Hi, Emma here, I’m helping Isabel this week who’s isolating in her bedroom with Covid.
But it gives me an opportunity to once again highlight Qu Jing, the former head of public relations for Baidu, the Chinese search engine.
I hesitated before doing so as in the past she’s taken negative press badly. In response to one critical story, apparently she was seen whipping an effigy with a rope.
But really, how can anyone with interest in workplace relations ignore last week’s story by my colleagues Ryan McMorrow and Nian Liu?
“I’m not your mum,” Qu said to her staff. “I only care about results.” And to underline her disdain for nurturing she threatened, “I can make you jobless in this industry.”
After the resulting furore, it was Qu, not her team members, who found herself without a job.
Of course, Qu was right that she wasn’t maternal in the sense of being caring, kind and protective. But who said mothers need to be sweet? There are plenty of ways that bosses act like mothers.
For starters, both can be critical. I often think of the journalist and presenter, Jenni Murray’s story about her mother phoning her after an early television interview with a Cabinet minister in the 1980s. “Oh, you were doing an interview with Norman Tebbit,” her mother said. “I didn’t notice what you were talking about. I think your fringe has got a bit long and we couldn’t really see your eyes, which are your best feature, and you’ve put on a bit of weight. I am not sure that red top was quite right because you’ve got quite high colour cheeks.”
Both mothers and bosses can both dish out passive aggression. Maybe a light dose of the silent treatment?
While helicopter parenting is surely a close relative of the micromanaging boss, Qu was doing a disservice to mothers — really, they can be just as annoying as managers. (Not mine of course — in case, she’s reading.)
So yes, the workplace may not actually be your family but it definitely has some overlaps. Emma Jacobs
This week on the Working It podcast
Do you feel your life is a series of unmanageable projects, and the instant messaging is . . . endless and intrusive 😓? Most of us exist within a workplace ecosystem that prioritises the immediate over the worthwhile. Cal Newport, bestselling author, New Yorker writer and computer science professor, wants us to slow right down. His new book, Slow Productivity, outlines why we need to do fewer things — but do them better.
This week on the podcast, I talk to Cal about the key tips any of us can learn to make our working lives truly productive. He gives us permission to vary our routines: an occasional trip to the cinema will refresh our creativity more than another afternoon of reactive Slack messaging. (Cal calls this sort of performative work “pseudo-productivity”. Which captures it perfectly, IMO.)
Want more? Working It has 10 copies of “Slow Productivity” to give away to readers. All entries we receive via this form before 5pm on Tuesday May 21 will be entered into the draw. Get one for yourself, or gift it to your manager (😉). Isabel Berwick
Five top stories from the world of work
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Why electric cars are the hot company perk: I am old enough to remember when we all wanted a company car. Now the benefit is back, but this time as a green initiative. Emma Jacobs and Peter Campbell report on the growing trend.
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Domestic violence is a workplace issue: A campaigning column from Pilita Clark, calling for employers to follow the example of companies like L’Oréal and make explicit pledges to support staff who are in abusive relationships.
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Tesla’s Technoking gives lessons on performance reviews: Feedback and performance reviews are under scrutiny as never before, and Anjli Raval takes Elon Musk’s autocratic approach at Tesla as the starting point for a column examining this thorny issue.
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How female producers are taking the controls: I loved this upbeat feature by Helen Brown, talking to some of the women taking the helm in recording studios. They are optimistic — and that’s a big shift from the industry’s recent past, when exclusion and harassment were too often the norm.
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Jürgen Klopp and the leading of Liverpool: Lynsey Hanley is a great writer, and here she turns her attention to the remarkable leadership of Klopp at Liverpool football club. It’s a portrait of a city’s revival, and the team’s manager has been at the heart of it.
One more thing . . .
I have binge-listened Helen Lewis Has Left The Chat, an eye-opening (and often bleakly funny) BBC podcast about the profound effect that instant messaging has had on our lives and workplaces. In one episode, Helen looks back at the frenzied atmosphere during pandemic lockdowns — everyone was at home and Slack messaging became the focus for activist employees’ complaints about colleagues — with sometimes life-changing consequences. At several years’ distance, the (un) reality of that extraordinary time is thrown into sharp focus.
A word from the Working It community
My covid-enforced slowdown this week, writes Isabel, while also thinking about Cal Newport’s mission on slow productivity, took me back to some more of the excellent responses to a recent Working It newsletter outlining why we need more “spaciousness” at work.
Here’s Christina Hughes, chief executive of Women-Space, which offers coaching to senior women working in higher education. Christina introduced me — and perhaps now some of you — to the work of Nancy Kline:
I was thrilled to see your article on spaciousness and the report of Megan Reitz’s research. My interest is because finding the time to think is — perversely given their whole purpose — an enormous issue in universities. One contribution to trying to change this is the work of Nancy Kline. If you are not aware of her work, Nancy’s basic message is: “The quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first. The quality of our thinking depends on the way we treat each other while we are thinking.” For example, her work has been applied to how to run better meetings.
Read the full article here