Diary of a Saasy Girl

The great thing about the cloud is that you can work on it from anywhere, literally anywhere in the world. This gives both companies and employees freedom to operate. For the business, they may not restricted by office locations in order to attract the right talent. For the employee, they can experience a nomadic lifestyle with their only requirements being a reliable internet connection and some overlap on timezone with the mothership to liaise with colleagues. But as we become more flexible with our working arrangements how does a manager actually manage their team effectively? Here at Funding Circle we have offices in many timezones and embrace remote working for our colleagues. Here's some tips on how we are trying to make managing our globals teams efficient. Firstly, the managers are responsible for their team performance. The goal is to have high performing teams. When you have a working group with high competency, coupled with consistent behaviours and shared values the...

I presented this deck provided by Salesforce at the recent London Admin group and part of it gave 5 inclusive leadership practices that we can all adopt to help every member of our team feel a productive member. Here are the five and I’m going to go into more detail about them and tell you how, as a manager, I make these happen. Lead with equality Have brave, authentic conversations Practice inclusive meetings Be fair in assignments and promotions Celebrate and bond with everyone in mind Lead with equality Add equality to your goals Understand your team’s unique strengths Practice inclusive hiring Encourage active leadership and growth Support flexibility Be an equality ally At the heart of where I work at Funding Circle, we do practice equality. You are hired based on your ability to do the job and your experience in your field of expertise. As a manager there I appreciate my team’s strengths and use them to our advantage. Some will ha...

I have to confess when I first saw #BAM half of me did wonder if it was a Batman reference, to be closely following by POW! Of course not, don’t be silly. BAM means ‘Be A Multiplier’ and is all part of @SalesforceEQ. We were given a special deck from Salesforce and asked to present it during our July meetups. London Admins were happy to oblige and with a handy notebook and sticker in addition, well, who doesn’t love some swag. The deck started by asking the presenter to share their equality story. I had a think and stopped at my first job that I took a few decades ago. I came up with 6 or so stories of things that had happened to me. As I prepared for the talk I looked back at these moments during the 3 years I was in the company and started to wonder that these weren’t so much about equality but about sexual harassment. I could laugh about these moments but there have been some other times when that hasn’t been the situation. I told the audience about these moments and as ...