UltraAlbatross3748
Analyze the case study below and support your answers with research…
Analyze the case study below and support your answers with research on career development and performance review processes through the Library and the Internet by answering the following questions.
What are the systemic issues at Godaddy? Explain and justify your answer
How can Monica Bailey leverage the Women’s leadership lab to complete the performance review project? Explain and justify your answer.
How can the performance review process be used to promote the personal brand of diverse employees?
Identify ways Bailey can improve the performance review process to improve career development and advancement opportunities. Explain and justify your answer.
GoDaddy and the Holy Grail:
Equal Access to Top Performance Reviews
When Monica Bailey joined GoDaddy in 2013, the company that empowered entrepreneurs and
small businesses was in the process of transforming its image. For years it had been known for
polarizing television commercials that were focused on generating attention and buzzCNBC
called its brand “synonymous with controversial advertisements with scantily clad women.”
Bailey, who came to GoDaddy after 17 years at Microsoft and having run her own coaching and
human resources consulting business, wanted to do her part to help in the transformation. Bailey
shared: “When I joined the company, I had to explain, ‘Hey, I’m a feminist from Seattle. You
have to promise me you’re not gonna do any more of those ads.’ To which I was told by
numerous members of the leadership team that, ‘The day of those ads is over.'”
What people did not know, Bailey came to learn, was, in her words, “the internal culture of our
company was never like those ads. In fact, a third of GoDaddy’s top leadership team were
always women.” So, while the company was inclusive internally, GoDaddy aimed to shift its
external brand to reflect its actual culture and to champion their diverse customers. This was no
small task as the company’s external reputation among women was so negative that when Blake
Irving, who was GoDaddy CEO from 2013 to 2017, appeared at the 2014 Grace Hopper
Celebration of Women in Computing, the audience booed.
But the GoDaddy leadership team was unfazed. Irving returned to the 2015 Grace Hopper
conference as a keynote speaker to address the topic of pay parity. “Blake took to the stage and
did something nobody expected. We gave him the raw data on how we were paying men versus
women in similar roles throughout the company, and we became one the first companies to
publicly share this data,” Bailey explained. “And the data was exactly what needed to be
sharedboth incredible results and a real need that something more must be done.” As Bailey
Sheila Melvin and Professor Adina Sterling prepared this case as the basis for class discussion rather than to
illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation.
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GoDaddy and the Holy Grail SM-318 p. 2
and other leaders at the company often said, “We had to get comfortable with uncomfortable
data.”
Collecting and sharing data, however, was just a start. GoDaddy’s senior leadership team
believed it could do much more to make their company a top workplace for women in
technologyand so did many of the women who worked there. So, when GoDaddy executives
listened to a presentation at Grace Hopper on blocking bias by Lori Nishiura Mackenzie,
executive director of Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research and
cofounder of the Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab,1 they heard an idea
they thought was worth investigating further.
PARTNERING UP
Background
Monica Bailey
Monica Bailey knew early on in life that she wanted to make an impact. She explained:
I was raised on the coast of Washington in a fishing town near where Kurt Cobain
was from… It was a rough and tumble town, with fishermen and lumberjacks…
My mom was a caseworker and worked with abused kids, and my dad built
houses, and they raised me to make a difference.
The people of her town, she told Diva Tech Talk,2 were “amazing” and “had to be as fierce as the
ocean to survive there.” Although she considered some of her friends and classmates to be
clearly “smarter than me,” they did not have the same access to opportunities. Bailey,
meanwhile, applied for every possible scholarship and graduated from Washington State
University’s Edward R. Murrow School of Communications with a dual major in psychology
and communications, and an additional focus on women’s studies.
Bailey’s professional coming of age was at Microsoft, where she started out doing temp work
before being hired as a technical recruiter and beginning her journey in tech. Microsoft, she told
Diva Tech Talk, was a place where people got “to experiment, try things, iterate, and hopefully
make change in the industry, and the world.” She explained, “I was there 17 years, got to work
with amazing folks, get exposed to a lot, learned so much. I did M&A around the world, top of
the house executive assessments, and CEO/president succession planning. I facilitated creating
[Microsoft CEO] Satya Nadella’s development plan… I loved that experience. I was given so
many opportunities to learn and to do things that mattered.”3
But Microsoft, though extremely fulfilling, was also highly political at that time and Bailey
decided she needed something new. Initially, she launched out on her own. “I really enjoyed
1 The Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab was endowed and named in 2018. For more on the
Lab, see: https://womensleadership.stanford.edu/ (April 3, 2019). 2 “Monica Bailey: Making GoDaddy the Company Where Everyone Wants to Work,” Diva Tech Talk, December
21, 2018, http://www.divatechtalk.com/blog/ep76 (February 7, 2019). 3 Ibid.
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GoDaddy and the Holy Grail SM-318 p. 3
coaching, executive coaching, but just coaching in general, helping people, and pursued my own
coaching and HR consulting business for about 18 months.” When she saw a LinkedIn
announcement for an open house at GoDaddy she reached out to James Carroll, who was then
GoDaddy’s executive VP for international business and development. She said, “I live in
Seattle. I can come help you guys at your open house for free. I’m clearly horrible at business
development, but I love you guys, and I’d love to help you, and maybe I could help you with you
some work you would even pay me for.” They met, and GoDaddy almost immediately asked her
to join the team. She accepted the offer, and never looked back.
GoDaddy
GoDaddy was founded by Bob Parsons in 1999 to create an affordable alternative to the big
Internet domain registration companies. Parsons said he established the company on the
principles of “providing superior customer service, competitive pricing and a responsibility to do
the right thing” with the intent to “make a little money from a lot of people,”4 rather than a lot of
money from a smaller customer base. By 2018, GoDaddy had grown to “power the world’s
largest cloud platform dedicated to entrepreneurs.”5 It had 7,000 employees at 14 facilities,
including Arizona, California, Iowa, and Washington in the United States, and overseas offices
in Asia and Europe. In 2020, the company had more than 19 million global customers.
The Women’s Leadership Lab
The Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, founded at Stanford in 1974, aimed to
put “research into action by inspiring innovative solutions that advance gender equality.”6 In
2013, the Clayman Institute created a new initiative led by Professor Shelley J. Correll with an
aim to accelerate change toward gender equality in organizations.7 Correll then launched a
corporate affiliates program that, among other things, offered toolkits intended to promote more
inclusive hiring and talent evaluation.8 At the outset of the initiative, Correll developed a change
model that drove the research philosophy of what came to be known as the Women’s Leadership
Labthe emphasis was to educate organizational partners and engage them in a collaborative
co-creation process to design interventions that would meet the culture where it’s at and generate
small wins.9
Mutual Benefit
GoDaddy had made inclusivity a business priority and established a “Women in Tech Initiative”
back in 2013, the year Bailey joined the company. By working with the Women’s Leadership
Lab at Stanford, GoDaddy executives hoped to deepen and accelerate this initiative and thus
make more rapid progress on their goals of “transform[ing] the brand, grow[ing] the business
4 Monica Sanders, “Rags to Riches: Bob Parsons, Founder of GoDaddy.com,” Legal Zoom,
https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/rags-to-riches-bob-parsons-founder-of-godaddycom (February 7, 2019). 5 “Our Story,” GoDaddy, https://aboutus.godaddy.net/about-us/default.aspx (February 7, 2019). 6 “Mission,” Stanford Clayman Institute for Gender Research, https://gender.stanford.edu/about/mission
(February 7, 2019).
7 For more on Shelley J. Correll, see https://womensleadership.stanford.edu/people/shelley-j-correll. 8 For more on The Women’s Leadership Lab Corporate Program, see:
https://womensleadership.stanford.edu/corporate. 9 For more background on the research approach, see: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-
research/publications/reducing-gender-biases-modern-workplaces-small-wins-approach.
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GoDaddy and the Holy Grail SM-318 p. 4
globally, and build[ing] a diverse and best in class product and engineering function.”10 The
company firmly believed that “diverse teams build better products”11 and that recruiting great
women at all levels would help it better serve its customers, more than half of whom were
women who owned small businesses.12 The polarizing advertising of the past was not deemed to
best serve the company’s ever-diversifying set of customers.
The Women’s Leadership Lab had spent years conducting research intended to diagnose bias in
organizational structures, especially people processes; designing and evaluating solutions to
block this bias; and conducting pilot interventions to test their research. It was interested in
partnering with GoDaddy to test the efficacy of its change model, explained JoAnne Wehner, a
research associate at the Lab. In this way, it would further its mission of helping to create a more
level playing field on which everyone could evenly have an opportunity to be successful and
thrive, and a world to which everyone could equally contribute, regardless of gender. GoDaddy
was of particular interest to the Lab because it had a less-entrenched bureaucracy than many
organizations its size and, explained Wehner, “offered the promise of agility in terms of
implementing process changeespecially since they were already a few years in to significantly
overhauling many of their people processes.”13
WHERE TO BEGIN?
Diagnosing Bias
GoDaddy had put considerable effort into its people processes since 2013. “Even before
working with the Lab, we took to the whiteboard and redesigned everything with great
intentions,” explained Bailey. “So, we created wonderful values. We redesigned the
performance review. We did all of this. We even released our pay parity data. At the company
level, for every dollar a man earned, his female counterpart in a similar role and geography also
earned a dollar.”
But, continued Bailey, as they dug more deeply, they began to understand that things were more
complex than they seemed. GoDaddy values, for instance, “were powerful and emotive, but they
weren’t written by researchers who know how to block bias.” And GoDaddy’s vaunted pay
parity, too, looked less praiseworthy as they analyzed it further. She explained:
At an initial glance, it looked like we paid people really welluntil you dig in
and you start to see I actually don’t have any women getting to a Level Six…
women’s promotion velocity was slower than that of their male counterparts. So,
yeah, women were doing quite well in their pay at their levels, but they were
sitting in those levels longer than their male counterparts.
10 “How GoDaddy Reinvented as Gender Champions,” HR Open Source, December 5, 2016,
https://hros.co/case-study-upload/2016/12/5/how-godaddy-reinvented-themselves-as-gender-champions
(February 7, 2019).
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Quotes from JoAnne Wehner come from internal written materials provided by her and conversation August 15,
2018. Subsequent unattributed quotations are from same source unless otherwise indicated.
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GoDaddy and the Holy Grail SM-318 p. 5
This deep dive into the data made Bailey and the GoDaddy leadership realized that they needed
more help. “Even with all that intention to create inclusive people processes, it’s nearly
impossible to get it right unless you learn how to reduce bias and put energy and focus towards
it,” said Bailey. “So that’s when we met the Lab team.”
GoDaddy gave the Lab access to “everything,” said Bailey. This included access to “GoDaddy
Voice,” a survey Bailey built to measure and better understand employee engagement; all data
regarding gender; and a sample of redacted performance reviews. “We also gave them a seat at
our most senior calibration meetings, which we call talent review” explained Bailey.
Digging through Data
The Lab started its analysis with the employee engagement survey responses. They found,
explained Wehner, that female employees at GoDaddy felt less supported by their managers
when it came to career development, and reported some dissatisfaction with the level of
inclusion within their teams. The team then dug even deeper, testing for statistical difference by
conducting a regression analysis with the raw numbers of men and of women who reported
support for each question; this was critical, said Wehner, because organizations often “eyeball”
the percentage gaps by gender and think what they are seeing is small and therefore not
problematic. “It is only actually running the statistical tests that allows for a true analysis of
where there are significant gender gaps in attitudes,” she explained. “This is how we identify
where there is smoke and where there is potentially fire.” In this way, researchers determined
that some women at GoDaddy felt they had less managerial support and involvement; received
less valuable feedback on their performance; were less comfortable in expressing their opinions
overall; and were less likely to feel that GoDaddy had opportunities for their career growth.
Next, the Lab conducted focus groups at several GoDaddy campuses.14 These revealed that a
perceived lack of transparency around GoDaddy’s people processes had contributed to a sense of
distrust and suspicion among some female employees. Likewise, there was a pervasive unease
among some women at all levels as to the way the company made decisions for promotions and
assignments, and how evaluations were incorporated into these processes. And there was some
dissatisfaction among female employees regarding the cohesion-building exercises adopted at
both the team and company level, which many said felt more masculine in nature and thus
exclusionary towards women.
The Lab also created an additional survey intended to delve deeper into issues identified as
problematic in the GoDaddy employee engagement survey. This included specific questions
relating to employee understanding of the evaluation process as well as perceptions of fairness
around evaluation decisions and promotion processes, criteria, and training. The survey was
There were, according to the Lab, “a total of three focus groups at GoDaddy’s southwest location: two with female
employees and one with male allies and two focus groups at their Silicon Valley location: one with male employees
and one with female employees. Each focus group was presented with the pre-focus group survey of approximately
ten questions based on our interpretations of the employee engagement survey and what it may have missed or
overlooked. A very short survey was distributed among the participants as well for analysis and presentation to
leaders in the company. Researchers captured the content of the focus groups for future analysis.”
14
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GoDaddy and the Holy Grail SM-318 p. 6
given to participants in the focus groups and, though the sample size was only about 30, Wehner
considered the data to be the most compelling they received.
Next, researchers analyzed approximately 60 performance evaluations seeking general patterns
in language use. They found that, as is not uncommon, women received more vague feedback
than men. Women were more likely to have their personality mentioned; more likely to be told
they needed to change their communication style; and more likely to have more communal
language to describe their performance, involving helping others lead, rather than leading
themselves.
Finally, and perhaps most critically, researchers observed the calibration, or talent review,
sessions of GoDaddy executives, mainly vice presidents, senior directors, and directors. The
calibration sessions discussed employee performanceand these discussions affected decisions
relating to career trajectory, promotion, equity, and salaries. “The patterns observed in
calibration meetings can help diagnose a key juncture where bias may be leading to different
outcomes for male and female employees,” explained Wehner. Watching this happen in real
time allowed the Lab to see how GoDaddy placed men and women in the nine-box matrix the
company had developed to gauge individual progress on specific goals. They observed, said
Wehner, “some examples of women being evaluated for personality traits that seemed irrelevant
to their performance.”
These sessions were similar to performance review processes at many, if not most companies. A
key takeaway from observing these sessions was the evident lack of objectivity in GoDaddy’s
calibration process. “Because managers were not required to prepare in any specific way prior to
the calibration session,” said Wehner, “there was a significant lack of consistency around that
preparation, with some managers using processes they learned at previous jobs, some developing
their own process, and some with seemingly no process at all. Thus there was…extreme
variability in how employee performance was discussed and therefore evaluated.” GoDaddy did
not have uniform processes for running these discussions and leadership values were not
consistently applied in these conversations. This, explained Wehner, impacted the quantitative
performance ratings of men and women, creating a situation in which “men were often more
likely to be labeled as a high-performers.”
DETERMINING THE INTERVENTION FOCUS
After a year or so of intense observation and data analysis, researchers suggested possible ways
to focus their intervention. As Bailey summarized, “They basically said, ‘Hey, there are a
number of ways you can go here. For instance, you could try and experiment with regard to
hiring. But, frankly, a lot of other companies have done that. And then there is the Holy Grail:
helping with career advancement through equal access to top performance marks, which of
course then impacts pay and promotions.'”
Bailey decided to pursue the Holy Grail. “That was set up early on as one of my big goals, a
significant portion of my deliverables for the year,” said Bailey.
The Reaction
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GoDaddy and the Holy Grail SM-318 p. 7
Bailey was well aware that working to level the playing field by way of performance reviews
would not be viewed as an exciting approach. Performance reviews, indeed, had been under fire
for some time in the industry. In 2014, the Washington Post ran an article headlined, “Study
finds that basically every single person hates performance reviews.”15 In 2015, the New Yorker
published a story called “The Push Against Performance Reviews,” which started:
Few institutional practices are as old, or have been hated as long, as the
performance review. Job ratings were used (and criticized) in China as early as
the third century; in the early eighteen-hundreds, an owner of cotton mills in
Scotland hung color-coded wooden blocks over employees’ workstations to
indicate their merit. The bureaucratic corporate culture of the nineteen-
hundredsthe century of cubicles, assembly lines, and Six Sigmaenshrined
performance reviews in corporate handbooks. With its numerical scales and
reinforcement of rigid business hierarchies, the annual evaluation would seem
uniquely designed for the postmodern age.16
And, in 2018, Inc. Magazine declared “Performance reviews are dead” and labeled them a “relic
of the industrial age.”17
Bailey well understood that people disliked the performance review process and, nonetheless,
here she was contemplating a full-scale overhaul of it. She was quite sensitive to how this would
be received, given its low popularity. “Nobody wants to be called ‘medium,'” she said. “Or told
they ‘meet expectations.’ But she nonetheless remained a champion of the performance review.
In fact, GoDaddy was designing its performance review process “right around the same time a
lot of companies were blowing up their performance review processes. And I just could not, and
still cannot, get my head around the idea that companies would do that: Well, how do you hand
out money if you blow up your performance review process?”
While Bailey was determined not to “blow up” a process that she saw as imperfect, but necessary
and critical to improve the capabilities of her company, others in the company were more eager
for explosive, highly visible changes and less interested in focusing on the review process, which
occurred largely behind the scenes. However, Bailey knew that so-called visible initiatives were
often done at many companies for a “quick fix” that didn’t lead to enduring change. “The hard
part is there’s no way to those larger moments unless you do the work,” she said, “and the work
is embedded in our people processesbecause that’s where bias lives.”
15 Jena MacGregor, “Study Finds that Basically Every Single Person Hates Performance Reviews,” The Washington
Post, January 27, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2014/01/27/study-finds-that-
basically-every-single-person-hates-performance-reviews/?utm_term=.ab98bcd5f042 (March 27, 2019).
16 Vauhini Vara, “The Push Against Performance Reviews,” The New Yorker, July 24, 2015,
https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-push-against-performance-reviews (March 27, 2019).
17 Thomas Koulopoulos, “Performance Reviews Are Dead. Here’s What You Should Do Instead,” Inc.
https://www.inc.com/thomas-koulopoulos/performance-reviews-are-dead-heres-what-you-should-do-instead.html
(March 27, 2019).
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GoDaddy and the Holy Grail SM-318 p. 8
A Warning
Early on, as Bailey was still considering taking on the review process, Lab cofounder Lori
Mackenzie, who played an active role in the process and was looking out for Bailey’s best
interests, gave a warning. “Lori said, ‘Monica, I just have to tell you that I think you’re on a
glass cliff here, which is our way of saying we always set women up on these assignments that
they can’t possibly achieve and no man in his right mind would say yesbut you’re saying yes.”
Bailey was somewhat nonplussed. “Lori,” she replied while sitting on her suitcase at an airport
between GoDaddy offices, “it’s kind of a low point when you, who I respect so much, thinks that
[I’m crazy].”
But Bailey was used to challenges and told her, “I built my career on these glass cliffs, and so I
think I can do this. If anybody can give it a try, I know it’s me.”
Championing the Initiative
GoDaddy differed from many companies in that it had what Bailey described as a “very flat,
large” senior leadership team, or SLT, of close to 30 people at the time. Bailey knew it would be
critical to gain feedback and support from the senior leaders of the company, but it would be
inefficient to take significant amounts of time from the SLT to garner this support. At the same
time, GoDaddy placed great value on obtaining such feedback. “It’s a big differentiator for us in
how we work collaboratively with our folks to design solutions and one of the reasons we have
such great sponsorship and are able to affect change so effectively.”
Bailey was stuck, as it were, between a rock and a hard place. Her goal was to overhaul the
performance review process specifically as it pertained to the application of GoDaddy values and
the running of calibration sessions. To do this, she wanted and needed stakeholder feedback.
But, at the same time, she knew only too well that it would be virtually impossible to get the
entire SLT to agree upon a new approach in a group setting. So, she decided to build a “tiger
team” of select senior leaders to work more closely with her. The team had seven people,
recalled Bailey, “a mix of folks who were very passionate, with deep expertise, who happened to
also be rather hard to please.”
Bailey had a considerable amount of compelling research that had been provided to her by the
Lab and she shared this with the Tiger Team. “Here’s the researchhere’s what we’re going to
work on,” Bailey told them. But her colleagues, even in a smaller group, did not suffer from an
excess of enthusiasm for performance reviews. “They were like, ‘Ah, performance review
criteria. That sounds really boring….’ ‘I don’t want that. I don’t think that will make a
difference. I don’t get it.'”
Instead, said Bailey, “Everybody wanted unconscious bias training. That was really popular at
the time. Everybody wanted to do something really big and tangible so when folks walked into
the room, we just suddenly had a better culture.”
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GoDaddy and the Holy Grail SM-318 p. 9
Bailey understood, however, that there was no quick fix. Performance reviews offered a key
pathway to undo forms of bias from the “inside out” because they got to the core of GoDaddy
its people and its leaders. Thus, she came to an unhappy, but important realization. “This team
of stakeholders I had pulled together was clearly not aligned. There wasn’t a lot of agreement,
and I didn’t have Blake, the CEO, in that group at the time. If either one of them had been there,
it would probably have gone differently. But, I did not have my stakeholders aligned with me.”
It was a low point, but Bailey, who knew her job required her to be “an organizational athlete,”
was not one to give up. “The bottom line was, we just had to get it done,” she said, adding, “And
I believe diversity has to be embedded in the way we operate, rather than a separate program.”
As Bailey thought through her next course of action, she considered the most effective options
for gaining the buy-in that would enable her to champion the initiative.
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