My transgressive leadership in tech chose nurturance over efficiency

"You do not need to earn your rest,*" I told the team I managed, after the organization that I worked for at the time's leave policies got a lot more restrictive. Sick leave was to be capped, with higher barriers for approval.

I tried to escalate my concerns on the changes when I heard about them, but they were already finalized.

What I could do in that moment was show up with the information to my team and offer flexibility where I could, in defiance of this shift in corporate policy.

Why did I feel so strongly about this?

In my own chronically ill and neurodivergent self, I was dealing with escalating physical and mental health issues — I needed more time off than this or similar organizational policies often offer.

Beyond that, I hold a deep belief that I have seen unfold over and over again — that when I co-create systems** of nurturance where people are able to be honest about and find pathways to attend to their own care needs, they show up as more of themselves over time.

When team building is an act of nurturing resilient ecosystems where needs are able to be expressed, and the people on the team come together to meet them through adapting roles, scope, priorities or expectations – the individuals as well as the whole team become stronger for it.

We live in cultures where the work of care and the work of grief are not only under-valued, but also ignored. Depending on where we live, conditions demand workers take 2-3 days off to bereave someone or a few days/weeks to have a child and be back at it.

In the face of policies that engender these conditions, my Transgressive leadership practice was to ask the people on my team what they needed instead of making assumptions about what would be best for them, and then work with people up the chain to find ways to meet them through advocacy.

I do not believe in a leadership that protects the profit goals of the organization over the wellbeing of the people in the team.

and

Supporting the profit goals of the organization is a key to keeping our job secure and getting us paid, so succeeding at that was important too, when possible.

Creating systems of nurturance opened the way for product engineering that was connected and responsive to the users, the Product and Design teams, and the rest of our ecosystem.

There was often conflict to wade through, hurt feelings and people whose ideas had been ignored in the past. I listened, and I brought them into the conversation.

The participative ecosystems I co-created built awesome products. The team all shone on their own, my work was to make the space for them to do so — through my warm meeting facilitation, checking in and coaching them to solve their own challenges in 1:1s and interfacing with the ecosystem so we were adaptive to the needs and findings of our colleagues.

With the support of the team, I fostered a culture of prioritizing reviewing each other's work so we could unblock each other in rolling the work out, over being focused only on our own work.

Building reviews and feedback into the process of releasing work contributed to the resilience of the software products the team built, and created a consistent practice of people learning from each other and growing their own skills through exercising them.

From onboarding to moving on from the team, I focused on connecting people on the team with each other so we were building one product or service together.

I did not want to be a centralized holder of power and decision making on the teams where I was Engineering Manager or Team Lead.

I showed up by naming the power dynamic at play inherent to my role and being willing to make decisions when it was supportive to the team — while prioritizing processes that allow for decisions to emerge from talking about it together in team meetings.

Success and efficiency, when they came, were a natural consequence of the creation of systems of nurturance, not the goals of my Transgressive Leadership.

Fire Up your Self-Leadership is a transformative journey for tech re-wilders — people who are tired of the trend of AI adoption that does not actually solve everything as it might be sold, and in fact brings about the loss of livelihoods and serious impacts to our ecosystems and resources. Beyond tech monopolies and AI, you dream of technology that bridges people, computers and Mother earth.

I would love to partner with creative leaders with ideas and visions of cultural change and are worldbuilding within/from tech, who tell it like it is, and who are creating alternate possibilities for what could be.

This is a journey that will begin by getting rooted in your yes and take you to reclaiming your play and desire as primal fuel for your creative success.

I support you through the Transgressive Leadership framework** * to break cycles of scarcity and become resourced from within, so you can bring into reality your creative vision.

Want to be invited when I'm offering workshops and consultations leading up to Fire Up your Self-leadership? I'd love to learn what you are dreaming of.

Notes and citations

* The phrase "You do not need to earn your rest" did not originate with me, it is repeated on the internet and I'm not sure who coined this.

** My approach to feedback and systems thinking was shaped by reading Donella H. Meadows' book "Thinking in Systems: A primer", edited by Diana Wright, 2008.

Go for the Good of the Whole
Remember that hierarchies exist to serve the bottom layers, not the top. Don’t maximize parts of systems or subsystems while ignoring the whole. Don’t, as Kenneth Boulding once said, go to great trouble to optimize something that never should be done at all. Aim to enhance total systems properties, such as growth, stability, diversity, resilience, and sustainability—whether they are easily measured or not.

-- PART THREE: CREATING CHANGE—IN SYSTEMS AND IN OUR PHILOSOPHY, Thinking in Systems, Donella H. Meadows

** * The signature coaching framework I'm developing distilling my learnings, skills and experience, with coaching support from Ayana Zaire Cotton at Seeda School, through their Powerhouse Portal container.