Aden is a pragmatic and playful advisor on communication, change and social workplace dynamics. She works with passionate leaders who want impact their work, team and organizations. Aden started out as a creative for an educational software company to make learning fun, engaging, and memorable for k-12 students in school districts spanning the United States. Eventually, she began working inside the corporate world in a new way. She left her job at the software company and made the leap to full-time with the improv comedy school where she had been teaching classes in her free time, eventually focusing her efforts on the corporate training side of the business. This gave Aden the opportunity to design and lead team-building training, facilitate leadership meetings, and help teams think about how to work better together.
By 2013 Aden was combining the playfulness of the improv training with the powerful tools her father had developed. And in 2015, stepped into her role as president of the Art of Change Skills for Life. Through this work, she saw how the experiences she had in the early software job played out for other people in other settings, with other teams, in different companies and industries worldwide. People who are excited to share and explore ideas with each other and who are curious to hear their colleagues’ perspectives, enjoy their work more and get better results. Leaders play an important role in how people feel about the world around them, and how their work relates to it. We’ve all heard the old adage that great leaders find the best people and then get out of their way…it’s actually a lot more complex than that.
"Show me a quota that isn’t hit, a goal that isn’t achieved, or an employee that wants to quit, and I will show you a breakdown in communication."
Fostering curiosity is also about modeling curiosity. Encouraging people to bring their best to the table, is also about how leaders communicate their expectations and permissions to the people who report to them. The corporate environment can be incredibly toxic or an incredible place to come up with groundbreaking products and services for consumers to utilize. While anyone can have a positive impact on the culture of an organization, leaders are poised to make the greatest difference.
Change is inevitable. Progress is not. YOU make the difference.