Why shouldn’t men be allowed into a business event aimed at females? Do men have no use for the products women make? Is man-money incompatible with their lady-banks? Can men not have lady-lawyers or lady-accountants? Or lady-bosses?Must men and women follow separate business opportunities like they go to separate bathrooms? What if the lady-founders want to follow the opportunity with the shorter line?

You may see them as a perfectionist. Overbearing. High maintenance. A control freak. Nit picky. Difficult. It’s exhausting. You may avoid them. Or resent them. Since strivers are often high achievers, they tend to land in positions of power, putting their unrealistic expectations on you.

When is it appropriate to send the “Is now still good?” message? It’s not like they’re going to see it. If they were attentive they’d be in the meeting and this wouldn’t be happening to you.

You’re sending the recipient to purgatory. They'll spend the whole weekend in an avoidance loop, thinking about your email and dreading the mental calories it will take to reply. They’ll be headed out on a date with their spouse, turn on their phone to call an Uber, and there will be the notification for YOUR EMAIL, just waiting. Watching.

I mean the people who take the time to walk to the sink with a single mug, dump out the contents, fill it with just enough water to cover the striations of coffee stains, add a few squirts of dish soap, and walk away. Why not spend the extra 15 seconds to wash it? Or put it in the dishwasher? The dishwasher is RIGHT THERE.

When someone doesn’t know the industry jargon in a work setting, we think it discredits them. But you don't need fancy buzzwords to have eyes to see. Different vocabulary just means they come from a different context.

Hard work isn’t the only ingredient to burnout. All work and no play can even be invigorating under certain circumstances. But when hard work is combined with the following ingredients, it’s a recipe for burnout.

Do engagement surveys actually measure how people feel? Or just how much they trust you? What are people really responding to when they complete a survey anyway?

That's what leadership looks like: Putting aside your own experiences and recognizing when it isn't about you. Because, as we explained in that meeting, bias has no place in the workplace.

When it comes to hiring and promotion, we tend to think admin skills are intuitive. So we devalue them. But admin skills are not universal.

We each have our own voice. Not that bland, polished, HR voice that performs respect by never expressing an opinion. Strong opinions on how companies’ decisions shape our lives in meaningful ways.

We ran together, but no one could run the race for her. She had to cover the distance on her own two feet. Hundreds of other people ran the same route as we did. She just needed one of those people to do it with her. And I got to be that runner.

But why would someone take a 40+% pay cut by choice? That time must be more valuable than money. There are plenty of reasons besides laziness why this might be true. 

Rudeness bothers me. It occurred to me that I could refuse in protest. Make everyone wait until the woman came out of the handicapped stall so we could all stare her down as she washed her hands. 

It takes strength to show calm, respect, and humanity to someone who isn’t giving it back or "did this to themselves." It takes discipline to hold space and structure until order is restored.

Your organization isn’t a spreadsheet. You can’t just delete the cells with numbers you don’t like.

It’s not that people don’t care, they just don’t know what to do about it. And the job still needs to get done.

She couldn’t control the mayhem upstream, but somehow she was the one apologizing.  “Have you ever heard of a ‘blameless post-mortem’?” I asked. It’s a concept that I learned from software companies. When a bug causes a major incident, the review isn’t about a bad line of code but the whole causal chain.

This story still makes me laugh... and haunts me to this day. Is a boundary still a boundary if only one person asserts it? Or is it rebellion?

What started as a step back became a growth hack. When it came time to brand my service, I knew exactly what I was good at, where there was a gap, and what people would pay for.