Category: about

Introduction: Kate Fontanella

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Kate Fontanella loves sailingKate Fontanella has a passion for training and facilitating adults to gain the skills they need to grow professionally. She is currently looking for a position as training professional.  She has most recently worked developing a training program for EMC for an Oracle Reporting tool called OBIEE.  For this project she developed an online training program to prepare both managers and staff to change how they work with the data and report on the information.  Prior to this contract position Kate worked as the CRM Manager at Ropes & Gray LLP and the ILTA InterAction Peer Group Vice President.  Kate was been with the firm for over a year and worked to improve automation and user adoption.  At her previous firm’s Kate started from the systems initial roll out to a more sophisticated plan to get it integrated into the business development process for attorneys.

Kate has worked with several law firms throughout the Boston area on various software implementations and training projects. She holds an MBA with a concentration in Marketing and Human Resources from Clark University.

Kate is also an avid sailor and in the summer you will find her on the Charles River most nights after work.

Image courtesy of Extra Medium.

Introduction: Mark Wingrove

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Editor’s note: Mark is our “true geek”, who will largely be blogging about actual geeky stuff. He has had the (mis?)fortune of working for Jenn at a previous job.

The True GeekAccomplished IT professional with a 10-year track record of successful technology management, and administration within various industries. I found my way into the IT world by way of geology. Yes, rocks. While studying geology, I was heavily involved in geographic information systems (GIS). GIS is computer mapping and modeling in the areas of earth science. With my computer background attained as a side effect of my dealing with GIS, I found myself working mostly with the IT department at my first job out of college, even though I was hired as an environmental chemist.

This being my first attempt into blogging, or any form of public communication, I enter with great enthusiasm and trepidation.

My reluctance (and fear) of writing was instilled at an early age. The first poor grade I ever received was for penmanship in the fifth grade. This compounded my aversion to writing, and I avoided it at all costs. For my part, if practice makes perfect, than the lack of practice… well, let’s just say my last bad grade wasn’t in the fifth grade. So, I use this blog to gain the practice I should have gotten so many years ago, and also to share some knowledge and lessons I’ve learned along the way.

Photo courtesy of johnmuk.

Re-introduction: Jenn Steele

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Jenn Steele, a sister, and a nieceOnce upon a time, I was a Leader of Geeks.  I was the head of IT at two different Boston-based law firms, and was absolutely passionate about leadership.  Then I started getting more involved with social media & blogging via the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA), and fell in love with the internet.  So around the time that I was Social Networking Coordinator for the ILTA 2009 conference, I was talking HubSpot into hiring me as an Inbound Marketing Consultant.  For the first time in seven years, I was an individual contributor.

I really NEEDED to be an individual contributor, since I had really burned out at my previous job (think technology hell.  Then multiply that by 7 and get less sleep.  Yeah, that.).   After an extended brain/blog hiatus, I’m ready to talk about leadership again, so I’ll be blogging under my same old Leading Geeks persona.

I live in Waltham, Mass. with my husband and utter lack of any other living things (pets, plants, children, etc.). My hobbies include fine wine, single malt scotch, physical fitness, science fiction television, and epic fantasy novels. I have an obsession with figuring out what motivates people, and tend to concentrate on scientists and technologists. I have a severe Blackberry addiction with no plans for rehab any time soon, much to my husband’s chagrin (although I did take it off vibrate mode and now only check it every 20-30 minutes or so while at home).

Words that have been used to describe me include:

  • Refreshing
  • Straightforward
  • Honest
  • Intimidating
  • Inspirational
  • Odd
  • Funny
  • Intelligent
  • Blunt
  • Perceptive
  • Weird

And that’s about it.  Nice to re-meet you, and I’m looking forward to blogging on this new Leading Geeks!

Welcome to the New Leading Geeks

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Welcome to the New Leading GeeksAfter a much longer hiatus than I initially anticipated, we’re re-launching Leading Geeks!

Why?

I (Jenn) got lame.  I changed careers, and it turns out that also changed my day-to-day thoughts enough that I didn’t have my nifty general ideas to spew out on my blog.

Who?

Stay tuned!   Folks will be introduced over the next few weeks. (But you can get a sneak peak using the links up at the top.)

So…?

Hey; I’m just putting up this post so everyone knows I have 3 awesome co-authors who will start publishing soon.  Turns out there’s not that much else to say :).

On Illness

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I love my nieces and truly enjoy spending the holidays with them, but this year, I returned home with a very bad cold. And, as I usually do, I forced myself to go to work with it (although I did work from home for a few days, since there was no way to get that much Kleenex at work 🙂 ). This is a bad habit of mine. I have gone to work with walking pneumonia, viral meningitis, swine flu, and countless colds with less ominous names. Why? It’s what I was taught.

At my first post-college job (as a chronic migraine sufferer–thankfully I’m not any more!), my first review went something like this:

“You’re completely amazing. We would need six people to do all the work you do. However, you take all of your sick time, so we’re rating you a 4 out of 10.”

And my bad habit was born!

That said, many geeks–especially IT geeks–do the same thing. They’re aware that the company needs them to come in and fix things, so they drag themselves to work and infect everyone else. The problem is exacerbated by the rigid way that many companies count sick time; many geeks have to save their time for sick kids, etc.

Counting sick time rigidly and creating a culture of coming in despite illness backfires. Sick people infect other people, who perform poorly or take time off. This costs companies much more money than simply letting people stay home when they’re sick!

As such, I was quite impressed by HubSpot’s recent time off policy change. They stopped counting time. They said that they were fully cognizant that everyone put in more than 40 hours/week, and we were professional enough to handle balancing getting our jobs done with taking time off. What does this mean for me? I’ll probably be more likely to stay home when I’m sick. Sure, I’ll work from home (since I’m a type-a workaholic), but my coworkers have much less to fear!

On Freedom

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I’ve decided to keep this blog focused on leadership (and perhaps grammar), and I’ve started a different blog on inbound marketing. Why? Because I’m finally free to post my actual thoughts.

I couldn’t always post my ongoing leadership thoughts because I had to be very careful that none of my geeks or anyone else in my firm thought that my posts were real. Somehow, if there was even the slightest hint that one of my geek constructs was based in real life, paranoia ensued. Perfectly understandable, but very limiting to my blog!

Oh, my posts still won’t be based on actual geeks I know or who have reported to me, but I expect that no one will be suspicious now. As such, I can let my thoughts on leadership and leading geeks “flow” more readily.

I’m excited to see what will come.

On Changing Careers

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Eleven years ago today, I started my first job in IT (although it was still called MIS back then). It was a career change away from the medical profession (I was a really bored medical secretary who had applied to med school), and it led me a very long way. I moved from there to my first law firm, and then became IT Director of two different Boston law firms.

By the time this post publishes today, I’ll be several hours into my first day as an Inbound Marketing Consultant at HubSpot. Eleven years after entering IT, I am making another career change.

Some of you knew this change was coming, some didn’t. I figured I’d take advantage of this “announcement” post to answer some questions that I’ve been asked recently:

Why the change?
Well, you know the saying that some folks climb all the way to the top of the ladder only to find that it’s leaning against the wrong building? Yeah, that’s me. I wasn’t happy doing what I was doing and cared more about a lot of the peripheral job functions (okay, well, leading geeks and budgeting weren’t truly peripheral…) than I cared about the plumbing aspects of the job.

But weren’t you really active in the legal IT community?
Yup. And leaving ILTA was incredibly difficult. However, in many ways, ILTA and my role as Social Networking Coordinator for the ILTA ’09 Conference precipitated this change. I realized that I adored what I was doing in marketing and social networking, and I decided to follow my heart.

What’s going to happen to this blog?
Leadership is still incredibly important to me, and I expect that I will still blog on the topic. I also expect that I will become a “geek in transition” and will blog about what I’m learning at my new job. I’m going to blog on what interests me, and we’ll all just see where it goes. I definitely appreciate those of you who have been reading since I started blogging in early ’08, but I understand that you’ll stop if I bore you. I hope to not be boring, but such is life, eh?

This should be an interesting ride.

On Boredom

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I truly hate being bored. I don’t mean “I have nothing to do” bored, I mean “I’m doing something that requires less than 1% of my thoughts but doesn’t leave me free to think/do something else” bored.

I don’t think I’m alone in this sentiment. I’ve noticed that most geeks also hate that latter form of boredom. I can’t say I’m surprised–most geeks are intelligent, creative, and like using their brains; the antithesis of boring work.

The problem with this is that with my job and with the jobs that many geeks have, we have rote, boring work that HAS to get done. This work is very easy to delay until it becomes a problem for me, for the geek, or for someone else at work. To avoid this, I employ the following strategies:

  • Identify the boring work. If I want to avoid the work badly enough, I can conveniently “forget” that it exists. I try to identify what I have to do but might prefer to ignore at least once a week.
  • Don’t delay gratification. I’m a morning person. If I try to kick off my day by getting the boring work done “first”, I may as well just go home. Instead of investing my high-energy morning creativity in interesting, creative tasks, I have just frittered it away by doing energy-sapping, boring work. By waiting to do boring work until my mid-afternoon slump, I maximize my time and energy investment. (Note: If I weren’t a morning person, I would probably reverse the process and do boring stuff first thing when I was mostly brainless.)
  • Assign a time to boring work. Approving invoices is perhaps my most tedious task. When do I do it? Friday afternoons, of course. Why? My brain has already left the premises, so I may as well spend my time wisely and do my rote tasks then. Also, by assigning a time (which is on my calendar with a reminder), I don’t allow myself to conveniently “forget” to do the work.

But enough about me. How do you handle the boring parts of your job? What works for you? I’d love to learn new strategies!