Do as I Say, Not as I Do?

Earlier today, I wrote a post asking questions about Nextdoor’s workplace strategy.

From what I’ve seen, members of the C-suite appear to work from various locations, while engineers are expected to report to a new engineering hub in Dallas, Texas. If that’s the strategy, I’d genuinely like to understand the business rationale behind it.

I tagged several members of Nextdoor’s leadership team. Some I couldn’t tag because I couldn’t locate their LinkedIn profiles. Ironically, one of them was Kelsey Grady, Executive Vice President, Communications.

An interesting thing happened afterward.

Craig Lisowski viewed my LinkedIn profile.

According to his LinkedIn profile, he is CTO (Chief Technical Officer) and President of Products, and his location is listed as San Francisco, California.

If the engineering “meeting of the minds” is centered in Dallas, that’s quite a commute.

So I’ll ask again, respectfully:

What is the leadership philosophy behind having executives distributed across multiple locations while requiring engineers to work from a centralized office?

There may be a sound business reason. If so, I’d love to hear it. Transparency around decisions like these helps employees, prospective candidates, shareholders, and customers better understand the company’s direction.

Someone, please explain this to me.

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