Carl talks with Kristina Halvorson about how you balance becoming an unexpected caregiver to elderly family members while keeping your ridiculously busy life as a business owner, speaker, author, and event organizer from crashing into the ground.

With so much uncertainty in our lives, how do we decide when to reopen our offices? And when we do how do we make sure we're keeping everyone safe? Join Carl and Darin Lynch as they discuss the Irish Titan Return to Work Plan. You'll also get the opportunity to ask your questions on the air.

On this week's podcast, Carl and special guest Dr. Randy Blazak will discuss unconscious bias and how mental processes we aren't even aware of often affect what we think and decisions we make. Understanding the role we each play in enabling systemic racism and racial injustice are critical in disabling them.

In this episode, Dr. Walling and Carl talk about the mental challenges of being stuck at home and balancing work, family, and personal time. Lots of great questions from Bureau members as well, covering the dangers of remote work for workaholics, how to deal with slowdowns in new business, and manging with the fear of losing your livelihood.

You can also watch the live video of this episode here: https://youtu.be/5TyGJP76W_E

Wherever you are and whatever you’re going through, remember that you aren’t alone. You are part of a community that cares about you and wants to help you overcome every obstacle. I’ve never felt that compassion as strongly as I did this past week. Nearly 300 of you reached out with ideas, resources, encouraging messages of gratitude and thoughtful questions asking how the Bureau team was doing.

Last night I sorted through all of the emails and direct messages and I found one common theme: support. A genuine desire to help the community, the industry, our clients, our teams and beyond through this time of change. An eagerness to provide better information on working from home, leading remotely, surviving financially, protecting our companies legally and maintaining our team’s health and wellness.

Many of you have already created great resources based on your personal experiences. Others are working on new content right now. Some have been recommending resources they believe in. And so many of us still have questions keeping us up at night. Listen to this episode to find out more about what we’re going to do.

Community is a powerful force for good, both from a leadership growth perspective and from a business standpoint. As leaders connect, collaborate and learn from one another, they gain invaluable insights and connections that help to advance their craft, teams and organizations.

At InVision, they have a unique vantage point that they’re leveraging to benefit a growing design leadership community. With more than five million customers at tens of thousands of companies, including 100% of Fortune 100s and brands like Airbnb, Amazon, HBO, Netflix, Slack, Starbucks and Uber, they have an in-depth understanding of patterns of collaboration, delivery best practices and shared challenges.

Adam Fry-Pierce, Director, Design Community at InVision, joins us to talk about initiatives including DesignBetter.Co, InVision’s Design Leadership Forum and InVision’s partnership with the Bureau. Listen in for insights on scaling tribes, connecting people around a shared goal and achieving work-life balance.

As your organization grows, and grows and grows, you may find things start to look a little disjointed, almost as if they were created by different teams at different companies. This was the case at VMware a few years back, as they noticed products just weren’t lining up, even on a basic level. To create cohesion, a small team set out to develop a consistent look and feel with standardized micro interactions.

Fast forward to today, and the outcome of these efforts is Clarity, VMware’s fully open source design system. From a small project in the corner of VMware’s engineering organization, Clarity has evolved into one of the company’s most foundational UI projects. Jehad Affoneh, Sr. Director, Head of Design at VMware, has been working on Clarity through it all. Starting out at VMware as an engineer, Jahed today leads design globally across most of the company.

Like many internal projects, Clarity started out underfunded, with just a few people working on it. But it soon took off and continues to make strides. Jehad reflects on lessons learned, sharing strategies to help pull off a design system project of your own. He also speaks to ways design leaders can build credibility across the organization and how the role is really about designing for your team, the business and the user at an end-to-end level.

After growing up in India, Chetana Deorah emigrated to the U.S., right around the time of Y2K. Working at Pentagram, Yahoo, Pivotal Labs and Scribd, she spent more than a decade immersed in growth teams and culture before joining Netflix as Design Director, Global Growth & Acquisition.

Today, as a consultant and mentor, growth is still top-of-mind for Chetana, both personally and professionally. She helps leaders and organizations to think through solutions, experiences and strategies that drive growth culture and business gains. Two themes that surface frequently in her work are resilience and trust.

For organizations focused on growth, the resilience to be able to fail and learn from failings is crucial. Equally important is the ability to build trusting relationships with customers or clients. Whether you’re leveraging user experience design or content strategy, it’s possible to build trust at each stage of growth, be it acquisition, activation, retention or revenue referral. Tune in to hear Chetana’s thoughts on product and business growth, as well as some things to look for when hiring or designing customer experiences.

If you haven’t visited GoDaddy lately, it’s time to take another look. With a recent rebrand and the introduction of GoDaddy Guides and new web and marketing tools, GoDaddy has shed its skin and PR issues of the past. Today, their focus is on simplicity and helping entrepreneurs at every stage of their journey.

Over the past five years, Jared Lewandowski has been working with GoDaddy’s team to elevate the user experience. As Head of Design & User Experience, Presence & Commerce, he’s seen the team grow from five to 40 to 100 designers, with plans to take that number even further.

As Jared says, GoDaddy has outgrown its awkward teenage years and really come into its own lately. Learn more about GoDaddy’s new brand, their focus on empathy and how they’re surfacing insights to help entrepreneurs gain an advantage.

When you’re busy, it’s easy to let things like project plans, status reports and well-planned meetings fall by the wayside. But when these things slip, so does communication and trust with stakeholders.

No matter how you work—agile, waterfall, hybrid, etc.—you have a plan in place. There are a series of steps that you will take to get the work done. And to keep things moving, you’ll need stakeholders to be involved and in the loop. They need to know when and where to plug in so you can negotiate risks, get feedback and meet deadlines.

Brett Harned, Founder of the Digital PM Summit and Director of Education at TeamGantt, outlines three solid PM tools that can help foster better communication, more trusting relationships and a brighter future for your projects. Listen in.