My Experience at Leaders In Tech: Building Leadership Excellence Through Vulnerability

The retreat is both a laboratory and ultimate safe space, one designed to let you “try on for size” unfamiliar, nerve-wracking leadership styles and get real-time feedback on the efficacy of each approach. It’s both familiar and intensely challenging. It’s summer camp, or a new school, or the first day at a new job, except that this time there’s nothing you could do that would screw it up.

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Everything Is a Gift: My Growth Mindset Mantra

In practical terms, I use the mantra as a sort of verbal touchstone during meetings, planning sessions, and even heads-down work. Its wry inversion of negativity reliably makes people chuckle when I invoke it during challenging conversations, and I’ve learned that saying it aloud can diffuse tense moments and break through impasses. 

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Using Feedback to Forge Your COO Roadmap

Your operations roadmap is your current set of explicit, fully articulated goals for improving the company’s “how”—its processes, systems, tools, reporting, communication, and more. The roadmap should cover both near-term and long-term initiatives, and while it serves an important organizing function, it also has two other vital benefits.

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Alicia DiamondCOO
Defining Responsibilities: How New COOs Should Define Their Roles in Relation to the CEO

An effective COO is responsive to the unique needs of both the company and its CEO, so the role always varies between occupants and firms—sometimes to such an extent that two COOs might have almost completely dissimilar duties. Because the scope of a company’s operations is so broad, there is an extent to which the COO is a gap-filler position, an organization-focused executive brought in to compensate for vulnerabilities or to create strategically vital bandwidth for the leadership team. 

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Alicia DiamondCOO
What is an Artful Concern?

It’s a phrase I use to define all the well-run, inspiring organizations that make the world a better place. They do so not by being the biggest, the best, or the most well known. Instead, they deliver flawless experiences, reliable service, or must-have products.

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Alicia Diamond