Partnerships and Possibilities Podcast

“It’s not just enough to get people in the pipeline. You have to make it worthwhile to get them to stay.” In what ways does your organization seek and hire a diverse workforce? In w...

“A team is more than just the sum of a bunch of individual contributors’ thinking together. A team’s primary work is learning together and making decisions.” What makes a team...

“We’ve been making these issues [of women in the workforce] explicit at least since ’70s. Forty-five years is a long time to talking about the same stuff.” How are you pushing to ex...

“There is not much that is specific to a virtual team, that couldn’t apply to almost any team.” Are you on a virtual team or managing one? What challenge does your virtual team face...

“Everybody is saying we need to strive for servant leadership, but nobody seems to know what that looks like.” What is your style of leadership? What kinds of leadership have you observed...

“We’ve been ranging over a lot of current topics lately, and for so many of them we feel we’ve visited them before – everything old is new again. Here is what we’ve been finding out about influe...

“At one point during the ‘Women in Agile’ presentation, a man sat down to join the mostly female audience. One of the presenters thanked him for participating. He replied, ‘Don’t thank me ...

“When I see inequity, here is how I’m responding to it, here’s how I’m trying to shift the behavior, both in myself and in creating the conditions to shift it in others.” What are you seeing in your...

“Do we need managers? It depends.” What role(s) do managers have in your organization? How are managers viewed in your place of work? What does the staffing structure look like?...

“Technological and philosophical progress happens because it builds on the work of previous folks …we’re all part of a continuous stream.” What are your thoughts? Are “new” ideas repackaged “old” ide...

“There are people who fundamentally believe that competition is the way to get the best out of people, and there are people who fundamentally believe that the spirit of collaboration is the way you th...

“Retrospectives help us define and examine a body of work, what we can learn from it, and what that tells us about going forward and then choosing those next steps to move forward.” What would be use...

“There is a cost to setting up a system where people feel less connected to your company.” Have you had any experiences with the untethered office? What are your thoughts on this evolving workspace c...

“The mission and the culture need to be embedded in every single process that touches a prospective employee.” Have you observed a company or do you know about a company that you think does a fabulou...

“Do the thing to learn the thing.” Do you work in a learning organization? Has it been effective in building your capabilities and enhancing your work processes?...

“Simple rules need to be scalable and generalizable, they have to be action-oriented, and they’re always stated in the positive.” Has your organization, team or group incorporated simple rules? What ...

“A mentor helps you understand how to navigate your organization, a sponsor helps advocate for you, and a coach is there to help you develop both the skills and the thinking acumen to be able to perfo...

“The more things change, the more our objections to change stay the same.” – Bill Taylor Are you a middle manager whose organization has gone through a change? What was your role in this organization...

As a leader can you acknowledge what is going on with the people that you’re dealing with, do you see them? Do they feel seen when they are with you? Seeing each other in a real way, and making that a...

“Some of the highest performing companies in the country have the culture thing figured out, they nurture their internal brand as a strategic asset that stimulates a strong external brand.” – Ted Sick...

“You cannot be a good contributor if you never look away.” Have you read any of the recent articles published in the September 2013 issue of the Harvard Business Review? Where do you agre...

“There’s a lot in the zeitgeist right now that’s looking at the differences between how men and women lead, how those differences in leadership style, whether done by a man or a woman, impact people’s...

I think that we have a culture, right now, a business culture, a larger social culture that has so much rigidity around scarcity and fearfulness and a lot of the negative parts of being human and we’r...

HR typically has been set up in the past and has been staffed by people who saw it as their role to protect the organization… but there is another whole set of function that support the strategic role...

“It’s how we respond to the changes, it’s how we think about them, it’s how we interact, how we deal, how we cope, how we make meaning of the change that makes the difference.” What are you doing to ...

“It’s really about stepping into your power, and believing that you have more power than many women typically do.” Have you read Lean In? Or have you experienced some of the issues discussed in today...

“The meetings you do have you want them to be a good use of everybody’s time but there is also ‘do we really need to have a meeting every single time?’” If you have other techniques in helping meetin...

“ More often the same person who is convening the meeting is expected to lead and facilitate it. Leading it is making sure the right content is being covered, and introducing the content, facilitating...

“It is not only new information coming in all the time that needs to be learned. But old assumptions are being challenged, so everything we thought we knew and could be put on the shelf and rely on, t...

“Lean is about being accessible to and more influenced by the voice of the customer and having the flexibility to adapt and adjust as you move along.” Have you participated in a lean start-up process...

“In a team situation, having a star performer becomes a threat and an opportunity. If a person is a star performer, their job is to spread their skills around to other members, to mentor and pair with...

“Using self-awareness and self-knowledge for self-management seems to be key in becoming an effective leader.” What instruments have you experienced that have been helpful to you? When has really goo...

“Membership in the secret club carries with it the need to behave in certain ways that may not be your personal inclination. My advice would be to get some experience to get a clear-eyed understanding...

“Leadership really comes from the nature of the questions you ask rather than the statements that you make.” What questions have been particularly powerful for you? What questions have you asked or h...

“One of the guiding thoughts about simple rules is that not only are they pretty short and action oriented by starting with a verb, but they are also generalizable and scalable so that they can help y...

“How can a leader be an innovator or expect innovation in their own organization if they’re not willing to experiment with the idea of innovation about what leadership is and how you do it?” How is l...

“To really accept that the world and change are emergent is to accept a kind of stance that says ‘I really can’t know the future and I really can’t do a whole lot to prepare for it’ and that makes peo...

“You can’t really be a good negotiator if you can’t hold boundaries …And to hold the boundary you have to be able to see it, you have to be able to perceive where the boundary lies.” What kind of neg...

“We become somehow acculturated to making do with what we’re given rather than asking for what would make things better.” What are some of your negotiation experiences? What tips did you garner from ...

“If we admit that we can continually improve, we somehow think we’re admitting we’re not enough right now. And I don’t think of it that way, I think we are doing the best we can right now, and we can ...

“Vulnerability is really about allowing ourselves to be seen… there are ways of being seen a little more clearly in places that actually helps and helps other people and helps the situation.” What ki...

“The need to have more women involved in software development, since women are at least half of the consumers of software development … does give us some differences in perspectives, although there ar...

“Stories can be very powerful, [but] it’s not enough to just have a story to tell, it has to have relevance, it has to have meaning, to you personally, you have to tell the story sincerely, [and] with...

“Politics is really how we get things done – it’s the networks, it’s the interactions, it’s who talks to who, who influences who.” What kinds of power and politics have you seen in your organization?...

“If you use the credibility that comes with your job title, once, and then people discover that it really wasn’t authentic then you’ve broken trust and trust is difficult to restore once broken.” How...

“Effective persuasion becomes a negotiating and learning process through which a persuader leads colleagues to a problem’s shared solution” – Jay A. Conger, PhD, Professor and Author Have you experie...

“Our influence is a source of power; the way we influence is unique to each of us.” What is your unique source of influence and how are you using it in your organization? When have you needed to reac...

“Once you define a problem differently, it opens up different solutions and the possibility then of influencing the patterns becomes much greater because there are different places you can touch the p...

“Leaderful organization…It’s collective because it involves lots of people and it disburses the leadership throughout. It’s collaborative and it’s compassionate…”...

“The essence of leadership; it’s about who you are and being clear about your values.”...