Leading During and Beyond Covid: Gina Hadley of the Second Shift
One of Ascent’s co-founders, Tiffany West, recently caught up with our friend and Ascent Fellow, Gina Hadley, Co-founder and Head of New Business at The Second Shift. They discussed how the COVID experience has changed Gina’s work, the way she leads, and the way she sees the world.
The Second Shift is a marketplace that connects highly skilled, professional women with employers ranging from Fortune 100 companies to boutique firms for short-term, flexible hire work. The company’s mission is to close the gender pay gap. Gina and her colleagues believe that the only way to achieve that is to work with women differently at certain points in their careers.
With the intensity of the past year or so, we were struck by the openness to change and the unexpected that Gina describes in this interview. We’ve assessed and written about the need for leaders to have capacity for change. In this interview, Gina describes what helps her navigate both the change in the world around her, as well as the change that she and her colleagues are working to create.
Tiffany: Let’s check in with you first. How are you feeling? What’s been getting you through the pandemic?
Gina: Honestly, I felt paralyzed in 2020, so I started working with a professional coach (who is actually one of our members). She has helped me identify what kind of leader I want to be and what I want for the company. My tagline is “efficient empathy” because at a certain point, empathy has to turn into action.
I’ve also learned that there are certain things you have to put down and walk away from. I used to finish a book I hated because I felt like I had to, or keep struggling through the New York Times Crossword when I clearly wasn’t going to finish it. Now I give myself permission to walk away.
TW: Let’s move to your work life. The Second Shift has always been about remote working and working differently... Then COVID forced everyone to start thinking and working that way. How did your client and member relationships change as a result?
GH: Since we launched in 2015, we have been slowly but surely convincing companies that the workplace archetype is not a great fit for everyone – especially professional women. The COVID shutdown was a fantastic forcing mechanism, and we assumed that it would create an opportunity to engage in a far more robust way than we had previously, and that we’d have to do less convincing. But in reality, everybody froze their budgets because no one knew what was going to happen, revenue-wise. It took about six months for clients to start coming back to us, and some of our largest clients are still in a consulting freeze even now, over a year later.
One of our biggest learnings is that many companies see re-evaluating the notion of “full-time employment” as an existential conundrum. Everyone knows that they need to work this way – flexibly, remotely – for the foreseeable future, but nobody knows how to do it.
For our clients, they now recognize that everything has changed, so we now do more consulting. Clients used to see us as a way to fill pressing talent needs and issues; now they see us as long-term partners in developing their talent strategies and processes. If the CEO tells hiring managers or HR that 30% of the talent needs to be temporary, how do they budget for that? How do they scope it?
On the member side, we saw that there was a real need for our member community to galvanize in a way that it hadn’t before. My co-founder, Jenny Galluzzo, realized that our members needed more than just jobs. She immediately created monthly, member-led webinars that pulled people together. They were extraordinary, and our community educating each other was new. We will never lose that part of what we do.
TW: How did COVID impact the internal workings of The Second Shift?
GH: We are lean, agile, and small, so we didn’t have to lay anyone off. Our business model also contains recurring revenue streams that have kept us afloat while the rest of the world sorted itself out.
TW: Going back to your clients as employers...I think it’s interesting that many companies are trying to put in place new ways of working based on the past year. When you look at the lack of childcare, eldercare, and other support systems, working from home wasn’t actually that great for a lot of people.
GH: It’s important to remember that this past year is not “the future of work.” It has been a reaction to a pandemic. Everything we’ve learned over the past year about how people work from home has the caveat of “but we thought we were going to die if we went to the supermarket.”
Yes, the pandemic has been a forcing mechanism to think differently about work, but it’s going to take another 12 to 18 months to understand the impact and shifts that companies need to make for the long term.
TW: Several companies have said that they’re moving to a hybrid model – usually 3 days in the office, 2 days at home – forever. What do you think about this?
GH: What’s interesting about that model is that it ignores the fact that you have to be flexible about flexibility. If you define flexibility, it’s not flexible. It’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all solution.
The problem is that companies love having one rule that applies to everyone. Yes, working from home may be great for senior employees, but what about the kids coming out of college who really need guidance in their first jobs? It’s really hard to manage and plan for different ways of working; businesses are not good at that.
I have a lot of empathy for my clients as they try to figure this out. The good news is that the rhetoric is shifting. No one is saying that people want to go back to the office full time.
TW: What else are your clients wrestling with as a result of COVID?
GH: Several clients are asking us to help answer the question of what “culture and fit” means now. If you think about this from a diversity and inclusion perspective, diversity of location is a revelation for companies. Hiring managers can now hire people from anywhere. That’s incredibly valuable for a company.
TW: Doesn’t diversity of location mean that, when you apply for a job, you’re now competing with people from everywhere, and not just the city where you live?
GH: That’s true, but it also means that you can take a job anywhere. So now a small, cool startup in another state is on your radar, whereas it was never even an option before. It benefits the people on both sides of the equation.
As a side note, companies in second-tier cities are way ahead of the curve on ways of working because they have to be in order to attract and keep talent.
TW: Where has The Second Shift not been able to help (yet!) where you thought it would?
GH: A major retraining of middle management. In “the old days” of 2019, just showing up at the office was enough for a lot of middle managers to succeed. Working remotely, you need to be much more transparent and open because you can’t hide on Trello or Slack.
Bound up in this is that we need to change the model where getting promoted means you start managing people, regardless of whether you’re good at it or even want to manage people. We need to let the great managers be managers and the great individual contributors be individual contributors...and still get recognized and promoted. That would be an extraordinary breakthrough. That, to me, is the future of work.
I know this change is coming because our clients are telling us they need our help here.
TW: Do you have one piece of advice for people managing remote workers? And for people working remotely?
GH: Milestones! In a remote work situation, knowing what’s expected of you and when is key. Even if you don’t hit the milestones, at least everyone knows what they’re working toward. When you’re not in the same physical space as your colleagues and can’t knock on someone’s door to ask a question, you need much more clarity.
And keep in mind that the milestones don’t need to be huge. They can be as trivial as “I’m going to send 20 business development emails today.” But at least everyone knows what you’re working on, and you have a goal. Being able to cross things off a list has been my savior.
The key is helping your team understand that it’s not a way to judge them; it’s a way to see what everyone’s working on so you know how to help.
I’ll stick with milestones when we go back to the office, too. They’re incredibly helpful.
TW: Any last thoughts on COVID’s impact on how we work?
GH: I really hope we can keep the intimacy and empathy that people have felt with their coworkers during Covid. I like seeing the kids run across the zoom screen, a dog that won’t stop barking, or seeing people struggle with caring for others while working. We rarely got glimpses into colleagues' lives before Covid, and I think we’re closer, in a lot of cases, than before because we now see people’s day-to-day realities. Let’s keep that humanness.
TW: We started on a personal note, so let’s end on a personal note, too. How have you and your family managed with the pandemic?
GH: The gift for me was getting to spend time with my teenagers. We made dinner together, watched shows…I wouldn’t have seen them in normal times! Working at home, all together, can be very trying at times. Luckily we get along really well.
The hardest thing in all of this has been seeing the impact on my mom, who has dementia and is in assisted living. COVID and the isolation surrounding it have absolutely accelerated her decline. I’m lucky that I hadn’t left anything unsaid with my mother, but that experience has been the real dark cloud in all of this.
Personally, I allowed myself to find joy in the things that were a distraction before – like preparing meals and doing laundry. Cooking for me is assembling, making a plan, and having an outcome. Tangible results! And I started meditating. My father came to me in a dream and said I have to do it, so I’m doing it even if it’s just five minutes a day.
Many thanks to Gina Hadley for a thoughtful conversation. You can find more about Gina and the Second Shift here, and more about some of Ascent’s Fellows here.