Month: February 2020

Reflection on Yoda#4 “Your job already has social impact” … but it might not be the impact you want, and how do you shape that?

I’d like to respond to Yoda#4 Mo Yun Fong’s post, “Your Job Already Has Social Impact” by saying YES AND… “it may not exactly be the impact you want – and here are some thoughts on how to shape your impact”.

As Mo wrote, most or all jobs have some social utility, whether at a large or small scale. It is a privilege to have a role where you create products and manage platforms that could potentially impact thousands or millions of people. However, what’s challenging is if you desire to impact a different demographic of people than the current end users of your product.

For example, I had found myself at a crossroads, deciding between two entirely different roles at two companies. One role was internal facing and had strong potential to impact the company’s global workforce of >100K workers. The other role was more external facing, and could impact as many, if not more, people across the US – and one key difference was the potential beneficiaries in this latter case are historically marginalized, as compared to the former case of high-tech workers. Both roles had the potential to create social impact, but, given the fact that I’m a Myers-Briggs “NF” (intuitive feeler), I’m an idealist and gravitate towards roles which most closely, explicitly, and directly align with my passion to empower communities who have been disenfranchised. You can probably guess which role I ended up choosing.

However, not everyone is quite as idealistic and I think there are many ways to be creative in how you shape your social impact. I personally have a bias towards promoting equity, so I’m framing my solutions with that bias in mind.

Adapt Products and Services to Benefit More People

Say you work on a large tech platform that reaches millions of people. You have a voice to speak for subgroups who traditionally may have no voice in product design. Can you think of ways to adapt the product so that it serves a wider range of people? Is the product culturally responsive for different groups? Can people with disabilities access the product? On the flip side, are there ways that the product might be biased against certain subgroups of people? There are lots of subtle barriers and features that prevent people from using products and platforms, and we need people inside companies who have this awareness and can correct for this type of bias in design.

To demonstrate how subtle this bias can be, here’s an example. On LinkedIn, for 3rd degree connections, they hide the “connect” feature under the “…” button on the webpage. At first glance, it looks as though the only way you can reach out to a 3rd degree connection is if you send a Premium InMail by purchasing LinkedIn’s Premium membership. However, in reality, you can still “connect” with that person for free by clicking “…” to select this option. I did confirm with a LinkedIn employee that they hid this feature on purpose to encourage you to purchase their membership. Why this is a big deal?  (1) People who have less social capital, are less connected, and are more likely to have a lot more 3rd+ degree connections and relatively fewer 1st and 2nd degree connections. (2) People who are less tech savvy may not realize they need to click on the “…” button to find the free “connect” option. And I posit that people who fall under conditions #1 and #2 are more likely to be less educated (and less tech savvy) and possibly lower income — if there is a correlation between income, education, the ability to use technology, and the size of one’s professional social capital / networks. So, if this is true, then LinkedIn may be unintentionally disproportionately targeting lower-income individuals to purchase their Premium membership, which is an inequitable policy. If someone can’t afford to purchase the membership and doesn’t realize that they can “connect” with folks for free, then they face barriers to developing their professional network.  The simple solution would be to move the “connect” button back to the main page. It would be amazing if there was a social-impact-minded LinkedIn product manager out there who could make this happen!!

Adapt Your Work Processes

Not all of us work in roles where we have direct influence on how products are designed and implemented, especially if we are in more junior positions and/or not working at a product company. However, I believe that we can find ways in most of our jobs to promote equity and social impact. For example, when I worked in philanthropy, I had developed recommendations on how to incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion in how foundations give away money, and there were some recommendations that need approval from senior leaders for implementation. However, there were many administrative recommendations that junior staff could potentially implement without explicit approval – small things such as removing character limits on written responses on grant applications. You may scoff, but nonprofits claim that 50 percent of the time that they spend on their grant applications, is spent editing their responses so that they fit the character limits.

Use Your Influence Internally in Other Ways – Start Small!

There are small and large ways to influence your work environment with social impact in mind. There are stories of employees starting diversity & inclusion programs, recycling programs, employee volunteer programs, charitable giving programs, etc. I even know people who have started apprenticeship programs to provide pathways for people with no college degrees to work in technology. However, starting an entire program might sound overwhelming, so start small. For example, if your team is hiring a new person, can you influence how the job description is developed? Does the role really require a college degree? Can you ask the recruiter to look for candidates from other sources than the usual elite colleges – maybe local community colleges? Would you be open to hiring someone with a criminal background, as a way to give a returning citizen a second chance? If your company has a policy against hiring people with criminal records, find out why – and press them to really understand if it’s a blanket policy or if they’d be open to hiring people with certain kinds of criminal backgrounds. You could also encourage your company towards supplier diversity (food, office supplies, consulting services). Or do the cleaning/ janitorial and other staff get paid a living wage? Do you treat all staff with respect? 

I hope this smattering of concrete examples might help you to think more creatively about how to enhance the social impact your job has.

Please share other thoughts, ideas, and anecdotes on how to shape your social impact through your work!

Yoda#4 Perspective: Your Job Already Has Social Impact!

Our yoda today and guest contributor Mo-Yun Lei Fong is currently Sr. Director, Google Technical Solutions, Assistant and Search; she was previously Google’s Director, Computer Science Education, Catalyst for Equity in Education, and Chief Compliance Officer for Google Payments. After graduating with her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford, she began her career as a school teacher and then was promoted to assistant principal at Monta Vista High School. She then went on to Harvard Business School and became the founding executive director of the Stanford Educational Leadership Institute, prior to joining Google.

Every job has an impact on society – it’s a matter of mindset and how large a scale and direct an impact you want to have.

Coming out of undergrad, I decided to defer a career in chemical engineering because I had a strong desire to teach and give pay forward what my teachers had poured into me. The idea was to teach for a couple of years, go back to engineering, and maybe retire as a school teacher. Two years turned into three as I wanted to see my sophomores graduate, but in that third year, I was already starting to get the itch to do more. If only I could start a school and not just impact 180 students a year, but an entire student body of thousands? I got that wish, as I became an assistant principal at the school, the same year I applied to business schools with the intention of opening up my own girls school focused on STEM. I chose to attend Harvard Business School, which has a lofty mission to “educate leaders who make a difference in the world.” At the time, I translated this to literally make a difference in the entire world, setting expectations high and the pressure was on to figure out how to do just that.

Upon graduation, I thought, “If only I could help restructure the entire school system, I would really start to make a difference in the world.” When I was offered the role as the first executive director of the Stanford Educational Leadership Initiative, I was convinced “this is it!” Combining the amazing resources and thought leadership from Stanford Graduate School of Education and Stanford Graduate School of Business, we set out to transform the complex US school system to better serve students. Working with the largest school districts, we developed executive education courses and research to help school leaders bring back best practices that could potentially impact hundreds of thousands of students. For me, though, something was still missing. If only I had more direct business experience, I could be even more credible in this intersection of business and education and have even more impact.

My pivot to the corporate sector was fortuitous. I was responsible for the “acceptable use policy” for the allowable goods and services sold using a payment platform. This drew from my experiences not only working with policymakers but setting up the enforcement operations. Although far removed from the world of education, my mindset was on protecting the public from physical harm, fraud, and risk. Users at the time were in the millions and my responsibilities continued to grow. With each career move, it pulled me further and further away from direct social impact. I was no longer in the classroom helping the individual students with their math problem or writing college recommendation letters, but the policies that were set had economic implications on small and medium business owners. Similarly at Google, my role as the Chief Compliance Officer was protecting a global user base from money laundering and terrorist financing after 9/11. It was then that it dawned on me that every job has an impact on society – it’s a matter of mindset and how large a scale and how direct an impact you want to have.

I knew that my work was playing an important role in society, but it didn’t stop the desire to get back into education. I remember my original purpose in wanting business experience which was to help more students attain the education they deserved and need to be successful in the 21st century. I started asking everyone I knew both at work and in my social circles if they knew any organizations that could use some help. Again, the stars aligned and I for the next four years, I led a team to bring the importance of computer science education to the national stage and helped spark the imaginations and learning for millions of students globally. And now in my current role working on Google Assistant and Search, I have the privilege of providing information and technology to sectors beyond education and to billions of users. This is an opportunity that would not have been possible, if I hadn’t started talking to people about my dreams to change the world for the better.

Having held jobs that had direct impact at a small scale, to jobs that have indirect impact but at a much larger scale, I sometimes wonder if I’ve made the right tradeoffs in my career. But as I sat down for lunch across from Jennifer, a former student of mine who now works at Google launching devices that will be used by millions of customers, I realized that those early years of teaching had just as much meaning and social impact as my current day job. Every life we touch makes a difference, so at the end of the day, there is very little tradeoff. Even HBS recognizes that though they can “ touch only a few thousand directly each year, we can indirectly influence many more.”

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us, Mo. Reactions? Please comment below!