All posts by

Melanie Rivera

Originally published on Medium. Have you ever seen someone make a head-scratching mistake at work and thought to yourself, “That’s common sense! They should have known that!” Or better yet, as a manager, onboarded a junior employee and skipped talking about something practical — like dress code — because you thought, “That’s common sense: everybody knows that!” Careful. The Invisible Playbook of “Common Sense” at Work There’s something sneaky about “common sense” and it’s in its very name: common. Common to whom? The answer here is whatever population is in

I love mission-driven jobs. In fact, I’m borderline addicted to them. My whole career has been in the nonprofit sector because I want to spend every ounce of my working life on missions I believe in. And yet, as a leader and a coach in the nonprofit sector, and someone who cares deeply about gender parity and race equity at work, I know that for lots of us — and especially women of color — our passion for the work we do sometimes makes us vulnerable to inequitable pay scales