Leadership – Page 3

Terminating an employee

June 3, 2018

I appreciate all the positive feedback that I received on my post Seven Lessons for New Leaders, so I thought I would stick with the theme for a new article. One of the most daunting tasks for a new manager is the decision to terminate an employee. Not only is it filled with emotion, this decision ...

Systemic Biases

June 1, 2018

This post may get a little controversial. I recently re-published a post that I wrote in 2011 discussing the career benefits of being an early riser and starting your business day at 7am. (6:30 is the new 7am!) Generally, I received positive comments on the post, but a couple of comments pushed me back on ...

Seven Lessons for New Leaders

January 1, 2018

In today’s tech world, many start-up and early stage companies are being led by a management team often comprised of first time “people managers”. Twenty-five years ago, when I became a manager at IBM, I was required to take a series of management courses that covered topics including managing performance, motivating employees, HR policy and ...

6:30 is the new 7am!

December 6, 2017

I recently re-read a blog that I published from 2011 entitled “7am”. The essence of the post is that developing a discipline of starting your work day at 7am will affect the positive trajectory of your career. Well, it seems lately that 6:30 is now the new 7am. It is 6:08am. I am at a ...

Winning the Tech Talent War

November 16, 2017

Last night, I attended TalentMinded’s Next Generation Talent Acquisition meet-up on “How to Hire and Retain Tech Talent”. The panel included Jack Noppé, Chief Product Officer of Intelex Technologies Inc., Lauris Apse, Senior Director of Digital Operations at CBC, Malgosia Green, Chief Product Officer, TopHat and Gianluca Cairo, Chief of Staff, Innovation, Science and Economic Development, Government of Canada. The panel discussion ...

Where is the line? – the ethics of social media content creation.

September 7, 2016

I was approached by a young intern for some advice. He had been asked by a manager in his company to research a topic and write a blog for the manager so that the manager could post it to their LinkedIn profile as their own work, with no accreditation to the intern as the author. ...

Do Job Titles Matter?

August 1, 2016

After 37 years in the tech industry, I have become cynical of job titles and companies who have an abundance of lofty job titles and minimal revenue. I often meet early stage software companies with a few dozen employees, yet their executive ranks are filled with a CEO, COO, EVP of Sales, CMO and CTO. ...

Backing a Winner – an epilogue

June 8, 2016

It has been over two years since I wrote the blog “Backing a Winner” , which was about Larisa Yurkiw’s quest to fund her vision to become the fastest women in the world of downhill skiing. At that time, Larisa, who had her funding cancelled when the Alpine Canada cut their speed racing program, was ...

Why I think I am a 61-year-old Millennial

May 2, 2016

While driving this morning, I listened to a radio interview focused on the news headline that Millennials now outnumber Boomers and the impact that is having and will have on the workplace. The speaker was espousing that like their Boomer parents, Millennials have the same goals of getting married, having a family and owning a ...

Would you run your Sales process like you run recruiting?

September 10, 2015

A collaborative blog post by Kim Benedict and Pete Smith “We are in a talent war”. Maybe you’ve heard this statement recently. We certainly are hearing it frequently from CEO’s and other senior executives of software companies. Yet, in this war, so many of the wounds seem to be self-inflicted or from friendly fire. To ...

Category: Leadership