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 what ways does it convince them to stay?

“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? How do you become an effective member of a team? And how does your team become effective together?

“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 expand the discussion? How are you seeing others come up with genuinely new insights and observations about the struggles of women in the workforce?

“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? How have you worked to solve them?

“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 in colleagues? Which have been most effective for particular situations?

“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 influence and how we’ve been making it new again.” How do you observe yourself or your colleagues influencing each other? What kinds of influence do you see as critical for lasting positive changes?

“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 – I have a daughter!’” What are you seeing in your organization relating to women’s experience in the workplace? How are you involved in the growing conversation?

“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 organization relating to gender roles and gender equality? What type of things are you doing that are helping these more subtle gender equity and equality shifts occur?

“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” ideas?

“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 that you get the best out of people.” What are your experiences with staff ranking or other policies and processes in your organization that you feel have helped you perform better or have gotten in the way of performing better? Have you seen or experienced real significant differences in policies and processes between private industries or government, schools and other such organizations?

“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 useful for you to learn to incorporate retrospectives in your organization? Who would benefit from exploring this idea and how to do this kind of work in an effective way? How open do you think people in your organization would be to including retrospectives as a process for continuous improvement?

“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 concept?

“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 fabulous job of finding good people and making them feel special? What are some of the things that you have seen this company do? What contributes to the whole recruiting, hiring and onboarding experience?

“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 impact have simple rules had on your group’s coherence?

“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 perform well.” Have you been a mentor, sponsor or coach in your organization? Or maybe you have been on the receiving end? What differences or similarities have you experienced? Which relationship have you found to be most helpful in your career?

“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 organizational change? What challenges and/or successes did you face?

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 acknowledgement, is so powerful.

“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 Sickinger If you work in a place that you really think could be a top workplace, what is it about that place that makes it so? If you have some opinions about what would keep a workplace from showing up on such a list, we’d be interested in your thoughts on what those conditions are.