InRhythm

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Culture

Thanking Our Heroes

Make no mistake, people are resilient. We adapt to the changing world around us, as difficult as it may be to do so. Never before has humanity been challenged en masse as it has been since 2020 began. The new decade was toasted and people cheered as the promise of change was ushered in. Little did we know how much change was ahead.

Now, months later, with the wrath of the novel coronavirus still raging, we’ve been forced to adapt. It is in these challenging times that we need heroes more than ever before. What was ordinary is now extraordinary given the substantial risks to our personal health, income, and families. These challenges affect individuals not only at the heart of the crisis but ripple into the lives of many others.

Weeks ago, the leadership team at InRhythm began asking our colleagues how they were feeling and what their concerns were. We weren’t asking in a perfunctory way; we were genuinely interested in checking in with our employees with the intention of listening deeply. Many of our colleagues shared stories that humbled us, sharing concerns about the well-being of their family members and friends. Some of the InRhythm family’s spouses, siblings, and close friends are facing unimaginable hardships day after day. Some of us are close to healthcare workers tending to patients who are dying alone while living in their garages or away from their family to minimize the risk of their loved ones’ exposure to the virus. It’s difficult to imagine unless you’re walking in their shoes.

Healthcare workers are not the only ones challenged physically and emotionally. Our extended community of friends and family at InRhythm includes numerous essential workers such as grocery staff, truck drivers, and other critical members of the supply chain. They too must face no-win decisions, working to support their families despite how great the risks are for contracting COVID-19. In these challenging times, tasks, and jobs that previously seemed ordinary have shifted to becoming extraordinary. Essential workers and their loved ones also deserve our gratitude, our compassion, and our support.

At InRhythm, we are lucky compared to other companies and industries. We’ve continued to work and do so safely from the comfort of our own homes, albeit not without interruption but these distractions by our loved ones bring new joys to our “workplace”. There is a lot to be grateful for, so while the leadership team and I are working to stay in tune with the fears and concerns in the InRhythm family, we decided to roll out a Gratitude Our Heroes event to show our appreciation to the people working to keep us safe and healthy. To have so many terrific people doing great work to curb the virus and help people continue to live to enjoy life in the extended InRhythm family is an honor.

Our Heroes

  • Alex is a first responder down in Arlington, VA running toward danger while others may be running away from it.
  • Annie is a Child Life Specialist at New York-Presbyterian Hospital working with children and their families to keep them feeling safe through this difficult time.
  • Arjun is a Surgery Resident at one of Brooklyn’s busiest COVID hospitals, working tirelessly with limited resources to save New Yorkers’ lives.
  • Binky is a Nurse Manager for the Cardiothoracic ICU at Lenox Hill Hospital, responding to the pandemic head-on, working tirelessly triaging patients, and even picking up extra shifts to help with the unwavering demand.
  • Emily is a Registered Dietician working in a dialysis unit, treating patients who are especially vulnerable to the virus.
  • Jinkle works as a nurse in Silver Spring, MD, caring for many COVID-19 patients.
  • Ihonny is an OBGYN in the Dominican Republic continuing to see patients and providing virtual visits sometimes at no cost despite fewer resources.
  • Katherine is a Nurse Practitioner currently on maternity leave and at her parents since COVID-19 is transmissible via birth and her husband tested positive for the disease; still, she’s using this time raising money for masks for front liners.
  • Lourdes is the Chief of Pharmacy at a large medical facility in Uruguay who stepped back into a full-time role, with phone calls around the clock, after nearing retirement and working a part-time schedule.
  • Megan V. passed away. We donated to the New York Public Library on her behalf due to her love for education and learning.
  • Megan Y. is a Public Health Nurse in Hopewell Township, NJ, on call throughout the entirety of the week, reporting and following up on new cases coming in every day, contact tracing, and advising individuals of the next steps to best alleviate the virus
  • Shirina is a full-time scribe at CityMD, treating hundreds of people daily.

2020 will go down as a challenging year, but we should all learn from this experience, become more aware and sensitive to the challenges of others, and uphold our compassion and support for each other even after the pandemic retreats.

On the subject of Leadership vs Management

In a business environment, there is a huge difference between a leader and a manager. In many circumstances and in many companies these two terms are conflated and treated similarly. Arguably, I believe they are different and should not be performed by the same person (if your organization is large enough, that is. At a startup you cannot afford one person per role).

An important component in understanding the difference between leadership and management is to understand that these are responsibilities, not roles or titles. One’s title can be anything. My business card could say “Lead Software Engineer” or “Code Monkey Level 3,” but it does not change what my actual work and responsibilities are. Similarly, a responsibility is not the same as a role. Two people that have “Director” in their title could be, and are likely to be, responsible for managing different humans, different budgets, the outcomes of different projects, and in their day-to-day could work on completely different things. In the rest of this article we’ll take a look at the definitions and differences between leadership and management and how they can be applied.

Leadership

I define leadership as having a responsibility for the direction and success of your team. In many, if not most, cases leadership means you are not only responsible for direction and success, but also education. Leaders are responsible for providing growth opportunities and for the success of the project that they are attached to.

From an engineering perspective, “success” may mean that you have a product with zero known bugs and strong test coverage or a streamlined development process so your team can work as effectively as possible. From a product perspective, “success” may mean getting the product to market smoothly, communicating progress with any interested parties, and hitting all your desired/required features.

Leaders are supposed to be at the top of whatever technical chain they’re in. You can find leaders in engineering, product, business, design, and any other career track. This is reflected in how we use phrases like “industry leaders” to describe those who are setting the bar that all the rest of us aspire to grow to. Nobody says “industry managers” … I suppose because that would imply some sort of cabal or oligarchy. You’ll notice that I haven’t talked about employees, their hours, benefits, communication, or anything else related to that. Leaders are not responsible for humans, they are responsible for teams. They are responsible for providing resources to their team but they are not responsible for human needs.

Management

Management is all about the humans. Managers are responsible for making sure that the humans they are charged with are happy, productive, and meeting expectations. People who have management responsibilities tend to be responsible for things like making sure that people get in on time (if your company has a start time), making sure that employees feel good about their job using techniques like one-on-ones, and helping the humans on their team when someone is struggling to meet expectations or struggling to communicate their needs. You may also work on group cohesion or reporting to the rest of the company about your team’s accomplishments. As a manager, your number one priority is the specific humans that you manage.

Company Hierarchies

While personally, I’m a fan of keeping company hierarchies as flat as possible, that’s not always possible or easy to achieve. When it comes to the creation of leadership or management hierarchies, I believe those responsibilities should be delegated to different humans if and when possible. In a recent position, I had two different people serving as my Leader and my Manager. Neither of them had a title that included either of those words, but both understood that from a technical perspective, one would be my guide and the other would manage me from a human/HR perspective. This model worked out fantastically for our team, as we had very well-defined responsibilities instead of just calling one person my “boss” and having that one person be responsible for everything about my worklife. If, in your organization, you can set up separate Leadership and Management chains, I would strongly encourage it. By better defining people’s roles and responsibilities in smaller, more measurable ways you’ll have better communicated your expectations all around and everyone involved should be happier and more productive at their particular responsibilities.

This post is brought to you by InRhythm’s own Jack Tarantino. Check out his blog for more thinking like this.