Remember that time someone gave you a gift and you opened it and were like, “oh wow, this person doesn’t know me at all”? Maybe it wasn’t your style (or size), or too flashy, or just totally not anything you’d be into? The type of gift that is more about the person giving it, than about you?

Well, most feedback is like a shitty gift, given for the sake of someone else.

Great feedback, on the other hand, is a gift for both parties. When approached with curiosity, care, and understanding, giving feedback becomes a learning conversation. The first step…

There are times in life where we need some outside support to help us get to where we want to go. Often we turn to friends, family, and community to help us reflect and get unstuck, but sometimes we might also want a more formal set-up in the form of a therapist, coach, mentor, or advisor. As someone who has worked with all the above (and is currently a full-time executive coach) here are a few thoughts to help you on your journey.

Coaching

The purpose of coaching is to facilitate learning, development, and change. One thing about coaching that surprises…

Understanding the differences between management and leadership can help you be more effective as a team, department, or company leader, but when it comes to management there are a few subtleties that have outsized impact: managing yourself and managing relationships. Forget the idea of managing people. The rest will fall into place.

Management, by the very definition of the word, has to do with supervision, administration, and control of resources. There are all kinds of resources in an organization that need managing:

• Processes
• Decisions
• Budgets
• Products
• Programs
• Knowledge
• Time

Notice that ‘people’ is not included in the list. “Human Resources”…

A closer look at management, leadership, and why it’s important to understand the differences between the two.

If you’re stepping into a leadership role, chances are you’re also going to be doing a lot of managing. And while it’s true the two overlap quite a bit, understanding the differences can help you be more effective manager, a more inspirational leader, and more successful overall.

On Management

Managers are a specific breed of leader, created by the business world to guide the destinies of corporate enterprises. They are responsible and accountable for running and managing a part of the business. This might be…

The pandemic, for all that’s been written about it, has done a bang-up job of making the invisible visible. The tenuous state of the American health-care system, the brittleness of supply chains, not to mention the irregularity of men’s hand-washing. It’s also brought to the foreground the shifting cadences and complexities of how we show up at work, often under the guise of navigating “The New Normal”. What’s now visible is the variability in how work and life happens day to day, an acknowledgement of the importance of self-care, and an acceptance that this shit is hard. …

The design team at Movable Ink is unified across brand, product design, and research. This approach allows us to focus on growing the practice of design within the organization and creating a unified customer experience, but can be challenging because the various design disciplines collaborate with vastly different parts of the organization, users, and customer base. I’ll save the details of our org design for another post, but you can imagine that designers are embedded with various teams working on different products, projects, and initiatives. …