Deloitte Companies to Watch
Another impressive accolade for Magnet Forensics! Deloitte has placed Magnet on their top 10 companies to watch list! To qualify for the list, the companies need to be operating for less than five years, be based out of Canada, and put a large portion of their revenue to generating intellectual property. Our CEO, Adam Belsher, had this to say about the award:
“We are honoured to be named one of Deloitte’s Companies-to-Watch. This award recognizes the hard work and dedication of our team. We’re thankful for the success we’ve achieved, and we’re incredibly proud to be contributing to the important work done by our customers who use our solutions to fight crime, enhance public safety, protect companies from fraud and theft, and ensure workplace safety and respect for their employees.”
The event was put together very well. It was great to be able to interact with individuals from the other companies and share success stories. I even had a chance to meet up with Stephen Lake of Thalmic Labs and have a good chat with him. I’m going to name-drop him everywhere I go because he’s my old university room/house mate! He also happens to be a incredible person that if you have the chance to meet, you absolutely should. Here’s some coverage on twitter of us talking with our founder Jad Saliba:
RT “@jeffnesbitt: @communitech #fast50ca enjoying awards in toronto with #thalmic and @MagnetForensics. pic.twitter.com/AQlP3IJO5S”
— Nick Cosentino (@nbcosentino) November 14, 2013
We enjoyed the whole night, and we were grateful for Deloitte putting on the event. The entire Magnet team is very proud of our achievements.
Articles
- What comes first: employee engagement or great work?: A short but interesting article on employee engagement. The author claims that most employees probably start of at their position very motivated and engaged. Over time, an employees engagement drops if their leaders are not proactive in keeping their engagement levels up. By proactively acknowledging the success of your employees, you can keep your team engaged and producing great work.
- Great Leadership Starts and Ends with This: Jeff Haden put together this quick little article about an answer an audience member gave about what the key to leading people is. Caring. Overly simplified? Well, the individual went on to say that regardless of all of your strategies, plans, and experience, if you can’t prove that you truly care about your team then they aren’t going to buy in. I’m never one to buy into something so absolute, but the takeaway for me is that team members cannot be looked at entirely as resources. Sure, the people on your team affect productivity and in that sense are resources, but forgetting to acknowledge the human side of things is a recipe for failure.
- 9 Ways to Win Employee Trust: In his article, Geoffrey James put together a great list of nine things to help build trust with your team. I wouldn’t say these are groundbreaking things, but it’s important to be reminded about them. Try reflecting on his list and seeing if you actually do the things you think you do. You might be surprised. Some of the top things on the list for me are ensuring employees’ success is number one on your priorities, listen more than you talk, and walk the walk. Great list!
- Lambdas: An Example in Refactoring Code: I put out this programming article earlier this week and had some great feedback. In this article, I talk about a real world example of how using lambda expressions in C# really helped when refactoring a piece of code. Some people have never heard of lambdas, and some people seem to hate them. In this case for me, it greatly simplified a set of code and reduced a bunch of extra classes. I definitely owe it to myself to start investigating them a little bit more.
- Executive Coaching: Bringing Out Greater Leadership: This article is all about taking charge with your leadership. Judith Sherven talks about executive coaching for leaders, but the main points I see in here are around confidence. If you aren’t confident in your ability to lead, motivate, and inspire how can you expect anyone else to be? It ends up becoming a tough balance, because you need to listen and take feedback from your team, but when you make decisions you should do so with confidence.
- Stop Worrying About Making the Right Decision: Ever heard of paralysis by analysis? This article does a great job of explaining why you shouldn’t let that creep in to your leadership approach. It’s important to make good decisions–there’s no doubt about that. But the reality is that no matter what decision you make, there are certain unknowns that can creep in and potentially have a huge effect on the choices you’ve made. So what’s more important: making the perfect decision, or being able to adapt effectively?
- Appraising Performance Appraisal: Steven Sinofsky‘s article is a bit of a beast, but it’s a great starting point if you’re reconsidering performance appraisals. Even if you’re totally content with your performance review system, it might be worth reading to spark some ideas. Steven does a great job of pointing out some common pitfalls of typical performance appraisal systems and comments on some things you really need to try and understand before sticking to any one system. I’m not well enough versed in the performance review and/or human resources side of things, but this article certainly has enough to get you questioning the common approaches.
- Tab Fragment Tutorial: Shameless plug for my Android application that I put out on the Google Play store. It’s the end result of the tutorial I wrote up over here. I think it’s going to blow past my legitimate application for converting units!
- Does a Good Leader Have To Be Tough?: Deepak Chopra has some seriously great articles. In this article, he analyzes the pros and cons of being a “tough” leader. In short, there are positive takeaways from being a tough leader, but there are a lot of negative aspects to it. Deepak suggests you consider a different approach from tough-soft leadership. By focusing on a hierarchy of needs to be a successful leader, toughness is only one aspect of leadership. A pretty solid read, like all of Deepak’s articles.
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