Ratliff & Taylor

🎶I guess you've wondered where I've been🎶- Billy Caldwell (but, really me to everyone who's been waiting on an email/teams response from me these last couple of weeks 👀) I've been out and about in the community these last couple of weeks and am so thankful Swagelok provided me these opportunities to grow and develop: 🚗Toured Lorain County Community College's Center of Idea and Invention and learned more about their commitment to educating the future of STEM. 🚗Attended The University of Akron College of Engineering and Polymer Science annual reception and met a number of talented engineering students involved in the design teams. 🚗Represented Swagelok at the Central State University STEM career expo and even caught up with some other peers who made the trek from Cleveland (Alisha Minter Charles Donaldson, Jr., SHRM-CP) 🚗Celebrated Swagelok receiving the Company of the Year award at Engage! Cleveland's Generation Next awards 🚗Served as a panelist with Josh Marx, Nicole Decker, & Tyler Adams at an invite-only forum for young professionals called "Building Your Impact: Strategic & Systems Thinking" hosted by Ratliff & Taylor to share my insights. Made a number of connections with awesome people! 🚗Attended the Washkewicz College of Engineering at Cleveland State University Diversity in Engineering Event to show Seth Lamp, MBA the ropes of campus recruiting. Also caught up with some students from last year's event and got to hear all the awesome things they've accomplished since last year! It's been an exhausting, but rewarding couple of weeks, mixed with craziness of campus recruiting season! Now all I need to really to end this week of craziness is for the New York Mets to get a W tonight 🤞 & I do promise to respond to all my emails and Teams ASAP 🫡

Yesterday was my first time back in the community in nearly three weeks. For those of you who know me personally, you may have an idea why. I'll be sharing more on this soon. 😊 But what brought me back momentarily? Spoiler alert: I was asked to be a panelist for an incredible event. The always forward-thinking Ratliff & Taylor team hosted an invite-only forum for young professionals yesterday called "Building Impact: Strategic & Systems Thinking." Each person in attendance was handpicked by their leadership team to not only give their emerging professionals a platform for sharpening their personal strategic and systems thinking, but also strengthen the relationship between said emerging professionals and their leadership. Additionally (and uniquely), Ratliff & Taylor will report back all of the ideas, discussions, and feedback from yesterday's forum to our area's leaders to give them a complete blueprint of leveraging their emerging professionals in their ecosystem. How cool is this? They are using EVERYONE'S collective voice to give our area businesses the best means of growing holistically. I was truly humbled to be asked to participate in the forum's panel discussion alongside Josh Marx, Malory (Sanchez) LaRocca, and Nicole Decker. Our panel focused on defining strategic and systems thinking from the perspective of seasoned professionals like Josh and Nicole against the lens of emerging professionals like Malory and me. Here are a couple of key takeaways I offered my peers of emerging professionals: ⬇️ ➡️ Taking a page out of Adam Grant's book (literally - his book Think Again), I encouraged the group to think like scientists and create their strategies as if they we creating a testable hypothesis. This not only encourages the strategy to use existing data as a foundation, but it also gives us permission to be wrong and make adjustments where needed (update the hypothesis). ➡️ If we want organic strategic and systems thinking in our working environments, our leaders are responsible for creating a physiologically safe environment. Without this, you can't expect your emerging professionals to share their ideas (or shoot down the bad ones). Here are a couple of key takeaways I learned from my panelist peers: ⬇️ ➡️ Malory mentioned that she's practicing not "going first," and there's a lot of power here. There's strength in listening THEN responding when it comes to strategy. ➡️ Josh and Niki's overarching theme brought strategy back to their people and culture. At the end of the day, our leaders are accountable but that shouldn't limit everyone from thinking like an owner. --- Thank you, Alison Arkin MS, PCC, GPCC, Beth Sweeney, and Kyla Schneider for the opportunity to join this panel. To my new friends Brigid Coyne, Katherine Shifferly (ps: stole your photo 😊), and Marvin Houston, MSCJ, LPCC, LICDC-CS, I deeply look forward to connecting again soon! And Tuck Sweeney, always a pleasure catching up (and thanks for the photos!).

Proudly announcing Ratliff & Taylor as a first-time CLC Corporate Partner. Thank you for being a Diamond-level sponsor this year! We are grateful for your support and your leadership in the executive search that brought Becky Ruppert McMahon to us! https://lnkd.in/ez-VwHg8