Of Bridges and Connections
Life can often be described as a set of imperfect parts that occasionally come together in a perfect opportunity. In many cases, those opportunities are natural, uninfluenced and easily acted upon for all involved as a way to bring together two or more otherwise...
Information Governance Insights: The Exceptions
It is a constant in life that, no matter how perfect, there is always an exception to every rule. This is true in your Information Governance program as well.We spent a lot of time last year discussing how to build an effective program that can manage information...
Employee Retention: 5 Tips
Employee retention is critical to every business – including “high turnover” industries like childcare, automotive, retail, and more. Research shows that replacing an employee can cost up to 20 percent of the position’s annual salary. The focus of employee retention...
Government Leadership Needs More Women
Back in 1981, just 13 percent of chief administrative officers in government were women. Since then, that number hasn’t budged. It’s staggering to see what little progress has occurred in advancing the roles of women in government. Even with what appears to be a big...
Don’t Fear YouTube!
YouTube can be a very frightening place. Whether you’re a YouTuber user or you’re setting up a channel, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can end up down some deep rabbit holes. Started 10 years ago to share videos online, YouTube is now the realm of the...
Police Officers: Networking into a Second Career
Cops have the best networks. The bond between police officers is strong and builds a unique community of trust. Think about it. All those life and death situations that police come across, the stress, the many challenges and yes, the danger. It all works to bring them...
Bringing Storytime to the Boardroom and the Classroom
Think back to the last great presentation that you watched. How did the speaker begin? Did he or she start by jumping right into the details or did they launch into a narrative, setting the stage for what was to come? As presenters, in our jobs, community involvement,...
Social Science Celebrated
Why are the arts celebrated? Why are STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) programs heavily supported? Why are efforts to advance professions successful? Why DON’T we equally celebrate, support, and have success advancing non-arts humanities and social...
Information Governance: Communication & Training Plans
It’s not SOP if nobody knows about it We’ve been talking for months about how to build an Information Governance program for your organization. You’ve got a steering committee in place, the records identified, retention established, repository ready and you are ready...
Who Are “YOU” When You Do What You Do?
Do people – employees, peers, bosses, customers, everyone – feel valued when they interact with you? Do they feel listened to – and heard? Do they feel you make every effort to address their needs – or explain what you can do for them? In our “get it done,” fast-paced...
A Positive Article About Dying!
I appreciate my demise is a regular theme of my writing. But maybe it is important that I prompt contemplation of this huge, inevitable event that most of us spend our lives trying to ignore. And perhaps a more useful outcome of my reflections is that they were not...
Unleashing the Potential of Women Entrepreneurs
Recent studies have shown that women are half as likely than men to start a business. While this is a gender equality issue, it is also an economic one. We compose over 50 percent of the U.S. population, have earned 60 percent of undergraduate degrees, 60 percent of...
The Root of All Diversity
As 2015 reluctantly winds down to its final days, I find a highly-charged momentum continues on a topic that has become and will seemingly remain among the most important objectives of any organization and its leaders. Across the country, from companies to communities...
Are You Interested in a Freelance Writing Career?
One of the great things about government is that unless something cataclysmic happens, there will always be a government and it will always need contractors in various forms. Freelance writers don’t think to go for government contracts even though they are often...
Twitter Basics for Local Government: The Why and How
Everybody tweets. Chances are your employees tweet from their mobile phones while they’re on the clock. Yes, even government employees. Some are probably very good at Twitter, using it to manage their own personal brands and share their own voices. In an age where...
Retirement in Government: The Silver Tsunami
Stay Ahead of the Silver Tsunami Here at Hennepin County – Minnesota’s most populous county – we’re preparing for the silver tsunami. Almost 43% of our 8,000 employees are preparing to retire in the next five years. When Baby Boomers leave, we will lose not only...
30,000 Ft. Approach to Career Success
Throughout our lives, whether as employees or students, we’ve been trained to focus heavily on the minutia—dates, names, and other tidbits of knowledge. Instead of understanding the “why”, we worry about all of the “what”. The “what” included the name of the theater...
How to Avoid Being an Unemployed Millennial
Recent news has shown an improvement in the unemployment rate, but are all generations created equal among the numbers? Not quite. Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce found that 40% of millennials are unemployed, the worst being for graduates...