Posts By Rod Gallant

Hackschooling

Many of you may have already seen this talk by Logan Laplante. In my opinion he nails the age old question of “What do you want to be when you grow up?”. When you think about it, his answer makes perfect sense but I’m pretty sure that none of us answered it with his responseRead… Read more »

Hidden Superpowers of Balanced Creative Teams

I’m always intrigued by team dynamics, what makes good ones work well? what causes problems? etc. We’ve all likely worked in great and not so great environments. So what makes a great team and what attributes should you look for when building your team? In a recent article on 99u.com Emily Cohen wrote about “TheRead… Read more »

Job Search Techniques from the Internet’s Favourite Pets

As most of you are aware, I’m an HR guy. So I read a lot of articles relating to recruitment and job searching techniques. Last week I came across this one on Mashable by Afifa Siddiqui titled ““Job Search Techniques from the Internet’s Favourite Pets”. Really, who doesn’t like looking at Grumpy Cat memes? IRead… Read more »

Evaluating Experience

Experience is routinely framed as a pre-requisite (i.e. do you meet Experience X? yes or no). In my Agency (Canada Revenue Agency), we’ve had a long history of also considering and evaluating the quality of one’s experience in order to make appointments/placements. So from a pool of qualified candidates, a hiring manager would define aRead… Read more »

This is Water

A video I find myself watching on a fairly regular basis is “This is Water”. It is an adaptation of a commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College in 2005. If you haven’t seen the video before it is well worth 9 minutes of your time. I’m no saint but since firstRead… Read more »

Creating Change in Government

Originally posted on www.govlife.ca William Eggers recently shared an article on Twitter by Tiffany Dovey Fishman called Creating Change in Government. Change is something we are all very familiar with in government. As someone who’s been around for a while I’ve certainly seen my fair share. Most of it positive, with the odd head shakerRead… Read more »

The Choice of Leadership

Originally posted on www.govlife.ca I’ve been reading a lot about leadership lately, mainly thanks to George’s weekly roundups here on #govlife. Earlier this week Scott wrote a piece on leadership as well, The New Government Leader. He talked about the behaviours that define tomorrow’s successful government leaders. The article he referenced suggested that future leadersRead… Read more »

The Crippling Effect of Over Thinking. Everything.

Part of my regular reading includes posts written by Matt Cheuvront. He’s the founder of Proofbranding based out of Nashville. Matt has a blog, Life Without Pants, and also writes on Medium.com. You’ll likely see me reference some of his posts here on #govlife. He recently wrote a new piece recently called The Crippling EffectRead… Read more »

Expect Nothing in Return

A couple of weeks ago Kent Aitken shared a post by Tim Sanders on CPSRenewal titled Expect Nothing in Return. It got me thinking about my own interactions I have on-line and what my expectations are about them. The author indicates we are “socialized to thinking that networking is an exchange of value.” I thinkRead… Read more »