Leading Conversations

Social distancing has made it even harder to make individuals feel like part of a team. Dr. Wei Zheng surveyed Stevens alumni to learn how their managers were making them feel like accepted, valued contributors — even from six feet (or many miles) apart.

It’s easy to get lost in the new challenges when a pandemic or other disaster hits. Leadership development expert Dr. Peter Dominick explained how managers can develop meaningful connections to employees and encourage their resilience amid a crisis.

Facilitating conversations about race and inequity should not be passive nor static, being open to new information, new experiences, and personal growth are essential. We detail 7 empirically-derived methods for promoting and facilitating conversations about race, racism, and inequity.

Boris Levin is the Chairman and CEO of Mott Corporation. He previously served as Group President at Nypro Healthcare, President at NP Medical, and General Manager at ACMI. In this interview, he talks about using first principles of engineering to think about business problems, his company’s proactive COVID-19 strategies, their unique mechanisms to embed core values into everyday work life, and how he empowers others to make decisions.

Chris Ferreri, the Chief Operating Officer at Hartfield, Titus, and Donnelly, shares insights pertaining to his academic and professional career.

Annie DeStefano is the Vice President at Silicon Valley Bank where she works with CEOs and founders of venture backed Fintech companies. She is also a member on the Advisory Board at Stevens Institute of Technology. Having worked at Goldman Sachs and Foursquare on the technology front, she has become a leader in Fintech.

Stevens Joachim, the Chairperson at Global Legal Entity Identifiers Foundation and Chief Financial Officer at Smart World Productions, shares insights pertaining to his academic and professional career. Having had experience working in a variety of industries and environment, Joachim offers an intriguing perspective on leadership, particularly what it takes to be an effective leader.

Lisa Mascolo, a Stevens alumnus and current trustee of Stevens, talks about how technology is not for its own ends but an enabler of problem-solving. She also talks about the leader’s job as listening, learning, and teaching, in addition to leading; how a leader needs to be both effective and admired, both confident and empathetic, and know what to do when they don’t know what to do during disruptive times.

In this interview, Stephanie Rowe talks about her work with the TSA, pulling together large-scale technology change projects, her entrepreneurial endeavors and lessons learned, and her consulting work on product innovation. She also shares what she sees as the “branding” problem of STEM, and how STEM can be rebranded to be more welcoming of women and girls.

In this interview, Joelle Rusin talks about how her data analytics projects help solve old business problems, how she gains credibility as a young woman in technology, and how she keeps a sharp focus on her goals when navigating biased interactions.

In this interview, Elaine Turville talks about how to gain credibility in technology, build personal brands in collaborative work, translate technology for nontechnical audiences, and integrate technology and business process expertise.