Posts tagged as "collaboration" - Chris Hardie

It's an honor and a privilege to have volunteer opportunities to use our time and talents for the betterment of our communities. One common opportunity is to serve as a board member at an organization you care about and whose mission you support. I've written before about things you might consider when leaving a volunteer board of directors for a non-profit or other community organization. I've also had some good conversations recently about the process on the other side of that kind of community...

I see a surprising number of organizations and businesses that suffer from the malady of reinventing basic business processes and rediscovering tools and resources they already had, at the expense of using up valuable staff time and straining relationships with their customers and constituents. Sometimes this reinventing and rediscovering happens because there's been a change in staffing, sometimes it happens because people just don't bother to write things down.  But I'm amazed at the "shortcuts"...

In every organizational conversation, there's some process for setting the agenda of what the conversation will be about, and how it will be conducted.  Usually there's a subset of the organization's members who set that agenda - sometimes just a single person - shaping the issues and decisions that the organization takes on. In a non-profit organization board meeting, it might be the Executive Committee or the board chair. In a small business, it might be the business's owners or managers. In...

I haven't been reading at the pace I want to but I've still be able to squeeze in some books here and there.  Here are some mini-reviews of a few of them: Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá Sex at Dawn is an honest and thorough exploration of the history of human sexuality, and what that means for how we understand our sexuality today.  Written by some folks who have clearly done their research, it's part anthropological study and part cultural critique, and it's got plenty...

We try to keep Summersault LLC as "flat" as possible, with minimal hierarchy and focus on authority relationships, opting instead for collaborative roles and even aspirations of a tribal staffing model.  But in my role as "Principal," I still end up taking on what would traditionally be called a "management" relationship with other staff. Recently, as a part of getting ready for some staff training, I tried to write down 10 things that might be helpful for a new member of the team to know about...