In February, Yahoo’s new CEO Marissa Mayer made an announcement that I think we can safely call controversial, to say the least. Everyone from Richard Branson to the late night talk show hosts have weighed in. She decided that all employees who had any sort of work-from-home arrangements needed to be working full time in the office by June or quit. This decision has spurred a lot of discussion on telecommuting—the pros, the cons, and whether what she did was a good call.
She may have had good reasons to do what she did, but I think the bigger question here is: could she have done it differently? Is her because-I-said-so edict really an effective leadership technique? I’ll be honest: my initial gut reaction saw a case of “power gone corrupt.” But then I sat and thought about it for a while. Let’s face it: you don’t get to be CEO of Yahoo, brought in specifically to save the company, unless you’re smart. In her first five and half months of helming Yahoo, their stock increased by 46 percent. She knows this isn’t a technical issue. The technical issues of whether or not telecommuting is effective aren’t what are at stake here. It’s got to be something deeper. So what’s the underlying issue? What’s at the root of this call and what’s at the root of her employee’s reactions? I have thoughts I’ll be exploring over the next couple posts, so stay tuned.
