Picture this: The leadership team of a small nonprofit organization is at its annual retreat. The makeup of the leadership team is mostly white, mostly women. These are the senior-most leaders from the organization; all of the people in the room have at least 20 years of professional experience. This group is not new to each other – all have worked at the organization for 5 or more years. The group engages in a game Read more…
Vulnerability moment: As a Chief of Staff, I floundered. When I was hired by the Interim CEO, things were so unsettled that I had a hard time putting out the dumpster fires long enough to be able to pull the valuables out of the trash. When she left, the next CEO had a clear vision of what she wanted me to do, but didn’t communicate it clearly, so we spent a good deal of time Read more…
Can you believe it’s July? I can’t. At my last job, July marked the beginning of the planning year. Annual goals were set for July 1 – June 30. I was responsible for facilitating the goal setting process for the leadership time (and effectively, if done right, for the rest of the organization). It was a Herculean effort to get people to produce a decent set of focused, aligned, and measurable goals. The process started Read more…
In his book The Good Enough Job, Simone Stolzoff shares a powerful lesson about defining your identity as more than what you do for work. There’s so much pressure to “love what you do, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” There’s a danger in giving work all of your best energy and not tending to the other aspects of your life – even if you absolutely love it. Stolzoff shares a number Read more…
When I was a Chief of Staff, I was new to the role and to the organization. I spent a lot of time and energy navigating the newness of the situation, and even without the element of learning it would have been a challenging job. I loved the role itself – but it’s probably the most complex role I’ve ever had. It can be a lonely job – you are rarely a part of a Read more…
Back in April I wrote a series on the importance of feedback. If you weren’t a subscriber yet or want a refresher, you can access the full series here. In the final part of the series, I referred to a framework for providing behavioral feedback – the SBI framework (Situation – Behavior – Impact). I like it because it takes the emotion out of giving feedback, it allows you to get specific and evidence-based, and Read more…
I once worked with an organization with a wildly broken and inequitable compensation system. Hiring was driven completely by individual hiring managers, and it was up to them to advocate for whatever salary they felt appropriate. This means that people started at very different starting points depending on their team. Then there was the mess of promotions. In my experience there are two distinct paths to an increase in compensation – one is a promotion, Read more…
Have you ever taken a personality test? I am kinda obsessed with them, especially now that they are freely accessible. I think I probably took my first Myers-Briggs test when I was in college or maybe in my first job. I could never remember the results – mainly because all the letters sound the same. A few years ago I found www.16personalities.com and suddenly I can remember. This methodology is Myers-Briggs-esque, but has some additional Read more…
I once observed a manager who claimed to subscribe to the philosophy of servant leadership. She had an admirable practice of meeting early-on with new team members about her philosophy and her preferred ways of working. She dropped the term servant leadership into those orientations and into hiring discussions as something she was looking for in the people on her teams as well. Yet in practice, I’m not sure her ways of being were completely Read more…
Last week I was talking to a colleague about a job lead. In the course of the conversation, he used the term “golden handcuffs” to describe the perks of a job that he otherwise should have left. He said, “the place was a mess and wasn’t using my skills or providing any growth opportunities, but man, did those golden handcuffs look pretty!” Full company closures in July and December (above and beyond PTO), summer Fridays, Read more…