Letter from the Founder
Welcome to the seventy-third issue of CEE News!
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I recently completed a leadership course taught by Dr. Ronald Heifetz, Founder of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University. I took the Harvardx course to audit it for a client who wants to develop their high-potential employees. Not only did the course offer ways to mobilize people to tackle tough problems, but it also helped participants build the capacity to thrive through the complexities of change.
In his closing lecture, Dr. Heifetz told this personal story on the myth of measurement.
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Letter from the Founder
Welcome to the seventy-second issue of CEE News!
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What role should female leaders play in helping their C-suite navigate the issue of state efforts to restrict reproductive rights in America?
What are some workplace policies or practices that companies should enact to support women and accelerate progress in closing the gender gap in the workforce?
These are just two of the questions tackled by participants in our recent panel discussion, HERstory: A Conversation With Executive Women About Gender Equality. As I listened to the responses from the panelists, I was struck how women executives are uniquely suited to navigate the nuances of the 21st century workplace.
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Letter from the Founder
Welcome to the seventy-first issue of CEE News!
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Following the murder of George Floyd last May, a tragedy that touched off months of protests and civil unrest, a credit union CEO near Minneapolis found himself in a place similar to thousands of corporate leaders. He knew he wanted to reach out to employees in a personal, companywide email letting everyone know he took this seriously and that the credit union was looking at its own diversity practices to determine what additional measures could be taken.
But as he sat down to write, he recalls, “there was a level of anxiety for me about the right words to pick. Am I going to offend someone? Am I pushing my own agenda? How is this going to land on people? How are they going to absorb it?”
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Letter from the Founder
Welcome to the seventieth issue of CEE News!
Last Thursday, I met a girlfriend for a glass of wine at a beautiful restaurant in San Diego during Happy Hour. After spending more than twelve months in a state of suspended animation—limiting my social interactions to fewer than a dozen people—I felt free.
Since March of 2020, my husband and I have limited our gatherings to a small cohort of family and friends. We ran our companies from our home offices and dedicated ourselves to making sure that our teams and clients were as safe, sound, and sane as possible through a year+ of uncertainty.
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Letter from the Founder
Welcome to the sixty-ninth issue of CEE News!
If the turmoil of 2020 has prompted your leadership team to reconsider people priorities such as employee well-being, resilience, or purpose, then you’re in good company. Your employees are reconsidering you, too.
An August 2020 study by McKinsey found that nearly 70% of U.S.-based employees said that the Covid-19 pandemic has caused them to reflect on their purpose in life. Almost half said that they are reconsidering the kind of work they do because of the pandemic. Millennials – the largest generation in the U.S. labor force – were three times more likely than others to say that they were reevaluating work.
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Letter from the Founder
Welcome to the sixty-eighth issue of CEE News!
Gay men are naturally fashionable. Black men are the best athletes. Asians are the model minority.
These are just three examples of positive stereotypes, or subjectively favorable beliefs about certain social groups. And, just as negative stereotypes can be harmfully inaccurate, so too, can positive stereotypes. The trope about Asians being the model minority, for example, largely stems from the idea that Asian Americans have achieved socio-economic mobility through superior education. The problem with this positive stereotype is that it undermines the Asian American and Pacific Islander AAPI community as a monolithic group protected from systemic racism in America. The inconvenient truth, however, is that the AAPI community faces discrimination and persecution while society falsely insists they are protected.
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