October Transitions
Blurring the lines between work and home with Made Manifest Founder Linn Vizard
Last month, a member of the Workomics team experienced a sudden, unexpected death of a close family member. Bereavement is a hard thing. It’s also inescapably intertwined with our work and workplaces. Unfortunately, helping employees navigate death is not something organizations do well. This 2019 Harvard Business Review article lays out three ways organizations struggle to support employees who have experienced a loss.
Grief that is “disenfranchised,” because it is not fully acknowledged or supported;
Corporate bereavement policies for time away that are woefully inadequate;
The way work demands focus and consistency, when grief robs you of both.
It’s awkward to talk about death. Especially in a remote work setting, there is no in-person opportunity to pull people together and share sad news. It feels wrong to just post on Slack or send out a mass email. I suppose that is why grief in the workplace often goes unacknowledged.
As a company, we didn’t have a precedent for this kind of thing, but it felt right to call everyone on the team the same evening we learned the news. There honestly wasn’t much to say, but the voice-to-voice connection meant everyone knew what had happened, that their colleague was hurting.
The next day, people pulled together the list of things she had been working on and figured out coverage. Messages went out to clients. “I have sad news to share. We learned last evening that Colleague is on leave as there has been a death in her family. I’ve removed her from the email chain and am looping in Other Colleague who will provide support in her absence.”
As for the length of absence, we only knew it was laughable to think she could be back in the office after the two or three days typically specified in corporate bereavement leave policies. We told our colleague to set her email autoresponder to say she was away indefinitely, and we would figure it out from there. In the end, it was two weeks later when she decided to resume her regular schedule.
But, resuming a regular schedule is not the same as resuming regular work. When our colleague returned to the office, we identified together a list of tasks that felt more manageable for her mental, emotional, and physical state. She didn’t take on assignments with inflexible timelines or requiring sustained attention to small details. Instead, she’s doing work that can be done in spurts, as her energy allows and with an open line to adjust her workload and schedule as needed. As the HBR article suggests, we offered her “permission to be both a functioning employee and an incredibly sad, grief-stricken human being at the same time.”
The job of supporting a bereaved colleague is ongoing, just as grief is. The challenge is that, as coworkers, grief doesn’t predominate our thoughts the way it does for our bereaved colleague. We know she continues to grapple with pain and loss, but without necessarily appreciating how much it affects her from day to day. So, while the time off and the shifting of tasks was helpful and practical for the acute phase, I suspect it is the acknowledgment and openness that makes the most difference over time. What has been most helpful to our colleague is our collective understanding of the situation and how it shapes her work — so that as she continues to grapple with grief, she knows she can find support from her coworkers when and where she needs it.
A Conversation with Linn Vizard
Throughout 2023, this newsletter is featuring discussions with women business owners. This month’s interview is with Linn Vizard, the founder and design lead at Made Manifest. Made Manifest is a service design consultancy. The core of their business is consulting services, where they do projects with clients to improve a service, a process, or an experience. They also help organizations and individuals build service design capabilities. Linn also does a lot of speaking and writing to advance the discipline of service design, including her popular Ask a Service Designer newsletter.
Linn and I were co-workers for a couple of years, but I spent much of that period on maternity leave. When we recorded this interview, she was recently back-to-work after her own maternity leave. We talk about her broader business, but the conversation also has some very candid reflections about how it can feel to juggle a business and a seven-month-old all at once.
SB: To start, could you share a little bit about how Made Manifest evolved to be what it is today?
LV: I sort of fell into running a business. I was at a moment in my career where I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to keep working in design. I went on a self-funded sabbatical to try and figure things out. During that time, folks from my network started reaching out and saying, “Hey, would you be interested in helping out on this project?” That was the start of it.
At that point, I thought it might be temporary. I put together a very rushed brand and website — enough to feel credible. After I’d been doing it for a couple of years, I realized it wasn’t temporary. I’m running a business, and it’s growing. That was the moment when I put some effort into branding, getting incorporated, and getting the business more formalized.
SB: I love the name. How did you think about the name versus being something like ‘Linn Vizard and Associates’?
LV: That was something I really agonized over. It came down to wanting to build something that was more than just me. I paid someone to help me come up with the name. For me, if it was a name I had picked, I always would have been second-guessing it. By going through a structured branding process to select the name, it didn’t feel so impossible. There were a range of options and Made Manifest felt the most resonant to me.
SB: It really evokes all the right things. Did you consider co-founders or going into partnership? How are you thinking of your team?
LV: At the beginning, I didn’t really think about a co-founder or a team, because it felt somehow safer and less of a responsibility to just be an independent free agent. It’s a lot of responsibility to support other team members and build great culture. That’s definitely changed because it’s hard to have the type of impact you want to have when you’re solo. And I do find it can be very lonely building a business as a solo founder — I sometimes wish I had a co-founder.
I really like collaborating with people, but many of my favourite collaborators are very happy doing their own thing and prefer working together on a project-by-project basis. It’s been fun growing that group of folks to collaborate with regularly. Then starting in 2022, I added my first full-time employee, then a second, and I’m looking to grow the team further in the future. But I quickly realized that it’s unreasonable to expect a team member to play a partnership role, unless you’re specifically hiring them as a co-founder.
SB: You've got plans to grow at a steady clip, so I'm curious about how you define success for yourself and for the business.
LV: In the very, very early stages, I had a very practical benchmark: can I replace the income I had in my job by doing this? Once I was over that hurdle, I realized there were some big questions around design practice that I really wanted to work on: namely, how do you create good outcomes, beyond reports and recommendations? The business has become a vehicle for working on that.
Since I started doing this work, I've always been on a quest to figure out how to get things closer to implementation, to make things more real in some way. That’s been up and down — sometimes we succeed more than other times.
Success for me is that the business is a vehicle for learning and exploration. Some of that is around trying to practice design in a different, better way. Success for me is also about doing this work in a way that feels calm, collaborative, and creative. I think it’s really hard with the pressures of client work in a service-based business. Hard, but not impossible.
Longer-term, I think success looks like being able to offer more entry-level or internship positions. I really believe that the field of design needs more apprenticeships — paid opportunities to learn on the job. But when you are a smaller firm, it makes the most sense to hire seasoned folks, who have enough experience to be independent and need less in the way of support or guidance. Right now, my business just can’t support the level of training and growing that an early-career person would need. It’s a goal of mine to grow to be the sort of business that can help foster young designers.
And then the last aspect I'm very curious about is ways to do business that feel ethically aligned. I am trying to think about ways to structure a business that are supportive to the team, to the clients and the people you serve, and also a broader set of interests like the planet and the environment. One of the ways we do this is that Made Manifest is a 1% For The Planet1 member. I’m also really interested in things like B Corps,2 because it is a conundrum. How do you do all that and make money?
SB: One of the things that I've been following is the measures to introduce employee trusts, because I think that’s a really interesting model for professional services where ultimately, the thing that you are selling is people’s time and ingenuity.
Ok, so: Made Manifest started as just Linn. Then it’s Linn plus one, Linn plus two, and maybe eventually it’s Linn plus a lot more people. Does your definition of personal and business success start to diverge, or do you deliberately try to keep them together? What’s the interplay?
LV: I think the honest answer is I’m not too sure. It’s a transition, separating your identity from the business’s identity. It’s healthy and needed, but tricky. I did have the experience of going on maternity leave very suddenly, because my son arrived prematurely. And from a business perspective, that was actually a good reality check. The business can run without me: the projects got done, the clients were happy.
But the business was actually the first time in my life that I took an experimental approach to my career. It was very refreshing, because it gave me permission to just try things out and respond to the opportunities as they appeared. Previously, I’d always been someone who has all the steps mapped out. Of course, the downside of experimenting is that it’s hard to keep that mindset while also being intentional about a definition for success. It’s an exercise in finding the right balance between letting the business respond to external forces, versus driving towards a set vision. To date, I’ve taken it very day-by-day, month-by month, and I’m enjoying it so much. If I’m not enjoying it in the same way, then maybe that’s the signal to be more intentional about the longer-term direction.
SB: I want to delve into the topic of business ownership and motherhood. As we’re speaking, you have a seven-month old. Can you tell me about how that has shaped the way you think about your work and your business?
LV: This is still something I'm actively processing. We didn't really talk about it earlier, but part of the motivation for me in launching the business was wanting to show that different paths are possible. When you look at design generally, something like 75% of the workforce is women, but most of the owners and bosses are dudes. I wanted to build an alternative and show people that different things are possible. Becoming a mom is part of that.
I had people say to me, “Now that you're having a baby are you going to go take a corporate job? You’re going to stop that little freelancing thing you’ve been doing, right?” I was really lucky that early in my career I worked at Usability Matters, a company that had three women founders, two of whom were mothers. That was huge for me, in terms of feeling confident that the business was compatible with motherhood. I wanted to keep running my business. That was hard because I took quite a short maternity leave in the Canadian context, where the norm is for women to take a full year.
I had planned a four-month leave, but ended up taking five months because my baby was born early. As a business owner, I wasn’t eligible for maternity benefits,3 but my partner took a full year of paternity leave. Right now, I’d say I’m working 70-80% of a full-time week, but when you’re running your own business, there’s never a clear-cut workday.
I was also surprised because I had been very convinced that biology is not destiny. Carrying, birthing and breastfeeding a human was a bit of a rude awakening on that front. When people talk about the mother-infant dyad, there is a true biological intertwinement. Perhaps that should have been obvious, but I underestimated the biological, hormonal component — the delicately balanced system of mother and infant, that requires being close to one another.
SB: I was the same. I very cavalierly took a four-month maternity leave. But pumping breastmilk because you have fifteen minutes between meetings didn’t work very well. Babies eat because they’re hungry, not because it’s a certain time, and trying to fit that biological process into a very structured business calendar was really, really hard. I was just hopelessly naïve about all those things.
How are you managing the workday now?
LV: My hours are dictated by the needs of the business and the clients. I used to be super controlled, super structured, but having a baby has taught me to be a lot more fluid and go-with-the-flow. I am working from home, which is a double-edged sword.
I feel really grateful for the flexibility to get on a call, run a workshop, breastfeed, take more calls, change a diaper at lunch, give my partner a break from the baby. Sometimes there is guilt about how much time I’m spending with the baby — It can feel like I’m half-assing being a mom and half-assing running a business. But most of the time, things are very integrated, in a way that feels good.
The negative side is I do feel very pulled in many directions, and it can be very difficult to focus. I have this time confetti, where I’m trying to squeeze so much into little splinters of time. I can see the appeal of getting up, leaving the apartment, and working from 8 until 6. But that kind of clear-cut work time is most often afforded to men. I’m grateful for the flexibility and integration that I have, but I do think there’s a cost of socialized expectations on women to do and be it all.
SB: Do you read ? She had a piece on the weekend about men going golfing for six hours out of the house, while more stereotypically female hobbies happen at home where you can take care of child minding or domestic tasks.
LV: That’s exactly what I was thinking of. I feel like that, but for work. The conclusion I’ve come to is that our societies are broken in a way that doesn’t set women up for success. Especially with infants, there are biological realities mothers have to manage. Breastfeeding is not a structured, rigid thing. It’s very fluid and organic. The ideal would be having society set up in a way that supports women in that, rather than penalizing them. It’s a holistic valuing of care, which is a lot of what Anne Helen Petersen writes about.
For me, it’s really a mix of feelings. I am incredibly grateful to have a partner who took a year of paternity leave, which is actually still really rare. I have found it very helpful postpartum to spend time in a domain where I feel competent and confident and have a sense of identity — my work and business. But it is really tricky as I’m trying to mix in that more schedule-based work of running a business with the fluid, organic work of feeding and caring for an infant. Right now, it feels like the identities of mother and business owner are so dominating, that that’s all there is room for, but I try to tell myself: it's temporary.
SB: How do you imagine the role of motherhood plays out differently as a business owner compared to being an employee, especially once you’re back to work with a little human to care for?
LV: There's an Adam Grant podcast. He talks about integrators — people who don't mind blurring the boundary between work and home. In contrast, segmenters have a strong desire to separate business and personal life. I think that as an entrepreneur, it's much easier if you're an integrator. The flexibility you get from being an integrator and being your own boss is great. However, the trade-off is being pulled in a lot of directions and maybe finding it harder to fully switch off.
I think as an employee, even though I had environments that were supportive and encouraging, it wasn’t the same level of autonomy or locus of control. I do miss being part of a bigger workplace. I miss the ambient social interactions and social group. But as a business owner I have this very nice feeling that it’s OK to fully be myself.
I love how Linn straddles the space between intentionality and go-with-the-flow. She is so thoughtful about the fundamentals of her business, from branding to growth to how it contributes to broader society. But she blends that with an openness to seeing how the world unfolds, and taking the opportunities as they present themselves. It’s an enviable mindset for both running a business and raising children.
Workomics Staff Picks
A round-up of some ideas we bounced around in October:
We were curious to read about Shopify issuing a memo discouraging staff from having side hustles. Many small businesses (including ours) enthusiastically encourage side businesses and passion projects. At the right scale, they give people real-world experience building something, provide fresh perspectives, and help to insulate from burn-out. But as organizations grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to have consistent definitions of what’s okay and what’s not, and you can see how some side hustles start to crowd out people’s day jobs.
We spent some time talking about this LinkedIn Post about hiring babysitters. It’s good advice for parents with young kids who have the means to afford it. But it is also interesting how she designs the role to be as attractive as possible to potential babysitters: “I want everyone to feel that working for our family is the best deal they've ever had.” Compare that mindset with how many roles are designed in a typical business environment!
A few of us went to see Amy Edmondson speak at Rotman about her new book, The Right Kind of Wrong. She walked us through her typology of failure (simple, complex, and intelligent) and was a super-captivating speaker. This HBR interview is a nice intro to the ideas she shared; I’m looking forward to reading the whole book!
Meanwhile, this morning I shipped a pirate and a Spartan warrior off to school for a day of Halloween hi-jinx, with much anticipation for an evening of trick-or-treating ahead. Wishing everyone a spooky Halloween!
In comradeship,
S.
Organizations who join 1% For the Planet commit to donating 1% of annual top-line revenue towards environmental work.
B, or Benefit Corporations have a corporate governance structure that is accountable to all stakeholders (not just shareholders) and go through a certification process that assesses their social and environmental performance.
In Canada, parental and maternity benefits are administered through the Employment Insurance (EI) program. If you own more than a 40% stake in a business, you are not required to participate in the program, and are ineligible for regular benefits due to job loss. The government does operate a program whereby you can register and opt in to paying premiums; if you’ve registered and started paying in at least 12 months beforehand, business owners are typically eligible for “special benefits” including parental, caregiver, and sickness benefits. If you register and receive special benefits you are required to continue contributing EI as long as your business remains operational. For owners of corporations, it is often not financially advantageous to participate in such a program, compared to the alternative of paying yourself from retained earnings during a leave.