Leadership Lessons from the Kitchen: How to Prevent Difficult Communication from Burning Your Fingers

I would never have guessed at the time but leaving the Ivy League to go to culinary school gave me the opportunity to learn a lot about leadership. I recently shared four of the lessons I learned as a chef and the response was overwhelming. Since my lessons seem to have hit a nerve, I thought I’d […]

Why Communication Fails and How to Fix it: The Perception Gap

Despite your best efforts, there’s a very good chance that your communication is being perceived and processed in a way you did not intend. The disconnect between what is meant to be communicated and what is actually understood is known as a Perception Gap. In this two part series, I will talk about Perception Gaps, […]

Diversity Officers Must Have These Four Qualities

Google, known for having its finger on the pulse of the future, has an employee base that is only 2% black and 3% Hispanic. Apple, also known for building our future, has an employee base that is 70% male. These indisputable stats show that ethnic, racial and gender imbalances are prominent in the U.S., despite […]

What We Want Our Future Leaders To Know

What will make a future leader successful? I explored this in my piece, *Portrait of a Future Leader, published as part of Upwork’s Work: Reimagined series on Medium. Really getting down to the nitty-gritty of how major workforce trends will affect leaders was exciting. But I don’t know everything. What will make a future leader successful? I […]

Can Eliminating Workplace Bias Be as Simple as Interrupting It?

Despite continued diversity efforts from the United States Government and organizations around the country, minorities are still largely underrepresented in the United States workforce. When looking at the statistics presented by “well meaning” companies, the picture is painfully clear. For example, Google reports that 6.4% of their employees are Hispanic and just 4.4.% are Black. […]

How to Merge Creativity and Business

Business is so much more than ROI and numbers. It is also about creativity and compassion. The truth is, you cannot run a successful business if you are not creative. Bringing creativity into your leadership is more than just supplying the Playdough at a company retreat.  It is about fostering innovation and allowing mistakes to […]

Leading Collaboration in a Virtual World

In the blink of an eye, the new normal has become working from home. The expectation is to become a high performing team that is able to collaborate remotely and successfully achieve all of its goals. This means that overnight, leaders are expected to become experts in how to lead collaboration in virtual teams. New […]

Competency Database Management

A well-defined competency database is an organizational game changer. Why? Because organizations with this database optimize performance. First, what is a competency and an organizational competency database? A competency is defined as a knowledge, skill, ability or interest. Many groups of competencies are inherently difficult to measure, such as strategic analysis or complex pattern recognition. […]

Seven Tips for Managing Unconscious Bias

Bias—a tendency to believe that some people and ideas are better than others—wrecks havoc in the workplace. It keeps women and people of color out of the boardroom, limits job opportunities, prevents organizations from the true monetary and cultural benefits of a diverse workforce, makes it difficult for Baby Boomers to get tech jobs, and […]

It Takes Courage To Use EQ

Emotional Intelligence. We hear the term all the time, thinking it’s some abstract leadership model that only the elite use to improve themselves and their teams. I’m here to tell you that EQ is real and the opportunity to use it occurs many times a day, if you’re willing to listen and use it. Here are three […]