[00:00:00] Hala Taha: [00:00:00] You're listening to YAP Young And Profiting podcast. A place where you can listen, learn, and profit. Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Hala Taha, and on Young And Profiting podcast, we investigate a new topic each week and interview some of the brightest minds in the world. My goal is to turn their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your everyday life.

No matter your age, profession, or industry, there's no fluff on this podcast and that's on purpose. I'm here to uncover value from it. By doing the proper research and asking the right questions. If you're new to the show, we've chatted with the likes of ex FBI agents, real estate moguls, self-made billionaires, CEOs, and bestselling authors.

Our subject matter ranges from enhancing productivity, how to gain influence, the art of entrepreneurship, and more. If you're smart and like to continually improve yourself, hit the subscribe button because you'll love it here at Young [00:01:00] And Profiting podcast. This week on YAP, we're chatting with Marissa Orr previous Google and Facebook executive, bestselling author of Lean Out, an international keynote speaker. While working at Google,

Marissa attended every leadership conference for women being offered, but she was very disappointed with the advice she was given. Thus, she decided to start her own lecture series on female leadership, which spread like wildfire. After she left the corporate world, Marissa transformed her leadership series into a book, Lean Out: The Truth About Women, Power, and the Workplace.

This book has completely turned the narrative for women in business, on its head, as opposed to blaming gender inequality on a women, not acting like men. Marissa exposes corporate dysfunction as a source of the nations gender gap, which still hovers at 80%, despite being 50 years after the equal pay act.

was enacted. Lean Out is now a massive hit being featured in Forbes, Fox, [00:02:00] Yahoo finance, and CNBC. And most recently, Marissa launched a podcast. Nice girls don't watch the bachelor to continue the dialogue around women in the workplace. Tune into this episode to learn the differences between lean in and lean out two competing philosophies in modern feminism and how the system still promotes male dominant traits in the workplace.

We'll then dig into Marissa's time at Google, her uncomfortable interactions at Facebook and how to make a real difference in your career. No matter what obstacles that you face. Hey Marissa, welcome to Young And Profiting podcast. 

Marissa Orr: [00:02:37] Thank you. Thanks for having me today. 

Hala Taha: [00:02:39] Of course. Thank you for being on the show.

You are extremely inspiring. You worked in the corporate world at Google for 13 years. Then you had a short stint at Facebook for over a year, about a year and nine months. In your corporate positions, you attended every leadership conference for women being offered, but you were extremely disappointed with the [00:03:00] advice you were given.

You decided to start your own lecture series, which we'll get into in a bit. And that spread like wildfire and really set the foundation, I think, for the rest of your career. And after you left the corporate world, you released a book it's called Lean Out and it's changed the narrative for women in the business world.

It's been featured on Forbes, Yahoo, Fox, and CNBC. So let's start off with a very basic question. There seems to be two competing philosophies when it comes to women in leadership and modern feminism, and that is lean in and lean out. And for those of you who are listening, who don't know about lean in, that was a very popular book.

It came out in 2013, it was written by Sheryl Sandberg, who is the chief operating officer at Facebook. Then in 2019, Marissa, you came out with lean out and Sheryl is actually 10 years. Your senior, you guys went have a very similar background. You went to the same elementary school and middle school. You both worked at Google and Facebook.

So [00:04:00] on paper, you guys seem like twins, but in reality, you have a very different perspective. So tell us about your perspective on women leadership. And what's the difference between the perspectives of lean in and lean out? 

Marissa Orr: [00:04:13] I would, first of all, I would like to agree that Sheryl and I look the same on paper, but we did grow up in the same neighborhood a few years apart, and both worked at Google and Facebook.

I think we represent very different types of women. Not the least of which she's very well-educated. She went to Harvard and has all these really esteemed titles and things about her background. Whereas I don't have much of that at all, except a really voracious appetite for psychology and research and science.

And I think that's how we our different perspectives were born. So with that long-winded introduction, I almost forgot the question, which was it? Was it explain a little bit how it's different? 

Hala Taha: [00:04:53] Yeah. What's the difference between lean in and 

lean out? 

Marissa Orr: [00:04:56] Yeah. So the crux of lean in is that the gender [00:05:00] gap is caused by these cultural forces that keep women down.

So that keep us constrained into these very narrow stereotypes and roles. So for example, we are told to sit still and be quiet. And so because of that, as kids, and then over time, we start to internalize those messages of society and we mute our ambition as a result. So one of the key premises in her book is something she coins the leadership ambition gap, which means that part of the reason that only, for example, 5% of fortune 500 CEOs are women, is because culture and society conspires to keep us down and reduce sort of our goals for ourselves and not take leadership positions, et cetera, lean out the premise is

that the gender gap really has nothing to do with women. So the core message and lean in is that women need to change their behavior in order to close the gender gap and get more women in leadership [00:06:00] roles and lean out, my premise is really it has nothing to do with women that women are not broken or deficient, but the system in the corporate world is such that it rewards certain traits that men have not because they're inherently better or superior, but that's the way the system is set up.

So for example, it's a zero sum game by its nature. As a triangle where spots become more scarce, the higher you climb, it lends itself to people who love competition and are more adept at putting their needs ahead of others. And research shows that women were men compared to women work do better, perform better.

And we're motivated by these zero sum win, lose games. Whereas women are more motivated and perform better in systems that are win-win and collaborative environments. But the system is set up as a zero sum competition. So it's biased toward people that are motivated by those types of games. It has nothing to do [00:07:00] with women itself, and there's a lot of different aspects where we differ, but that's really the gist of it.

Hala Taha: [00:07:05] I think that's really interesting. So let's talk about, you mentioned this kind of briefly that we blame stereotypes for women not getting into leadership positions. How does this differ from men? Because there's plenty of positions out there that men really don't get involved in. Whether that's being a nurse or a teacher is typically a woman's job.

So how come we have all these stereotypes? And we look at women like, Hey, you guys are not in the C-suite, you're not on board positions, but for men, we don't really look at that the same way. What's your opinion on that?

Marissa Orr: [00:07:37] I think that's a big problem. And I write about that in lean out, of course, because what you're saying is that reflects the value judgment in society of, or what roles are more valuable and where should we should be measuring women's progress.

So we measure women's progress in terms of CEOs, but not in anything else, not in any professions that are really necessary for society and important. Like you mentioned, nursing and [00:08:00] teaching, but one thing I want to comment on in the beginning of your question was around the stereotype issue.

And one thing I talk a lot about in the book, a lot of lean in, and it's not just lean in it's books, any sort of business books that are born of this sort of modern feminist discourse that has been spearheaded by Sheryl, but it's not just lean in, it's just that's book really represents a whole category of the books that have dominated the past decade.

But essentially what it says in that, in, in lean in and others is that women are punished for being aggressive or assertive, whereas men are rewarded as such. And that's a big reason that more women don't get to the top. And one of the observations that I make in the book is something I've noticed in my career is that the bossy more aggressive women were the ones getting promoted, where it was the ones like me, who fit more in with your idea of a stereotypical woman in terms of being nurturing and compassionate and being very relationship focused and not as throat and aggressive women like me were the ones that [00:09:00] struggled.

Because if you think about it, if you have a set of adjectives that describe a stereotypical woman, mature, communal and collaborative and kind and caring, whatever, and then you have the male version, which are more aggressive and desire for dominance and all that, what profile is more likely to get to the top of a large corporation?

The male profile. So the question I pose in the book is, why is it okay to discriminate against the stereotypical female profile? But if we discriminate against the woman that violates it, it's a national crisis. And there's research a lot of research that shows that traits like being agreeable, like that sort of more aligned with the female stereotype, our liability in the corporate world.

And that's not because they're not valuable. They are incredibly valuable. Like I was just listening to your podcast with Chris Voss. I loved his book, Never Split The Difference. He talks about being likable as important in negotiations and in life [00:10:00] and that's commensurate with the female stereotypes. So then why don't we see more of that get to the top?

Because the corporate world is a structure that is designed to surface those more aggressive traits. It's a zero sum game. It requires people to put their needs ahead of others. It's not. It's not the real world where there's some sort of equal power dynamic. Like you mentioned the Starbucks cup.

If the, they weren't nice to her, the person, they put decaf in the cup. And I agree with that. I really subscribed to his philosophy, but it doesn't work in the corporate world because there's an uneven power dynamic and there's rules of the game that don't mirror rules really.

Hala Taha: [00:10:39] Yeah, I actually was going to ask you about that whole likable thing that you just mentioned, that it's less likely that a woman will get promoted if she's likable versus if she's more, stern and bossy. But it's funny because I see both I recently met her situation. Yeah. And also, but I also see women being punished for being too bossy.

And so [00:11:00] it's what are we supposed to do? We're punished if we're likable. Yeah. And it's I feel like w how are we supposed to act? Why can't we just act like ourselves is what I always do. 

Marissa Orr: [00:11:09] We can, and that's the problem, is that's part of why I wrote this book was to like, take a breather from all of the voices telling us who and we're supposed to be, and that how we are, as we are, isn't good enough.

And that we have to change in some sort of way. And you're right. There's a double bind for women because if they act aggressive or assertive, they're punished for that. And if they act within type they're punished for that as well. But the point is and the book is that aggressive women are punished for acting out of type, but it doesn't make them any less likely to be promoted.

So while it might, while it is true and I am agreeing that's something that happens and it's not right, and it's not the way it should be, but it's also not the cause of the gender gap because research shows that actually men are more penalized for acting out of type than women. So there's [00:12:00] all this research in the book and I terrible, I forgot the guy's name, who did it, it's Tim something, but it basically shows that

men who act more in line with the stereotypical female profile are punished more in terms of less promotions and less earning fewer promotions and less earning potential than women who act out of type. The gap between if you think of a stereotypical male, the gap in earnings and advancement between a man who acts in type and without a type is larger than the gap between a woman who acts in type and out of type.

So it's not even a gender issue. It's a matter of what traits and characteristics lend themselves to winning this particular game. And that's what I'm trying to point out in this book is that aggressive and bossy women certainly suffer for violating stereotype. And I think, and I'm not advocating that should happen.

It's not anything that I think is good, but that is not the social issue [00:13:00] that we should be addressing when it comes to equality and women at work. 

Yeah, it's 

Hala Taha: [00:13:05] such a unique perspective. Like I've really never heard anybody talk about like basically personality types and how it impacts the gender gap.

So let's dig into this a little bit deeper. You talked about a personality test that you took at Google, where there was these like fiery types. And then there were these, I forgot the exact language like  earth green. Yeah. Earth green,

Marissa Orr: [00:13:26] and fiery red. 

Hala Taha: [00:13:27] Exactly. So tell us about this personality test and also how somebody like you with a very stereotypical feminine personality can thrive 

at work.

Marissa Orr: [00:13:39] So I'll tell you this story about what happened with the personality profile, cause there's nuances to it that I think are important. So when I was at Google, we did team-building exercise at an offsite where, and a lot of people do this. If you work at a big company, and this is a popular thing, but you take this survey before the offsite, where you fill out all the details about your personality, your likes, whatever.

[00:14:00] And then when we got to the conference room in mountain view at Google's headquarters, we were handed these thick black books with the results, and they were like these stunningly accurate maps of our personalities. And on the inside of each cover was printed. One of four colors to represent one of the four major personality types.

Like you said I was agreeing, which meant I have a strong drive to help people. I strive for harmony and I prioritize my relationships and I make the joke in the book that this was like the hippie group. And to underscore that point, they didn't just call it green and they call it earth green. Which is exactly the profile you want to project or the image you want to project in a room of corporate sales managers.

But anyway, the opposite of green was red or they call it fiery red and reds are competitive. They strive for power and control and they prioritize results over greens like me who prioritize relationships. So the HR person running the exercise, told us to get in groups by color. So I go over to the greens and as I'm seeing people around the room, this [00:15:00] question just pops into my mind.

I blurred out like. What are the colors of our senior executive team and the HR person, like clearly knew the answer did not want to share it, but everybody was now so curious and it turned out nine out of 10 were green just kidding. They were red. And it was a huge aha insight moment for me at that point, because people in the room were oh that's not fair.

We're only promoting, reds, but I saw it very differently. I thought greens like me who are motivated to build relationships, maybe we're not, maybe this is a motivation issue because if you're green and motivated toward relationships, then management position, are not only unsatisfying, they can be uncomfortable because having authority over people in that capacity, compromises relationships, because authority and relationships are intention with each other.

You dial one up. The other goes [00:16:00] down. For example, if you're on a team with a couple of best friends for years, and suddenly you're promoted to be their manager, let's say you flex that position, right? You're like, I'm the boss lady. Now you're telling them what to do your relationship suffers. But if you do nothing and you're still acting like their best friend, then your authority is undermined.

So for people like me who are really motivated and rewarded by relationships, these positions of authority are not something. Not only that we don't aspire to or that we just don't enjoy. And I was good at it. Good at being a manager, I just didn't want to be. And there was one other point I was going to make about it.

But anyway, point being. To me a motivation issue. If you're green a management position, people are only going to work for things that they actually want, and they're not going to work hard for things that they don't. So if management is the reward for hard work, you're only rewarding the people that actually are motivated by positions of authority, which is a subset of the population.

It's the old adage [00:17:00] about people who ascend to positions of large power are motivated to acquire a larger and larger amounts of power on the way. So again, it goes back to this systems issue because the reward for hard work. Money once you get to a certain level becomes less and less the thing you're working for because it becomes incrementally less satisfying as it becomes a smaller percentage of your base.

So what's left? Powered people who are really motivated, like reds toward position of power and control are going to work harder and get those positions more often than green. It's not because they're more qualified for it. Not because they're competent, but because that's the system that's set up. And as we know from behavioral economics, cognitive, so every discipline will tell you that structure drives behavior.

So we can't really have any meaningful conversation about women at work or the gender gap without just talking about the structure that creates that disproportion in the first place. And then, sorry, there's one other thing that I [00:18:00] wanted to say, which is the corporate hierarchy was designed a couple of hundred years ago by men in the industrial age.

It was the first time, they needed to organize hundreds of workers around common business goals. So if you're a man setting up your organization and you're more motivated by competition, you set it up as a competition. It makes sense it's their worldview, but it was also built for a time where the kind of me was large-scale manufacturing and that needs like assembly lines and scaled production needs a top down order, power chain of command.

But we're in an information economy now, and the entire world has changed. You need creativity and innovation, which don't thrive in a top-down power structure. It needs the opposite, but we're still using these legacy systems that were created a couple of hundred years ago. Everything in the world has changed except these underlying structure.

So that's really the very, long-winded answer to your question. 

Hala Taha: [00:18:58] Yeah. Thank you so much for explaining [00:19:00] that. And so I think at the root of this all is really about how do we define success? How do we define success differently? Because not everybody is actually motivated by getting into positions of power.

Like you said, we define power in a very male dominated way. A lot of us who work in corporate, there's really only one ladder to success and that's getting to the C-suite. That's what everybody in corporate wants. I work at Disney streaming. That's what everybody wants, including myself. I consider myself probably to be one of those red fiery personalities.

Who's ultra competitive, but there's plenty of people who I work with who are super talented and who are leaders who do not want to manage people and who have opposite personalities of me. They're very creative. They contribute a lot, but they're never going to get to those leadership positions because it's just not their personality.

They don't have it in them. So how do we then define success for those people? And is it totally broken where there's no hope for those people, they're just going to stay where they're at, or what do you suggest those peoples [00:20:00] do? And how do we start to define success differently in your 

opinion?

Marissa Orr: [00:20:02] One thing that you mentioned, which is an important element of this, which is a narrow definition of power, but there's also an equally large problem here, which is our narrow definition of leader. Cause if you read sort of management texts from the fifties, sixties, they don't, you don't see the word leader pop up all over the place.

It's manager today over the past 10 years or so. And we've had this industry of thought leadership pop-up we've now used the term leader and manager synonymously. When they're two very different things. There are fantastic managers who are also fantastic leaders, but there's also fantastic leaders who are not managers.

Before the last 10 years we've reserved the word leader for people like Martin Luther king, who didn't have a following because these people were work, worked for him and that he held power over their salary and livelihood, he was a leader because he painted a vision for the future that people wanted to follow.

[00:21:00] They weren't forced to. So I think that when we talk about women not being in enough leadership positions, the problem is we think of that as management positions. So part of it is broadening our understanding of the term leader, because if you say people said to me, so are you saying women don't want to be leaders?

No, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying women, not all women want to be managers. Those are two different things. So I do think that we're thinking too, inside the lines of how it's always been done and what we've always done. We've always had this structure. How can we even conceive of anything different?

It's not that hard. If you try and just get outside of those lines, you can make people. For example, I work very well with red type personalities. My daughter is actually the dyed in the wool red, and actually we work well together. She reminds me of all the things I need to do, but anyway, I work very well with that personality type because there is a yin yang, a complimentary set of skills.

So like Sheryl Sandberg and [00:22:00] Mark Zuckerberg have said so many times publicly that their partnership, that the secret sauce to their great partnership is that they focus on what they're good at. And they lead in this partnership fashion. So Sheryl's really good at scaling and putting operations and systems into place for things that already exist.

She did that at Google too, and she took over the ad-words organization. Mark is very good at creating new things that don't exist. He's very into the strategy and the product side, and he has no interest in the operational details. I always found it strange that they talk so publicly about how important this partnership is to their success without realizing no one else in the organization was allowed to do something similar because you can't partner with somebody that's good on the management side, because they have the position of power.

You can't work in sort of these complimentary ways because being an individual contributor is [00:23:00] seen as a lower power position, but there's no reason you can't have parallel tracks and retool the system. You really want to keep your top performers. They don't want to be managers and and they do this all the time for engineering, which I make a footnote in the book about, but I don't highly.

And I think it's an important point. It's very well known that people that are really good at coding and engineers don't want to be managers. Why? Because they love coding. They want to stay on the doing actual work. And from a business standpoint, it makes sense not to put them all as managers, because if they're great at coding, you want them to code.

You don't want them, those skills, if you're going to code or it doesn't scale by managing a team, but that's true in all aspects of the business. So like you mentioned the creative stuff, I'm super creative. It's not just that I'm green I don't want to be a manager. I'm creative, which is, I don't think linked to any sort of color.

I've never done the research on it, but it's an element that I think a lot of people relate to. I really like to dig into the project, do the work, managing other [00:24:00] people and taking information from up top and giving it to people at the bottom. It's so crushing to me and other people really love it.

So I was really good at storytelling at Google in terms of creating sales pitches and presenting all the time to the sales team. And when I was really successful at that, how was I rewarded with having to manage a team to stop doing the thing that I loved and what I was good at? So it was a loss for me, and it was a loss for Google.

So I think the structure we have now, it doesn't work. And I think to your point about being ourselves, we can only be ourselves where we're not putting these arbitrary value judgements on what's valuable and what's not. And I think that, you can change the rules of the game and retool the system, but that takes a long time.

And I don't think we need to wait for that to happen because you can also change the rules of the game, where you can change how you play it. And that's what I mean by defining success on your own terms, just because the corporation says this position means that you did well, you succeeded, you [00:25:00] advanced doesn't mean that's how it has to be defined for you.

It took me 15 years to realize I was working really hard for things that I didn't want. I was instead of figuring out. What it is that I want and going after it, I was just following a script of what I'm supposed to want. The next promotion and I'm looking around this person didn't work nearly as hard as I did and they got promoted.

So now I'm pissed and now, I've got to fix it. I got to get to that position. I didn't really want that position, but I really wasn't defining what it was I was aiming towards. So it was easy to just use what the system spit out as the goalpost. And that's part of the problem. So really the, one of the messages in lean out is lean out

doesn't mean quit your job or reduce your ambition. It just means leaning out of anyone else's story for who you should be, what your career should look like and what success means. So that's really what that piece of it is in terms of defining success on [00:26:00] your own terms. 

Hala Taha: [00:26:01] Yeah, I love that. Thanks for breaking that down.

So in your book, you say the system is broken and you say it's because of how we pick winners and how we motivate people. So I think we gave a good overview of both of those things just now. So like you said, it's up to us to define our own success criteria, but in terms of people who are in management positions, who are leading companies right now, how can they act differently and do things differently so that they aren't just picking those fiery red personalities for promotions and how can we actually make a change if 

we are leaders?

Marissa Orr: [00:26:37] That's a great question. And it goes back to this idea that in the course. Women have dominated academia every year since 1982. So the question becomes why doesn't that last after graduation and the work world and the predominant theory is, this culture thing, I think it's much simpler. I think in school we have grades, we have [00:27:00] objective ways to measure our work and our impact.

And in the work world, we don't have grades. So instead of measuring people on the outcome of their work, we measure them on how they behave on the way to that outcome. So I'll explain what I mean in the office or on zoom, whatever it is, these days in a knowledge economy. We're not producing widgets. We can't count.

Like I made five, you made seven, you did more work than I did today. A lot of times we're dealing with the ambiguous and invisible strategies that might not take shape for a year. So in these environments where it's really hard to tell who's doing a good job, or frankly, who's working at all, what happens is our brains default to whatever's most visible, we have a real bias for visibility.

And so it becomes the people who we see the most talk, the loudest work on the most visible project, self promote, the most, self-aggrandizing the ones that, desire to dominance or dominating a meeting. These are the things we see. And so we start to use them as [00:28:00] proxies for work and leadership and impact and these visible behaviors they do.

They correlate more highly with Matt again, but they don't correlate more highly with good performance or leadership. The real answer is a shift to really objective ways of measuring somebody's work for as a creative person. Again, one of my real strengths is being able to do something that takes someone who is very linear, maybe two weeks to do.

And maybe it'll take me a couple hours. Look, there's a lot of things that they, linear people do that I, I wish in a million years I could, but that's one thing I do very well, but one thing I was penalized for at work, because then what am I doing for two weeks? It didn't matter if what I did was better.

It was the fact that I wasn't visibly working on it as hard. And it's the opposite of what we want to be rewarding at work. You don't want to be punishing people for being efficient and creative, but that's what ends up happening. So [00:29:00] I think there are, we throw technology at everything in this world, but we don't throw technology on getting better grading people on their performance.

And another example I use in the book is in college, like my roommate, and I took all the same classes, but she was very conscientious and went to all of them and I was lazy and, study the night before and we got very similar grades and I would use that as an example of like in school.

That was okay. Cause we both got a 94. It doesn't matter how I got the 94. And it was a really big wake up call at work. Suddenly I had to focus on how to present my work more than I ever worked. So really if you're a manager and I tell when anyone not just women, the more you can get and there's companies doing this and really interesting ways like Bridgewater, the hedge fund, where they really try and make it more of a meritocracy using algorithms and technology.

But we don't all work at places like that. One thing you can do is when you have performance conversations with your managers, [00:30:00] Ask them for very clear, tangible outcomes that they want for the quarter and discuss or the half and ask what would what kind of measurement can we use to gauge how I'm doing against those goals?

And then use that as a foundation for every single performance conversation. Because what I've found is if you don't have that a manager at the end of the quarter can use any anecdote or false perception of you throughout the quarter to influence your score or your ability to get promoted. So the more you can ground conversations and objective ways that you've impacted the business and you're consistent about them.

It might not be a panacea, but it, at least it helps. And that's until we get better with, on the technology piece, I think that's one way to address it on a day-to-day basis. 

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Let's talk about COVID a little bit, because it's obviously changed the way that we work. We all work from anybody who's a knowledge worker is pretty much working from home. I haven't been in the office at Disney since March, we're all working from home and I found that everything is more results oriented

now. Now I know that you're not working in a corporate situation now, so you might not have a complete opinion on this, but I've noticed that it's less about, having to be like stuck at your desk anymore because they can't, they have no power over that anymore. They can't see us anymore. And they only see the results that we have.

So do you have any opinion on how COVID has shaped our system good or bad when it comes to the gender gap and when it just comes to how we judge productivity and things like that?

Marissa Orr: [00:33:52] Do you guys use video conference at Disney? 

Hala Taha: [00:33:55] Both. Yeah. 

Marissa Orr: [00:33:57] Okay. So again, like you said, I can't speak to [00:34:00] this from personal experience.

But I do speak to, that over the past six months, I've talked to thousands of people in my virtual talks and, friends of mine that are still at Google and work wherever I have heard similar things to what you're saying, but the majority of people I speak to actually tell me the opposite, which is they're finding they're working longer hours than they were in the office.

And not because people, and this might be a kudos to Disney because if you guys do have your setup in a way that does focus on results, you're way ahead of most people, because in a lot of companies, they're still not that objective way to say at the end of the quarter, I pulled in this much in sales or whatever it is, and it's even harder when there's no face to face opportunity to drop by the boss's desk and make yourself heard for five minutes.

So people feel more of an obligation to be on video [00:35:00] show their face, email more because there is no other way your boss doesn't see you leaving for a client meeting, and see you in a conference room presenting or in, on the team meeting. So actually what I been saying and, this is interesting feedback that I need to consider a little bit because I've been speaking on the opposite scenario, which is it's increased the pressure and it's increased the amount of work.

Increase the amount of productive work and it's increased the amount of publicity kind of work. So what, and I think work expands to fill the containers in so far as how long people are working, and so now we're a home that can containers bigger. So people are expecting when there are no objective results like grades, then who's ever more motivated to be seen as the good one sets the new benchmark for which everyone else on the team now has to compete with.

So I see it as [00:36:00] the same issues manifesting in a different environment, but clearly there's pockets that it's great news that are working in the opposite way. 

Hala Taha: [00:36:09] Yeah. And it could be a fact of my personality that I'm very good at making my work very visible and I'm very good at videos. And so I can shoot a video and use my podcasting skills to stand out where maybe other people are having a tougher time.

Maybe it's just easier for me. Okay. So let's talk about your time at Google when you started this women's lecture series. Cause I think this is really cool that you started this sort of not side hustle was like an intrepreneur within the company. Then you took it out and you started doing speaking series at other companies.

So how did this come to fruition? Why did you do it and talk to us about that journey because I'm sure there's lots of people out there who wants to start speaking and want to start their own thing. 

Marissa Orr: [00:36:53] I started. Okay. So I've really have always been fascinated.  I've done so [00:37:00] much reading and research just because I'm interested in it and gender and psychology and evolutionary biology.

And, then I got into a whole thing on business books and behavioral economics. I don't know I'm all over the place, but over 15 years I did a ton of reading and I've always just been very interested in, in, in gender and excuse me, I've I did a lot of writing before college and in college.

And then not again, until I started writing this book, except I did write a ton of email, but apart from that, there was always right. Exactly. But I think there is this creative person inside that just was trapped for a long time. And when it, toward the end of my career at Google, I just started feeling like

I don't know how to describe it, but I felt and it's funny, cause my role at the time that I started, this was the best one I'd ever been. I was so happy. I loved it. Maybe that's what it was. I was also on stage, a lot presenting to sales people all the time and I had this [00:38:00] aha like, oh my gosh, I love being on stage.

And I love writing and then performing my writing, which was really what I was doing at Google. And I'm quite introverted actually. So you wouldn't think I hated speaking up in meetings, but get me on a stage. And I was like total ham. So it made me wake up a little bit like, oh, I love

doing this, but I don't love doing it about online video advertising, which is what I, I was doing it for the, my job. And like you said, in the beginning I was attending all these women's workshops. Cause after lean-in was published, Google went all in on like female leadership programs, all this stuff.

And, having always been passionate about that and I was like, sign me up. But over time I became so disenchanted because it was so it seemed just started out with great intention. And I think that it was good at first, but it morphed into this beast where women in the most high positions at the company would get up and lecture us.

And then everybody wanted to get involved because it [00:39:00] was good for their career. And we couldn't really be honest about what was going on and sometimes stage, there'd be like a woman I worked for who hated women more than anyone else I've ever worked with. And she's telling us about female empowerment.

So it just felt phony. And it angered me because this was something I cared very much about. I'm also a single mom of three kids. So I have very tangible, real challenges that I felt like I wasn't even allowed to talk about. So I just got more angry is what it was, as I. I'm thinking of my answer as I'm talking and now I'm getting to it.

It was, I just got angry. It was so phony and I hate phoniness and phony about a topic super important to me. And so that really was what inspired me to write my own perspective. And then, because in parallel, I had been doing these trainings in Google and it was the first time in my career. I really got to write my own stuff and present it.

I started to see how much I loved it. So I think the anger combined with [00:40:00] discovering a little bit of what I liked, I just felt compelled in a way I can't describe. And it didn't really take off at all, like wildfire, because at first I, it was five of my friends in a conference room that I made them sit there while I presented this thing I had.

But then over time, more women started to show up and I started going out, looking for other opportunities to present this. It was very fulfilling to me and when I went to Facebook, there was a part, a big part of me that thought, oh, this is the perfect place to expand this platform because in my mind, I thought, I'll do this for 10 years on the side and then maybe start my own thing.

Facebook's a great way to accelerate that program. Your birthplace of lean in. And they came to me as they tried to recruit me for something totally unrelated. But in the recruiting process, I asked a million times I really feel passionate about this project. Would I be able to continue working on it and ever, oh, of course this is Facebook.

Of course, we're gonna, blah, blah, blah. [00:41:00] That's an ACO as planned at Facebook at all. It was a horrible experience. I write about it, in the book, the prologue, you can also find it on medium on my medium page. Why working at Facebook inspired me to write lean out and it was terrible. And I met Sheryl Sandberg my second week.

There was a part of me that thought, oh, this is a shortcut. She'll love the show. We'll meet each other. She'll love that. I'm doing all the stuff. She'll give me the she'll give me the platform I need. Like I had all these crazy fantasies about what was going to happen and actually led to my demise, but figuratively speaking.

But at Facebook, again, I was in such a horrible place mentally, emotionally that I returned to work on this series as a life raft basically. At some point it was at a women's thing, Facebook and I just the anger returned. And I thought, you know what? Instead of getting self-righteous about all of this, I need [00:42:00] to take myself seriously.

And share my truth and tell my story and share, what I think and feel. And that's really what gave birth to the real commitment to turning that lecture series into a book. And I'm speaking on it full time.

Hala Taha: [00:42:16] It's amazing. It's amazing how passion you had 10 years or so ago has led to your ultimate goal now.

And same thing with me, I started Young And Profiting podcasts as a side hustle in 2018. Now I own a podcast marketing agency we're doing so well and it's two and a half years in and I'm ready to, hopefully become a full-time entrepreneur as well. So it is possible to have a side hustle and turn it into your full-time thing.

Marissa Orr: [00:42:43] It's not easy though. I will say. 

Hala Taha: [00:42:45] It's not it's you have to be really hard. 

Marissa Orr: [00:42:48] If Facebook decided to turn it into a book and I was still working there, I would wake up at four 30 every morning and work on it for an hour before I got the kids up to go to school and off to my job at [00:43:00] Facebook. And it took me, I had to change my whole personality basically to become disciplined.

And I think once things in my life got bad enough, like finally, I was able to take the thing I needed to seriously. So I just, I do want to say it's very, you can turn it side, but it requires like a lot. Yeah. 

Hala Taha: [00:43:20] It does. It requires sacrifice, and organizing your time in a different way. And you're not going to have enough, the same amount of time for your relationships and things like that.

Marissa Orr: [00:43:30] But also that it's, you can do it in small steps. I think people get overwhelmed by the idea. And I think that's what stops people. But if you start, like you did dabbling in something you really enjoy, like I did, then, it could eventually turn into something over time. 

Hala Taha: [00:43:46] Completely my first, when I first launched my podcast, I was launching a podcast every three months and then it became, every month, then it was every week, then, it just kept escalating and I got a team and processes and that's how you scale.

So I completely agree. Okay. So I want to [00:44:00] dig deep on something that you mentioned previously, you mentioned your time at Facebook and you hinted to the fact that it was a very different culture from your time at Google. And, you told them about your little side hustle project that you had in advance of working there.

And then you had some backlash when you actually started working there. Like I said, Heather Monahan is one of my mentors. So I listened to your interview with her. And you guys were talking about how they made you take down a blog post that had four views on it, because it was something that didn't agree with.

So tell us that story. What did you do when that happens and how can somebody who has a side hustle advocate for themselves when they are doing something that's totally legal. It's, non-competitive, it's none of the corporations business, in fact. So what did you do? And tell us a story and how others can learn from it.

Marissa Orr: [00:44:51] Yeah, it was crazy. So I worked, so I grew up at Google my career. Like I grew up in my career at Google. I [00:45:00] started off right after grad school and was there from the time I was 23, 24 up through whatever. So it's a very weird company to grow up in because it's Google and I was you start to think.

That's how well I knew that's not how all companies operated, but I thought that's how all tech companies were. And they, Facebook would be the same as Google and Google had its issues. I'm not saying, they were S it was like utopia, but they were, when I was there, I think maybe they're different now.

I don't know. They were tolerant of conflicting mess or internal debate or open debate. And as long as it was respectful, dissenting views, they actually have changed since then. But anyway, that's how I grew up, so to speak. And so I was speaking when I was at Google, I would speak, I was at pace a new school and doing all these, nobody cared at all.

Like [00:46:00] you could write a blog post critical of Google. And as long as you were sharing confidential information or whatever, they just didn't care was not that way at all. Facebook and I was really surprised. They're very strict about everything to do with messaging. So even in the sales realm, there were these very strict ways that you had to talk about the product and your presentations, and they were very controlling over that.

And I wrote. So like for example, I spoke totally separately from Facebook at a medical conference on it, and I spoke on an innovation and I had to get my deck approved, even though it had nothing, it was just that kind of thing. It was new. So then when I was going through this hard time, I just started writing for the first time.

And, since college and I posted a couple articles, my, my new brand new medium blog, which like you said, like literally it didn't have all it had was my [00:47:00] name. It didn't link to any social media. It was just my little sandbox. And when I would write something, I would send it to my best friend and my parents.

And that was it. And it never mentioned Facebook or Google. You had no idea who I was from writing this and I wrote one about self-deception and then my other post was about how innovation gets stifled in large companies, because innovation is compromised by big ego. Okay. No one had ever seen this article except my parents.

I don't even think Sarah, my best friend read it. Okay. It was boring. And then one day I got this email from corporate comms at Facebook to tell me to take it down. And I was like, I was floored because I couldn't even figure out how they found it. Like how this isn't something I shared with anyone and it wasn't connect.

It was like its own island. So then a friend of mine who worked for HR ran, she ran HR for a big bank, [00:48:00] explained to me that they use these software packages to find any place in the internet where some employee, that person that has the name of your employee has posted something. So I guess that's what happened.

And they read it and asked me to take it down. I was shocked because like I said, it's still up there on my medium page. It's like the second article I ever wrote. Now it's all connected to my social, but back then, no.

Hala Taha: [00:48:24] Did you take it down or did you say no? 

Marissa Orr: [00:48:26] I said if I changed it to my initials instead of my full name, are you okay with that?

And then she came back and said, I think at first took it down. And then I was just so pissed. I went back and asked later on. She said it was fine if it was just my initials. So it just had my initials, my name wasn't anywhere on it. And then first thing I did after Facebook was put my name on that soccer.

Hala Taha: [00:48:51] Yeah. 

I'm surprised. I'm like the most popular person at Disney streaming on LinkedIn. I'm so surprised that they aren't like at me, like [00:49:00] all the time, ask, asking me to take things down or reviewing my stuff before I post it at first, they were, even though I disclosed that because I already had Young And Profiting before I started there, I disclosed it.

And at first they were giving me some issues and the legal team kept contacting me. And then now they just, they just let me do whatever I want. So it's kinda nice. 

Marissa Orr: [00:49:21] And Google was encouraging of that stuff, but it speaks to the culture at Facebook. And I also think that there's, it's really, if you think about Sheryl Sandberg's narrative on women, she spent a year on a campaign to ban people from using the word bossy.

There is an intent to control language, and I think that's reflected in the women's stuff. And also in the company itself, there is a mission to control everything about what people say. 

Hala Taha: [00:49:52] So let's get into another story about your Facebook time. So when you were initially recruited, there's a woman who [00:50:00] basically recruited you to join the company.

She gave you so many compliments. She made you feel really welcome, and like you were going to be a great fit. And then you got to the company and she ended up bullying you so much for so much so that somebody else reported it. And you had to take a course on bullying and whatever. Tell us about that story.

And also, what are some of the lessons that you learned from that? 

Marissa Orr: [00:50:21] Yeah, so I got a call from, I refer to her as Kimberly in the book. She's a senior executive at Facebook and she called me in March of 2015 about a role at Facebook. She wanted to recruit me for one of her directors is someone I'd worked with closely at Google.

So he was recommending me and I wasn't ready to leave Google. I was pretty happy at Google at the time, but Kimberly is one of the, she's just super over the top charming, knows exactly what to say to make you feel like she gets me. She was like super she's, very flat. It was a lot of flattery. And this went back on for many months.

It was really a [00:51:00] courtship and over maybe, I don't know, nine or 10 months of this back and forth, not every day, but like we spoke and we became friends and she finally won me over. And then, my third week at Facebook, she just totally turned on me in a way that was so dizzying and confusing. And, she wouldn't acknowledge my existence in public.

She wouldn't reply to any of my emails. She undermined me or me jobs all the time. I was like, I had no idea what the hell is happening to me or why it was horrible. And I eventually found out that it was so she used to work at Google too, but I, and I knew her, but we had never worked together. So there it in several different ways, I found out that there were other people.

That she had done this too in the past who I had connect, essentially, she was pissed about my meeting with Sheryl and saw it as some. Oh, I didn't give that context. So I reached out to Sheryl [00:52:00] my first week there to see if she would have a second for a quick introduction. Hello the next week she was speaking at our sales conference in San Francisco.

My second week of Facebook, I just sent her an email saying oh, I'm from north Miami beach. Like nobody in tech is from north Miami beach. So it was like a hometown girl kind of thing. I'd love to just shake your hand and meet you in person real quick. But she ended up giving me 20 minutes on her calendar.

We met for about half an hour at the conference, the two of us. So I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. Shell's name or cause me to be my best friend. And this is, these stupid fantasies, but Kimberly saw this as, cause she didn't, she wasn't there in the meeting. She doesn't really know me that she saw it as like a political maneuver, because he or she has been courting this relationship with Sheryl Sandberg for three years, trying to spread her feathers, like a peacock.

And here I am my second week I go on. So I could see from that perspective, if you're that type of person, why you might describe those intentions to me, but it's laughable. If you actually know me, I'm like horrible at [00:53:00] politics. So anyway, She just was pissed and wanted to do everything she could to not only get rid of me, but humiliate me and drag me through the mud in the process.

And so someone else reported it, but we had to go through an HR investigation, which was a nightmare. I had no choice, but to participate, of course she was found innocent. And then next thing I know I'm on a PIP, a personal improvement plan where, they say you're going to be fired if you don't improve.

Number one, I didn't want to participate in the investigation. And I was told that there's a very strong anti-retaliation policy that if I do participate, I won't be punished. So that investigation ends. And a month later, I'm on a PIP. I'm like, what is going on here? Of course I say something to the new HR person who didn't know about the investigation.

I'm like, isn't this protected suddenly I'm like off the PIP. It's very clear. Cut legal thing that they did, but I knew eventually I'd [00:54:00] be fired. It was impossible to do my job. And by the way, one of the, I still have the PIP the performance improvement plan document in my drawer. And sometimes they go back and laugh.

Cause it's like the biggest reason for it was my failure to develop good relationships with Kimberly and her team. So it was just a really horrible experience. I went from this job. I love to Google where I had great reputation. And I was like loved by the sales team and I was really well-respected and I had this great setup where I flexibility, it was like an old timer had been there forever.

And then Facebook, I was like a freaking pariah with leprosy. I, it was just terrible. And you start to really question like, who am I, what am I doing? And that's really what forced me into being honest with myself about me and who I am. And that world was never going to be a place I could fully manifest, my talents and potential.

Hala Taha: [00:54:59] So there's two [00:55:00] questions that I want to ask you. So one is why is it that women are so competitive and nasty to other women in the corporate world? So let me start with that first. And then the second question I have for you is why did you wait until you were fired at Facebook? Why didn't you just quit?

Marissa Orr: [00:55:18] I'll answer the second question first, which is I'm a single mom of three kids and financially independent, and I don't get money from anyone. So to basically say, screw you, Facebook, I'm going to do this book was just trust me. I wanted to quit. And every week I do my budget and see, but it just felt completely irresponsible.

I've a house and a household and kids and I live in an, nice neighborhood with good schools. That's just, wasn't even an option. So what I did was work on the book, knowing I was going to be fired to get the salary and the stock and everything I could so that when I [00:56:00] was fired, I could use that as my money to take a bet on myself, because it requires a lot of money to do something like what I did.

And I based this, that was my plan. Save up as much as I can so that I could live on that money while I try and forge this new path. So that's a very easy question to answer. The first question was I think that women can be very nasty to each other because, and competitive, because work is a competition.

Corporate world is a zero sum game. And I think that the vast majority of women. Being out of that world now. And having met tons of more women outside the corporate world, when women are working together toward a common goal, their relationships are their power and their currency. And when you put women in a zero-sum competitive scenario, it erodes the very fabric of their relationships.

[00:57:00] And it erodes the very thing that makes so many of us strong. So I think that women aggressed toward other women in ways that are covert and underhanded and seem nasty and men aggress for other men in more direct, overt ways. And we almost expected of them and men don't use relationships as like emotional weapons like women do because women connect to other women through relationships and these sort of like really deep connections and

when you're competing again, it's very easy for women to you turn around and then it's not easy for women. It's easy for women that are really competitive and trying to get ahead. It's then flip the script and turn that against other women. But I think that women in environments, like I read about all these women all over the world that are dealing with like these severe economic issues and these women in these villages and communities come together and change that their [00:58:00] corner of the world for themselves in these amazing ways.

So I don't think it's that women are like always mean and competitive to each other. I think they're like that when they're working in a world that requires them to do that in order to succeed. 

Hala Taha: [00:58:14] Yeah, it's that's the only way to get to the top anyway. So you might as well have that crab in a bucket mentality, cause you're not going to get rewarded for anything else. Okay. So you left Facebook and then you came out with this book. Were you worried that you were going to get backlash for this book? And did you get backlash and did anybody reach out to you like Sheryl Sandberg and what happened if people retaliate against you?

Marissa Orr: [00:58:40] I think, no. I think that, first of all, the thing I was worried about most was that I was afraid honest to God that Kimberly was going to hire a Hitman to kill me. And I went around to tell him, I went to my family and friends. I was like, if I die under mysterious circumstances in the next few years, [00:59:00] you must investigate her.

Like it's her I'm telling you. And part of that was because I was reading this amazing book called The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout. At the time and it was a great book, but not necessarily the great book to read when you're outing a sociopath, publicly. So that was really my biggest fear.

I still sometimes get afraid when I watch like movies or whatever. I'm like, oh shit, is she really going to kill me? But anyway, that was what I was afraid of. I wasn't afraid of backlash. I don't know why I wasn't, I probably should have been, but I wasn't because if you read the book, it's hard to get. I don't know.

I think it's hard to get angry because I'm trying to be very fair and objective and take different people's perspectives and show. Why we're not making progress on this issue and the faulty logic. I don't think I'm dragging anybody through the mud as a person, you know that. And I only talk about lean in and the first chapter, maybe this a little bit in [01:00:00] the second after that, I don't even talk, although I do take down other books, but I think that maybe my, I haven't received backlash because I think that maybe my intention came through really loud and clear, which is my intention is to help women.

And if show Sandberg and I have different ways of doing that, then that shouldn't be controversial if our goal is the same, it's only controversial if somebody has a vested interest in their way being the right way. But if both of us care about it, cause I do think that lean in is helpful for a lot of women.

I loved it when I first read it because I was in a place of, I was uncertain about my career. I didn't know why I wasn't getting ahead. And she had all these answers for me, which just were easy, but ultimately weren't right. And I was I think, hoodwinked by it. So I do think that women, that aspire to be, CEO of a corporation, this is probably a very useful book because you're looking at experiences from somebody who's been where you're trying to [01:01:00] go.

My issue with it. Women are not some big monolithic brain where we all want the same things and want to get to the same places. And it became this. If you don't agree with lean in you're anti-woman, which is ridiculous. So I do think it does help, but I wrote this because I never saw anyone like me with my challenges, my voice that I could connect with.

Talk about any of the real challenges we all were facing. So I didn't get backlash. I never heard from Sheryl because she's got much bigger things going on. She's at the Senate, like on the Senate floor every other day. And she's never mentioned lean out, partly I'm sure, because she's smart and knows that if she said anything or acknowledged it, that it exists, it would be the best thing that ever happened to me because people are still finding out about my book.

They all, everyone knows Sheryl Sandberg. So even if she went out there and was like Marissa Orr

 is the worst and that's why we fired her and lean out socks. I would be like, yes, [01:02:00] like finally people have heard my name and they know about my book. So now I haven't heard from her. I'm still crossing my fingers that I do.

Yeah, that's the story. 

Hala Taha: [01:02:10] That's so funny. Maybe I'll have Sheryl on my show and then mention it.

Marissa Orr: [01:02:14] Maybe on both of us at the same time. 

I still heard option. 

Hala Taha: [01:02:18] I'll just, yeah. I'll ping you in. I'll ping you in randomly. 

Marissa Orr: [01:02:22] I still, I think we would need good friends if we, if she, I Harper these I'm like, you know what?

If she knew me, we still would be really good friends cause we're allowed to disagree. 

Hala Taha: [01:02:32] Very cool. So the last question I ask all my guests is what is your secret to profiting in life? 

Marissa Orr: [01:02:39] My whole thing in life is to stay true to who I am and figuring out what that even means. 

Hala Taha: [01:02:45] Cool. And where can our listeners go to learn more about you and everything that you.

Marissa Orr: [01:02:50] You can find me and listen to a much better answer to that question when I'm more articulate on my podcast, which is Nice Girls Don't Watch The Bachelor [01:03:00] and just a heads up. Actually, I'm a big loyal fan of the bachelor nation. That's supposed to be a reverent and a joke, the title tongue in cheek.

And then I am on Instagram, Twitter at Marissa Beth Orr my middle name's B ETH. So at Marissa Beth Orr on medium, it's just at Marissa Orr, and then I'm also on LinkedIn. 

Hala Taha: [01:03:22] Very cool. So we'll put all her links in our show notes. Thank you, Marissa. This was such a great conversation. I loved it. 

Marissa Orr: [01:03:28] Thanks so much for having me.

Hala Taha: [01:03:30] Hey guys. 

Thanks for listening to Young And Profiting podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Marissa Orr if you're a new listener, don't forget to take a few minutes to subscribe to Young And Profiting podcasts and to everybody who's enjoying our show. I'd love it. If you could drop us a five-star review on Apple podcasts.

So here's the deal with Apple podcast reviews. They are the most coveted kind of reviews and that's because they directly impact my Apple [01:04:00] podcast rankings. As many of you guys know we're a top 50 education podcast on Apple. If I get a whole bunch of reviews and one day I might shoot up to the 10 in the education category.

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So this week I'm going to share two Apple podcast reviews. The first one is from TCR from Milwaukee. It goes like this, the goat female podcasts, or Michelle Obama has nothing on Hala. Not only does Hala have great guests on her show, but she also comes well-prepared. Ready to ask the questions that all of us want answers to.

The next one is from Jeff. He says the next Oprah. Hala does such great research on her guests and has such an elegant way of making them feel at home that she literally reminds me of Oprah. Do yourself a favor and make listening to YAP podcast apart of your weekly routine. Wow! thank you so much TCR and Jeff getting compared to Michelle Obama and Oprah is no joke.

That's really flattering and I hope I can achieve just a slither of their successes. And if you're out there listening and you found value in today's show, please also take a [01:06:00] few minutes to write us a review on Apple podcasts. I also have been loving seeing everybody tag Young And Profiting on Instagram.

So if you're listening, no matter what app you're listening to, you take a screenshot of your app and then tag me at yapwithhala in your Instagram story. That's at yapwithhala  in your Instagram story. I'll definitely repost and support those who support us. And you can always tag me on LinkedIn with any of your podcasts, recommendations, and reviews.

And I love to engage on those posts. So thank you guys all so much for listening to Young And Profiting podcast. You can find me on Instagram at yapwithhala  or LinkedIn, just search my name. It's Hala Taha. Big thanks to the YAP team as always. You guys are amazing. Thank you so much. This is Hala signing off.