Karen’s Articles
Jobs Don’t Have Genders
At the Engage Conference I wrote about last week, the panelists — Dr. Lynn Shaw, founder of WINTER (Women in Non-Traditional Employment Roles), Iliana Flores from the Teamsters, Ariane Hegewisch of IWPR, and Lark Jackson of Chicago Women in Trades had me riveted. The...
A Room That Changed My Aperture
Last week, I walked into a building in Washington, D.C. I had never been in before, and I paused. The Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream has a ceiling that demands you tilt your head back and stare. Intricate coffered plasterwork, gold detail, and soft...
The Cost of Waiting
I play cards with a group of women. There's a little food, a little wine, and a lot of laughter that gets louder as the evening goes on. When the group first started, the hostess shouted to her husband in the kitchen, with silliness in her voice, "The dessert isn't...
Changing Our Questions
Last week's blog, Less Wrong Tomorrow, clearly struck a chord. The responses came quickly, and many were vulnerable and personal. One reader wrote about caring for her aging father: "We have so many decisions to make, but Dad seems paralyzed. We're uncertain about...
Less Wrong Tomorrow
One of my favorite workshops to facilitate is strategic planning, and one of the most common reactions I hear during those sessions sounds something like this: “How can we plan when leadership keeps changing direction?” “We don’t even have a finalized budget yet.”...
The Mistakes We Manufacture Under Pressure
I walked into Anna’s office 11 years ago for a coaching session that didn’t happen. Again. It was the fourth time “something had come up.” After six weeks of my showing up, we still hadn’t had a single real undistracted, productive, focused session. Anna worked in a...
The Mistakes We’ve Stopped Seeing
For the past few weeks, I've been writing about mistakes—how we make them, how we respond, and how leaders can guide their teams through them. This week, I want to address perhaps the most dangerous type of all mistakes: the mistakes that have become normalized. These...
Mistakes and the Art of Owning It
For the past few weeks, I’ve been writing about mistakes including how we make them, how we respond, and more recently, how not everything that feels off track is actually a mistake. This week, I want to come back to something very practical. What happens in the...
Mistakes and How They Shape Us
For the past few weeks, I’ve been writing about mistakes at work, including how we make them, how we respond, and what people remember. This past weekend gave me a different lens through which to consider mistakes. The weekend didn’t have the look or feel of...
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