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Five Takeaways During COVID-19 As a Working-Mom-CEO


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I’m the founder and CEO of a 40+ person HR consulting business. My husband is a preschool teacher, and I have two kids — one going into her sophomore year of high school and my son who’s leaving for college soon. With offices and schools still closed, we’re doing all we can to navigate the uncertainty and make the most of our time together. 

Keeping Kids Engaged

My daughter recently learned that her high school is going completely virtual. When her school moved online in March, she loved day one, and was exhausted by day two. Then my husband and son’s schools both closed. Suddenly our family of four was all working from home. We’re fortunate that we have plenty of space. When I’m upstairs my daughter takes over the living room. Sometimes we trade for a change of scenery.

My son’s school struggled to organize online classes, and he ended up with little to do from the time COVID-19 hit until he graduated in June. Friends made up for the lack of a formal graduation by hosting a socially distant ceremony in their backyard. With no school work, we found chores to keep him busy and got him volunteering at our neighborhood food bank. 

Feeding a family of four — all of their meals from home has been a new experience since we used to leave the house at different times, and grab lunch at work or school. I’m keeping lots of healthy food and snacks in the pantry. We’re also cooking together more. Yesterday I made granola bars, while my daughter experimented with funfetti cake pops. Teenagers may disagree, but I’ve enjoyed slowing down and spending more time together.

Self-Care Helps Manage Uncertainty

In order to be there for your family, you’ve got to take care of yourself. Think about the instructions you get when you fly: put on your oxygen mask first, before helping others. I started 2020 with a new year’s resolution to do morning meditation and have experimented with affirmations too. Some mornings, I take a brisk walk to clear my head. 

A big part of my business is leadership development. When the pandemic hit, I had no idea if or when people would invest in training. Would this part of the business fail? Obviously no one was going to join a live workshop anytime soon. Fortunately, virtual workshops quickly became the norm. My worst case scenario did not come true. Nonetheless, periods of worry and uncertainty combined with constant change are exhausting. 

Routines keep us grounded, and no routines are more basic than eating, sleeping, and exercise. My number of steps dropped when I stopped commuting so now I’m intentionally walking once or twice a day. I’ve also given myself permission to be more flexible and less productive than usual. You can’t expect as much from yourself or others while the world is in turmoil, so give everyone some grace.  

Gratitude Makes You Feel Better

There’s research that gratitude can actually change your brain over time. Practicing gratitude makes us more appreciative of what we have. Start small by making a list of things you’re grateful for each night before bed. Or have each family member share what one thing they’re thankful for when you sit down for dinner. It can be as simple as fresh air, a new puppy, or your health. There are many ways to practice gratitude. 

My colleague from Milan and his wife were quarantined in different Italian cities during lockdown. All non-essential businesses were shut down, and there was no social life whatsoever. I commiserated with how hard that must be. He responded by saying that his grandfather had a much more difficult life during the war, so he never feels unlucky. What an amazing example of gratitude.  

Wait! I’m Still a CEO

With my family continuously readjusting to new routines, I’ve had to think creatively about what my team clients need right now. They’re looking for guidance on remote work and virtual meetings, clear communications, and tips to stay connected and engaged. People are also grappling with how to engage in anti-racist work following the killing of George Floyd. Leaders want to be empathetic while struggling to manage their own anxiety. Working parents need strategies to function while keeping kids safe and occupied. 

As a leader, I know it’s important to stay resilient and provide my team a sense of safety. We’re talking more often, checking in with each other. We’re inviting our kids and pets to online meetings, and hosting a Zoom celebration in place of our summer picnic. 

Perspective Taking

I’m staying focused on how I can help myself, my family, my team, clients, and community stay strong and get through this. I’m grateful that my loved ones are healthy and my company has so far weathered the storm. I’m encouraged because everyday I see people taking care of those in need ranging from small businesses to kids who won’t have meals while schools are closed. I know eventually this will pass and I think about how it’s going to make us stronger, more flexible, and more appreciative.

5 Leadership Behaviors Loyal Employees Trust

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Is any relationship ever completely reciprocal? Not really, because one party always wields more power over the other. This is a human behavior dynamic that is tough to ignore, especially when we look deeper at workplace culture and team dynamics. There are leaders and followers, loved ones and lovers, employers and employees. We might like to think equality, common goals and unquestioned commitment are the norm but it simply doesn’t happen. It’s true in personal life and in the workplace.

I recently spent a weekend at a high school graduation where teachers glowingly described the fairly small class as a group of leaders. Although parents and kids basked in the glow of achievement and praise, it was clear that some in the group were more equal than others, more accomplished, more confident and composed. While the speeches were heartwarming they seemed insufficiently realistic: clearly not all in that class are destined for success, and not all will be leaders. Despite what we say as a society about equality, the best we can offer is what seems like a cop out: the promise of equal opportunity.

Leaders today talk a lot about loyalty, retention, and the business value of empowering employees to be brand ambassadors. Nonetheless, research literature and blogs abound which discuss the erosion of employee loyalty to the workplace, especially among Gen X and Y. The prescriptive leadership and talent management advice runs the gamut, from changes in compensation structures to more flexibility in work schedules, team building and more, all aimed at encouraging employee engagement with the employer’s brand. But the worry persists and with good reason: can the damage inflicted on employee trust by years of layoffs, pay cuts, IPOs and benefit claw-backs be overcome?

Speaking of IPOs and trust, look no further than the recent Facebook news breaks. Zuckerberg may face his biggest challenge yet as CEO when shaping the new Facebook workplace culture “post IPO”  – The change in company climate will undoubtedly be reflected in the employees, a reality that Jena McGregor from the Washington Post sums up nicely here and with this quote:

“So how will Zuckerberg manage them? The Wall Street Journal has a great roundup of ideas for the 28-year-old founder. He’ll need to feed these new millionaires’ entrepreneurial mindsets, giving them time and autonomy to work on their own projects. He’ll have to become expert at stroking egos while not setting up cultures that give the lottery winners on staff too much sway. And he’ll need to keep people from checking the stock price, oh, every 10 minutes, and be willing to say goodbye quickly to those who don’t want to stay.”

So, is there a way to increase loyalty and engagement in the workplace? I believe there is, and it requires a near-equal exchange of information about the business’s goals and challenges and a shared sense of the value of work. This true for CEOs and for employees alike. It’s a two-way street of respect and trust.

All great leaders know getting there is the challenge, of course. Here are 5 behaviors for leaders and hiring managers to adopt when struggling to keep employees happy and loyal:

1) Tell the truth. Not everyone is a star. Pick out those with leadership or other valued talent potential and nurture them. This will come back to the business as these individuals, in turn, nurture other workers.

2) Communicate roles and responsibilities. Provide a path to success not only for those with leadership promise but for all employees. Sometimes this will mean difficult changes, but remember the most important skill of a leader: never surprise an employee with bad news. Have a development plan for all, and a get-well plan for those whose performance lags. Make sure everyone knows the plan.

3) Create a workplace culture that values real people relationships. For many employees, workgroup relationships and relationships between managers and workers drive engagement and loyalty more effectively than foosball machines, logo T-shirts, and Thirsty Thursday gatherings.

4) Be fair and open. This does not mean treat everyone equally – it means have transparent processes for managing and leading. Employees are more likely to respond positively to change when the process used to manage change is fair.

5) Model the behaviors you seek. Just as the headmaster at the high school did, accept your responsibility as a leader and act with engagement, commitment and responsibility. Do this every day.

Each of us possesses skills, strengths, talents and flaws. Each of us seeks to belong, to be engaged, to relate to those around us. Loyalty is built on relationships, shared understanding and trust. Engagement and commitment require loyalty, shared goals and fair treatment. Don’t take loyalty and engagement for granted – create a remarkable culture where there are possible and rewarding outcomes of the workplace.

We are only human after all – Every one of us. Every leader. Every brand. Every workplace. Every person.

A version of this post was first published on Forbes on June 4, 2012.

Photo Credit: visitbasis via Compfight cc

HR Isn’t The Needy, The Nerdy Or The Girlie

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Cool spring morning. Grade-school recess. A group of boys and girls gather on a damp field. Captains are called out. The usual suspects. The strongest players. Each picks his own number two. The second-strongest players. The ones they’ve done battle with before. Sometimes a girl but usually a boy.

The number twos call out names and point successively. Advise their captains who else to pick. One by one by one. Strongest to weakest. Until the last few remain. The skinny asthmatics. The uncoordinated. The needy, the nerdy and the girlie. The perennial last picked. Or the never picked.

Sometimes a teacher or a playground monitor would intervene. To encourage the kids to include the never picked. But mostly they didn’t. Mostly they just wanted to play with the best. If new kids came to school, they’d have to prove themselves worthy before becoming sought-after talent.

Those were the rules. And they always played to win. Always. Played. To. Win. You may not be old enough to remember these playgrounds of mythic Gen X and Boomer lore, before the “it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” Before the not keeping score and non-discriminatory team picks. Before the nearly forced inclusion and everyone getting a trophy.

I remember. I was a captain and a number two. Even early on when I was a skinny asthmatic, I broke the childhood glass ceiling with decent coordination, people skills, strategy, flexibility, energy and empathy.

Then, as with every generation since, growing up means more of the “winning” same in academia, sports and the workplace. Regulatory complexity may mandate some leveling of playing fields, especially around equal opportunity and giving everyone a fair shake, but in business we play to win. And make money. And be better. And have a lot fun doing it.

When you know the players and how well you’ve play together, as in the playground example, you can replicate your winning teams with consistency, because the players rarely change. Unless you grow up and live and work in a world where tenure is less than five years and people can be as fluid as the very air they breathe, especially when it’s stale or poison, it makes amplifying talent engagement a business imperative.

Enter the people person, the second-strongest player, the key advisor to the captain. The one who gets the game, the players, the competition and who knows what to invest when and where and how much.

Get this: The enterprise executive whose traits are most similar to those of the CEO is the CHRO.

Did you get that? The CHRO (42 percent of which are high-performing females, by the way, for those keeping score at home). Not the CFO, CMO, or CIO. The only other exception is the COO because these roles and responsibilities often overlap with the CEO’s, this all according to “counterintuitive” and groundbreaking research based on data from executive recruiting firm Korn Ferry and the work of Dave Ulrich, a University of Michigan professor and a leading consultant on organization and talent issues.

You can read all about it in the HBR article “Why Chief Human Resources Officers Make Great CEOs.” This research also clearly revealed that a CEO’s people skills, strategy, flexibility, energy and empathy (and many other business-centric attributes) closely align to the CHRO.

Forward-thinking companies understand that these skills are critical to the top roles to engage and retain top performers – and attract the best candidates to join the team in today’s highly competitive market. This is why amplifying talent engagement can and should be treated as a business investment strategy – which is what the C-suite wants, and their respective boards, investors, high performers and prospective employees and customers.

Now it’s true that the majority of HR professionals tend to be nurturers, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but those who come from other parts of the business have learned those other parts. They’ve also had P&L responsibility, and have also done an HR stint (or two). These are ultimately the potential leaders, the CHROs, the bright CEO-shadows aglow with talent engagement outcomes that come from their cultural investment, business investment and revenue growth strategy.

The good news is that according to a recent PeopleFluent survey, HR leaders are focused on the following top three talent engagement strategies in 2015:

  • Leadership Development
  • Talent Acquisition
  • Performance Management

And Brandon Hall Group research showed that today high-performance organizations “optimize and maximize their business performance by investing in their talent management as a true business function that powers the business strategy.”

Sound familiar? It should, because every reputable analyst firm in the HR industry validates this over and over again.

However, it’s also counterintuitive today that one of the hottest topics still being discussed is whether or not HR should be split in two – one branch that handles administration and the other to manage leadership and organization.

Research by Bersin by Deloitte underscores this because HR is swamped with administrative tasks. Nearly 50 percent of business and HR leaders surveyed said their companies are “weak” on preparing HR to deliver programs aligned with business needs.

What to do? Get the proper technology in place. Using the playground-team analogy again, growing companies just can’t scale beyond a few hundred employees without the right technology enabling HR to scale certain tasks in a way that humans never can. This means bringing efficiencies to a complex administrative process that could never be achieved otherwise.

This is exactly what we recently discussed on the TalentCulture #TChat Show, with the consensus being the right technology partner not only takes care of the repetitive administration tasks from recruiting to onboarding to learning and development to performance management and more, they become the business partner that excels in culture empowerment, talent engagement, business strategy and actionable and sustainable growth, ensuring the technology investment is sound with continuous return.

CHROs demand this partnership; and Mark Stelzner, Founder and Managing Principal of IA, a consulting service firm that has supported many of the most complex human resource decisions in the world, has told me this time and again over the years. But like me and thankfully many others, these CHROs leading the charge of change and amplified talent engagement are quite sick and tired of being treated like the needy, the nerdy and the girlie.

Because Brothers and Sisters, this winning HR team is the one you need to be on today and tomorrow.

About the Author: Kevin W. Grossman co-founded and co-hosts the highly popular weekly TalentCulture #TChat Show with Meghan M. Biro. He’s also currently the Product Marketing Director for Total Talent Acquisition products at PeopleFluent.

photo credit: Finish via photopin (license)

Who's On Your List? Advice For Rising Stars From Yum! CEO

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Written by Bob Burg

In his excellent book, “Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen,” iconic Yum! Brands Chairman and CEO, David Novak explains the importance of getting inside the heads of those we wish to influence. In other words, it’s not enough for us to want or desire a goal — we must know what motivates and drives the people we wish to take along with us.

It starts with genuine interest and caring about their needs, wants, goals and desires. But even that is not enough! Why? Because the following error can render our ideas nearly useless. According to Mr. Novak:

“One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is not thinking through all the people they have to lead to get where they want to go.”

He recommends that we ask ourselves who we need to affect, influence or take with us in order to be successful. As a former marketing executive, he compares this to a marketer trying to identify potential customers. And he believes that this list is absolutely essential.

When suggesting likely candidates, he casts a broad net: “your boss, your coworkers, people on your team, people from other departments whose help you’ll need — even people from outside your organization, such as shareholders, vendors, customers or business partners.”

Implications for Intrapreneurs

What does this mean for those among us who operate as “intrapreneurs” — those who work in an entrepreneurial way as employees of larger organizations? If you’re determined to make things happen as a leader (whether you have a formal title or not), but you don’t take Mr. Novak’s advice to heart, be prepared for a sudden halt in your progress.

His advice reminds me of a leadership failure or two from my past. In those situations, I’m fairly sure I persuaded those I targeted. However, my list was too short. I left out key “needed people,” and never even tried to obtain their buy-in. This wasn’t intentional; it was more a matter of not thinking things through and considering all the people whose commitment I would need. And inevitably I paid the price.

Network Relations: Connecting The Dots

Those were painful lessons, but I needed to experience them in order to grow. Or perhaps I could have avoided the pain, if Mr. Novak’s book had been available at the time. I’m not sure I would have understood without my first-hand experience as a reference point. But if there’s one thing better than learning from our own painful experience, it’s learning from someone else’s wisdom (which, most likely, was based on their own painful experience).

So, in that spirit, I encourage anyone who is on a path to intrapreneurial success to be sure and dot the I’s and cross the T’s — not just in terms of selling your vision, but in selling it to everyone who needs to be sold.

BobBurgHRHeadshotLearn More! Listen now to Bob’s 1-on-1 chat with David Novak, “Taking People With You,” where he shares numerous hard-hitting, valuable ideas from his book.

(Author Profile: Corporate speaker, Bob Burg, is coauthor of the International bestseller, “The Go-Giver.” His newest book, “Adversaries Into Allies” is scheduled for a late October release. Bob was a featured guest on #TChat events in early September, where he helped our community focus on ways that intrapreneurs can create business value within organizations. To learn more about Bob and connect with him on Social Media, visit www.burg.com.)

Image Credit: Pixabay

Who’s On Your List? Advice For Rising Stars From Yum! CEO

/3 Comments/ /by

Written by Bob Burg

In his excellent book, “Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen,” iconic Yum! Brands Chairman and CEO, David Novak explains the importance of getting inside the heads of those we wish to influence. In other words, it’s not enough for us to want or desire a goal — we must know what motivates and drives the people we wish to take along with us.

It starts with genuine interest and caring about their needs, wants, goals and desires. But even that is not enough! Why? Because the following error can render our ideas nearly useless. According to Mr. Novak:

“One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is not thinking through all the people they have to lead to get where they want to go.”

He recommends that we ask ourselves who we need to affect, influence or take with us in order to be successful. As a former marketing executive, he compares this to a marketer trying to identify potential customers. And he believes that this list is absolutely essential.

When suggesting likely candidates, he casts a broad net: “your boss, your coworkers, people on your team, people from other departments whose help you’ll need — even people from outside your organization, such as shareholders, vendors, customers or business partners.”

Implications for Intrapreneurs

What does this mean for those among us who operate as “intrapreneurs” — those who work in an entrepreneurial way as employees of larger organizations? If you’re determined to make things happen as a leader (whether you have a formal title or not), but you don’t take Mr. Novak’s advice to heart, be prepared for a sudden halt in your progress.

His advice reminds me of a leadership failure or two from my past. In those situations, I’m fairly sure I persuaded those I targeted. However, my list was too short. I left out key “needed people,” and never even tried to obtain their buy-in. This wasn’t intentional; it was more a matter of not thinking things through and considering all the people whose commitment I would need. And inevitably I paid the price.

Network Relations: Connecting The Dots

Those were painful lessons, but I needed to experience them in order to grow. Or perhaps I could have avoided the pain, if Mr. Novak’s book had been available at the time. I’m not sure I would have understood without my first-hand experience as a reference point. But if there’s one thing better than learning from our own painful experience, it’s learning from someone else’s wisdom (which, most likely, was based on their own painful experience).

So, in that spirit, I encourage anyone who is on a path to intrapreneurial success to be sure and dot the I’s and cross the T’s — not just in terms of selling your vision, but in selling it to everyone who needs to be sold.

BobBurgHRHeadshotLearn More! Listen now to Bob’s 1-on-1 chat with David Novak, “Taking People With You,” where he shares numerous hard-hitting, valuable ideas from his book.

(Author Profile: Corporate speaker, Bob Burg, is coauthor of the International bestseller, “The Go-Giver.” His newest book, “Adversaries Into Allies” is scheduled for a late October release. Bob was a featured guest on #TChat events in early September, where he helped our community focus on ways that intrapreneurs can create business value within organizations. To learn more about Bob and connect with him on Social Media, visit www.burg.com.)

Image Credit: Pixabay