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The Case Against Chief Diversity, Quality, Excellence Officers or Centers

All companies appear to be grappling with their approach to diversity and inclusion in the organization. Many have appointed Chief Diversity Officers. However,  when you appoint a Chief Anything Officer, you decline responsibility for that thing yourself. I’ve seen this in Quality, Excellence, you name it. When you name a Chief <something> Officer, you no …

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Build Respect in Organizations, Not Families, Part 4

I started this series positing that respect is the cornerstone for how we might treat each other, to manage our interactions with success, especially in light of the #MeToo conversation. The series so far is: Organizations Are Not Families, Part 1. Why the metaphor of family-as-org demeans the people working there. Build Respect in Organizations, …

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Power, Management, and Harassment: It’s a Cultural Problem

You may think the #MeToo tag doesn’t have anything to do with product development. Not so fast. When people behave badly (more often it’s men than women, but it can be either), the people suffer. When the people suffer, the product suffers. It suffers in development and it suffers in release. The issue is this: …

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Terrific Question for Assessing Culture in a Job Search

In The One Question You Should Ask About Every New Job, Grant says, Ask people to tell you a story about something that happened at their organization but wouldn’t elsewhere. There are four categories of stories: The human-ness of senior management (or not) Promotion opportunities for anyone How the organization fires/lays off The consequences for …

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Series on Hiring Technical People

Have you seen Nick Korbel’s series about hiring techies? See On Hiring Techies. There are several posts: Evaluate Potential, Not Accomplishments. He’s talking about evaluating qualities, preferences, and non-technical skills. Coding Challenge: A pre-interview audition. The cool thing is that they then discuss the audition in the interview. The Team Interview. I dislike panel interviews. …

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