Grown-Ups Never Understand Anything by Themselves

If you were the type to carry a “This Meeting Should Have Been an Email” coffee mug to conference rooms before the pandemic, you probably need a “This Zoom Meeting Should Have Been a Group Slack Message” for your home office by now.

As someone who has worked remotely for a couple of decades now, I have been stunned by how quickly video calls collectively became our default method of communication for everything in the pandemic. 

Personally, I find video conferencing all day exhausting — they feel like a halfway point between in-person meetings and voice calls that manage to bring together the worst of both worlds most of the time. I know I have allies out there. We're all furtively whispering, "Mind if we turn our cameras off?" at the beginning of the calls. 

It's like we've brought all our bad meeting habits from the "real" world into the virtual one — and added a few more for good measure.

This week in Managing Editor, Geoff Whiting brings us the highlights of Mercedes Cardona’s session on hosting better virtual meetings at Managing Editor Live. Come check it out!

Whose Story Are You Telling?

Kelsey Raymond is co-founder and CEO of Influence and Co, a content marketing agency based in Columbia, Missouri. Technically, she's my competitor, but I prefer the term "frenemy." Influence & Co. does good work, and well, I just like Kelsey.

Like many of us in content marketing, she’s had to grapple with the challenges of telling her clients’ stories while also balancing the long-overdue renewed attention on racial inequities in the United States.

It’s a challenge exacerbated by the simple fact that most of Kelsey’s team is white. (Same.) But to create relevant stories that truly reflect our nation’s demographics, Kelsey’s team hasn’t stood still. Instead, they’ve worked to confront their own biases through honest discussions and reading. “We need to really be able to understand the experiences of others,” Kelsey explained in her interview on the Margins podcast last year.

Kelsey and her team have shared anti-racist books and resources with each other, but they’re also taking action with their clients — by working to identify and cultivate thought leaders and subject matter experts outside the usual realm of “older white men.” Sometimes this is a matter of explicitly asking for more diverse voices, and other times it’s simply a matter of finding people in different roles in an organization. “We’ve seen that creates better content as well,” Kelsey says. Come take a listen!