Rachel Happe believes in the power of community to enable human potential and is fascinated by social dynamics and false truths. Co-founder of The Community Roundtable, she has spent the last 25 years helping organizations implement emerging technologies to advance their business strategies. Her work focuses on how networked communications environments transform how people work, their productivity and their personal satisfaction by aligning their passions, skills, and relationships. Her purpose in co-founding The Community Roundtable is to support organizations in using community governance models to pursue agility and innovation. Clients benefit from the Community Roundtable’s models, research, and expertise to advance their community’s performance. Rachel uses her ability to make sense of abstract trends and see the implications that technical and operational decisions can have on people and processes to support business leaders in developing their community, collaboration, and engagement strategies. And Rachel believes “People are patient about the wrong things.” We encourage you to take a moment to consider your legacy at work and reach out to us at https://legacy-makersatwork.com/
Rachel Happe – Community Engagement Advancer
Rachel Happe is a new kind of leader that, in her words, “convenes, connects, nudges, and engages.” Particularly as a woman she can create friction with traditional leadership models in the commercial setting.”
Rachel believes in the power of community to enable human potential and is fascinated by social dynamics and false truths. Co-founder of The Community Roundtable, she has spent the last 25 years helping organizations implement emerging technologies to advance their business strategies. Her work focuses on how networked communications environments transform how people work, their productivity and their personal satisfaction by aligning their passions, skills, and relationships. Her purpose in co-founding The Community Roundtable is to support organizations in using community governance models to pursue agility and innovation.
Like many people looking at their own career, Rachel says her journey so far at first seemed disjointed and opportunistic. But she told us following her transition from the Pentagon to management consulting to technical product executive to analyst covering social technologies gave her the right experience and perspective where and when that combination of expertise was most needed. The resources she brought were overkill for years; then her business took off when the market was ready to embrace the tools and organization needs to address the transformation of their management and culture.
She loves challenges and that is pivotal to her career journey, but she grew up with a lot of imposter syndrome. She was surprised by how many people were impressed by her writing. Running her own business, having to take responsibility for success and failure, helped her to get over the imposter syndrome. The desire to integrate the various pieces of life and work examples came from the family she grew up in. Her mother was a community organizer and her father a minister. And she was fortunate to work with a mentor who helped her understand that the things she is good at were not common.
When we asked her, Rachel said she doesn’t think about her legacy very often. She didn’t set out with an intent, and she discovered her way. Her definition of work legacy is all the people you influence and how that affected their decisions. Do we live on with the people we touch?
What’s next for Rachel? As always, she is looking for patterns and the next big, audacious thing for her, perhaps in the civic world. “We are always becoming.” Listen to the episode for more on her intriguing legacy journey, takeaways and advice.
BIO: Rachel Happe (@rhappe) is a Co-Founder and Principal at The Community Roundtable.The Community Roundtable collaborates with clients to develop proven, practical strategies for better engagement. Clients rely on TheCR’s models, research, and expertise to advance their community’s performance.
Rachel co-founded The Community Roundtable to support business leaders in developing their community, collaboration, and engagement strategies. Clients including AMEX, City Year, AAAS, EA, Ciena, the Canadian Medical Association, and the World Bank Group benefit from Rachel’s ability to make sense of abstract trends and her ability to see the implications that technical and operational decisions can have on people and processes.
Rachel has over twenty-five years of experience working with emerging technologies including enterprise social networking, eCommerce, and enterprise software applications. Rachel has served as a product executive at Mzinga, Bitpass, & IDe, and as IDC’s first analyst covering social technologies. She started her business career as an analyst at PRTM.
Websites
· twitter.com/rhappe (Twitter)
· communityroundtable.com (Company Website)
Email: rehappe@gmail.com