Your boss is not your mother

Hi Emma, ​​I’m helping Isabel this week who is isolated in her room with Covid.

But it gives me the opportunity to once again highlight Qu Jing, former head of public relations at Baidu, the Chinese search engine.

I hesitated before doing it because she had received negative press badly in the past. According to one critical story, she was apparently seen whipping an effigy with a rope.

But really, how can anyone interested in labor relations ignore last week’s story from my colleagues Ryan McMorrow and Nian Liu?

“I’m not your mom” What did he tell his staff.F. “I only care about the results.” And to underscore her disdain for parenting, she threatened, “I can put you out of a job in this industry.”

After the resulting furor, it was Qu, not his team members, who was left without a job.

Of course, Qu was right in saying that she was not maternal in the sense of being loving, kind, and protective. But who said mothers have to be sweet? There are many ways bosses act like mothers.

For starters, both can be critical. I often think of journalist and presenter Jenni Murray’s story about her mother phoning her after a television interview with a cabinet minister in the 1980s. “Oh, you were doing an interview with Norman Tebbit,” she said. his mother. “I didn’t realize what you were talking about. I think your bangs are a little long and you don’t see much of your eyes, which are your best feature, and you’ve gained a little weight. “I’m not sure that red top was quite right because your cheeks are quite high in color.”

Both mothers and bosses can dish out passive aggression. Maybe a light dose of the silent treatment?

While helicopter parenting is certainly a close relative of the micromanaging boss, Qu wasn’t doing moms any favors; In fact, they can be just as annoying as the managers. (Not mine, of course; just in case, she’s reading.)

So yes, the workplace may not be your family, but it definitely has some overlaps. Emma Jacobs

This week on the Working It podcast

Do you feel like your life is a series of unmanageable projects and instant messaging is that? . . endless and intrusive 😓? Most of us exist within a work ecosystem that prioritizes the immediate over what is worthwhile. Cal Newport, best-selling author, New York writer, and computer science professor, wants us to slow down. His new book, Slow productivityIt describes why we need to do fewer things, but do them better.

This week on the podcast, I speak with lime about the key tips any of us can learn to make our work lives truly productive. It gives us permission to vary our routines: an occasional trip to the movies will refresh our creativity more than another afternoon of reactive Slack messages. (Cal calls this kind of performative work “pseudoproductivity.” Which captures it perfectly, in my opinion.)

They want more? Working It has 10 copies of “Slow Productivity” to give to readers. All entries we receive through this form before 5 p.m. on Tuesday, May 21, they will enter the draw. Get one for yourself or gift it to your manager (😉). Isabel Berwick

Five notable stories from the world of work

1. Why electric cars are the most attractive advantage for companies: I’m old enough to remember when we all wanted a company car. Now the benefit is back, but this time as an ecological initiative. Emma Jacobs and Peter Campbell report on this growing trend.

2. Domestic violence is a problem in the workplace: A campaign column by Pilita Clark, calling on employers to follow the lead of companies like L’Oréal and explicitly commit to supporting staff who find themselves in abusive relationships.

3. Tesla’s Technoking Gives Lessons on Performance Reviews: Comments and performance reviews are under scrutiny like never before, and Anjli Raval takes Elon Musk’s autocratic approach at Tesla as a starting point for a column examining this thorny issue.

4. How production companies are taking control: I loved this upbeat article by Helen Brown, speaking to some of the women taking charge in recording studios. They’re optimistic, and that’s a big change from the industry’s recent past, when exclusion and harassment were too often the norm.

5. Jürgen Klopp and the leadership of Liverpool: Lynsey Hanley is a great writer and here she focuses her attention on Klopp’s remarkable leadership of the Liverpool football club. It’s a portrait of a city’s resurgence, and the team’s coach has been at the center of it.

One more thing . . .

I have listened too much Helen Lewis has left the chat, an insightful (and often sadly funny) BBC podcast about the profound effect instant messaging has had on our lives and workplaces. In one episode, Helen recalls the frenetic atmosphere during the pandemic lockdowns: Everyone was home and Slack messages became the focus of activist employees’ complaints about their colleagues, with sometimes life-changing consequences. Several years later, the (un)reality of that extraordinary time becomes clear.

A few words from the Working It community

My covid-imposed slowdown this week, Isabel writesWhile also thinking about Cal Newport’s mission on slow productivity, it led me to some of the excellent responses to a recent Working It newsletter outlining why we need More “breadth” at work..

Here’s Christina Hughes, CEO of Women-Space, which offers training to senior women working in higher education. Christina introduced me (and perhaps now to some of you) to the work of Nancy Kline:

I was excited to see your breadth article and Megan Reitz’s research report. My interest is because finding time to think is (perversely given its purpose) a huge problem in universities. One contribution to trying to change this is the work of Nancy Kline. If she doesn’t know her work, Nancy’s basic message is: “The quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thought we first think. The quality of our thinking depends on the way we treat each other while we think.” For example, her work has been applied to how to run better meetings.