Archive for September, 2016

Today Mozilla is hosting the second meeting of the Digital Economy Board of Advisors of the United States Department of Commerce, of which I am co-chair.

Support for the global open Internet is the heart of Mozilla’s identity and strategy. We build for the digital world. We see and understand the opportunities it offers, as well as the threats to its future. We live in a world where a free and open Internet is not available to all of the world’s citizens; where trust and security online cannot be taken for granted; and where independence and innovation are thwarted by powerful interests as often as they are protected by good public policy. As I noted in my original post on being named to the Board, these challenges are central to the “Digital Economy Agenda,” and a key reason why I agreed to participate.

Department of Commerce Secretary Pritzker noted earlier this year: “we are no longer moving toward the digital economy. We have arrived.” The purpose of the Board is to advise the Commerce Department in responding to today’s new status quo. Today technology provides platforms and opportunities that enable entrepreneurs with new opportunities. Yet not everyone shares the benefits. The changing nature of work must also be better understood. And we struggle to measure these gains, making it harder to design policies that maximize them, and harder still to defend the future of our digital economy against myopic and reactionary interests.

The Digital Economy Board of Advisors was convened to explore these challenges, and provide expert advice from a range of sectors of the digital economy to the Commerce Department as it develops future policies. At today’s meeting, working groups within the Board will present their initial findings. We don’t expect to agree on everything, of course. Our goal is to draw out the shared conclusions and direction to provide a balanced, sustainable, durable basis for future Commerce Department policy processes. I will follow up with another post on this topic shortly.

Today’s meeting is a public meeting. There will be two live streams: one for the 8:30 am-12:30 pm PT pre-lunch session and one for the afternoon post-lunch 1:30-3:00pm PT. We welcome you to join us.

Although the Board has many more months left in its tenure, I can see a trend towards healthy alignment between our mission and the outcomes of the Board’s activities. I’m proud to serve as co-chair of this esteemed group of individuals.

“Gender equality remains the greatest human rights challenge of our time.”  UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, September 22, 2016.

To address this challenge the Secretary General championed the 2010 creation of UN Women, the UN’s newest entity. To focus attention on concrete actions in the economic sphere he created the “High Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment” of which I am a member.

The Panel presented its initial findings and commitments last week during the UN General Assembly Session in New York. Here is the Secretary General, with the the co-chairs, and the heads of the IMF and the World Bank, the Executive Director of the UN Women, and the moderator and founder of All Africa Media, each of whom is a panel member.

Photo Credit: Anar Simpson

The findings are set out in the Panel’s initial report. Key to the report is the identification of drivers of change, which have been deemed by the panel to enhance women’s economic empowerment:

1. Breaking stereotypes: Tackling adverse social norms and promoting positive role models
2. Leveling the playing field for women: Ensuring legal protection and reforming discriminatory laws and regulations
3. Investing in care: Recognizing, reducing and redistributing unpaid work and care
4. Ensuring a fair share of assets: Building assets—Digital, financial and property
5. Businesses creating opportunities: Changing business culture and practice
6. Governments creating opportunities: Improving public sector practices in employment and procurement
7. Enhancing women’s voices: Strengthening visibility, collective voice and representation
8. Improving sex-disaggregated data and gender analysis

Chapter Four of the report describes a range of actions that are being undertaken by Panel Members for each of the above drivers. For example under the Building assets driver: DFID and the government of Tanzania are extending land rights to more than 150,000 Tanzanian women by the end of 2017. Tanzania will use media to educate people on women’s land rights and laws pertaining to property ownership. Clearly this is a concrete action that can serve as a precedent for others.

As a panel member, Mozilla is contributing to the working on Building Assets – Digital. Here is my statement during the session in New York:

“Mozilla is honored to be a part of this Panel. Our focus is digital inclusion. We know that access to the richness of the Internet can bring huge benefits to Women’s Economic Empowerment. We are working with technology companies in Silicon Valley and beyond to identify those activities which provide additional opportunity for women. Some of those companies are with us today.

Through our work on the Panel we have identified a significant interest among technology companies in finding ways to do more. We are building a working group with these companies and the governments of Costa Rica, Tanzania and the U.A. E. to address women’s economic empowerment through technology.

We expect the period from today’s report through the March meeting to be rich with activity. The possibilities are huge and the rewards great. We are committed to an internet that is open and accessible to all.”

You can watch a recording of the UN High Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment here. For my statement, view starting at: 2.07.53.

There is an immense amount of work to be done to meet the greatest human rights challenge of our time. I left the Panel’s meeting hopeful that we are on the cusp of great progress.

Diversity and Inclusion is more than having people of different demographics in a group.  It is also about having the resulting diversity of perspectives included in the decision-making and action of the group in a fundamental way.

I’ve had this experience lately, and it demonstrated to me both why it can be hard and why it’s so important.  I’ve been working on a project where I’m the individual contributor doing the bulk of the work. This isn’t because there’s a big problem or conflict; instead it’s something I feel needs my personal touch. Once the project is complete, I’m happy to describe it with specifics. For now, I’ll describe it generally.

There’s a decision to be made.  I connected with the person I most wanted to be comfortable with the idea to make sure it sounded good.  I checked with our outside attorney just in case there was something I should know.  I checked with the group of people who are most closely affected and would lead the decision and implementation if we proceed. I received lots of positive response.

Then one last person checked in with me from my first level of vetting and spoke up.  He’s sorry for the delay, etc but has concerns.  He wants us to explore a bunch of different options before deciding if we’ll go forward at all, and if so how.

At first I had that sinking feeling of “Oh bother, look at this.  I am so sure we should do this and now there’s all this extra work and time and maybe change. Ugh!”  I got up and walked around a bit and did a few thing that put me in a positive frame of mind.  Then I realized — we had added this person to the group for two reasons.  One, he’s awesome — both creative and effective. Second, he has a different perspective.  We say we value that different perspective. We often seek out his opinion precisely because of that perspective.

This is the first time his perspective has pushed me to do more, or to do something differently, or perhaps even prevent me from something that I think I want to do.  So this is the first time the different perspective is doing more than reinforcing what seemed right to me.

That lead me to think “OK, got to love those different perspectives” a little ruefully.  But as I’ve been thinking about it I’ve come to internalize the value and to appreciate this perspective.  I expect the end result will be more deeply thought out than I had planned.  And it will take me longer to get there.  But the end result will have investigated some key assumptions I started with.  It will be better thought out, and better able to respond to challenges. It will be stronger.

I still can’t say I’m looking forward to the extra work.  But I am looking forward to a decision that has a much stronger foundation.  And I’m looking forward to the extra learning I’ll be doing, which I believe will bring ongoing value beyond this particular project.

I want to build Mozilla into an example of what a trustworthy organization looks like.  I also want to build Mozilla so that it reflects experience from our global community and isn’t living in a geographic or demographic bubble.  Having great people be part of a diverse Mozilla is part of that.  Creating a welcoming environment that promotes the expression and positive reaction to different perspectives is also key.  As we learn more and more about how to do this we will strengthen the ways we express our values in action and strengthen our overall effectiveness.

This is a guest blog post from Jane Finette, Executive Program Manager, who works closely with me in Office of the Chair.

In a recent blog post Mitchell described why she has been eager to see the hiring process at Mozilla have a larger focus on cross-functional participation, particularly for senior leaders whom we expect to represent a broad swath of Mozilla.  Enabling wider participation in how we hire for leadership has been our starting point.  She notes we began organizing panel discussions for a broader set of people to talk to the candidate some time ago.

The need to hire for a new senior role, Vice President of Marketing Communications, presented an opportunity to further explore this new type of approach. Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, our CMO and the hiring manager for this role, and I sat down to plan and document some further experiments with the hiring process for this role. Our goal from the start was to explore two outcomes: an increased participation within the organization and the simultaneous creation of a meaningful process for candidates to evaluate us.

Enabling participation in the hiring process for the VP of MarComm position was particularly crucial because this person has a role that represents and communicates publicly about a broad swath of Mozilla. The VP of MarComms oversees the global communications, social media, user support and content marketing teams and works across the organization to develop impactful outbound communications for Mozilla and Firefox products.

What was the process?

Jascha and I designed the interview process right at the start with participation as one of the key objectives. Together we identified interviewers as peers, direct reports, expertise leaders and others who were not from the group where the candidate would work; in this case Marketing.  We identified cross functional areas the hire would interact with on a regular and a geographic basis, these were people who might not otherwise have been part of the interview process.

Here is an overview of the process we devised:

1st round: Peers (no direct reports).
Purpose: Interviewing for values match, strong competency in area of expertise.

2nd round: Directs report + leaders in area of expertise, including cross-functional areas.
Purpose: Interviewing for leadership attributes, values match, competency in area of expertise.

3rd round: Panel – including moderator and panel members who were not part of the group where the candidate would work. Panel was a maximum of 7 people.
Purpose: Validate values match. Give insights into broader organizational dynamics.

4th round: Case study including peers + directs reports and a small selection of members of  the panel. Maximum of 12 people.
Purpose: Place for the person to demonstrate their expertise and shine, and experience a typical environment.

5th round: CEO and Chairwoman
Purpose: Validate values match, leadership and skills where appropriate.

We conducted well over 50 screenings and entered 8 very well qualified candidates into our process. The process took approximately four months to complete, approximately the same amount of time required for an executive level hire.

What have we learned so far?

The hiring process for the VP of MarComm is now complete. Alex Salkever, joined Mozilla as our Vice President of Marketing Communications on May 18, 2016.

We have a hypothesis that increasing the level of diversity and participation will lead to stronger hires at Mozilla. We are continuing the pilot to explore this further.

(1) In our opinion interviews are both for the organization and the candidate

• By increasing the level of diverse participation, we have been able to get more input from across the organization, finding blind-spots and bias. In our pilot case, the role was intended to be hired outside of the US due to the global nature of the position. The hiring manager explained he was heavily influenced by his peers in the organization regarding the location of this hire, which could have led to a suboptimal situation if he had pushed with his original preference. Additionally, we chose a candidate who has strong technical chops for a Marcom lead and yet, the recommendation was shaped heavily by the feedback provided from the non-marketing/policy participants.
• We are exploring turning this into a repeatable interview process.
• We have created an environment where candidates can also evaluate us from multiple perspectives.
  (i) By adding differing perspectives to our current hiring process, we are exposing a new hire to our unique culture and operating principles right from the start.
  (ii) The new hire already knows and has the potential to have credibility with a significant number of people at Mozilla from the first day. The process is essentially a way of reputation building on a distributed basis.

(2) Participatory hiring process in senior levels is our starting point

• Our starting point for a more participatory hiring process is our senior roles.  As Mitchell noted, “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.” These roles require an ability to interact, motivate and work across teams, they also have the high potential to affect culture.

(3) Defining what success looks like helps identify who should participate in the hiring process

• A key practice to apply in all hiring processes: define (i) what success for the role will be and (ii) all the stakeholders in the organization whom can support success, this creates the pool of participants. In this case, we worked with both the hiring manager and the recruiter at the start of the process to design and determine the process.

(4) Add more people early on

• A previous learning indicated a broader group of diverse interviewees should be in the 3rd stage of the interview, not the last stage as their feedback proved to be critical in the decision process. This was upheld in this example. In order to invite a broad group to meet with a candidate, this could take the form of a panel to create an effective use of time.

Gotchas:

• We note that time taken by increasing participation in hiring could inhibit the process. In subsequent examples we intend to create and test a lightweight version of the process.
• When involving more people in the process, we must be careful to collect candidate feedback individually, as in larger group settings ‘group think’ can happen.

Often a standard type of interview process is designed for the company, rather than the individual being interviewed. The standard process is intended to maximize assessment in a core area of expertise, whereby candidates are evaluated by their manager, peers and direct reports in their domain only. This creates an unhealthy power balance and exposes a set of addressable biases in the process such as ones based on cultural fit, and skills gap perspectives from other areas of the company.

What’s next?
We will continue to explore, record results and share further findings. We have now begun another participatory hiring experiment at the ‘director’ level role.   It’s an interesting question what piece of evidence would conclusively prove cross-functional and cross-level participation in hiring leadership brings benefits to an organization.  We’ll continue to experiment.