Latest posts
-
Charmain Bogue on What Private Sector Leaders Misunderstand About Government Work
The assumption that public sector experience does not translate is one of the more expensive biases in executive hiring. There is a persistent assumption in corporate hiring that government experience is a liability or at best a neutral factor. The person did not work under market pressure. She did not have profit as a north…
-
Charmain Bogue on What Happens After the Wrong Executive Is Hired
Organizations know within six months. The decision to act takes much longer. The bad executive hire has a predictable timeline. Within the first two quarters, people who work closely with the new leader start to notice the gap between what the hire was supposed to fix and what is actually happening. They note it to…
-
Charmain Bogue on Why Most Exit Interviews Are Designed to Learn Nothing
If the system were designed to produce real information, it would be structured differently. Exit interviews exist in almost every organization of substantial size. They are conducted by HR, recorded in a system, and produce aggregate reports that occasionally appear in leadership meetings. They almost never change anything. This is not because the people leaving…
-
Charmain Bogue on the Quiet Cost of High Performers Who Never Complain
Organizations find out about their strongest people the same way they find out about structural damage: when something falls. There is a profile of employee that organizations rely on but rarely examine. She takes on extra work without complaint. She solves problems before they escalate. She covers for team members who are struggling. She absorbs…
-
Charmain Bogue on What It Means to Be the Only Woman in the Room
It is not imposter syndrome. It is data. There is a specific experience that women in senior roles know and rarely discuss directly. You are in a meeting. The room is mostly or entirely male. You make a point. It gets partial acknowledgment or none. Twenty minutes later, a man makes a similar point. It…
-
Charmain Bogue on Why Cross-Functional Teams Fail Before They Start
The problem is rarely the people. It is what nobody agreed on before the first meeting. Cross-functional teams have become the default solution for problems that span departments. Something is not working. The pieces belong to different parts of the organization. So leadership assembles a team from each area, appoints someone to lead it, and…
-
Charmain Bogue on the Culture Fit Problem
Every time an organization hires for fit, it should ask fit with what, exactly. Culture fit is the most used and least examined phrase in hiring. It explains everything and describes nothing. A candidate is a great culture fit. A candidate does not quite have the right culture fit. The phrase moves through hiring committees…
-
Charmain Bogue on What New Executives Get Wrong in Their First Ninety Days
The job is not what the interview described. The sooner you accept that, the better. The promotion or hire was months in the making. The new executive spent hours preparing, researching the organization, mapping the stakeholders, rehearsing how she would introduce herself. And then she shows up, and the job she prepared for bears almost…
-
What Working Motherhood Actually Costs, and What It’s Worth
People like to ask working mothers whether they can have it all, which is a question designed to produce guilt no matter how you answer it. I have stopped engaging with the framing, because it smuggles in a lie — that there is some achievable state called all, and that falling short of it is…
-
What I Tell Women Coming Back to Work After a Long Gap
The first thing I say is that the gap is not the problem. The story you tell yourself about the gap is the problem. Most women I work with walk into a return-to-work conversation already apologizing, already braced to explain a stretch of time as if it were a crime they need to plead down.…