Hey, Boss: It's Your Job To Promote A Healthy Team Culture

3:00PM Aug 24, 2023

Speakers:

Keywords:

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team

manager

important

person

work

newsroom

hr

culture

feel

bit

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people

kim

call

give

direct reports

journalism

peer

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All right, folks, I think we're going to dive in here if it's alright with everyone. Hello, everybody. Thank you for making it through the through the Midway and clawing your way through the water bottles and pencils and and towels. I don't know there are a lot of towels. Why are they giving away towels? Is there some kind of mess we need to mop up? I don't know. Probably this is news. So hi everyone and welcome to our session on kind of newsroom culture and particularly on just trying to be a good boss and the kind of boss people want to have but still being productive and and getting the news done. And thinking about your team. That's what we're We're gonna talk about today. So why don't we go ahead and introduce ourselves? I went the wrong way already in the slides. Okay. So, Kim, take it away.

Hi, I'm Kim. We thought we would introduce ourselves, you can Google our resumes. But we thought we would talk about why we're here and why we want to be good bosses. I did not ever intend on going into management, I just kind of like showed up there because I had a lot of really bad bosses. And then I wanted to be the person that I didn't have coming. Coming up, there were very few people who looked like me and had my experience when I was baby manager. And so it made me care a lot about not perpetuating that cycle.

Yeah. So I'm Eric Carvin on. Well, you can read up there, Director, social news gathering at NBC News, relatively new gig for me, I was at HP for 21 years before that. And the reason I wanted to be here, and the reason I care about this stuff, there are a couple of reasons one of them is because a lot of people, I think in how I'm going to say at this point, my generation had a little bit of a rough time with managers early in my career career. And sometimes, for reasons that didn't seem all that clear to me. But also because I've, because of the role I have now, and some others I've had before, I've been managing a lot of reporters who deal with having to see a lot of tough stuff and deal with a fair bit of kind of vicarious secondary trauma, and in some cases, harassment abuse. And so I feel like if it's not my job, one to think about their well being and their hopefully even happiness with their work, then I don't think I'm doing my job. So that's why I'm here. So, so let's dive in.

Some some caveats. Before we go and there's a handout that is like, I think it's linked in the, the thingamajig. That has lots more than we're going to be able to talk about, and it is not exhaustive, but it is like things, lessons that the two of us have, have learned. But some major caveats. We're not HR, no, you're not HR, probably not. I mean, maybe I don't, maybe there's some random HR person in here. But we and we will mention that a couple of times about like, we know what you can and cannot do and say. But just just remember that that's like there, there are limitations to building, building culture.

And I think importantly, also, you know, I'm, for example, I'm not here to represent like NBC policies on these things. This is more, as Kim said, things that have worked for us.

Yeah. And this is again, not exhaustive. And so we'll we're going to have you have a couple of minutes to talk to yourselves and then we'll have plenty hopefully plenty of time at the end for people to share their own lessons and also ask ask us questions.

Yeah, this is something Oh, and AES has been trying to do a little bit more in recent years and especially this year is encouraged some conversations within the audience. So you know, want to talk to your neighbor a little bit about some of the concerns you have around team culture and also some things that have worked for you and we're just gonna give you a couple of minutes and then we're gonna come right back

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For those who just walked in the room, everyone in the audience is discussing team culture ideas. Problems, we'll be right back.

Is okie dokie Why don't you take 10 seconds to wrap up your thoughts? Yeah. And we're bringing you right back

in grade school, we used to do like this. I don't know. Why did you do this in grade school?

My kids do this now. And

it's like the like, Oh, yeah.

Okay. There it is. Way. Oh, oh, okay. If you hear us, there's some putting on your shoulders. Yeah. Oh, great. Oh, look, it works does work. That's crazy. If you hear us clap ones. Okay.

All right. We're back. We're back. Everyone. Everyone's been in fifth grade at some. Yes. Amazing. I'm glad y'all made a friend. Hold on to your thoughts. Yes, we're gonna come back at the end some time for people to come up with their own thoughts. Yes. And discuss. Yeah. Okay. Let's move along there. Okay, so, okay, so let's start, oh, this seems like a really negative way to start, but it's not. So I want to talk about impostor syndrome for a second, because I think that's something that I honestly, I think we all experience and feel. And a lot of people are not honest with themselves about it and try to put on sort of a nice facade. But especially when you're new to being a manager, there's a little bit of this feeling of like, did I really earn this to get this for the right reasons? Am I ready? And well, first of all, we're obviously here to tell you that you are ready. But also, just as importantly, that feeling that you have is actually coming from a good place. I think that the only people who don't have impostor syndrome are probably people who don't really care enough about their jobs, I think it's a sign that this work is really important to you, that you care care about doing a good job, and that you care about your team. And that you you worry about failing. And that is all natural as a part of being somebody who cares about their work, and who wants to do things at a very high level. So but you know, what I what I like to say is that imposter syndrome isn't isn't a problem to solve. It's a lifestyle, it's just a part of something that you need to learn to live with. And you need to sort of acknowledge that it's just part of who we are as people who care about our work.

And I think Oh, and a presenters have been talking about failure, we've been talking in the tech world, we're talking about failure, failure all the time. And so like, you're gonna screw up, and that's completely fine. And that is that is, don't let it contribute to your imposter syndrome. Let it be that you are constantly learning and constantly growing, which is what you want your team to do to

just same way with experimenting in the newsroom around around the journalism, you know, when you're a manager, you're gonna make mistakes, too. And the best thing, the most important thing is just learn from them. Otherwise, we won't go anywhere. Okay, there we go.

Okay. Um, so, there are things that you don't know, I think there's sometimes a perception among first time managers that you have to be a subject matter expert, like how can I run a data team, if I don't know how to do Ruby, that's not true. You are probably put in a management position because you have charisma, you have a something that makes people want to follow you, as a leader. And there's a big, you can learn management, you cannot learn leadership, leadership is a talent. And you probably are in that position, because you have you have that talent. So it's okay to and you should be humble and catalogue what you don't know you don't have to know what exactly how to do everything that your direct reports do. But you do have to know that you don't know so that you can say hey, I'm not the subject matter expert in this you are. You're I want to help you find a way to put this project forward, or whatever it is. So know what you know what you don't know and be able to collaborate It's on on that.

Yeah, allow the people on your team to be the experts that they are. And I think an important piece of that too, is like just a good reminder, one of the most important things you need to remember to do when you're a manager is give people credit for their work, always, always, always give them a fuse of expensive credit for what they do well. And when they do something not so well work with them privately, and like solve the problems that way. But there's nothing worse than a manager who takes credit for your work. And you don't want to you don't want to turn into one of those.

Yes, I prior worked with the other carbon and a carbon. And one of the things we did for our team was we actually did a spreadsheet that was a catalogue of strengths and weaknesses. We started with language, but it ended up being like some people were better at maps, some people were better at sourcing, some people were better at like getting credit. And we made that a spreadsheet that we and so it's like what you're good at, what you're not good at and what you want to learn, right. And that is how we put forward our to like team, our team goals,

we have a doc on my team, we call it the Teach and Learn doc, that's basically half of it is like stuff I'm really good at that I would love to teach and the other half of it is stuff I wish I knew how to do. And we're trying to find ways to match people up or down or in some cases, maybe even do a little internal team session to try to try to address that.

But if in knowing what you don't know you kind of have to know your your folks. So there are a few things about knowing knowing your folks. We'll talk about one on ones in a little bit, which are incredibly important. But you can't build culture if you don't know the personalities of the people who work for you. It is important to know a little bit about their lives and what's going on because then you can man help them manage their work lives in reference to what is happening in their personal lives. A story I usually tell us I there was someone that was underperforming on one of my teams vastly underperforming. No one could figure out why I started just taking them to coffee and just talking about like what's going on? Are you okay, you seem off. And it turns out that that person had a family member who had been diagnosed with cancer and they were helping out with it. They didn't want to talk about that with the rest of the newsroom, which is totally fine. But it explained their underperformance and then I could reframe it in my head as isn't an underperformance I need to help them manage this manager work on top of their their personal life load. So make sure that you know that you know, folks, there's some like silly things, you know, their kids names, their pets names, like little things like that mean a lot to people and mean that they they care. And then make sure that you're constantly pushing your folks to grow. And where they where they want to grow and where you think they need to grow, which aren't always aligned. But as long as you're having conversations about what you both think is next for that person, then then you can collaborate on that together.

For sure. Oops, I went too far. Go back, go back. All right.

This is something, okay. Um, you as the manager, you set the tone. And we'll talk to Eric, we'll talk more about certain aspects of this in a second. But you set the boundaries, and you set the tone for what is acceptable and what and what the culture is going to be. So if you want your culture to be your team culture to be incredibly transparent and positive, if you show up slamming doors, and unhappy and always complaining about whatever's happening, that's, that's not going to be the tone for your team. Because they're going to at least set what what is uh, what is the appropriate thing based off of how, how you act. So if you show up angry, then they're going to think it's acceptable to show up angry. If you show up stressed or you don't share anything about your life, then they're gonna be like, Well, I don't know anything about Eric. So why do Why should I tell him anything about what's happening with me? Because He clearly doesn't want to reciprocate.

Right, for sure, for sure. That makes sense. So, I want to talk for a second about vulnerability and I think this is this kind of ties in a little bit with what Kim was just talking about, because, you know, they you do need to decide where your comfort zone is and where you're boundaries are as a manager and what you're comfortable talking about and not and sharing of yourself and asking of your team. But I do think there is something to be said for being really open, and allowing yourself to show your vulnerability and being really honest about that with your team, there can be a mistake, I think this is something that can happen with first time managers, where they feel like, you know, okay, it's, it's my job. And this comes from a good place, it's my job to make sure that things are good with my team. So I need to make sure that they know that I'm good, that everything's good with me that like I am handling whatever's coming. And I'm not being affected in some negative way. Because I don't want to deflect that from my ability to help them. I get it, I see where that comes from. But at the same time, I think that people really appreciate knowing that, that their boss has their own vulnerabilities. So I remember right after you've already, I mean, this was a, this was, I think, one of the toughest stories that people in a line of work like ours, and I'm sure for a lot of people in this room who covered different aspects of this, one of the toughest stories we've ever had to cover, you know, full stop. And afterwards, when we had a team meeting afterwards, I had a conversation with a team and and I shared with them what what I'll share with you now, which is that there was a day during that coverage, you know, we're getting a barrage of information coming into our email coming into our Slack wherever it might be, but not the latest news related to you validate that was coming in when that was a breaking news event. And at 1.1 of these simply mentioned this, this tiny fact that one of the victims, one of the kids who died that day, was two days away from their 10th birthday. And as it turned out, that was the week that my daughter was turning 10. And so like an I just kind of I lose it a little every time I mentioned this, but I sort of lost it a little around that. And, and I had to like sort of step away. And I went and I talked to my team about it later on. And I told them that this is this is a this was a difficult moment for me. And this is something where I had to step away and acknowledge that, that this work isn't always fun. remind myself we're doing it for good reasons. But, but that it's okay, it's okay to have those kinds of feelings. Again, you have to know where your boundaries are. You know, it's not about sharing things that you don't want to share, you really don't want to go there. Just because then you won't be you won't be happy in your own position as manager. But share sharing a little bit of that vulnerability, sharing some of those weaknesses, being honest about those things you don't know that Ken was talking about. It goes a really long way allows them to have the expertise they have, but also to feel hopefully more comfortable sharing the challenges they're facing in their work, which allows you to help them.

I think building a culture of trust requires some amount of vulnerability. My my husband passed away in 2020. And I often will just tell my team, I'm having a really shitty grief day. And then and I'm probably not going to be as responsive or as onpoint. Today, I tell them when I'm going to therapy, not because I'm trying to make excuses. But I want them to know that I'm not not responding to you, because I don't want to talk to you. I just don't want to talk to anybody today. And so they can they know what's happening. So then when that happens to them something in their life happens, or they need a minute, or they need to take a walk that they feel comfortable saying like, hey, I need to take a walk. Because something really rough happened, or I got a bad text from my mom, whatever it is,

it also helps because if you're going to have a day like that, where you might be less responsive or less open, maybe you can maybe there's someone else who can talk to them that day, maybe you can say oh, you know, my boss, or this peer of mine is someone you can go to today because I'm going to be a little less available if there are practical reasons for it as well. I think

a little a little bit on time, because that seems to come come up a lot. micromanagement is not a good use of your time or use of your team's time. But I think a lot of people who end up accidentally micromanaging it's not necessarily that they intend to be a micromanager. It's just that they don't necessarily trust that their team is going to get things done. And so you have to you have to find ways to build trust, trust with your team and part of the ways to build trust with your team is getting to know them but also like helping them project manage because I think that's one of the things that a lot of folks seem to struggle with and To understand helping them fail well and fail forward with so that they don't spend time being being frustrated. So you're you need to keep track of the time of who's spending too much time on this. Who's spending not enough time on this? And why is that happening? And how can I help these these folks grow, and make sure that what you're not just tracking your team's time, but tracking your time, as well. So like work, life balance matters. If you are constantly working until 10pm, your team will expect that think that they are expected to work to 10pm. I have didn't love doing this. But I often used to leave the office at 5pm, despite the fact that I had a shit ton of work to do, because I wanted my folks to leave and feel comfortable leaving and be able to go home when they needed to go home. If I stayed until eight every night, then they wouldn't be able to build their own work life balance, because they would think that that is supposed to be the norm.

For sure. And I think that, you know, I think a lot of people, as managers have gotten good at telling their team, take your breaks, take your vacation, you know, do all that stuff you need to do to get your time off and recover. But they aren't always as good at doing them doing it themselves. And remember that these people who are in the room around you might want to be used someday, and that's good. Or they might want to be someone in a position similar to yours. And so they're going to model they're going to model that behavior. And if there's anybody on that team who's not taking their time off, suddenly, you'll start seeing more people who are doing that, too. So I take my breaks, I use my vacation time. I take a lot of pride in that. And I make sure that I sort of talk about it pretty loudly with the team make sure they know. But fun thing I just did. Oh, we have a question. Sure. Why not? Ask away? Do you want to? I don't know if we'll hear you. Do you want to come up to a mic? We have mics? Yes. Yeah, you can talk.

So I'm just curious, like, when you have those moments that you still have a ton of work to do after the day? Do you just like, I mean, we're virtual. So is it better to just like, turn your Slack indicator off? And hide that you're looking

to do? Yeah, so what I used to do was, I would go home at five. And I used to have a boss that would send me emails at like 11pm. And then I'd have to like frantically feel like I had to respond. So I would look at this lovely function called Send Later. I never send emails outside of work hours that are not urgent. Because I don't want folks to not have dinner with their family, sending emails, and then the one time there's legitimately an emergency, they're like, oh, no, Kim always sends emails at 7pm. I'll just ignore that one. But it is like something that has to happen. Like I don't text with my team members, unless it is something that is important. And then they know that like I don't try, I try to keep everything within like the work communication realm. But if it is important, I will text them and so they understand urgency based off of like how I communicate with them?

I'm sure, it's good question, by the way. Okay, I just wanted to talk about hiring for a moment. And I want to also acknowledge, we're talking about a lot of things here that could be their own entire session or multiple sessions. And we realized we're just kind of touching on things very briefly, we have this handout that you'll see on the session page that has some resources and additional information. But I just wanted to briefly touch on hiring because if you're a new manager, or if you're an early career manager, you may sooner than you realize it have the opportunity to hire sometimes right away. The opportunity to hire is absolutely it's a gift. You know, it's, it's, it's a moment that, especially in our industry doesn't always come around as often as it does. And you need to treat it as something that is absolutely just critical, and that you handle really, really carefully. For one thing, we're talking about team culture here. Obviously, you want to hire people with the right skills. That's the easy part. But you also want to make sure that people are going to be contributing to the positivity of your team culture and not detracting from it. And also, that when you bring people in, that you're not looking for some kind of a cookie cutter, this is what we want for the team, that you're always looking to add something. You know, the best teams are the teams that have the greatest diversity of background of skills of thought, and of mindset, because the more ways that people think In terms of the fundamental work you do, the better job you're gonna do of doing that work, you're just going to be, you're going to be, you're going to do more accurate journalism, you're going to be able to cover communities you didn't used to cover as well before, you're going to be able to sort of realize angles that you wouldn't have realized. It kind of feeds back into the you're not the expert of everything as the boss thing, the more you want to bring in people with different kinds of expertise, and so treat these moments very, very seriously. And when I talk about a positive team culture, I just mean someone who is going to be a great collaborator, someone who is there to learn, but also there to teach. Take that moment, very, very seriously. You don't know when you're gonna get to hire someone, again.

Don't hire capable jerks.

Right? That's another way to put it. No assholes rule. Okay. Right.

Yeah, sure. Okay. Yeah, let's so we kind of alluded to one on ones before. And I want to talk a little bit more about this. So I think it's really you know, I personally think it's really important as a manager, to make specific time to have one on one meetings with each member of your team with anybody who directly reports to you. It's something that this is my perspective, but it's something that should be on the calendar, at a regular cadence of regular time, for a consistent amount of time. What that time is, and what that cadence is, is variable, depending on the nature of your team, and how much you you work together and talk together during the course of a normal day and what fits in. So I don't want to, I wouldn't want to dictate anything along those lines. But it's just important to have time, where you aren't talking about whatever breaking news or urgent work that you're doing in the moment, but you're talking about the bigger picture about what work life is like for this particular person, how they're feeling about how things are going, how things are going with their colleagues, and they're relating to each other, what their thoughts are about their career, you can even have, you can talk about career development in these in these conversations. I also like to give my direct reports the opportunity to essentially set the agenda for the most part with these meetings to kind of drive these conversations. Because there's, I have plenty of opportunities whenever I want, I can tell them, here's what I need to get done. Here's something I need to assign to you, here's something I need to talk to you about. Because of something that just happened, I can do that anytime I want. Because I'm the bus, it's very, it's easy. For me, it's harder for them. And so I want them, I want this to be in some ways, their time. Now, this also goes back to the new year, people and everyone's different thing that Kim was talking about before, I have found with the example of my team, everybody wants to handle this a little differently. And I've I've have some flexibility. I've got people who show up at these meetings every time and they've got a list of like six bullet points they want to get through and they're like, Okay, I gotta get to the next thing on my list. I'm like, sure you go, let's go to number three. And, and then there are other people who show up, and they just kind of want to talk about life and how things are going, they want to ask me how my life's going. They want to just sort of use it as an opportunity to just kind of improve the personal connection that we have. That's fine. There are other people who every time the meeting comes around, they say, You know what, I don't really have anything to talk about, can you skip it this time? And I'm like, really, like, Yeah, we don't really have anything to talk about, we can talk next time. And I'll say, You know what, okay, that's fine. And that's fine, too. It's the idea here isn't for it to be a burden on anyone, or to somehow fit my agenda as a manager other than, like, my agenda of hopefully people being happy and fulfilled. And, and so I tried to show some flexibility around that.

I'm a kind of a process geek. And onboarding is something that doesn't feel important all the time. But it actually is important, like the first experience, from the interview to the first 90 days a person is hired, sets the tone for how they feel about you and how they feel about your newsroom, probably for the rest of their time. If it's bad, it's really hard to undo that work. So we had our Union did a survey and exit survey of why people left and they most of those people said they left because they didn't feel like included in the newsroom culture they because it was it was during COVID and hybrid and so there. I didn't get to know anybody. I wasn't shown who people were I had to find out who did what. It was very confusing. I didn't know how to get in contact with anybody and all of that onboarding. So I we created a very specific onboard Same process that is not just like, hey, you need to sign up to get the AP Stylebook this way, which is great you need you do need those things are very important. But it was also like, Hey, you should meet our events manager on the off chance that like maybe some time down the road that you will be moderating an event. And you should meet the Diversity Committee. Even if you're a sis white man, you need to like you shouldn't you should know your colleagues give them every opportunity to meet people that they might not meet during their day to day work. So that they feel like a part of something I don't I don't believe in like work is family. But I, you want your newsroom to have a culture. And the culture is set by the people if they if no one knows each other, especially in days where like, a lot of us are remote or hybrid or started weird lives are weird, then you can't create culture, our newsroom went for like two years without without culture. And it caused a lot of people to leave.

You know, one, one, I'm just gonna call this a tip. But your mileage may vary. So maybe I'll say one thing that has worked on our team, is we have a pretty elaborate onboarding process as well. And one thing that we do is we get everyone involved in the onboarding everyone. So you know, I'm obviously doing a fair bit of it. And my more senior reporters are doing a lot of it too. But we get everyone on the team, including people who've only been there for a few months, to show the new person something, you know, get them all involved in that process, you're gonna, you're kind of killing two birds with one stone there, because then you're also helping build the relationships. And we're going to talk about peer to peer relationships, it's so critical to build those relationships within the team. You're the person who's new is getting things from a variety of perspectives, which has a lot of value, because who knows how they work and how they learn. And also the people who are already on your team are getting an opportunity to teach and show their own expertise. So that's something that we do on my team. The other thing that I'll just mentioned really briefly what we said before, we're not HR, we're still not hr 36 minutes, minutes later. But make sure you know, the your HR rules, make sure you're very acquainted with the your HR rep, make, make sure you just generally know the resources that are available to you and to your team from your company. And this is going to vary a lot from one place to another. This will be everything from them knowing who their HR rep is to go with questions to in some cases, it might be mental health resources, time management resources, technology resources, you want to if you're a new manager, and you don't already know what all that stuff is, you want to you want to learn up quick, because because being able to share that stuff with your team is going to be really important. And it's just a reminder that it can feel very lonely. When you run a team for the first time and you want to find any opportunity you can to not feel alone in this process. Some of it is going to be because hopefully you've got a good boss supporting you I do I'm very lucky in that way. Not everyone may feel that way. Hopefully you have your own peer relationships to help sort of prop you up and where you can talk to others who might have a little more experience when you need. Maybe you have a mentor outside of your own reporting line. But there's just also a lot of support, hopefully, within your organization. So if there's, if there's a really challenging personnel situation, get HR involved, you know, because there's no reason that you you need to deal with it by yourself.

I think also think it's like important about HR like about the things that you can and cannot say, because I have accidentally stepped in it. Where you know, you can't tell somebody to go get therapy, you can say there are resources, and I see that you're struggling, and here are the resources that are available. But like, you know, I didn't, no one had explicitly told me that as a new manager, no one had said, you can't legally it is a danger. If somebody complains to you about a possible sexual harassment thing and you do not report it to HR, then legally, you have made the company liable. No one told me that I had to learn that by accident, almost accidentally, mess messing up. So you should talk to your HR rep, especially if you're new and you are transitioning in a newsroom from a individual contributor role to a manager or Whitehair. Are there things I need to know about process and when I need to bring you in? How do we do pips here? How do we how do we do formal reviews here? Because someone's going to ask you sooner or later. Yes.

Because I think I'm a little older than a lot of people go along the HR rules, particularly when I was a younger manager, and you have the sense that you want to have really good personal relationships with people who work for you. And on occasion, someone will come and say, hey, look, I don't want you to do anything about have this, I just want you to know about something that happened, but just keep it between us. And you got to be really comfortable early on saying, I can't promise you that I can keep this a secret, there are rules at this company. And, and I want to have this conversation with you. But there are certain things that if it comes up, I will have to talk about it with HR. And it's better to get that out ahead of time, that realize down the road that, oh, man, I've stepped in it, I have to not just report this to HR, but now I'm betraying the confidence that this person thought they had your head, you're so much better off throwing up that red flag in the beginning. And I've also found more often than not, once you throw that red flag out, people still want to talk

about it. Right? Yeah, no, I think that's really important. And, you know, I've worked for a very big company that actually is pretty good at telling us those things as managers, and but you know, everyone is in a different sort of place. Just a reminder that in some cases, you might be breaking the law, if you don't report that to, to HR or to higher ups, if somebody has come to you with, especially with a sexual harassment complaint, I know that in the state of New York, that's it's illegal to not report that. And so, you know, and so, so you need to, you need to know the rules, and you need to follow the rules. But I think that's a really good point is make sure that they know the rules, too. And that what they're there, they know what they're getting into.

Yeah. And our last point is about structure. Some like, you should have a structure for your, you should have a structure of having one on ones, but you don't have to have a structure, one on one. Each person is individual and needs different things. Some people are at a point in their careers where like, I don't know how to do this, can you help? Can you remind me when my assignments are due? And I don't think I really want to do that unless you need me to do them. It sounds like you need me to do that. But sure, I will give you due date reminders of when your stories stories are due, but I'm not going to give them to you unless you you ask for them. You can't apply the same formula of how to manage a underperforming person or an over performing person to everybody, because everybody has different. There's all sorts of different things that are are going on. A good example is like, I managed the breaking news team, and I had somebody who's freaking fantastic reporter but with like, freak out every once in a while. And I was like, hey, like what's going on? She's like, I just have too much going on. I can't finish as long story. I'm like, Do you not want to do enterprise stories? She's like, No, I want to do them. And I was like, Okay, so like, what's, what's the problem here? She's like, it's taking too long. I'm used to writing four stories in a day. And the story has taken three weeks, and I'm really frustrated. I'm like, do you just need to like, do you need me to give you like an intern level story? So you can like, feel like you did something today? She's like, yes. So every time from then on, she would be working on an enterprise story. She randomly coming to me, I'm like, do you want to write up this press release about this dude being arrested? She's like, yes, thank God, I'm so tired of people not calling me back, and not being able to hit publish on something that did not work. There was another person who is the same way. When they freaked out, that did not work for them. They didn't they wanted me to leave them alone. They wanted me to help them find boundaries, so that no one would talk to them for four hours so they could finish the enterprise story. They didn't need that. So it's sort of individuals. So make sure when you're creating structure for folks in order to help them that it is tailored to that person.

For sure. I hit all your animations here. I think I did. Kim did this really great. Oh, actually, we have a question. Maybe before I go on,

I just wanted to talk about, see if we had space to talk about the challenges with when we have these warm, open, transparent relationships with our direct reports, especially I'm finding this more and more of my early career folks, is that they translate that to friendship. And I have had to be very explicit with my direct reports that I care about you as a person and I care about your professional future. And I want you to be successful as a person, but I am not your friend. Right. And there's a difference between the expectations that you have a friend and the expectations, you have a boss who cares about you. And if we end up in the wrong place, I am going to disappoint you. So don't think that I'm your friend.

Yeah, that's it. This is important. Let's talk about it. Now. I, the way I like to think of it is like you can be a friendly boss without being someone's friend. And you should I mean, you know, we need to, you know, have a positive environment. I think this is also an issue that comes up with a lot of people who often when you get promoted for the first time as a manager, you're managing people who used to be your peers, and so you may have genuine, pre existing friendships. I think that what you're doing and being really explicit about that relationship is really important. And saying, like, look, you know, But it's part of the boundaries discussion. So I'm here, you know, we can talk about these things, but we can't talk about those things, you need to understand that I'm the manager, not just for for you, but for the rest of the team. It's, it's a hard one. It's one that I feel like I have a real advantage that the team that I'm running right now, I came in from outside the company to take over a team. And so it was like it was clean. But I know that it's common to be to be promoted into that. Kim, do you have any thoughts?

I mean, I often manage people who are my age, or older. And sometimes they feel like they can be friendly, because I go a friendly face, you're also a young person or whatever. And the times I've been promoted, I, I've done this thing, where, like, I like I think you're a great human being, I want to be friends with you. I am your boss right now. So I'm in telling me this? Are you telling me this with friend hat? Are you telling me this with Boss hat? Like, do you need me as a boss right now? Or do you need me as a friend? Or like, do you just need to vent? Or do you need like problem solving. So when friend hat is on, I can't be at work. Like I usually like, oh, you need like, you just want to want to talk about your boyfriend. Can we do that at drinks, like later, and like keep it around there. But you you do have to like very clearly outline those boundaries, especially when it's somebody who you came in as a friend, right? Or you were promoted up into into that position. This is one of the reasons I don't say like fit work is family. And there's like the the second note here is like, there was a point in my career where I realized I could not go to the work happy hour and stay the whole time. Or like go go to someone's going away. And I was like, oh shoot, I have to go, I buy a round of drinks. I say, Wow, you're a wonderful human being. Good luck with everything that is new. And I actually just flat out started telling me, I'm gonna go now. So you guys can like actually talk amongst peers. And they're like, no stay. I'm like, no, no, no, no, you need your space. And this is this is your time, this is your space. And I, I, I would do do that. And

I think honestly, very personal in terms of establishing those boundaries. I mean, if you're not comfortable having a friend type relationship, or even any aspect of that with the people on your team that you need to be, you need to be kind of clear about that. The other thing that can be hard as you need to be consistent, I think among the people on your team and make sure because that can be one of the hardest things. What if you were friends with one of these people, but not the other one? And you got two direct reports? You need to you might need to reset things a little bit and reestablish that relationship? It can it can be really hard. Yeah. Well, you know, since we Oh, yeah. So go ahead.

It's related. And it's a problem that I deal with, which is that I want people to like me, which is something I think a lot of us are all of us

like, oh, I want people to like me, too. So there's a

push against that. Because you want to do all the things that we talked about while still dealing with your feelings about just being rigid or?

Yeah. Yeah, no. And I think the, the most important thing that you need to resist in that desire to be liked, it's fine to want to be liked. And it's good to be likeable. But you need to not let that get in the way of the difficult conversations you might have to have with people where you have to say, this wasn't okay. Or this needs to be different next time. And here's why. As long as you can do that, and maintain a reasonable relationship, like sort of a friendly rapport, then you're probably okay. Well, let's jump, you know, we were talking about the sort of lower half of this slide already a little bit. So let's, yeah, I this is the same thing that I've done on this on my team to where, where we, you know, I think it's important to try if possible, take the team out from time to time. But I you know, but the idea of making sure it's not about you as a boss, and that it's primarily about them being able to connect to each other. Everybody who's a boss, and many of you hopefully are in this room, I imagine. Can you remember when you weren't the boss, how it was kind of a little bit of a relief when the boss left and you felt like you could, you could relax a little bit, you could exhale, you could maybe talk about things you couldn't have talked about before. So the way Kim describes that, I think is great, have the happy hour, get the round of drinks, and then get the hell out and like give them you know, pretty early so they have plenty of time to connect, connect among themselves. And the reason for that we're going backwards on the slide is peer to peer relationships within your team are really important. I think it's one of the most important things you do as a manager is to try to foster those relationships and support the relationships among the people on your team and make sure that they are connected to each other, that they are supportive of wanting of one another that they are teaching each other and learning from each other and that they have each others back. You know, there are different ways to run a team, I don't personally like the idea of having people at each other's throat and just competing constantly, there's going to be a natural level of competition in some degree, you know, you're, everyone's trying to do their best, and that's fine. But you want it to be a friendly competition if you have one. And, and those relationships are going to be important. You'll see in that in that bullet up there. This is, this is from something I got from Bruce Shapiro with the Dart center. I don't know if everyone's familiar with Bruce, he runs the Dart center for journalism and trauma at Columbia. And he one thing that he said at a session that I attended, that really stuck with me is that the number one predictor of being able to be resilient in the face of trauma, as a journalist is the quality of your support system, but specifically, your peer level support system, the better support you have from peers, the more prepared you'll be to deal with the difficulties and the trauma of your work. And there will be difficulties. So I think that's important. Okay, so sort of along the same lines, you know, I hope it doesn't start to seem like a broken record, but I think it's really important. You know, I think a lot of people, somebody was talking about being maybe one of the older managers in the room, I feel like I probably am, too. And I feel like there are a lot of people in my generation, and probably others who can't help but have this feeling sometimes of like, my my day, you know, you know, when you when, you know, when I was new to journalism, I had to I was on the they stuck me on the overnight for five years. That's actually true. And, or, you know, they didn't, they didn't care what I thought or anything, they yelled at me, I had to run to the bathroom crying every other day, you know, and you're, hopefully you hopefully your team at least has it a lot better than that. And hopefully, people in general are experiencing a better and more positive culture. Now, that is a good thing. Do not, you know, don't tamp that down, be proud of it, you don't need to pay the negativity forward. Keep that as you know, sometimes there'll be a story to tell every now and then. But be happy and proud of the fact that they don't have to go through the shit that you had to go through. And I hope that you didn't. But if you did, I think that's really important. And along the same lines, and you know, Kim kind of touched on this before, you know, if you want to have a positive team culture, you've got to bring the positivity to your work, you've got to, you know, there's plenty to grumble about in journalism, and that's going to happen, but you need to, you need to celebrate the victories. You need to celebrate the, you know, the great discoveries and the and the great work that people do on your team or that your team does collectively need to help people always remember that we didn't, I mean, we didn't get into this work for the money are really probably even the glory. Maybe there's a little every now and then. But it's really for the mission. And you want to make sure that people really buy into that, and then find the joy in that. And okay, I know we're really running through time here. But I this is this is I think this is really important to think about, and be prepared for and have kind of a plan around trauma and burnout. We've talked about it a little bit already. But you know, the trauma is real in the newsroom. Some teams experience it more than others more, some people experience it more than others. You want to have a proactive plan around this. We're not going to talk here and now about what that plan should be. We can't really go into that. But you want to have a plan for I think I put it in two big buckets. One of them is simply the abuse that journalists can be subjected to online abuse, harassment that can come whether it's from you know, your audience, or just from the public in general, you want to make sure that people are equipped to deal with that and that you have a plan for how to respond when it happens. You want to be open and make sure your team knows you can come to me about this, or this is what I always say, you can come to me about this. If you don't feel comfortable coming to me find a manager you're comfortable going to go to HR find someone to talk to and who can help. Lots of strategies around that. We have resources in the doc that we shared. Also upcoming there. There are a couple of sessions tomorrow one of them is at 1130 countering trauma for everyone in the newsroom, you should consider going to that. And then at 230 There's another one on out smooth outsmarting abusive trolls. It's a hands on safety clinic, go to those sessions, learn what you can be prepared to deal with it. It's just unfortunately, it's just a part of what we do. You know solving burnout is not just time off. I think time is important. Sometimes it's what people need is time to be able to recover and get an and get back. But sometimes they may need more, they need to know about the resources that are available. They may need you like an example. Like if they're getting, you know, seems weird to talk about Twitter anymore, but it's still gonna happen on X or whatever we're calling it. But if people are getting bombarded by abusive trolls, maybe somebody else needs to take over looking at their mentions for a day or two, and helping them letting them know when something's important. And they can take a break from that. So

that's the proactive part of that plan matters a lot, especially as a manager, you can if you wait until somebody is like, being harassed, and they're, you know, photos of their kids are being posted, it's too late. There are lots of places that will help the dark Center helps. There's pan America, there's like 15 million organizations and sessions about you should have a plan for as a manager. And to go back to the last slide, your plan cannot be, you should be tougher. We had to deal with such terrible things when we were we're in it. I mean, honestly, like my reporters have to deal with so much more harassment than I ever, ever did. And having a proactive plan means like when somebody's personal information is when somebody's doxxed, we had a plan in which we were very grateful for a corporate would spend X amount of money for one of those reputation defenders to take their the person's information off the internet, we would call the police we call the police in XYZ situation we call corporate security and XYZ situation when that person when that person is attacked on Twitter, we ask that they lock their account, or we hand their account to somebody else, like you have to know what to do. Because when you're in a moment of panic, because that person is going to be in a moment of panic if they're really being abused. You can't not have answers, your role is to protect.

And I think that's a that's a really good point about you can't just tell people to be tough about it. I I still have to tell higher, like higher up folks, don't that's not the message you should be sending because there are there are people who've been doing journalism for a while who feel instinctively that way. And I think it's there are messages you can send along the lines of like, I know this is hard. But you are doing this for good reasons you are you are the mission of this team. This newsroom, whatever it might be, is a really important mission. But also here are the here's the help, here are the resources, here's what we can do for you in this situation. I know.

The last thing about culture is that, yes, you do set the tone of the culture, but you alone do not create culture. Culture is based off of every person you hire, you have one jerk can ruin the culture of a whole team. I'm sure everybody in this room has seen that. So you have to recruit and everybody has to participate in culture, even if someone isn't a jerk, but they just aren't, are they're checked out that also contributes to the culture. And you can't force people to be more vulnerable or less warm, you have to work with them on how on how to do that. And so I consider I consider leadership collaborative. Like I, I have my experience, everybody else has different experience, I want to learn from you as much as you learn from me, I read all of the management books, most of them are terrible, but I've read a lot of them. But none of not one was the perfect formula formula for for that. On top of that. We're talking a lot about team culture here, your newsroom culture is and maybe for some of you, maybe something you can change, but it's not necessarily something that I have been able to change the whole culture because that is that requires other teams, you know the other. And when I hire people, I was like, I can't guarantee you that you're gonna have a great time at Ghana. But I can guarantee you, I think I'm a good boss, and I can do this for you. I can't I can't do anything about that jerk. And I really try to explain that when people run up into issues of like, hey, this happened, like, why are we doing this? I'm like, I don't know. That was a decision that was made like way outside of my bounds. But let me hear you and see what we can do about it together or how I can help you understand it at the very at the very

end. I will say if you are in a position to influence the broader newsroom culture, please try. It's it's you know, it's something that I feel like I'm at a point in my career. Well, I can at least attempt that in terms of good by establishing peer relationships among managers. And if you if you're able to, you know, by having a positive team that's both productive and happy. Other people around the newsroom notice that and it can, it can hopefully move things in the right direction. Okay,

so that's all of our stuff.

Yeah, yeah, that's everything. Wow. I want to mention one quick thing, which is there's one other session I want to mention that's happening on Saturday that relates to the work we've talked about here. Saturday, 1130, prioritizing self care when you're booked self care when you're booked in busy, just focus on mental health, which is a lot of what we touched on here Saturday at 1130. So we're almost at time, but we, if anybody if people are able to stay, we can stay for a little bit. I think you guys chatted a little before that people have thoughts that they want to share about what what's worked for you around positivity and team culture, but also what hasn't? Like what challenges you still face? Or I know, we've already talked a little bit. Sure.

Thanks for a great session, by the way. Kabaneri So listen, I I'm like 10 months into managing a fully remote work staff and coming from traditional newsrooms. Everybody person, right. And very much used to like being a manager who, you know, you can tell by the way I look whether I was happier. Or like, Hey, I'm going to do this now again. And so I'm going to give you guys a hybrid arrangements now. Are there any things that you guys use with remote staff on their way to make sure they felt that sense,

I've worked in fully remote newsrooms a couple of times. A few things you have your one on ones should be face to face like literal like video calls. one on ones on phone calls are really difficult or one on ones like over chat or you. There's just too much in body language to miss, especially when you're talking about one on one stuff, which is usually not always like the coolest, like, easiest thing to talk about. Don't ever have a difficult conversation without looking somebody in the eye. Even if it's like through a camera. That's That's what that's one thing I found is really, really important. And then like, you have to find, like really dumb ways for teams to build culture through those like video calls. Like, you know, not that we all love soccer teams or whatever. But I used to make my team play Pictionary. There's a really terrible Pictionary app out there. And I would just be like, we're not going to have a real team meeting this week. We're just gonna play Pictionary. And I learned that nobody on my team can draw very well. But we had like, great arguments about like, does that look like a leaf or not? And it really like made us get to know each other in a in a time when we it was really hard to do. So.

This is a it's a really tough question. You know, I think the camera on camera off thing is a hard one too, because I think it's really important to have the face to face to face. But you know, I'm sure everyone's had someone on their team who doesn't really want to turn their camera on and and then what do you do around that? I, you know, I think it's part one of those getting to know your team situations a little bit. So for example, I have, even now even now that we're hybrid, we are in multiple locations. So there's still a virtual aspect to it. And including I have some people who are in a location by themselves, essentially there, there are other NBC is there. But in terms of my team, and one of those people once said to me, you know, we have three times a day, we have slack huddles where we just kind of catch up on where things are going around the news cycle. And she said, she said it really would help me to turn our cameras on and the slack cuddles because it used to, you know, started out it was just audio. And so ever since ever since she said that. I don't require it. But I always turn my camera on every time I'm on one of those huddles. And that I think has made a big difference to her. But it's hard. I mean, one on ones are really a really a critical part of the solution, just making sure maybe you have them more often, if you're a fewer remote team, maybe you need to maybe they need to be a little longer. And then the hard part is finding ways to do the equivalent of that happy hour. You know, in my late in my last year or so at AP when it was during the pandemic, somebody had the idea of doing like a Friday at 5pm Happy Hour every week. And it would be like 300 people on Zoom. And it's not like the best way to socialize. But it was the best that was available at the time. And so maybe maybe get that on the calendar or something along those lines, just so you have something if you can

find budget to fly, yes. Everybody in or flight to see people that's really if you can find that do that. Yes,

for sure. Actually got into that one situation because you know, there's a New York office, right? We've got probably about 70% of our team is in New York. Yeah. But I did not anticipate that the one staffer lives in Virginia. feel left out. Yeah,

yeah. That's the feeling I got from

some of you. If you're a hybrid and you everybody in the new physical newsroom gets lunch, please. Bye, everybody. who's not in the physical DoorDash gift card? So they can also or just tell them to expense their lunch or something? Yeah, same thing. Yep, go ahead.

Keeping morale up during extreme budget. Keep people excited.

We went through buyouts and layoffs in three months. That was real shitty. And I just flat out said, it's shitty. Like, I'm not going to pretend that this is like, great. And my boss, God bless us all was like, we can just concentrate on the journalism like no one can do journalism if they don't think their job is secure. So I would just tell my team, I was like, This is really hard right now. And I understand it's gonna be really hard. Tell me what you need. And if there's anything I can explain, the best thing I gave them was information. You know, like, we had buyouts where some people in the company did not tell their managers that buyouts were happening until it was announced to the whole company. And you know, managers usually know a little bit earlier, they just waited until it's the all staff email, I was like, just call them like, it takes four, I took five minutes, and it made my editors feel so much better that I took the time to call them be like, Hi, here's a really shitty thing. We're gonna do buyouts and they're going to be announced tomorrow, please don't tell anybody, but I wanted you to know, so you guys can be prepared. So you don't like lose your shit in front of the all staff call

transparency, empathy. You know, just always, I always tell my team, tell me what you need. I can't, I'm not always going to be able to get it for you. But tell me what you need anytime and just them knowing they can come to you. Even if you say I can't do that, them knowing they can come to you and have that conversation has value, even when things are tough.

Yeah, my favorite advice is what Emma said when we were chatting. And she said that she always reminds people to be generous, and assume the best of other people's intentions. And I think that's really, really nice.

Yeah, there's never a conspiracy.

think transparency is something that works really well for me, just like he is open. And you can be I think that there's a lot of trust. And it's

you know, one tricky thing about the transparency, though, that you'll discover when you become a manager, when you were like, Oh, I'm gonna be the manager who's finally going to be transparent. No one ever told me anything you're going to be, you're going to realize, oh, wait, there actually are things I can't tell people. And so sometimes the important bit of transparency is making sure people understand that there were things you can't tell them. You know, it's like, you need to trust me on this. And I know that that might seem difficult. But you'll know more in two weeks, or this is happening for reasons I can't talk about. But there are good reasons. It's hard. But and I know there are people on my team who sometimes get frustrated when I have to tell them. I can't answer this right now. I mean, I've had people tell me, like, how does my salary compared to everybody else on the team? And that's like, well, obviously, I can't to answer that question. But strategic things about the company, you're gonna have higher ups who don't tell you, you can't talk about this right now. And so you need to thread that needle and make sure people know like, look, I'm being honest with you here. I'm telling you everything that I can.

Thank you, everybody.

Thank you. Great questions. Everyone had great ideas

nice sort of

like very casual vibe.

Where to Fergus, I know. I got to plug these things in. Hi. There is Suzanne Chanel skis and we were talking about Well, I've been she's been saying it for a while.

For us,