Latest posts
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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Why Structure Is a Form of Kindness on a Team
Early on, I thought being a good manager meant being flexible about everything. No rigid rules, no fixed processes, just trust people and let them work however suits them. It felt generous. It felt like respect. It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that for a lot of people, all that openness did…
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The Quiet Work of Rebuilding After a Setback
Nobody tells you that the loud part of a setback is the easy part. The bad day, the hard conversation, the moment it all comes apart. That part is awful but it is brief, and adrenaline carries you through it. The hard part is the long quiet stretch afterward, when the crisis is over and…
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Mentoring Without Fixing, and Asking Better Questions
When someone brings me a problem, every instinct I have says solve it. I can see the answer, or think I can, and handing it over would take thirty seconds and feel great. I have learned to sit on my hands instead, because the fast answer is usually the worst thing I can offer. It…
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The Morning Routine That Survived Everything Else Falling Apart
I have built and abandoned more elaborate morning routines than I can count. The hour-long ones with the cold water and the gratitude pages and the perfectly sequenced stretches. They are wonderful for about eleven days, and then a kid gets sick or a deadline lands or life simply happens, and the whole beautiful structure…
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What Switchbacks Taught Me About Pacing a Hard Year
The first time I hiked a real mountain trail, I tried to go straight up. There was a clear path doing sensible switchbacks across the slope, and I ignored it, because the direct line looked faster and I was impatient. I made it maybe twenty minutes before my legs gave out and I had to…
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How to Give Honest Feedback Without Crushing Someone
Most feedback fails in one of two directions. It is either so softened that the person walks away thinking everything is fine, or so blunt that they spend the next hour defending themselves instead of hearing you. The skill is finding the narrow path between cowardice and cruelty, and it is a skill, which means…