I said sure. Later, when it was time to put me in touch with an editor, he finally copped to his ploy. There was no story; he was trying to get me to travel with him to New Orleans and share his hotel room.
I was so floored by his blunt admission, I was rendered speechless. Perhaps most shocking to me was that this was happening to me at a place that on the whole was supportive and had a good work culture. I declined the invitation, and though I felt gross about the encounter, I didn't go to HR. Again, I felt my job was potentially at risk if I spoke up.
Roughly 70% of those who experience sexual harassment at work don't tell a superior about it, according to a report from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). What is it that makes people like me shy away from reaching out?
What defines harassment is not concrete. Not everyone would agree that my experiences—mostly men I work with either objectifying me or propositioning me for sex in some capacity—qualify as sexual harassment. The EEOC defines sexual harassment as "unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature." However, it also says this: "Although the law doesn't prohibit simple teasing, offhand comments, or isolated incidents that are not very serious, harassment is illegal when it is so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim being fired or demoted)."
What exactly constitutes the tipping point between a small infraction and serious abuse? Former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson's lawsuit against executive Roger Ailes last year detailed a whole culture at Fox News built around sexual harassment and the general subjugation of women. Yet it took her 10 years to file suit.
As many as 1 in 3 women between the ages of 18 and 34 have suffered sexual harassment at work,
according to a 2016 poll. Yet only 40,500 sexual harassment reports were filed in 2015. Not only is it hard to determine what qualifies as harassment, the reporting process is completely daunting. Unless you have hard evidence of your harasser's commentary or it's happened with witnesses present, it's your word against theirs. And if you haven't talked to coworkers about your experiences, you're unlikely to know if anyone else has already reported your harasser.
Even if other people have flagged that person to human resources, there is no guarantee the department or company will have your back. In the account told by former Uber employee Susan Fowler, human resources actively ignored her complaints. While Uber's culture may seem particularly unique, it's not the only company that wishes to protect its own interests or those of its high-performing management.
In any outcome, there's always the fear that the person you report will retaliate in some way. Your harasser has already proven themselves the kind of person who crosses personal boundaries. Will they spread rumors about you? Will they try and get you fired? Will they threaten you? If other coworkers find out, will they rush to your support or shun you?
Then factor in the nagging part of your psyche that says, I can handle this situation without outside help. This self-preservation mechanism forces you to second guess whether you're even being harassed in the first place under the assumption that if you can handle it, it must not be that bad. There is actually very little incentive to report, unless the harassment is so bad you're unable to do your job, at which point you are more likely to look for another job rather than try to fix your current one. This self-interrogation is part of what prevents women from ever saying anything about their harassment.
It should not be this hard to get help at work. This isn't just a problem for Uber to solve; it's one we all should be aiming to fix.
Being friends with your boss can turn into a nightmare if your relationship gets too close. Here's how a few people dealt with it.
Michael Carter* knew his friendship with his boss had gotten a little too close when his boss confided that he was cheating on his wife.
Before he worked for this fortysomething oversharer, Carter worked in recruitment for a large, well-known tech company when he realized there weren't many growth opportunities in his division. At 27, Carter landed a job with much more responsibility at a startup where he was one of six employees. The open office and the size of the staff made it easy for people—even introverts like Carter—to get close quickly. That included Carter's boss.
"He wanted to be everybody's friend," Carter recalls. "He would often just start talking about his kids, his family, Formula One, make a few jokes." But things started to get awkward when his boss insisted that the whole staff go out for drinks together every couple of weeks.
"Some Fridays after work I just want to go home," Carter says. "But he wanted to be friends, and he was my boss and signed my paychecks, so I felt obligated to be friends and go for a beer with him, even if sometimes it was exhausting." Not to mention that it created the kind of tipsy intimacy that would lead to the boss confiding to one of his junior employees that he was having an affair.
Having a friend at work can make us feel happier and more motivated to get stuff done. So being chummy with your manager could have additional benefits. "If you are closely connected to someone at a higher level in the organization, they may be able to promote you, spread your reputation, [or] provide you with access to information that is useful," said Monique Valcour, a professor of management at EDHEC Business School in France in a previous interview with the Harvard Business Review. But that's exactly what put Carter in a tough spot: In his mind, his salary was inexorably tied to his relationship with his boss, so he had to maintain a friendship he was less than comfortable with.
That's what happened to Jessica Harris* when she was 22 and working at a large media nonprofit. She and her manager, a 35-year-old man, started working together more closely during a really stressful project. "We vented to each other a lot and commiserated, which brought us closer together," she says. But, says Harris, "in hindsight it was a really unhealthy relationship." She recognized it when he asked Harris to accompany him to a strip club to entertain an important client. She went, but acknowledges it was "so inappropriate."
There was no way to reestablish a professional boundary after that, Harris admits, but she was able to move to another department. "He resented me for it," she recalls. "We stopped being friendly after that."
Carter also was able to get out of his job at the startup. Another major software firm contacted him about an open position and made him an offer with a significant salary increase. He told his boss he was planning to leave. "He made me a counteroffer, but while he offered me a lot of money, I wanted my space back, and to not be caught in the middle of his marital affairs."
So he gave the startup four weeks' notice. Carter says that during that time, his boss took it personally and insulted him repeatedly. "He fired and rehired me about four times," Carter recalls. On his last day, the boss apologized and gave him a leaving present. But the whole experience left Carter with the sense that he would not be willing to contact his old boss for any reason in the future. "Being so close to him allowed me to see the personal side of him, and that just struck me as unprofessional," he says.
What should you do if your boss is trying to turn you into their bestie?
Debra Jack works in communications, and she says a C-suite executive that she used to work with asked her to write the copy for his profiles for dating sites. Jack says she tried to get out of it, but ended up doing it because she felt like she couldn't say no. She left that job a few months later. "In an ideal situation, you're a trusted confidant and adviser, with easy rapport and chemistry," says Jack. Her advice to others feeling like they are being put in an unprofessional relationship is to determine their personal comfort zone. "Some might be comfortable doing everything that's asked of them, but that's not for everyone."
For Jen Holmes, the best way to end an inappropriate request or line of questioning is to unequivocally shut the boss down. "Be very direct and say, 'I don't really want to talk about that,' and change the subject to a more appropriate work topic," says Holmes. Hopefully, she says, doing that a few times will send a strong message to the boss. "Being direct is the only way to successfully advocate for yourself in most scenarios," says Holmes. "No one has to try to decode what you mean, and they can't claim ignorance if you've stated a preference for or against something."
*Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the employees and the managers.
Spotify, Bandcamp, and others are rewiring the music industry.
The music industry continues to evolve at breakneck speed, as startups, legacy brands, and artists alike look for business models that will succeed in the streaming era. Even as streaming music shoots past the 100 million paying subscriber mark—a milestone led by Spotify and its brilliant blend of machine and human curation—many people are still happy to buy music, as Bandcamp's growth and profitability show, and startups like ReplyYes are finding new ways to sell vinyl to fans.
While superstars like Drake and Beyoncé had a blockbuster year in 2016, thanks to innovative album release strategies crafted for the streaming age, most artists are waiting for the economics of streaming music to pay off for them. In the meantime, Kobalt is using technology to track down unpaid royalties, and Songkick aims to bolster touring revenue for musicians with personalized concert listings data. If nothing else, fans can keep up with their favorite musicians on Instagram, which is quickly becoming an indispensable tool for artists.
Click on a company to learn more about why it made the list.
A former NYPD cop is leading the campaign to tone down the rhetoric and prevent the state from "breaking in two."
Capital & Main is an award-winning publication that reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.
In late February of 2016, the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan decided to hold a "White Lives Matter" rally at a public park a couple of miles north of Disneyland.
By all accounts, the rally seemed less a show of force than a last gasp—with the entire white supremacist contingent spilling out of a single SUV. By the time the time the Klansmen arrived at the park, they were far outnumbered by about 50 mostly peaceful counter-demonstrators.
A small group of protesters, however, escalated from getting into the Klansmen's faces to beating them with sticks, and one of their victims retaliated with a knife—non-fatally as it turned out. William Hagen, grand dragon of the Loyal White Knights in California, might have suffered more than just a cracked rib had not a loose-limbed criminal justice professor and former cop named Brian Levin put himself in front of the dragon's prone body and begun shouting at his assailants to back off while waiting for the police to arrive.
"Who knew in 1985, when I learned those skills at the New York Police Academy, that someday I'd be using them at a Klan rally in Anaheim?" Levin says, with the singsong drawl of a borscht belt comedian. "I wouldn't have bet money on that." Who knew, too, that more than three decades later Levin would find himself tracking a national surge in hate crimes, with the Golden State surprisingly at the forefront?
After some years of patrolling Washington Heights and Harlem, Levin left the NYPD and took his undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania and his law degree at Stanford. Two decades ago, as a professor at a small New Jersey college, he launched the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, which he moved to California State University, San Bernardino, when he received a teaching position there in 1999. Today, under his aegis, the center is the largest university research organization of its kind.
The center's report for 2015, the most recent year for which annual statistics are available, reveals a California more roiled by ethnic and religious division than is commonly believed. While the nation experienced a 6.7% increase in hate crimes, California had a 10.4% spike. Anti-Semitic acts of violence and vandalism were up over 21% in California, while the rest of the country saw a 9% jump. The number of hate crimes nationally against Latinos was essentially unchanged from the previous year, while in California, which became a Latino-plurality state in 2014, incidents were up. "Not all of that increase can be laid at the feet of the alt-right," Levin says. "Turf battles between people of color—in L.A. County particularly—counts for a substantial amount of that increase."
The statistics show a state far from unified in standing up to what many Californians regard as the excesses of Trump's America. "California is on the leading edge of whatever weather pattern is hitting the U.S.," Levin says, "and I think the same holds for intergroup relationships and politics. We certainly tend to be more of a blue state—but don't kid yourself. Go to places like Fresno. We talk about California seceding, but there's also talk of California breaking in two."
Levin wasn't reassured by the poor showing of the Loyal White Knights that afternoon in Anaheim, in large part because the surge in bigotry and hate crimes his center was following went far beyond what traditional extremist groups could foment on their own. Rather, he was aware of how deeply their fringe ideas and violent measures had permeated the mainstream through social media and news sites with a surprising subtlety.
Messages about the "otherness" of immigrants have gained an expansive audience. "Bigots have become especially nuanced and skillful at hanging onto the coattails of important public policy debates that are going on in the mainstream," Levin says. "There's an online cottage industry that attaches bigotry to real policy issues from national security to free speech on campus to the economy."
"Some groups continue to promote overt racism and bigotry," Levin continues, "but some are changing their branding, or toning down the swastikas. And their arguments are no longer that Latinos and immigrants are genetically inferior. It's that they're culturally or religiously inapposite to American ideals. Or sometimes the message is shrouded in the idea that we're under attack from terrorists."
Scrubbed of the eugenics ideology or race war rhetoric that may have helped spawn them, and freed from the stigma that comes from being the clear intellectual property of Nazi skinheads or the Ku Klux Klan, many of these messages about the otherness of immigrants have gained an expansive audience among Americans who might not embrace them in their raw form. While these views haven't been given much credence on NBC's Meet the Press or in the op-ed pages of the Washington Post, they're regularly part of the conversation on Fox News, and they constitute the bread and butter of breitbart.com—which now enjoys a monthly readership greater than the entire populations of Great Britain, Germany, or France.
Until his fall from alt-right grace last week, British journalist and self-described "free-speech fundamentalist" Milo Yiannopoulos was particularly effective at spreading the alt-right's loaded messages—both as an editor and a columnist at breitbart.com, and as the heroic subject of articles by other contributors to that website.
Late last October, Breitbart gave ample coverage to a speech Yiannopoulos delivered at the University of California, Irvine. "MILO: 'Western Civilization' Is At Stake This Election," one headline blared. "Let me tell you about where I come from," Yiannopoulos was quoted in the article. "The U.K. is falling to Islam as we speak. There are whole neighborhoods that are no-go zones, much like the Calais Jungle in France."
"Here in Irvine, we're barely an hour from San Bernardino," he continued, referring to the scene of a 2015 mass shooting that was initially reported as an act of jihad. "Everywhere in America you can see the signs that an alien culture, dedicated to the destruction of the West, is making its presence felt."
That was Yiannopoulos at his most high-minded. On his "Dangerous Faggot" college speaking tour, he attacked a BuzzFeed News senior tech reporter as "a typical example of a sort of thick-as-pig shit media Jew" and, days before the Republican National Convention, he had been banned for life from Twitter after his tweets unleashed a torrent of online racist harassment against Saturday Night Live and Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones.
Fifteen years ago, a provocateur like Milo Yiannopoulos would have had his work cut out for him securing 10 minutes to air his views on a cable access channel in Schenectady. But during last year's presidential election and beyond, as a towering Breitbart superstar, he had the opportunity to reach a potential audience of well over 100 million. As of this writing, according to recent Alexa internet rankings, breitbart.com was the 35th most popular website in the U.S., only nine rungs below nytimes.com and seven spots above washingtonpost.com. As for the Loyal White Knights of the KKK, America's largest contemporary Klan organization, their website came in at 94,210.
Visitors to breitbart.com and consumers of alt-right-inflected social media feeds can embrace bigoted ideas without becoming card-carrying members of the American Nazi Party or the Klan—and certainly without having disapproving neighbors see them in such a way.
Social media feeds and incendiary internet news sources had begun eliminating communication barriers to an extreme nationalist agenda some time before Donald Trump declared his candidacy for president. Nevertheless, America's two-party system had continued to serve as a bulwark against furthering the alt-right's brand of right-wing populism in Washington—as opposed to the business-friendly, entitlement-slashing programs of leading congressional conservatives like U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan. "I think it gets lost in the wash sometimes, but the alt-right is not a disruptive movement," Levin says. "It's a dismantling movement—a movement to dismantle the Republican party as an effective bloc. Alt-right leaders saw people like John McCain or George H. W. Bush, who signed the original 1990 Hate Crimes Act, and any other Republicans who would speak out against bigotry, as enemies."
Early in his campaign, Trump predicted he'd be able to mend fences for an increasingly polarized America. "I will be a great unifier for our country," he assured CNN's Jake Tapper in October of 2015. By calling for a Muslim ban and for mass deportations of undocumented Mexican immigrants, by declaring that Hillary Clinton should be put behind bars, by disparaging the Black Lives Matter movement, by declining to repudiate David Duke, or to make any mention of six million Jewish victims in his presidential message for International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2017, Trump didn't exactly bring a divided nation closer together. But he did manage to join hands among bigots, white nationalists, and separatists from all factions. "What has been so fascinating yet disturbing," says Levin, "and what I haven't seen in all my professional lifetime—is the unanimity [of] racist and anti-Semitic groups in their support for a mainstream, victorious candidate."
For the most part, there has been massive yet peaceful pushback against Trump during his first 100 days in office—the women's marches, the "Not My President's Day" rallies, and the tongue lashings that some Republican members of Congress have recently undergone at town halls back in their districts. What concerns Levin is the prospect of the extralegal activity of the extreme left finding a larger audience in the wake of the punishing defeat of a centrist Democrat at the polls, and an electoral process that made the likes of former Breitbart executive chair Steve Bannon arguably the most influential shaper of America's public policy. "The situation now gives license for the fringes on the left to say, 'Resistance must include violence,'" Levin says.
By Any Means Necessary, for example, is a Bay Area group whose program of protecting immigrant rights and affirmative action has included attacking neo-Nazis on college campuses. While the group garners less than 1,900 followers on its Twitter feed, one of its chief organizers did manage to get its message out on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox.
Levin's organization has tracked others. "We're seeing the violence by far leftists against people they regard as Nazis—whether it's Richard Spencer [the white nationalist punched in the face by a masked assailant on Trump's inauguration day], or the Traditional Workers Party or the Klan." Yiannopoulos's planned address at the University of California, Berkeley, was shut down when rioters smashed windows and set fires.
Although Levin's center has monitored hate crimes across the country, he contends that the media's recent focus on violent acts by extremists is masking a shift in the mainstream national discourse that is equally troubling. "What we're seeing now is a coarsening of society that encompasses both [verbal violence] and bigotry, aside from criminal acts," he says. "We have so much more intergroup conflict, involving so many different variables—not only traditional bigotry, but also those relating to class education, and employment."
The rise in incivility can be seen in recent letters to the editor justifying the harsh treatment of today's undocumented immigrants and of Japanese-Americans interred during World War II, in the verbal pipe bombs hurled across college campuses from the left and the right, in the threatening letters sent to synagogues and mosques, in the ease with which some Americans will mock women in burqas or tar all Muslims with the same broad brush.
"We're at the place now where legitimate policy debates are turning into something more nefarious, more bigoted, and more insular," Levin says. "A place where hate crime might be as much of the symptom as the cause."
Here's how to break down your big-picture goals into steps you and your team can actually take this quarter.
Dr. Challa wasn't starving for opportunity, he was drowning in it. He was bright, confident, and empathetic. Not only did he have great bedside manners, but he was also a savvy entrepreneur who'd grown his medical practice to nine locations in five cities.
But Challa's ballooning options were starting to exceed his abilities to chase them all—not to mention his team's. In theory, he could open up two more offices, acquire a small dermatology practice, add medical dispensaries to several of his locations, start a medical spa retail location—the list went on. As it grew longer, Challa's productivity was beginning to slip, and his staff was struggling to keep up with his energy and constant stream of new ideas. The ideas were solid, but their sheer volume outpaced any possibility of implementing them all.
Personal productivity and team productivity are unavoidably linked. And while companies often sit down to draw up quarterly action plans, individuals rarely do. But they should. In fact, 90 days is the perfect unit of time to make headway on your big-picture goals—and to give them the focus they need, so you and your team don't get too overwhelmed.
Most of the projects that threaten to derail our productivity when we finally start on them have longer timelines than we imagine, making them difficult to break down into daily or weekly actions. But done right, a 90-day sprint is enough to get meaningful units of work done that collectively bring you closer to your long-term goals. And it's still short enough that you can frequently course-correct anytime things threaten to veer off track.
Here's an example of the simple, one-page worksheet that can help you manage that balancing act over the next quarter—but you can draw a quick grid on a blank sheet of paper and it works just as well:
Start by choosing a maximum of three "focus areas" for the coming quarter. Of course you'll still have to take care of your day-to-day work, too, but these focus areas should rise above that—they're where you think your time, talent, attention, and money are best spent on longer-term objectives during the coming quarter. Your day-to-day tasks will keep you afloat, while your focus areas will propel you ahead.
For instance, you may decide that your focus areas are on increasing your lead flow, improving your sales conversion system, speeding up your collections cycle, or making a specific key hire.
Why cap it at three? Because too many top priorities means you have no top priorities. Ninety days comes fast, and if you spread yourself or your team too thin, you'll find that you do more things partially instead of fully, leaving a bunch of half-finished projects by the time the next quarter rolls around. You don't want that. Not only is this a waste of resources, but it's also frustrating for your team, who will appreciate having actually achieved something—not just started it—by the time your 90-day sprint is over.
Now that you've picked your three focus areas for the quarter, it's time to clarify your criteria of success for each one. This can be tricky. First, be ruthlessly realistic about what's possible within just three months, and second, look for concrete signs of progress. It's important to pin down criteria that are as objectively and quantitatively measurable as possible.
So take your time laying out the criteria of success for each focus area. You're not only defining what success will look after 90 days, but by giving yourself a yardstick to measure yourself against as you go, you're also deciding which changes you'll have to make to your ordinary workday. That may mean blocking out 30 minutes each day to work exclusively on one of your focus areas. Or it might mean delegating a daily task to a colleague this quarter, so you can spend more time on something else. But you won't know which steps to take until your criteria is in place.
Now that you've identified your top three focus areas and your criteria for achieving them, now it's time to lay out how to get you there. In order to keep your plan to one page, you'll likely have to break each focus area down into five to seven action steps and milestones. Your plan needs to be detailed enough to guide your actions but not so detailed that you feel overwhelmed or lose yourself in the minutiae.
This is the part where you decide which of these steps you can take and which ones you'll need others to help you with. Divide and conquer. If one of your focus areas is more of a professional-development goal, the main work will fall to you; if another focus area describes a business goal, it's perfectly fine to enlist your team. When it comes to the latter, assign a specific team for executing just one action step over the 90-day sprint. Remember: The whole point is to boost productivity, not just add more work to everyone's plate.
I handed this one-page plan to Dr. Challa two years ago, and he's used it with his team each quarter. Since then, his practice has increased revenues by $4 million and is more focused and organized than ever before. You can't do everything at once. But you can probably do the things that really matter more productively than you currently are—all within the next 90 days.
When you declare, "We have great, great people," you miss the better way to sell their greatness—and your own.
Like it or not, everybody is selling something. Job seekers, employees, and entrepreneurs all need to pitch themselves to somebody. For whatever else they are, social platforms are undeniably powerful self-promotion tools. Personal branding may come with certain pitfalls, but it's also something of an imperative.
The result? Widespread fluency in the language of exaggeration. It's one thing to pitch yourself honestly and authentically, but it's another (much easier) thing to overdo it. By trying to project competence and self-confidence, we leave listeners unconvinced or turned off instead.
Getting it right doesn't always require scrapping your whole strategy, though. It just means scrapping some of the words and phrases that are most likely to trip you up—like these four.
Superlatives are like paper currency: Issue too many and the value falls. Listeners will shrug when you overuse expressions like "the best," "the most amazing," and "the greatest." These high-octane words may project enthusiasm, but of a superficial sort.
Send the word "awesome" into retirement. Rarely is it used to mean something that inspires admiration, respect, or fear—its dictionary definition. (And by the way, your brain can tell the difference; the experience of awe is cognitively and neurologically distinct from pleasure or excitement.) Instead, "awesome" is often a catchall term for a thought that's poorly defined. Next time a client agrees to go to lunch with you, instead of saying "awesome," try the more specific, "Lunch? Sure. I'll look forward to chatting," or even just, "Sounds great."
It's also too easy to call something the "best"—have you really had a chance to test all other options before concluding that this particular thing or person surpasses them? It's not that your listeners will be taking you literally at every turn; it's clear that whatever you're calling "the best idea" is just an expression. But using that expression is imprecise and projects a subtle overconfidence that can come back to bite you.
For similar reasons, try to avoid calling too many things "unique"—another superlative that's hard to prove. (By the way, "most unique" is a grammatical abomination.) Don't even think of saying in a job interview, "I bring a unique set of skills," because first of all, that's for them to judge, and second, you're inviting the recruiter or hiring manager to compare your skill set against every other candidate's and conclude not just that it's sufficient for the job, but actually exceeds everybody else's. Always err on the side of offering clarity and specifics.
Some people have genuine bragging rights. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, he told an audience of employees that he was determined to "get back to the basics of great products, great marketing, and great distribution." With his track record and extraordinary abilities, it was hard to write off his expectations as sheer hype.
But as a rule of thumb, you'll want to avoid hyperbole if you want to sound confident yet credible. Effusive positivity often rings hollow. For example, listeners might wonder just what it means when the CEO of a car company announces, "We've got to make sure our cars are great." Okay . . . but what will make them great? (Talk about that instead!) Or when a company tells its shareholders, "We're in great shape."
These statements are unsubstantiated generalities. It's better to pick more specific language. Also avoid modifiers that bump up the hype factor when you're already describing something's merits—words like "totally," "really," and "very."
Repeating words can also undermine your credibility. If we hear a leader say, "We have a great, great plan," it sounds like he's either exaggerating or has run out of words in his lexicon—or both. If a team leader says, "We've got the best people working on this project. They're the best in the field, absolutely the best!" it'll sound less compelling than something more straightforward and better defined: "We have a seasoned team on this project—almost all of them with at least a decade of experience in corporate finance."
Similarly, if a financial analyst says to her boss, "We've got to invest in this company, we've got to invest whatever we can," the repeated expression stands in for her rationale—why she thinks it's such a promising investment—which you can be sure her boss will ask for.
Repetition can be a powerful rhetorical tool, but most of the situations where we're trying to project confidence aren't sweeping orations in front of teeming crowds. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s frequent repetitions in his "I have a dream" speech is an act of eloquence suited to the occasion—it's not because he's run out of thoughts.
Finally, be careful about referring back to yourself too much, with phrases like, "As I mentioned," "Like I said," or, "As I've believed all along." These may leave you sounding too self-assured or even defensive. Or worse, they can hint that you aren't sure you actually got your point across the first time, so you're underlining it again. Make your points clearly the first time around, so there's no need to repeat them.
These four language patterns can all quietly chip away at your credibility when you need it most. They'll make you sound as if you're inflating your points, and that you're unable to deliver clear, concrete, and credible ideas. Avoid them, and you'll come across as confident—not overconfident.
Intentionally scheduling activities you enjoy takes real discipline, but one writer says it's made him more productive and creative.
To-do lists are for robots, which I've discovered I am not. In my experience, the more "grownup" you become, the more you're forced to mechanically check things off a list just to get paid. That's life—welcome to adulthood, kid. But life wasn't working out the way I'd wanted it to; I got stuff done, I just hated doing it.
So when I finally quit my job to strike out on my own, I decided to inject a little humanity back in my work. To do that, I had to give my to-do lists the boot. I stopped writing those and began writing "love-to-do" lists instead.
I figured that since humans thrive on positive emotions, my career might take an upswing if I committed to doing more of the things I love. That was the theory, anyhow. Here's how it went for me.
I first considered making this switch when I recognized that no amount of professional accomplishment would make me truly happy. I'd done a lot for my last company, and I'd done well there as an employee. But by the end, I still found that I had to wrench my brain for even a so-so idea. My creativity was suffering, and I just didn't have enough of those "hell yes!" moments over the course of an average workday to love what I was doing. I was feeling autopilot set in.
The impulses to defenestrate my laptop and scratch up some adventure became more frequent. But I wasn't able to rationalize fun for the sake of fun. The articles wouldn't write themselves, I knew.
I still know that, and yet working for myself has turned out to be quite different—thanks in large part to the love-to-do lists I began writing shortly after going solo. Adopting them while I was still finding my footing as my own boss was liberating. Since I was charging what I wanted, I often had the freedom to write one really good article a day—or even one a week—which freed up a lot more time to do the things I loved.
Which ended up being terrifying.
Our culture has an enormous amount of lazy shame. We can hardly live with ourselves if we aren't producing something. It's actually pretty common for first-time freelancers to experience acute anxiety that even though they're making ends meet, they just aren't working enough.
I got over this fear when I realized that living my life and doing the things I loved made me better at my craft—and subsequently just as productive and creative as I needed to be in order to earn a living and feel good about doing it.
In my long hikes in the mountains, I'd find inspiring ideas hiding behind every bend like little forest sprites. Breaking away from the desk to play beach volleyball filled me with competitiveness and the hunger to constantly improve. That helped me go after bigger clients and work harder at my writing game. And lying down in the afternoons to do absolutely nothing—except gaze at the clouds—trained me to accept silence, and to listen for inspiration.
The more love-to-do's I checked off, the more satisfied I became with my life and my work.
But here's the thing: I'm as disciplined and productive as ever. I'm as focused playing guitar for 30 minutes as I am researching an article. So yes, I still have to do the standard to-do's—meet with client X, take phone call Y, edit Z draft. But I don't approach those work tasks with the same sense of dread that I used to.
Now that there's something energizing and actually enjoyable waiting for me just past every task, my motivation feels pretty much bottomless. Writing this article, for instance, wasn't the apex of my professional desires when I woke up this morning. But it turned out to be fun because I'm channeling the positivity I generated from this morning's rock-climbing session into something productive.
And when the weekends come, I'm guilt-free. I don't feel the need to be busy for the sake of busyness, so I can relax, and recharge, and do what I love. You know, like a human. When I settle down to my keyboard the following Monday, I don't have the back-to-reality blues that most people have—because I know that I can do a little of what I love during the workday, too. That keeps me present at work, and relaxed. And that's when I do my best. That's also when I get paid the most.
If this sounds like a paean to self-employment more so than an endorsement of love-to-do lists, it isn't entirely. You don't actually need to quit your job in order to gain more time to do what fulfills you. No, your boss probably won't like it if you duck out every Wednesday afternoon to go for a bike ride. And it's true that work is still work—it can't all be fun, which is why your employer pays you to do it.
But building more "love" into your to-do lists isn't about trying to change all that. It's just a strategy to consciously and regularly do more of the enjoyable things you already do (haphazardly) over the course of a workweek. That way you have more energy and inspiration to excel at what you do. And like anything else, it takes discipline.
To get started, take an hour tonight after work to do some journaling, and reflect on the activities that energize you most. Start your list first with the things you actually love to do in an average week. (If you don't normally go squirrel-suit skydiving on an average week—or have never even tried it—don't add that right away.) Then work out from there. If you're coming up short, think about what you used to do on an average week—when you were a kid, back when having fun was okay. Write those down.
Once you have a few past or current pleasures accounted for, you can think a little more wishfully. Write down some things that appeal to you even if you've never tried them—like salsa dancing.
Now you need to commit. Pick two or three items that you can realistically accomplish next week. Then schedule those love-to-dos right alongside your other work-related imperatives. Those are now appointments on your calendar like any other, so you need to keep just as much as you need to not miss that conference call or meet that project deadline.
My daily love-to-dos look something like this:
Meditate
Journal
Do some sprints
Break away from the computer every 30 minutes for a round of pushups
Read some fiction
Play some guitar
Sing
Play with the dog
Reflect on the things I'm grateful for
Look at the clouds
I don't always check off every single thing on this list every single day, but I can always hit most of them—whereas before writing love-to-do lists, these activities were just periodic pastimes.
And for my week, I'll schedule some bigger activities that I can't do every day:
Take a long hike in the arroyo (I live in Albuquerque)
Practice volleyball at least twice a week
Go rock climbing at least twice a week
Play a doubles beach volleyball tournament on Saturday
Go to choir practice
Spend time with my nieces and nephews
Climb the biggest tree by the river
Other than professional singers, not many people have "sing" on their to-do lists. But then again, not many people have committed to actually scheduling out the things they love to do. Once I began to, I not only got better at keeping my work-related commitments but they started feeling less like the chores they used to.
Daniel Dowling is the founder of MillennialSuccess.io, where he shares action steps and inspiration for millennials and their employers. You can find more of his work on Entrepreneur, MindBodyGreen, and Fitbit.com.
