I remember thinking, how am I going to do this? I had just started my first full-time job out of college, and I was getting married that year. I had been given two weeks of vacation for my first year that I had to earn throughout the year. If I wanted to take a honeymoon and be off a day or two before the wedding, I really had almost no time left to take off. And a couple of my good friends were getting married that summer too, and I was in their weddings out of town. Was I going
“Mommy,” my five-year-old said from the backseat of the car on the way to school one morning, “What do you do for work (pronounced more like wurk)?” I wasn’t sure where her question was coming from, but in trying to think about how to describe what I do to so her Pre-K mind would understand, I quickly thought that “consulting” wasn’t going to make sense. So, I chose instead to describe what I do in the context of what I was scheduled to do that day. “Well, today, I’m going to train some people on their first day of work.
I’m preparing to take my kids into Target, Lord help me. I just need to get some necessities. I park the car, turn and look them in the eye and tell them, “We are not going to the toy section. We are here to get milk, a card for someone, and some toilet paper. You will both walk beside me and the cart. You will not run, and you will not ask if you can go look at toys, okay?” I get “yes ma’am”. And then ask them to repeat back to me what I just said and what they
Much has been said about the open office floor plan. The concept arose out of Silicon Valley and became a popular way to supposedly create “collaborative” work environments where innovation happens. Oh, and as an added bonus, companies saved a lot of money designing office spaces as open. I’m not sure which came first, the chicken or the egg- the realization that money could be saved this way, or that “collaboration” and therefore innovation would thrive in this type of design. But in many studies, including this one: The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration, it was found
We conducted a focus group about a year ago with a group of business leaders around the idea of organizational values and culture. In this focus group, we presented seven key values, based on research that defined organizational culture. The goal was to see what these professionals thought about these seven values in the context of a broader assessment product. And whether this values set could predict a company’s culture in order to match candidates to cultures that align with individual the candidates’ values. Often things like this come down to semantics, but one piece of feedback where there was