How one manager puts people first

"The growth was more lasting when I took an approach of guided inquiry, guided reflection, hearing what people were feeling and hearing and experiencing and then playing that experience back to them."

Jess Walker was a guest on the Management Detox podcast, and I STILL think about everything we discussed. I worked with Jess in New York at Huge - a large digital agency in Brooklyn. I knew she was special then, but seeing how she has evolved into a leader of leaders is pretty inspiring.

She applies her dedication to creating value and growth to what she cares about most: people. She recently founded Wondering Forward, a coaching practice for individuals and teams, focused on helping people and organizations prevent and recover from burnout. She finds alignment and renewable energy in supporting others on an individual and collaborative level.

Jess says she went from being someone really in the thick of collaboration to becoming more and more zoomed out and future focused. Over a few years, this meant designing the flow of work and guiding daily progress to steering at one point 80+ person teams in the US and Europe.

For Jess, it’s a commitment to a mindset of caring for people above caring for business. This keeps her behavior on track. She brings a whole lot of empathy for where people are coming from and then uses it to fuel the best in others, to inform how communication is handled, and how decisions are made. She strongly believes - and I strongly agree - that if you take care of people, people will take care of the business is true more often than not.

See what else Jess and I talked about on the podcast here: