Podcasts Culture Owl Have You Know I Started My Business Because I Made a Huge Mistake feat. Wendy Fong EMBA 13

I Started My Business Because I Made a Huge Mistake feat. Wendy Fong EMBA 13

Published: Dec. 20, 2023, 10 a.m.

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Many of us have probably had that moment \\u2013 where you quit one job because you found your \\u201cdream\\u201d job. But that second place wasn\\u2019t everything you thought it would be. So what comes after that? Wendy Fong decided to start her own company to fulfill her search, and to help others with theirs.


Wendy is a business coach and talent optimizer, with a passion for building dream teams and developing their leaders. She is the founder and principal of Chief Gigs, which offers leadership and team development, organizational consulting, and search. Chief Gigs helps businesses and the people within them achieve optimum performance and thrive in a dynamic and diverse world.


She chats with host Maya Pomroy \\u201922 about her pivot from the corporate world to entrepreneurship, the ongoing strength of the Rice network, building great teams, her passion for fighting human trafficking and her dream of one day opening a nonprofit in Cambodia.


Owl Have You Know is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.



Episode Quotes:


Embracing diversity and self-awareness for optimal performance\\xa0

[10:27] Maya: What\'s something that often goes overlooked when it comes to optimizing team performance that you have found?

[10:34] Wendy: Interestingly enough, people\'s biases are so strong even though they don\'t know it. People tend to hire others who are like them. And so, sometimes I found entire teams all centered around one quadrant. So, you can plot people based on your answers into the world of work. And everybody is in the same quadrant with the same strength, but also the same, you know-

[11:04] Maya: Weaknesses. Yeah.

[11:04] Wendy: ...caution areas, right? And so, I think the most important thing is for people to be self-aware, so they can say, "Okay, I know this other person might not be the person when I interviewed them we just are BFFs right away, and we hit it off, and maybe the conversation was a little awkward. But the reason that is, is because they are the opposite for me." And...

[11:31] Maya: Different perspectives.

[11:32] Wendy: Exactly, and I need that. And for leaders to understand, if you need that, you have to be able to work with different people with different work styles.

When Wendy realized that her true passion is helping people
02:27 - After having been in operations for so long, I learned that my true passion was people instead of operations. But it was all so intertwined when you have a big job that you don\'t realize. And so after that, I tried to make my way to helping people as much as I could.


How do you know if it\'s the right time to do leadership development?

15:46 - Before you start seeing performance issues, right before you start seeing the cracks, is when you should really be engaging and building. Unfortunately, the issue with a lot of organizations is that they don\'t invest enough money into training and development. They don\'t invest enough money into HR departments.



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