How Do You Find a Job When You Are Blind?

Posted on September 22, 2016 by Marcia Moran

Meet Rebecca Bridges. Wife. Mother. Management consultant at FMP Consulting. Rebecca has also been blind from birth. Knowing the unemployment rate is 70% for people who are blind, how could she grow up with the hope of finding a job that she would enjoy? Is it luck or is it something else? We have all heard the statistics. According to Simon Sinek, author of Leaders Eat Last, 1 in 3 employees seriously consider leaving their jobs. Of that number, only 1.5% of employees actually leave voluntarily. They feel safer with the job they hate then the unknown. With these types of statistics, I wondered how Rebecca found the courage to fulfill her dream. You Have to Be Better than Anyone Else Rebecca remembers her Dad giving her advice as a little girl when she complained that being blind wasn’t fair.… …

How Empathy Stacks Up As A Critical Success Factor

Posted on June 5, 2013 by Marcia Moran

With Capital Connection 2013 just around the corner, I’ve been searching for a way to report the action at MAVA‘s premier event from a perspective different from every other journalist. The big ‘aha’ moment came during the drive home today. I’ll try to assess founders’ critical success factor ratio on a single, frequently under-appreciated leadership quality: Empathy. In addition to other things, I’ll spend my time trying to intuit long-term prospects based on the level of empathy each founder appears to express during their interactions with other people—both on and off stage. Please don’t label me a crackpot just yet. The science shows that people in leadership positions who demonstrate high degrees of empathy have a greater propensity to lead rather than manage. In the startup environment, leading with empathy qualifies as a critical success factor that influences the level… …

Empathy: Leadership Strength Or Weakness?

Posted on March 20, 2013 by Marcia Moran

Last week, Arlington Economic Development’s Business Investment Group sponsored Empathy in Business, a panel discussion with Ángel Cabrera, President of George Mason University, Bill Drayton, CEO of Ashoka Innovators for the Public, Carly Fiorina, CEO of Carly Fiorina Enterprises (and former CEO of HP), and Julie Rogers, President and CEO of the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation. Jonathan Aberman, Managing Director and Chairman of Amplifier Ventures, moderated the discussion. If you can find the discipline and energy to listen, you may learn why things failed and then make better decisions. — Ángel Cabrera It appears as if there are two camps when it comes to empathy as it relates to leadership: 1) those who think it’s a “squishy” emotion that makes a leader weak; or 2) those who think it’s a quality required to lead people effectively. For the… …