LGBTQ+ inclusion is more than knowing the acronym or wearing a Pride shirt. Building inclusion in the workplace can improve decision-making and innovation, increase satisfaction and retention, and strengthen your brand with customers.

I’m finding that many people have soaked up knowledge about diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, accessibility, and belonging. However, many of these people are not quite sure how to translate this profound knowledge into changed behaviors.

WNC Nonprofit Pathways offers broad programs across the region that include workshops and events to build skills. They also provide organization assessments at little to no cost for WNC nonprofits that strengthen organizations through targeted consulting around the nonprofit lifecycle.

Women’s Equal Pay Day will fall on March 14, 2023. This date signifies the current gender pay gap of 16%. This day is celebrated to show how much more women must work to earn as much pay as men. A gap of 16% may not seem like much, but I invite you to dig deeper into these numbers.

How we show up is tied to our business performance. We are shaped by each other and our experiences, which impacts how we show up in our relationships and our professional work. To say that we are successful purely by our own measures and intellect is a false narrative.

Those organizations who lightly address pay transparency with muddled salary ranges for open positions may abide by laws, but they are not building trust with candidates and employees. Pay transparency is a much bigger and more involved process.

We are circling the final days of 2022, and I am looking back at the year that has happened. We entered year three of a global pandemic, and personally we hit some big milestones in our house. Today I’m sharing items that don’t fall under certain categories like books or podcasts; these are the odds and ends that really impacted me this year.

I’ve read or listened to 51 books in 2022 (full list below). Sometimes I need to step out of the serious stuff and read a good fantasy story (Ex. Harry Potter or Percy Jackson) for a mind palate cleanse. Then I go right back to it. Typically, I choose audiobooks based on the narrator. What have been your favorites this year?

As many of you know, I’m a voracious reader and consumer of media because my inner nerd (aka Hermione Granger) loves rich mental stimulation. Therefore, I won’t bore you with every book, podcast episode, show, movie, report, or article that’s sent me into geek land. Today I’m starting with podcasts.

As the World cup begins and we all need some hope for the future, I want to highlight some leadership lessons from Ted Lasso. He is not a traditional leader in that he didn’t work his way up in the company to reach this status. He also doesn’t have identical relevant experience. And he is not from the home country of the organization. Ted Lasso has many obstacles to face from day one.

Trust is one of those words that gets frequently thrown around business circles. Business guru Stephen Covey once said, “Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.” Well, that sounds big. It seems like trust is a topic that we in the business world should know about. What is trust anyways?

The wage floor is minimum wage paid to an employee. Now, organizations have the opportunity to pay more than our wage laws. They might be willing to pay more for desired skills, years of experience, and talent market competition. Of course, that depends on the organization’s profit margin. If the organization has the money to spend, they can spend more on human talent if they so choose. High profit margin does not always equal better environments for employees.

As a supervisor, you need to understand why your employees are paid at certain rates and how they can change their pay. If you cannot, then you will be left with a lack of trust from your employees and difficulties in recruiting new employees. Pay equity assessments offer comprehensive views of your team’s salary data that will help you now and overall, as a supervisor.

As a new supervisor, you will need some feedback from your team about your leadership. I’m going to outline several ways to ask for feedback that go from short-term and informal to long-term and formal. These ways are also available across a spectrum – individual, team, and organization. For each of these suggestions, I recommend trying one at a time and over a few weeks or even months.

Employee turnover is the amount of people who leave an organization in a given year. As a supervisor, you will want to know your own team’s turnover rate and how that compares to other groups, the overall organization, and the sector.

How many of us are just trying to survive and find connections during a multi-year pandemic? Employee turnover is high. Budgets are tight. And many of us are understaffed. However, we can have years of experience being around supervisors (or dart boards) and not really understand the structure and rules of the game.

Rebooting your leadership is not a sign of failure; it’s just a refresh of perspective and motivation. Many of us are experiencing long-term burnout, which can show up as unexplained fatigue, lack of creative thinking, and disorganization. If you are experiencing these symptoms, then you are in good company. Most of the world is feeling the same.

Sensemaking is a group discussion where individuals share how a specific event or issue is impacting them. These sessions are important because they allow us to bring our full humanity to work while not disconnecting from the world. Change is everywhere these days, and the global pandemic waves continually push to renegotiate our relationships with people and time.

What we think is happening in our decision-making processes is a linear event where everyone is clearly identifying a problem, discussing solutions, and acting on the best one. However, we forget that each of us shows up with a different set of experiences in the workplace. Quite often I find that teams have unspoken confusion about how decisions are made and their roles in the process.

Working agreements establish the rules of engagement and clearly define expectations of each other. Discussing a set of working agreements within a team is important because it offers the opportunity to get the spoken and unspoken needs of the group onto the discussion table.