Archive for August, 2016

Last fall I came across a hiring practice that surprised me. We were hiring for a pretty senior position. When I looked into the interview schedule I realized that we didn’t have a clear process for the candidate to meet a broad cross-section of Mozillians.  We had a good clear process for the candidate to meet peers and people in the candidate’s organization.  But we didn’t have a mechanism to go broader.

This seemed inadequate to me, for two reasons.  First, the more senior the role, the broader a part of Mozilla we expect someone to be able to lead, and the broader a sense of representing the entire organization we expect that person to have.  Our hiring process should reflect this by giving the candidate and a broader section of people to interact.  

Second, Mozilla’s core DNA is from the open source world, where one earns leadership by first demonstrating one’s competence to one’s peers. That makes Mozilla a tricky place to be hired as a leader. So many roles don’t have ways to earn leadership through demonstrating competence before being hired. We can’t make this paradox go away. So we should tune our hiring process to do a few things:

• Give candidates a chance to demonstrate their competence to the same set of people who hope they can lead. The more senior the role, the broader a part of Mozilla we expect someone to be able to lead.
• Expand the number of people who have a chance to make at least a preliminary assessment of a candidate’s readiness for a role. This isn’t the same as the open source ideal of working with someone for a while. But it is a big difference from never knowing or seeing or being consulted about a candidate. We want to increase the number of people who are engaged in the selection and then helping the newly hired person succeed.

We made a few changes right away, and we’re testing out how broadly these changes might be effective.  Our immediate fix was to organize a broader set of people to talk to the candidate through a panel discussion. We aimed for a diverse group, from role to gender to geography. We don’t yet have a formalized way to do this, and so we can’t yet guarantee that we’re getting a representational group or that other potential criteria are met. However, another open source axiom is that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” And so we started this with the goal of continual improvement. We’ve used the panel for a number of interviews since then.

We looked at this in more detail during the next senior leadership hire. Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, our Chief Marketing Officer, jumped on board, suggesting we try this out with the Vice President of Marketing Communications role he had open. Over the next few months Jane Finette (executive program manager, Office of the Chair) worked closely with Jascha to design and pilot a program of extending participation in the selection of our next VP of MarComm. Jane will describe that work in the next post. Here, I’ll simply note that the process was well received. Jane is now working on a similar process for the Director level.

Mozilla works to bring openness and opportunity for all into the Internet and online life.  We seek to reflect these values in how we operate.  At our founding it was easy to understand what this meant in our workflow — developers worked with open code and project management through bugzilla.  This was complemented with an open workflow through the social media of the day — mailing lists and the chat or “messenger” element, known as Internet Relay Chat (“irc”).  The tools themselves were also open-source and the classic “virtuous circle” promoting openness was pretty clear.

Today the setting is different.  We were wildly successful with the idea of engineers working in open systems.  Today open source code and shared repositories are mainstream, and in many areas the best of practices and expected and default. On the other hand, the newer communication and workflow tools vary in their openness, with some particularly open and some closed proprietary code.  Access and access control is a constant variable.  In addition, at Mozilla we’ve added a bunch of new types of activities beyond engineering, we’ve increased the number of employees dramatically and we’re a bit behind on figuring out what practicing open in this setting means.  

I’ve decided to dedicate time to this and look at ways to make sure our goals of building open practices into Mozilla are updated and more fully developed.  This is one of the areas of focus I mentioned in an earlier post describing where I spend my time and energy.  

So far we have three early stage pilots underway sponsored by the Office of the Chair:

• Opening up the leadership recruitment process to more people
• Designing inclusive decision-making practices
• Fostering meaningful conversations and exchange of knowledge across the organization, with a particular focus on bettering communications between Mozillians and leadership.

Follow-up posts will have more info about each of these projects.  In general the goal of these experiments is to identify working models that can be adapted by others across Mozilla. And beyond that, to assist other Mozillians figure out new ways to “practice open” at Mozilla.

Information flow between leaders and individual contributors is critical to an effective organization. The ability to better understand the needs of the organization, to gather input across different domains, getting other perspectives before we make a decision and change management, help create a clueful and informed organisation.

This quarter we are piloting a number of untypical discussion sessions between leaders and individuals across Mozilla, whereby leaders will engage with participants who are not usually in their domain. There are hypotheses we’d like to test.  One is that cross-team, multiple-level discussion and information flow will: prevent us from being blind-sided, increase our shared understanding, and empower people to participate and lead in productive ways.  A second hypothesis is that there is an appetite for this type of discussion and some templates and structure would make it easier for people to know how to approach it.

We have 9 leaders who have agreed to host a discussion session this quarter, and we’re currently in the process of inviting participants from across the organization. Currently, there are 4 types of discussions we’ve identified that could take place, there are likely more:

• Pulse (“Taking the Pulse”) – allow a leader to quickly test an idea and/or get insights from the wider community about the current state of Mozilla, or their domain area.
• Ideation – to generate insights from a targeted and diverse group of participants.
• Decision – to ask for feedback regarding a decision from a broad group of people beyond the typical domain to ensure they are not blind-sided, and to provide key diverse input.
• Change Management – creates a shared understanding for a decision already made.

If these sessions prove useful, we may create a useful toolkit for leadership on how to run disperse discussion sessions, and gather input from across Mozilla. And in addition, create a toolkit for individual contributors for understanding and contributing to important topics across Mozilla.

We’ll plan to share more updates next month.