Over the last several years, human resources teams have been able to take advantage of ever more technology tools. One reason for this is the large numbers of businesses embracing digital transformation, helping business leaders understand the insights that data can bring them driving new vendors to enter the space …
Articles in the Management and Leadership category
all categoriesA resignation can be an opportunity
People leave jobs. If you are a manager, people will leave your team, just as someday you will leave your team.
When this happens it’s an opportunity, a chance to re-evaluate. While you might want to immediately pull out the job description that you used when hiring for the …
Changing Hiring Practices to Build a More Diverse Technology Organization, A Case Study from Avvo
Introduction
I was the Chief Technology Officer at Avvo from 2016 until 2018, when the company was acquired. One of the proudest achievements of my tenure there was building a more diverse and inclusive technology team.
While I have spoken a bit about our efforts before in talks, I haven't …
The Personal Strategy Off-site
If your company is starting to plan for getting back into your office, now is a good time for you to schedule a personal strategy day.
The Whirlwind
In the whirlwind of the day-to-day work, it is often hard to carve out time for something that does not have a …
Using Self-Selection to Create Journey Teams at Avvo
Many companies are interested in experimenting with self-selection as a way of organizing their teams. I see questions about the process often in online forums. While there are some excellent books and blog posts on the topic, I thought that I would share a self-selection exercise that we did at …
How I Get My Focused Work Done
In management, we can become very "interrupt driven." We get so used to distractions that we count on them. This dependency can make it very hard to focus when we need to. My calendar fills up with meetings. My unscheduled time is full of people stopping by to ask questions …
In 2018 Decide to Work Deliberately
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." – Henry David Thoreau
You may have …
Building a Management Training Curriculum at Avvo
This week, we kicked off manager training for Avvo technology managers. Before we could build a curriculum, we needed to decide what was important to learn and where we as a group needed the most development.
If I had done this with my organization at Adobe, years ago, I might …
A diversity challenge: tech start-ups have a great opportunity
For decades we’ve been complaining about the lack of diversity in the technology industry. We’ve worked on the pipeline problem. We’ve worked on reducing bias. We’ve worked on the sourcing problem. We’ve worked on the retention problem. The net result thus far is that we …
The Spotify model: how to create, dissolve, and remix teams to be more dynamic and more innovative
One of the most challenging parts of managing a traditional, hierarchical, organization is being responsive to new opportunities; especially those that require leveraging skillsets outside your own team. At Spotify, our organizational model allows us to create, dissolve, and remix teams with a minimal disruption to individuals or managers. This …