TuSK

Kristi Cavanaugh

Have you ever worked with someone who is a mind reader? Well Kristi Cavanaugh might as well be a psychic. Kristi runs the Central Sourcing business at EA, and she is nothing short of amazing. Kristi is one of those people that understands her business so well and her clients so completely that she is able to answer questions before you ask them. Every conversation that I have had with Kristi over the last 6 months has ended with Kristi, ever cheerful, saying “Great idea!” and then finding out later that she had already thought of it and put it into practice. The work that Kristi is doing inside the Central Sourcing business is truly ground breaking. If you get a chance to meet Kristi, do it. You won’t be disappointed. Learn more about Kristi here.

Cindy Haugh

Cindy Haugh is the leader of the global talent acquisition organization at EA. As such, she is my boss (for the stuff I do at EA at least), so there is no way this won’t come across as gratuitous brown-nosing. So be it.

I once wrote a piece about Brand Talent and how organizations need to help their employees spread their wings in order to keep them around and engaged. I am sure that most people thought it was another one of my pipe dreams, but it was based on my experience at EA. As I have said earlier, the thoughts of going to work for a large company used to bring on waves of nausea. Why would I want to give up control, the opportunity to innovate and the freedom to chose the work I wanted to do?

When Cindy first contacted me about working at EA I let her know up front that working at EA was about as palatable to me as poking myself in the eye with a stick. I told her all the reasons why. She listened patiently and then replied calmly “I don’t work that way.” And she has been good to her word ever since.

In Good to Great you read about Level 5 leaders. Level 5 leaders are people who are humble and fiercely focused at the same time. They know the right thing to do and they organize and nurture teams that can accomplish those objectives, all while deflecting praise and attention on to the team. These kinds of leaders get amazing results and build tremendous team cohesiveness because they put the result before their ego. People want to excel for them because people learn to trust that the leader is in it for the larger good. Cindy’s teams have accomplished amazing results over the last five years, and it is due almost entirely to her leadership.

Sean Rehder

Sean runs Rehder Talent Logistics (you can read his great blog here). I have said it before, and I will say it again: “Sean is the shortest distance possible between a great idea and software implementation.” For those of you who haven’t heard my glowing praise before, Sean is the guy who is our Salesforce / contingent workforce / process guru. Maybe I feel such an affinity for Sean because I hope that I share some of his same characteristics: visionary, hard working and solid as a rock. Most likely I am just deluding myself, because Sean never ceases to amaze. For instance, we have been talking internally about some really cool contingent workforce ideas. Sean overheard one of the conversations. Three days later he came back to us with a prototype of something that answered 80% of our problems. Part of this is the ease of configurability of Salesforce, but most of it was Sean pulling a couple of all nighters to get something done. Again – this isn’t something that we asked him to do. He was just excited about what he heard and decided to unleash his expertise and passion in the service of a client. Simply awesome. I have worked with Sean since October of last year, and I don’t think there is a month that has gone by that the guy hasn’t done something to impress me and the rest of the team here at EA. So I just wanted this to be a public thanks to Sean for all his outstanding work.