Lab Notes Blog

About Platinum Pivot and who it's for

Platinum Pivot is a project on a mission to help STEM professionals unlearn inhibition habits and practice replacing them with new reflexes that boost safety, wellbeing, and belonging in the workplace. The early seeds of this project came from real experiences in engineering, tech, and scientific workplaces where there is still a lot of unawareness around, and missed opportunity to integrate, better leadership & empowerment practices from long-established fields of study and the business world.

What Platinum Pivot champions for is not solely applicable to just STEM, or to just workplaces – I hope that's obvious. The reason we keep this emphasis is to make it crystal clear that workplace safety (the non-physical kind), wellbeing, and belonging also matter to practitioners in STEM like*:

• Engineers

• Scientists

• Researchers

• Analysts

• Technicians

• Developers

• Operators

• Specialists

• Students

• Interns

• Educators

• Consultants

• Contractors

• Individual contributors

• Lab & office staff

• Managers

• Senior leaders

• Humans

*list is neither exhaustive nor ordered, haha.

The emerging theory behind Platinum Pivot

Over two decades working as a systems engineering practitioner in multiple industries, I have gathered heuristic data informing three general observations (GO).

GO #1: When speaking with coworkers who are regarded as reliable allies by others, these allies often admit they are unsure or unaware of the behaviors they've engaged in to earn their reputation. They are pleasantly surprised by specific constructive feedback and motivated to keep growing their skills.

GO #2: When speaking with coworkers who struggle with asserting themselves or protecting their boundaries, these empowerees share that they often receive ineffective advice and little practical guidance. If they receive coaching on empowering behaviors or leadership skills (still not too common), they are pleasantly surprised by the results and motivated to keep growing their skills.

GO #3: Bringing mindful attention to habits, skills, examples, and stories of empowering ourselves or others (successfully and not!) has had a net positive effect on the quality and quantity of practice among more people in that workplace.

In all three cases, talking openly and forming peer mentorships has been game changing. These and many more observations and ongoing research have led to the emerging theory behind Platinum Pivot.

How this might matter to you

For the people I have coached over the last six years (and for myself!), embedding these new reflexes into daily work has boosted our senses of safety, wellbeing, and belonging more practically and sustainably than relying on mandatory workplace trainings alone.

I founded Platinum Pivot to share our learnings and tools more widely so more professionals can access more empowering daily workplace interactions that free them up to do more cool stuff the world needs. Not limited to but especially for those of us in STEM fields. 

Because when we experience more decent humanity at work, the products, services, systems, and technologies we create are better for the humans who need & use them.

To put this into cheesy conditional terms:

IF 

you are a human

AND 

you seek better self-empowerment OR to better empower others

THEN 

Platinum Pivot is here for you.

🧀🤖