FountainBlue's January 20 When She Speaks program, on the topic of 'Bring Your Full Self to Work'. Please join me in thanking our hosts at Jade Global and our panelists:
Facilitator Linda Holroyd, CEO, FountainBlue
Panelist Amber Barber, Senior Director, Program Management, Jade Global
Panelist Neela Deshpande, Director Technical Program Management, Operations and Strategic Engineering Operations, Boomi
Panelist Tejal Thakkar, VP, Transformation PMO and Chief of Staff, Malwarebytes
with executive introduction by Karin Maday, SVP, Customer Success, Jade Global
We were fortunate to have such experienced, authentic and inspiring panelists speaking so passionately about their diverse experience, and generously sharing the business reasons for and the best practices for showing up fully in the workplace. Below is a compilation of their recommendations and advice.
Grow the Culture
Adopt a 'we are all-one' mindset, inviting and empowering people who are not-like-you to fully participate and engage.
Model the way through authentic, vulnerable communication, shaping the culture to be open and supportive.
Embrace and accept all aspects of yourself, leveraging your strengths to develop the impact your team/organization/leaders need, in alignment with corporate goals.
Make the Business Case
Speak to the business value for bringing out the best in a diverse range of people, but act like each of your people are the foundation of the company's success - for they are.
Be metrics-driven while also putting people first.
Persevere
Create opportunities from the challenges while learning from your mistakes, leveraging the diverse skill set and experience from your full team.
Accept your weaknesses or even embrace your weaknesses as strengths!
Find your own way to best bring people together, unite behind a cause, transform and improve operations, address and resolve the gaps, and serve the customer, even if it's not the 'standard' way to do so, even if you're not the 'assigned' person to do so.
In this new normal when we may not see each other physically in person as often:
Make the time to share personal stories and add color to team and company conversations.
Assume the neutral or positive intent of others, unless the data shows otherwise.
Learn to read people better, even if the input is strictly digital.
The panel had many pithy comments which encouraged us all to welcome our full selves, including the remarks below.
You are enough.
Own your story.
Change the narrative.
We are All ONE.
Focus on your progress throughout the journey.
You've got this.
We are each unique, magical individuals with the potential to bring out the best in ourselves and in others - provided we choose to embrace our full selves, and welcome others to do the same.