Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS
Eileen WebbWhen your organization talks about “bringing your whole self to work,” they’re likely picturing an idealized version of you, not the complex human that you actually are.
Eileen Webb helps people and teams build better relationships at work by connecting them with their actual authentic selves.
Her approach isn’t touchy-feely, summer-camp trust-fall theater. It’s pragmatic professional-development work that can remove obstacles to collaboration and build trust among teams.
We talked about:
- her work at her consultancy, webmeadow, where she is Director of Strategy and Livestock (only partly a joke)
- the evolution of her work from backend web development to structured content and information architecture and then to content strategy
- her affection for working with mission-driven, progressive non-profits
- how curiosity drives her and has kept her in the strategy world
- how her technical background helps her in her strategy role
- how she discovered in reflecting on her work that projects in which they had built good relationships with people were much more satisfying and impactful than projects that were strictly transactional
- the importance of finding in relationships a way to be vulnerable and develop close connections
- the “infinite personal work” that it takes to be ready to work with clients in this way
- the impact of the work of Nanci Luna Jiménez on her, from an early encounter with her to her subsequent professional work as an associate
- the value in intellectual reflection on the historical dynamics that can affect your reactions in the current day and the even-more-profound benefits of understanding emotional insights
- the realities that organizations may not fully understand when they talk about “bringing your whole self to work”
- her work to help organizations and teams account for and accommodate human emotions that naturally arise in a professional setting
- how to sort out the distinction between healthy boundaries and “defensive reactions that are happening out of hurt”
- how leading the way by developing some comfort around your own vulnerability can model the behavior for others
Eileen’s bio
Eileen Webb is a strategist and facilitator who works with product and content teams looking to foster deeper collaboration and increased trust within their organization. She offers workshops, keynotes, and facilitation specifically designed to build relationships within and across teams. She has a background in information architecture, server-side coding, and human-centered development practices.
Connect with Eileen online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 145. When they think about digital work, many people go straight to the technology. That’s sort of what Eileen Webb did early in her career. She started as a back-end web programmer and then discovered in her client work the importance of structured content, information architecture, and content strategy. Ultimately, though, she discovered that the most important things in design and tech work are people and their relationships with each other.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode number 145 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I’m really excited today to welcome to the show Eileen Webb. Eileen is the Director of Strategy and Livestock at webmeadow. So tell us a little bit about your work at webmeadow.
Eileen:
The title is only partly a joke. I am a content strategist sort of by training. I don’t know. Is anyone a content strategist by training? I’m a consultant. I am a facilitator. I work largely with progressive organizations who are working to make the world a better place.
Eileen:
And right now I’m really focused on doing a lot of work around helping product and content teams build healthier cultures and better relationships in their teams. And then I also have a large number of chickens and 26,000 bees and some rabbits at my house, hence the livestock.
Larry:
That’s a great little hybrid operation. But it’s kind of funny because the reason I wanted to have you on the show is your current focus on people and relationships. But your career didn’t start that way. That’s one of the many fascinating things about you is that you started as a backend dev doing PHP and building websites.
Eileen:
I did. Yeah. I built CMSes. My husband and I had a little web dev shop that was the two of us, plus some other people who would pull in as necessary, doing design and things like that.
Eileen:
And so I was the backend dev and he was the front-end dev. So I built a lot of Drupal websites. I built a lot of WordPress websites and worked in PHP and did a lot of database architecture. And came to structured content from the engineering side of it.
Eileen:
We would look at a design and I knew that our clients wouldn’t be able to write the HTML if they wanted to change the design. And so we would structure the content so that they could put in headlines and subheads and decks and things like that and have them still look right on the page.
Eileen:
So that was my original shape into structured content was for presentation purposes. And then I just kept going and going down that road and doing more and more things in that kind of ways of how can we make this more structured? Before I ever knew that COPE was a term. How can we create content in one place and use it in a whole bunch of different places on the website? Yeah.
Larry:
And for folks who don’t remember COPE, that was the acronym that the NPR used for their Create Once, Publish Everywhere. Wow. That was like 2009.
Eileen:
Yeah.
Larry:
It was so early.
Eileen:
Yeah.
Larry:
I was freaked out by that. But that’s so interesting. I’m trying to follow. So the pathway is backend dev, website service stuff, and then you get into information architecture and structured content. And then all of a sudden, you’re like… Tell me about how content strategy… Because at some point, you identified as a content strategist.
Eileen:
The real answer here is that I ordered Erin Kissane’s book in a little package of books from A Book Apart – The Elements of Content Strategy – which is still a wonderful, sweet, little perfect read.
Eileen:
And I sat down and read it and was like, “Oh, I had no idea. This is a discipline, what I am doing.” I didn’t realize. I don’t know. I’d just been working with my clients and trying to help them answer big questions. And why are we even building this website? And those kinds of things. Who are your audiences? What are you trying to tell them? The big questions.
Eileen:
And then reading her book made me realize that, oh, I could actually do this. I don’t actually also have to build the backend of the site. I could have just this part, which was my favorite part, the nosy, put my fingers in every pie, talk to all the different stakeholders, make a plan for how the whole thing was going to work.
Eileen:
That could be my whole job. I eventually found other people who could do the actual building of the website part. So I got to do all of the strategy and the planning, which my brain and my heart really love. And then other people got to do the building.
Larry:
Yeah, that’s great. And then the strategy, it was a broad digital –
Eileen:
Yes.
Larry:
… and publishing and content strategy all rolled into one. You teased out the content strategy part pretty… I mean, you’re known in the content strategy world.
Eileen:
Yeah. So I largely worked with non-profits. I love working with, in particular, mission-driven, progressive non-profits, which meant that I was working with a lot of people who didn’t have infinite resources. Like there might be 50 people on the entire staff, and four of them were comms or web people or marketing people.
Eileen:
And so there’s a whole… It’s not like I would change the mission’s organization, but my expertise combined with my care and my passion for whatever their mission was, was like, how can we make the web work well to support your mission? And how can we make a website? How can we make a newsletter plan? How can we make a social media plan? Those kinds of things to support a non-profit’s mission.
Eileen:
There’s an interesting thing there, which is that some non-profit shapes work really well if you just parallel them to capitalism, where you’re like, okay, donations are like sales. We’re marketing in the same way.
Eileen:
But there are plenty of non-profits who don’t take donations or who are doing work behind the scenes that they can’t really publicize until years later because of the kind of work that they’re doing.
Eileen:
Some of the first stuff that I talked about in content strategy spaces was like, when you are working with a mission-driven non-profit, what are some of the things where… like the capitalist corporate models, where do they fall down and what can we do instead? And what are different approaches that we might use that connect better?
Larry:
That’s so interesting because that gets at both communication strategy and content strategy and what you were talking about before is this classic strategy; balancing the organization’s goals and their user’s needs and figuring out the optimal way to do things. And to this day, you identify as a strategist.
Eileen:
I do.
Larry:
Yeah. What pulled you that way as opposed to… Were you ever tempted to just go like, “Ah, man. This is getting hard. I just want to go back and write PHP again”? That never happened?
Eileen:
There’s a little bit… It’s funny. The word I use for it is nosiness, but that’s a diminishing word for it. That’s like negative self-talk. It’s curiosity. That’s the positive framing for it. It’s curiosity.
Eileen:
It’s curiosity, especially for orgs whose missions I really supported and loved. How can I help? How can my expertise get you further? And plenty of people were good at building. There were plenty of people who were good at building backend sites. And there were fewer people who were willing to take the big-picture view of what is the comms strategy?
Eileen:
And in particular, because of my background in technical, on the technical side of things, I’ve always been a really good translator and translation layer between the technical needs of a site, and especially if someone was integrating with some other systems, and how do we make all of that work for the marketing people and the comms people? How do we communicate the needs back and forth between the engineering side of an org and the marketing side of an org?
Eileen:
I think I had an early, relatively early, recognition that that curiosity and that willingness to stay open and translate between people was a less common skill set.
Larry:
Well, yeah. Because 98% of the people I’ve had on this podcast come from journalism or copywriting or something like that. You come from the dev side. So I assume that’s part of it, but it’s also like, you’re good with people. Is it safe to say that’s now your core competency and your core…?
Eileen:
Yeah. I feel like, over the years, every project that has worked really well, when I go back… And because my husband and I were running this small business agency kind of thing together, we would have retreats, quote, unquote. We’d do little biz dev retreats where we’d be like, “Let’s look at our clients over the last few years and see which projects worked really well, which projects were difficult.”
Eileen:
And the thread was always that the projects that worked well were ones where we had really good relationships with people and the ones where the relationships were so strong.
Eileen:
All projects encounter friction, but if you trust each other and you care about each other and you know you can trust that everyone working on the project has everyone else’s best interests at heart, it means that when crap happens, when friction happens, whether it’s an internal friction or an external, there’s a funding constraint or a grant fell through or whatever the things are, there’s a whole foundational level that you can count on that you’re like, well, we’re all just going to rally and figure out how this works now.
Eileen:
We’re just going to figure out what the next solution is, where we go from here. And we could just trust that none of us were angling to get out of this because it wasn’t going to be profitable enough or whatever the thing was.
Eileen:
And it gave me such a strong sense, just over and over again, of all of the places when a new content model was really complex and people took to it well, and they were able to integrate it into their processes, those were the clients and the projects where we had spent time together and where we had hung out in person, and we had done dinners after our training sessions and things like that. And we had become friends.
Eileen:
And the projects where it was very transactional, where it was like, “Please come teach us an information architecture thing or deliver unto us a taxonomy,” those things were so much less likely to stick, to get integrated into the workflows of the organization because they were transactional and not relationship-based.
Larry:
That’s so interesting. But as you’re talking, I’m wondering, there’s two things that could come out of this insight that you just described, to just come in with my ignorant view of this.
Larry:
One is it’s from an agency development perspective, that’s how you pick your clients. You find the people who you have that… But the alternative, another look at that is having the people skills to turn even a modestly, moderately qualified candidate into that kind of… You’re nodding. Yeah.
Eileen:
Yeah. Yeah. Of course, it would be lovely and amazing if you could just always only ever work with people who you’re like, “We’re immediately best friends. This is great.”
Eileen:
And there are plenty of clients where that is the vibe, where it’s like, within the first meeting, you’re just like, “Ooh, I would like to spend a lot of time with you. This is very fun.” And that’s amazing. But that’s not going to happen all the time.
Eileen:
And so there’s this whole other aspect of how do I… Humans are built to connect. And so how do I turn my curiosity towards this person? How do I connect across whatever difference we might have? And how do I keep myself open? And how do I keep myself reaching for them? Which is not always the easiest thing to do, right?
Eileen:
We all have a whole bunch of childhood crap about what happens when you reach for someone, what happens if you’re vulnerable with someone, what happens if you try to make a new friend and it doesn’t work. And all of the poor experiences we had early in our lives around those kinds of things affect how we show up as adults, affect how we show up in all relationships, but especially in work relationships where there’s not a lot of modeling of what vulnerability and close connection looks like in a work context.
Eileen:
But those spaces where you can find someone who is maybe feeling a little guarded and you can keep reaching for them and stay open enough that you can connect. Those connections can be so powerful. And then they become friends. And I use “friends” as a big generic term of just “person you care about.”
Larry:
Exactly. Yeah.
Eileen:
But they become connections. They become relationships that are valuable and that support the work that you’re doing, even if they were maybe a little frictiony in the first place, if you can keep yourself reaching and curious.
Larry:
Yeah. That’s so interesting because like you said, you can picture… As you were talking, you can picture all those childhood, grade-school rejections of like, “Hey, you want to be my friend?” “Nah, we’re good playing over here.” It’s like, “Ugh.”
Eileen:
Yep.
Larry:
That’s something you said before we went on the air was that you have to deal with that first. So what’s the personal work that is a precursor to being able to work this way with clients?
Eileen:
Oh, man. It’s infinite. It’s infinite personal work. So when I was in college, I met a woman named Nanci Luna Jiménez, my sophomore year of college, which was 1,000 years ago. She taught a workshop at my college that was about transformational relationships and communication.
Eileen:
And in a lot of fundamental ways, it’s about the things that happened in our childhood, which do not have to be capital-T trauma. It can be just like I fell off a bike and I cried and someone made fun of me. Everyone has something. Everyone has many things like that.
Eileen:
The ways that those unhealed hurts because our society is so upset about emotions in the world, especially in children. We squash them and we say, go be by yourself if you’re going to cry. Go out into the hallway if you’re going to cry. And don’t speak until you’re spoken to. And don’t laugh in inappropriate circumstances.
Eileen:
There are so many things where expressing your emotions as a child gets shut down. And those places where we’re squished, where we got squished, the defensive mechanisms we built around those situations, which we all have, and they’re different shapes for different people, everyone has them, that they are still here in our present adult life and getting in the way, getting in the way of us being our most brilliant selves and being our loving, curious, zestful selves out in the world.
Eileen:
And so I took this workshop from Nanci, I don’t know, when I was 17, 18, very young, and young enough that I was able to, like… It blew my mind open. And also, I was able to absorb a whole bunch of the framework and the teachings into my young adult, newly-forming life out in the world.
Eileen:
And then I reconnected with Nanci 15 years later, so I don’t know, five years ago. And we had stayed in touch a little bit. But we reconnected. And we we re just chatting on the phone and I was talking about how much I wanted to bring the sense of her work and the frameworks into these tech spaces that I was working in.
Eileen:
And she was like, “It’s really interesting you say that. I’m thinking about starting an apprentice program, and I’m looking for the first few people to go through this apprenticing program.” So I was like, “Yes. Serendipity. Correct.”
Eileen:
So I joined as an apprentice, and I’m now an associate on the team. I’ve been working with them for the last five years at this point. It is expanded work, but it’s the same foundational work that I learned when I was in college, that we all have work to do in healing, in healing our young experiences so that we can show up as full humans in our present-day lives.
Eileen:
And her framing of things, the goal of her organization is to end racism within her lifetime. That is also a goal of mine. But part of what I am doing is finding ways to take huge amounts of the teachings which are fundamentally useful and good in a zillion contexts and figure out how we can use them in work contexts, which also serves the purpose of ending racism, because the more healed we are and the more clear-thinking we are, the better we are equipped to do that kind of work well. It’s just two different… It all feels like, I don’t know, six different threads in a quilt or something.
Larry:
Yeah. What you just said about that healing is just shifting your context and your mindset as you approach… Is that what’s going on here?
Eileen:
Yeah. She always says, Nanci always says that it is not intellectual work. There’s a little bit of archeological excavation that can happen, where you’re like, “Oh, I am having…” Someone showed up late to a meeting and I got furious. I had an out-of-proportion reaction to it.
Eileen:
And there is value in tracing backwards and being like, “Oh, this is because of the way my parent always showed up late to dinner.” Like, “Oh, this thing in present day, I’m not actually mad about that. I’m mad about this set of things that happened in my childhood.” And that is valuable learning. It’s good to learn that.
Eileen:
But the healing doesn’t happen because of the intellectual knowledge that, oh, this is a thing that happened in my childhood. The healing happens when you face the thing that happened in your childhood and you let yourself actually feel the anger and the grief and all of the things that you squashed down or got squashed down for you when you were a young person.
Eileen:
But in doing that work, it frees present-day you. It opens up and you’re like, “Oh, a person is late to a meeting. That is not about me.” That is about them… That is about whatever is going on with them. And maybe I will say something to them about it, or maybe I won’t, but I’m not going to do it because I’m mindlessly reacting out of wound and out of my hurt past.
Eileen:
I will say something about it because it is the appropriate… because I would like to have this meeting start on time. But I’m not going to lash out at them out of my pain.
Larry:
Yeah. It’s interesting. As you’re talking, all the examples you’ve given, the examples of the application of this are in a professional setting.
Eileen:
Yes.
Larry:
And a lot of what you’re talking about is pretty foundational, fundamental psychological care.
Eileen:
Yes.
Larry:
You didn’t say anything about being a psychotherapist or anything.
Eileen:
No.
Larry:
Tell me about the framing and the boundaries around that. It’s clearly a professional development thing, but it has a lot of the language and techniques around psychological care and growth.
Eileen:
Yes.
Larry:
Yeah. Tell me.
Eileen:
I feel like those are made-up distinctions. There’s quite a bit of capitalism that just pretends that we are not full people at work, that we get to be weird automatons at work that do not have full psychological lives. We’re like weird cogs when we go to work, which is a lie, obviously. We are full people at work.
Eileen:
I also think there’s a piece of mental health oppression that says that the only appropriate place to talk about emotions is in a paid relationship with a therapist or maybe in the context of one of your closest friendships behind closed doors. And I also think that that’s a piece of the oppression, that keeping it isolated and pretending we even can keep it separated without having ripple effects through our whole lives, but also just the declaration that work is not a place for emotions.
Larry:
Yeah. But at the same time, a lot of this is probably unfolding in organizations that have this ostensible, “Bring your whole self to work.”
Eileen:
Do they really want-
Larry:
And it’s like, “Except for that part.”
Eileen:
Right. Do they really want you? Because I think they would love the results of people bringing their whole selves to work if what they’re thinking of is the Pollyanna selves. They don’t want my grief. They don’t want my anger. They don’t want my frustration at the world.
Eileen:
They want happy, productive, zestful me who also sometimes needs to take a half day off so that I can go volunteer at the bookmobile or something. That’s what they mean. That’s what corporations mean by, “Bring your whole self,” which is nonsense.
Larry:
But that introduces some pragmatic professional challenges. If you see these things going on and you’re like, “Oh.” And this stuff that you’re talking about could help. Have you had experiences with helping people implement some of the stuff you’ve done?
Eileen:
Yeah. Some of the work that I have been doing in the last few years is actually taking essentially an adapted version of some of the frameworks that we teach.
Eileen:
Nanci’s organization now is called the Luna Jiménez Institute for Social Transformation. And its focus, as I said, is on ending racism. And so the work that they do in the organizations they work with are very focused on that. And part of my work on that team is figuring out ways we can get those frameworks into other domains and into other disciplines because they are so useful and they are foundational to all of us just being better humans in a more just world.
Eileen:
We can do so much of that work in the context of building relationships on teams. And when we think about product and content teams and things like that, they’re very often cross-disciplinary, right? You’ve got some engineers. You’ve got some designers. You’ve got some researchers, writers. You’ve got all kinds of people doing all the different zones of work.
Eileen:
And there are so many places where there could be conflict or there could be miscommunication. And teaching people some frameworks for… all right, here are some places you can take your anger so that then you can go back to your coworker a little discharged.
Eileen:
If something happens in a meeting and there’s a new policy announced and you’re pissed about it, you’re not going to be able to have a good conversation about it because the emotions are up. And so instead of just pretending you don’t have them or seething in silence, we can actually build time into meetings for exercises that give you a place to have those emotions, to be heard, to feel heard, to be heard, to get them out.
Eileen:
And then on the other side of the initial emotion is clearer thinking, is deeper access to your core self, to your curious, zestful, interested in problem-solving, interested in staying connected to your teammates self.
Eileen:
But if we don’t let places for the unpleasant emotions to come out, then the reaction is mostly just like, “I will not talk to my coworkers after 5:00 PM. I will never invite Greg to a meeting because he is the absolute worst.” And sometimes those are boundaries that are healthy. And sometimes those are defensive reactions that are happening out of hurt.
And if we don’t make the distinction, I think we lose a lot of places where we could build connection and we could build something robust and beautiful and loving in spaces where we don’t always see it.
Larry:
The way I asked that question, I realized it was like… I wasn’t questioning boundaries. But the way you just said that, that highlights the benefits of this in a professional setting, that this is an obstacle of getting all the things we need to get done here.
We need to figure out… We’re not going to psychoanalyze you or do this, but we’re going to leave some room for reflection or whatever it takes to… And how much of this is, you said earlier, about safety or just helping people feel okay with…
Eileen:
Yeah. Safety is a tricky word because I feel like when we talk about safe spaces, that can’t be declared from the outside. That can only be declared by the person who is feeling safe inside it. That is the only safe space is if someone is feeling safe in the moment.
Eileen:
But I think that there are things that orgs and cultures and team leaders even… It doesn’t have to be a VP of people or something. It can just be a person who’s leading a team. There are attitudes and approaches that they can bring to their meetings, to their scheduling, even to things like sprint planning and stuff, that leave more space for people to be human than just being rigid and very productivity-focused and very like, “Efficiency is everything,” which it’s really not.
Larry:
Like some real human-centered design in your work processes.
Eileen:
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What if we centered people in our processes, not just users in our theoretical user journeys?
Larry:
Yeah, exactly. Hey, I can’t believe it. We’re already coming up close to time. I know. This always goes way too fast. But I want to make sure. I always like to give you the last word. Is there anything last that you want to make sure we get to or that’s come up that you want to follow up on?
Eileen:
I think a thing that is really… I feel like a lot of people, when they hear a little bit about relationship-building at work, I think there’s people for whom it feels scary because they’re being asked to be vulnerable. And that’s scary because you have tried being vulnerable in the past and it didn’t go well for you. And so I totally get that.
Eileen:
I think there’s a piece sometimes, and this is the piece where I am often is where I worry about… I feel scared that if I let people know how much I want this, that’s not safe. I don’t want to be isolated.
Eileen:
Sometimes I want to go by myself into my hotel room for a little while at a conference and get some rest, but I don’t want to be alone. It’s lonely. And I don’t think any of us actually want to be alone all of the time. We want to be connected.
Eileen:
And there’s a piece of wanting relationship that’s saying that I want relationship is so scary. That’s where the pain can come from is like, “Oh my God. People are going to think I’m cheesy. People are going to think this is total cheese-ball stuff. And it’s all icebreakers and trust falls.” There are other ways besides that.
Eileen:
But I think that it’s worth knowing that if that resonates with you, if you’re a person who’s like, “Oh, I actually really want this, but I don’t know how to do it, I don’t know where to start,” that it is worth starting. That’s the kind of vulnerability of modeling and out in the world that people…
Eileen:
You’d be surprised how many people… if someone is willing to start, how many people are like, “Oh, I wanted this too.” Like, “Oh, I didn’t realize there was someone else.” I mean, the system thrives when we all feel really separated.
Larry:
Yeah. And there’s some of that going on right now. The context of this recording. We were talking at lunch about that. Yeah, about the context.
Larry:
So giving just the grace to be a little bit vulnerable at work. And all of what you’ve talked about this last half hour can unfold with that in place. Nice. Well, thanks. Oh, one very last thing, Eileen.
Eileen:
Oh, yes.
Larry:
What’s the best way if people want to stay in touch, to follow you online?
Eileen:
Well, okay. It used to be Twitter, but weird. RIP good Twitter. LinkedIn, maybe. Or you can email me if you go to my website, webmeadow.com. Web with only one B for the webmeadow. Or go to LinkedIn. I don’t think there are that many Eileen Webbs on there. And yeah, just email me or LinkedIn message me. I don’t know.
Eileen:
How does the internet work, Larry? I don’t know.
Larry:
Early days. We’ll figure it out soon enough.
Larry:
Well, thanks so much, Eileen. This was super fun, really.
Eileen:
Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Leave a Reply