Every year, the U.S. recognizes March as Women’s History Month, and as the CEO of Center for Executive Excellence, a Woman-Owned Business, I’m excited to celebrate. If you’re wondering how you can celebrate Women’s History Month this month and beyond, here are four excellent tips.
I am so honored to be able to share – in this 90th edition of CEE News – that Center for Executive Excellence is marking our 10th anniversary this month! That’s one decade of delivering on our mission: Taking you from what is to what is possible.
What started in 2013 as gatherings in my home with a small group of trusted thought leaders to develop our moonshot vision has truly exceeded my expectations. We used Jim Collins’ Vision Framework exercises to craft our core ideology and shared values. We then took Collins’ advice to draft articles that we would love to see published about our organization 15 years in the future.
When we’d completed the articles, our Co-Founder and Scholar-in-Residence, Dr. Tony Baron, read one that he’d hoped to read in the New York Times about how our work was impacting leaders at Ivy League universities. I loved Tony’s vision, but remember thinking how impossible that vision was from what we might ever be capable of.
As the CEO of a training, coaching, and consulting team, I believe strongly in taking my own medicine. What I mean by this is that, wherever possible, I take the same assessments and participate in the same training that we recommend to our clients.
Because of this, I know that my my Top 5 Strengths, based on the Gallup StrengthsFinder assessment, are Strategic, Input, Learner, Maximizer, and Relator. My Myers-Briggs type is INTJ, which stands for Introversion, Intuition, Thinking, and Judging. I show up as a Di (Dominance/influence) at work based on the DiSC assessment.
Last year, I participated in the first cohort of a 12-month DEI Executive Training program that we launched in partnership with Blue Ocean Brain. The program consisted of four progressive levels of DEI lessons curated from the Blue Ocean Brain platform. For each level, our cohort completed six 15-minute microlessons and met in live online group conversations to unpack the material with DEI master facilitator, Casey Tonnelly.
As the year begins to wind down, many organizations are preparing to conduct year-end performance reviews with their teams. For managers of remote teams, in particular, ensuring that these meetings are both constructive and empathetic can prove difficult. If you’re a manager with a fully or hybrid remote team, keep these strategies in mind to ensure that you’re leading a human-centric discussion.
I took a hiatus from writing this message last month to celebrate my wedding anniversary with my husband of 20 years. We spent a week exploring ancient sites in Istanbul, Cappadocia, and Antioch (now Antakya), then another week at the seaside town of Alayna where our in-laws have a vacation flat.
Honestly, Turkey has never been on my bucket list. But, I’m so appreciative of the opportunity to research and experience the rich culture, ancient history, beautifully preserved archeology, geography, and food that Turkey has to offer. We stayed two nights in Istanbul just steps away from the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia.
This year, I had the opportunity to work with two major clients to help them refresh their strategic goals. One organization chose the old school method of having business unit and operational leaders gather in person at a multi-day retreat to share their first pass plans with one another, then refine those plans over the next two months and lock in their goals for the next fiscal year along with OPEX and CAPEX budgets. The other organization (which, ironically, is a department of an Ivy League school) chose to refresh their strategic plans iteratively over a five-month period. They wanted to involve more stakeholders in the planning process, which would ideally result in shared accountability for delivering on the goals.