Author: debbie-madden

Grow Your Business by Nailing the Most Important Meeting of the Week

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Did you know that on average, every single one of us wastes 31 hours per month in unproductive meetings? I’m going to show you how to prevent that.

Very early on at Stride Consulting, I searched for a process to help me scale. This was my 4th company and I had my heart set on scaling in a way that I had never scaled before.

I’ve never raised any funding. All four companies I’ve run have been bootstrapped. So leveraging a pile of cash to scale has never been an option for me. I was searching for a process to enable scale.

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Google Discovered the Highest Performing Teams Have These Two Characteristics

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What makes a high-performing team? It’s not intelligence. It’s not seniority.

Google recently discovered that the highest performing teams are the ones with two characteristics:

  1. Individuals are able to sacrifice something they want for the good of the team.
  2. Each person feels safe to speak what’s on their mind.

Hidden underneath all of this is the foundation that makes it all possible: trust.

If a team lacks trust, everything else is impossible.

Think about your team. Think about each person on your team. Do you trust them?

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When Should an Employer Ask an Employee to Quit?

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Companies spend a lot of time talking about retention strategies for good reason. High turnover is extremely expensive. The total cost to the organization for each employee who leaves can quickly reach between 100 and 300 percent of an employee’s salary.

On the flip side, we talk often about how and when to fire an employee. Likewise on the employee side, we talk about when it’s time for an employee to quit.

Yet, we don’t talk about the fourth option: When should an employer ask an employee to quit?

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Breast Cancer Nearly Took My Life. Instead, it Made Me a Better CEO.

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Here’s How.


On September 5, 2015 I discovered a tumor in my left armpit. Two days later, I was diagnosed with Stage II HER2 Positive Breast Cancer. I was 41.

I was also the founder and CEO of a tech startup that was less than two years old.

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You Probably Shouldn’t Be CEO of Your Startup. Ask Yourself These 3 Questions to Find Out.

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Too often, I speak with founder-CEOs who have fallen out of love with their business, or whose business has fallen out of love with them. Yet they continue as CEO.

Why? Because it’s hard to look inward.

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Solving the Gender Wage Gap Is Hard. Here Are Four Things You Can Do Today.

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On April 5, U.K. companies with 250 employees or more were required by law to reveal their pay data. The goal: Narrow the gender wage gap.

In response, many people across the world have shared their personal experiences, data, and opinions regarding gender pay differences. An Inc.com columnist, Heather Wilde, wrote about being paid 60 percent less than her male colleagues at the same level. The 2016 U.S. Census revealed it takes a woman one year, three months, and 10 days to earn what her male peer earns in one year. I personally quit a job once over a $5,000 gender wage gap.

Now that we’re really talking about this, let’s solve the gender wage gap once and for all. I believe achieving equal pay for equal work is possible. It takes time and effort and it isn’t easy, but it is a solvable problem. Creating true equal pay requires two things:

  1. Commitment to a system that evaluates each individual relative to their peers.
  2. Fluidness within the system created.

Through decades of trial and error, I believe I’ve found a system that works. It’s achievable by teams both big and small. It’s likely to raise a few eyebrows, and that’s OK. Sometimes, doing the right thing is hard.

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Is Snapchat’s Culture As Sexist and Toxic As Uber’s?

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What truly matters is how leadership responds. And time isn’t Snap’s friend.


There is a bottom line when it comes to what’s acceptable in the workplace and Snap just crossed it.

Yesterday, an email written by a former Snap female developer, Shannon Lubetich, emerged. The email was written back in November, on Lubetich’s last day of work. In it, she accused Snap, the makers of Snapchat, of having a toxic and sexist culture.

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Creating Core Values that Actually Stick

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Company core values. On paper, they are a set of words or phrases that embody who you are as a team. They have been hailed as a “company’s DNA”, “the culture of the organization,” and the “best kept secret of true high performance.”

By definition, core values are the fundamental beliefs of a company.

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How to Win Against Unconscious Gender Bias

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“For women, there’s a fine line between speaking your mind vs sounding like a bitch.”

As I sat on a panel at a tech conference, I looked out into the audience and heard a woman in the back row utter the comment above.

The Stats

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