GoDaddy: How A Leopard Changed Its Spots
by Miki SaxonI’ll bet you remember GoDaddy’s incredibly sexist commercials and bikinied conference models.
But did you notice that they totally stopped in 2013; they didn’t taper off, just stopped?
Obviously, something changed. It couldn’t have been public outrage; that had never bothered GoDaddy bosses before.
What happened was the installation of Blake Irving as CEO.
Irving not only stopped the ads, he set out to radically change a toxic culture that could easily have destroyed the company.
Culture starts at the top and its values and attitudes seep down throughout the organization.
That means change must also come from the top, but seepage won’t effect change.
Change requires structural and enforceable process change.
The answer is more complicated than just stamping out overt sexism. GoDaddy also focused on attacking the small, subtle biases that can influence everything from how executives evaluate employees to how they set salaries.
This was partly accomplished by changing the language, so that managers would evaluate impact as opposed to character.
“You can’t change a place just by hiring more women,” said Ms. Weissman, the senior vice president, who oversees a technical staff. “You have to create a safe space to talk about the assumptions all of us have. You have to work against the biases.”
Are the efforts paying off?
Today, almost a quarter of GoDaddy’s employees are women, including 21 percent of its technical staff. Half of new engineers hired last year were female, and women make up 26 percent of senior leadership. Female technologists, on average, earn slightly more than their male counterparts.
Who’d a’thunk it?
Go Daddy as one of the nation’s most inclusive tech companies and a top workplace for women and a lodestone of gender equity.
The company’s policies on equal pay, its methods for recruiting a diverse work force and its approach to promoting women and minorities had been lauded inside business schools and imitated at other firms.
Uber et al. take note.
With truly committed leadership a leopard can change its spots.
Image credit: jdog90