Evolving work cultures to help women celebrate their success more openly is one of Cheryl Clifford’s driving passions. Alongside her role leading Amazon Business’ Professional Services teams across the UK, France and Spain, she runs monthly ‘IamRemarkable’ workshops to support employees to tap into their own power and to be prouder and louder about their achievements. She talks about the importance of creating new expectations around celebrating success and why women need to stop comparing themselves and say ‘I am remarkable’ more often.
How does ‘IamRemarkable’ help women at Amazon become more visible in their success?
The #IamRemarkable initiative started at Google and was implemented by Amazon in 2019 to empower all of its employees – women and minorities in particular – to talk more openly about their accomplishments in the workplace and to challenge the established gender modesty norms.
It feels like I’m part of a minority in an organisation where the average age band is twenties. Other people might be in an ability, language, gender or sexuality minority and they may feel less willing to put their head above the parapet and celebrate their own success. I think we all feel that we have to adapt to a certain extent if we consider ourselves to be in a minority to the majority culture. In my own way, I learned this by coming to the UK from New Zealand in the 1990s and by realising that if I was going to operate successfully within British organisations, I had to change the way I worked.
The ‘IamRemarkable’ workshops talk about the different ways that people can suffer unconscious bias and prejudice in the workplace, how we can be aware of it as colleagues and how we can feel more comfortable promoting our own value in the workplace, but also create an environment where our colleagues and direct reports feel more comfortable to help each other celebrate their successes. I’ve tried to do this with my own team through a Monday meeting where we talk about what’s gone well in the previous week. There’s no confusion or modesty ¬because we know we’re there to celebrate the successes. Amazon also has its Accolades platform where people can tell others what they’ve done well, and it gets broadcast for the whole organisation to see.
What underpins women’s reticence to shout about themselves and their achievements?
There are many different reasons why people of all genders and ethnicities might feel uncomfortable about self-promoting. For women, I don’t think you can overestimate the impact of a historic cultural gender modesty norm. This norm suggests that women are going to be more concerned with the harmony of the people around them, valuing social cohesion more than individual achievement. I also suspect that women only want to be seen as doing a really good job. We want to be seen to be competent and capable in often male-heavy environments, and we try and protect ourselves from getting it wrong. You can see a different approach in the way that a lot of men will come into a new team, ask questions and speak up in meetings from the start because they don’t have the same concern about being seen to be ‘below par’. That happens when you’ve been brought up in an environment where your opinion is always valued, and you’re always encouraged to have a point of view. I would say to any young woman in tech to think about being a bit braver and more prepared to get things wrong.
Does the power lie in accepting our remarkable qualities without always comparing ourselves to others?
In high-performing organisations like Amazon, you work with people who impress you every single day. In that context, it can feel a bit ridiculous to sit and say ‘I’m remarkable.’ I see this in the workshops all the time. I get people to write down all the ways in which they’re remarkable, and they say ‘I don’t know if this is remarkable’. We all edit ourselves and that boils down to a fear of being viewed negatively if we celebrate ourselves. We don’t want our colleagues to think we’re criticising them or think, ‘Well, they might have achieved that but actually, they couldn’t have achieved it without XYZ’. Our whole culture is based on sharing and telling stories and if we create an environment where everybody is encouraged to celebrate success, then those fears can start to drop away.
What has given you the confidence to be remarkable in your own career?
My only plan for my career journey was that I wanted to have fun doing what I was doing and do it to the best of my ability. Regardless of how much something pays you, if it’s not something you’re really invested in, it’s always going to be painful money to work for. I would also argue that nobody really does a good job at something they’re not interested in anyway. Any setbacks I have experienced have always been as a result of me thinking that I needed to perform or deliver in a certain way, and not paying enough attention to what I felt in my gut. I have made my worst decisions when I didn’t trust my own judgement.
What makes Amazon Business a remarkable place to work for you?
I moved to Amazon Business in 2019 because I wanted to start working more directly with the technical product. Amazon is a huge organisation, but there are start-up businesses within it, and this is one of them — a team that is growing fast and a product that is developing and changing all the time. Amazon exists to make any customer experience a better one and the thing I love most in this role is that we get to work directly with customers all the time, staring down the barrel of their criticism, compliment and complaint. We take all that direct customer experience and feed it back to our product management team, and it’s been a joy to be able to translate customer desire and aspiration back to the people who are actually building the tool.
How does work-life balance fit in with career achievement?
Amazon’s founder said that he didn’t like the term ‘balance’ in ‘work-life balance’ because it suggests there has to be a trade-off. He preferred the term ‘work-life harmony’ where your work and your personal life work successfully together. Amazon is the first place where I’ve been able to do that, and have really been treated like an adult. If I want to start at 11am and finish at 6pm, I have the freedom to do that. Of course, Amazon is a demanding place to work and nobody is going to tell you to slow down. One of the things my first boss at Amazon said to me was that you’re always going to have more to do here than you will have time to do it in — and you will never ever find anybody who is going to tell you to stop. Work-life harmony is about prioritising the things that are going to make the biggest difference and setting your own guardrails up because that’s also part of your professional delivery.
What does success mean to you, and does the idea of what makes a remarkable career change over time?
Your twenties are the decade where you should really dig deep and over-index on work deliverables, because as you get older you will pick up things that slow you down like spouses and houses and kids, which necessitate more of your time. So, when you’re unfettered, go as hard as you can. And then for the rest of it, if you are in a job you love, doing things you enjoy with people that you like, and you’ve got a life outside work that you find joy in — well that’s probably as much success as anybody could reasonably expect or want.
