S6E1 The Gender Meritocracy

“It’s not just enough to get people in the pipeline. You have to make it worthwhile to get them to stay.” In what ways does your organization seek and hire a diverse workforce? In what ways does it convince them to stay?

“A team is more than just the sum of a bunch of individual contributors’ thinking together. A team’s primary work is learning together and making decisions.” What makes a team? How do you become an effective member of a team? And how does your team become effective together?

“We’ve been making these issues [of women in the workforce] explicit at least since ’70s. Forty-five years is a long time to talking about the same stuff.” How are you pushing to expand the discussion? How are you seeing others come up with genuinely new insights and observations about the struggles of women in the workforce?

“There is not much that is specific to a virtual team, that couldn’t apply to almost any team.” Are you on a virtual team or managing one? What challenge does your virtual team face? How have you worked to solve them?

“Everybody is saying we need to strive for servant leadership, but nobody seems to know what that looks like.” What is your style of leadership? What kinds of leadership have you observed in colleagues? Which have been most effective for particular situations?

“We’ve been ranging over a lot of current topics lately, and for so many of them we feel we’ve visited them before – everything old is new again. Here is what we’ve been finding out about influence and how we’ve been making it new again.” How do you observe yourself or your colleagues influencing each other? What kinds of influence do you see as critical for lasting positive changes?

“At one point during the ‘Women in Agile’ presentation, a man sat down to join the mostly female audience. One of the presenters thanked him for participating. He replied, ‘Don’t thank me – I have a daughter!’” What are you seeing in your organization relating to women’s experience in the workplace? How are you involved in the growing conversation?

“When I see inequity, here is how I’m responding to it, here’s how I’m trying to shift the behavior, both in myself and in creating the conditions to shift it in others.” What are you seeing in your organization relating to gender roles and gender equality? What type of things are you doing that are helping these more subtle gender equity and equality shifts occur?

“Do we need managers? It depends.” What role(s) do managers have in your organization? How are managers viewed in your place of work? What does the staffing structure look like?

“Technological and philosophical progress happens because it builds on the work of previous folks …we’re all part of a continuous stream.” What are your thoughts? Are “new” ideas repackaged “old” ideas?