I spoke on a panel regarding Performance Management at early-stage startups yesterday, and there was a question from the audience that I’ve been mulling over since.  The question was, “As a startup CEO whose company just raised seed funding and has a handful of employees, how much should I really care about fostering an environment…

I was recently on a panel at Stacklist’s Stack Summit.  Topic was Performance Management.  We were given the questions a few days in advance, and I jotted notes down.  They are below. What’s the measure of a good manager? How do you evaluate yourselves? → The health of their team — health = productivity +…

In keeping with my personal promise to write more, I published this post (https://medium.com/petal/fostering-a-culture-of-kindness-1b53bfa21854) for my company. Everything in the post is true from my perspective, although I admit that these kinds of posts are more for employer branding than for anything else. Sue

It’s been ages, right? I generally have a hard time writing blogposts while working at a company because a) people automatically assume that I’m writing about my current experience, and b) I don’t really have the time. It’s too bad because I really love writing to think. I arrived at a solution: to make writing…

My blog is kind of disorganized and random.  For those who want to skip to my favorites and/or the ones that readers have indicated are helpful, here is a list of the Top 10: Why Call It People versus Human Resources? Scope of the People Function Being a PM When Your Product is People Maximizing…

When I started writing this blog about a year-and-half ago, I worried that people might take my words to be representative of the company I was working for at the time.  This fear has prevented me from publishing many of my ideas; I have a catalogue of half-written posts lost in a swirl of ‘Untitled’…

I get a bit irked whenever leadership consultants use the terminology, ‘superpower’, as in “What’s your superpower?” because it builds up the question too much, especially knowing that the answer will likely be a let-down, like, “I’m a great organizer” or “I’m very analytical”.  That’s not really a ‘superpower’ based on my understanding of what…

When I switched majors from Molecular Biology to Philosophy in college, my rationale was, “Well, when I become a doctor (the original plan), I’ll never get exposure to philosophy, so I might as well learn it while I’m in school.  That’s what a liberal arts education is about, after all!” Little did I know then…

Yesterday, I sent an email out to >50 friends and advisors, letting them know that I’ve taken a new role at a Series A startup, and thanking them for their time and guidance through the search process.  The length of the bcc list astounded me — I hadn’t realized until then that I had leaned…

In recent years, the notion of ‘employee engagement’ has been elevated to a major raison d’etre for progressive People teams.  There are seemingly tons of new companies pitching services and products to raise engagement, and a multitude of survey companies offering to more accurately measure and suggest actions to improve it.   For neophytes, let me…

I don’t want to be ‘that person’ who is constantly beating the drum about all of the work that our team has to do, but I just spent the last few hours laying out all of the activities that a solid People team should be involved in — mapping the Inputs, Outputs, and How/Tools/Channels that…

to be fleshed out…add the 3 circles