I launched this website in early 2018 because I left a full-time executive position at the end of 2017 and was about to launch a practice in communications consulting and writing. (I also wanted to do meeting design and facilitation …
Tag: Organizational culture
When people behave poorly in the workplace
From my earliest jobs after college, I have vivid memories of incidents when my bosses at the time called me into their offices to reprimand me for doing something wrong. These dressing-downs were usually about breaking confidentiality – one boss …
It’s not the job. It’s me.
I would like nothing better than to write about people I know who are feeling happy and fulfilled in their jobs. But most of the people in my life, unfortunately, are not feeling that way. Those on the younger side …
The magic of alignment in work
I am six feet under with writing work and also experiencing the emotional whiplash that comes from being a consumer of political news these days, but since I skipped last month’s entry, I felt compelled to write about a topic …
Being up in your own head about work
It feels like every week brings another bad workplace story. Last week, Rolling Stone published a piece about Jimmy Fallon creating a toxic workplace environment on his show, Late Night. The piece included numerous reports from former and current employees, …
Being seen and rewarded at work
A dear friend and former colleague of mine emailed me the other day. She recently retired from an organization where I had worked for many years, most of them closely with her, and to this day, she remains one of …
Taking the first steps towards change
I am a lifelong devourer of books, but I rarely read nonfiction. I don’t know why, but reading big, fat books about building the Brooklyn Bridge or Lincoln’s cabinet just don’t grab me, narratively, the same way that fiction does. …
Can we make work suck less?
I am having an unexpectedly slow start to work in 2022—unexpected because I thought I had projects lined up and now they’re either stalled or assuming different shapes than what I originally envisioned. This has left me with a lot …
Going back to the office
Out of the many TED talks/articles that turned into books that then turned into consulting businesses, I think “radical candor” generated some of the funniest stories for me. Radical candor, for the blissfully unaware, was an approach to delivering candid …
Company values: It’s complicated, I guess
At most organizations where I’ve worked, if organizational values were not already a thing, they became a Thing while I worked there. People realized that it’s not enough to have a clear mission; you also need guiding principles on how …