Every team wants to be strategic. Few of them actually are. It’s one thing to execute business activities, it’s an entirely different thing to know why you execute them and how they fit into a system …
December … family time, festive celebration, yummy food, decorations, music, maybe a little snow. I love it. I always have. It’s easy to get swept up in the magic of December and put your work and c …
Nobody ever asks me this question – do you need to be liked to be an effective leader? I’m not sure why that is. I think it’s an important question to ask. I think the answer to the question reveals a …
Interviewing is hard. I think I’ve said that a few times before. Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, you realize – often painfully – you don’t. Sometimes, everything is what it seems to be. …
Delegation is one of those management attributes that is way more complex than most people realize. It’s one of those skills that is easy to critique from the sidelines until you’re the one struggling …
I don’t know about you, but it feels harder than ever to find and hire great talent. It seems like everyone I wish I could hire is gainfully employed, well-paid, and fully engaged. I still have severa …
It never ceases to amaze me how weird people act when they get a new boss. They get defensive. They get paranoid. They get political. They get needy. Nothing gets people acting crazy like a new boss. …
I’ll be on vacation this week. No access to email, phone, text. This blog is the last thing I’m doing before I leave, and then … bye bye. I must admit, I tend to get a certain amount of anxiety before …
We’re going to give her this job and she’ll either sink or swim. We’re going to toss him into the deep end and see if he can make it. There is a school of thought among managers that we can’t coddle p …
Are your team members lying to you? No, of course they’re not. My team doesn’t lie to me, what kind of question is that? When I ask leaders this tough question – Is your team lying to you? – those ar …
It hurts … It hurts so bad. I spent my entire weekend working on a project and I decided to throw it all away. Gone. All that work. All that effort. Just 24 hours ago, I was so excited. I had a great …
Put up your hand if you care about your career … Ok, me too. There is nothing wrong with wanting to do well. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be recognized and rewarded and promoted at work. The …
Some of my best career moves have been to do absolutely nothing. I’ve made a lot of progress by taking no action whatsoever. I realize that sounds a bit odd, but let me walk you through my logic. My o …
In your career, it’s easy to get distracted from what really matters. It’s easy to get locked into a cycle of work and lose sight of the point of it all. It’s easy to fixate on problems and processes …
We can probably all agree that challenging, motivating and developing our top performers is a priority. We can probably also agree that aggressively performance managing our lowest performers is a top …
Employee engagement gets a lot of air time. I fear it has become an abstraction. A concept we speak of at the surface level only. It is important. Of course it is. But employee engagement isn’t what r …
We’ve all gone through it. You think everything is ok, your team is doing well, your programs are performing, and then … bam. You get some cryptic meeting request from one of your up-and-coming stars …
Do you ever worry that at any moment your boss and co-workers will wake up to the truth that you have no idea what you’re doing? Do you remember that time you moved to a new department or industry and …
My mother has had a profound impact on my life – personally and professionally. It seems like a great day to talk about the influence she has had (and still has) on my career success. While she never …
It’s hard enough to be a great manager when things are going well. It can feel nearly impossible when your life is in disarray. Inevitably we all go through it. Divorce, illness, distraction, depressi …
Hang with me for a little while on this one. We all have horror stories about working for terrible micromanagers. I have a few doozies I share whenever the moment is right. Many of us wear our experie …
How hard are you on your team members? How often do you hold back criticism you probably should share? How do you decide when to push harder and when to throttle back? There is a magic balance every m …
No, I’m not ashamed to have so obviously hijacked a “rom com” title for the newsletter this week. Great movie … but I digress 🙂 Have you ever felt your team slipping away from you? Every so often, pa …
What makes a great leader? Is there a formula for leadership? Are some of us born of leadership material and others not? I’ve wrestled with these questions for several months now and I’ve shared my th …
I don’t know about you, but I get in my own way … A LOT. It’s easy to point at external factors for limiting your success … a tough boss, a struggling company, a bad economy, crappy co-workers. But if …
How much time do you waste building and rebuilding PowerPoint slides? How much time does your team waste? If you’re anything like I used to be, the answer is, “waaaaaay too much”. For years now, I’ve …
A few weeks ago I wrote a blog describing what I believe it takes to advance from Manager level to Director level. You can check it out here if you missed it. It seems like many of you enjoy …
I used to take 1 on 1 meetings for granted. I knew I was supposed to do them, but I’m not sure I fully appreciated why. They were the first meetings to get bumped when I got busy. I rarely had a set a …
Happy New Year! This is my favorite week of the year. Call me a nerd, but I love setting goals for the new year. There’s something so positive about the first week in January. I haven’t done an …
I don’t think I’ve ever worked for a company or on a team that didn’t complain about cross functional silos. Every offsite, kickoff, boardroom and brainstorm seems to try and address this problem. The …
I’ve always had very close relationships with my bosses. Except for my earliest jobs, I can’t remember not having a very friendly relationship with the person who managed me. I feel very fortun …
I’ve stopped talking so much in meetings. More precisely, I’ve stopped talking first in meetings. A while back, I was in a meeting led by another manager and I noticed something that has stuck …
I fired a person once and they were completely shocked by it. Not only was it sad news, it was surprising. In the weeks that followed I spent a lot of time wondering how it could have been so clear to …
Every so often I catch myself micromanaging staff members. Sometimes even very experienced, senior level team members. When it happens, I try to ask myself why. I know full well what the repercussions …
Hiring is hard. And the more I do it, the more I know this to be true. You do everything you can. You ask all the questions. You get outside opinions. You check references. You give them an assignment …
I’ve written a lot this year about interview questions. This blog, had over 600,000 views on LinkedIn earlier in the year. In it, I wrote about a different approach to questioning designed to get …
A few years ago, Gallup did a survey and found that only 13% of employees felt engaged by their jobs. And almost a quarter of us were “actively disengaged”, which means we pretty much hate g …
The fundamental premise behind the 30 60 90 Day Plan does not change no matter what role you’re in or hoping to be in. The purpose of the 30 60 90 Day Plan is widely misunderstood. It has nothing to d …
Without a doubt, the hardest part of being a manager is firing a team member. You don’t really hear that word a lot these days – “FIRING”- it sounds so harsh. I think we feel better about ourse …
The role of Manager is not finite. It moves. What your team needs from you, what the company needs from you, shifts in accordance to the conditions of the market, the economy, the business context. To …
I’ve been hiring a lot lately so I’ve had the chance to observe the various ways new employees try to make strong a first impression. Having also recently started a new job myself, this topic is top o …
Incrementalism is a trap. In my opinion at least. It is a byproduct of short term, quarter by quarter thinking. It is a sure-fire way to become the victim of disruption. It is also common in ju …
Saying “no” at work isn’t easy. At least it’s not easy to do without compromising relationships, creating conflict or dinging your reputation. In my experience, most of us get it badly wrong. Do you r …
This year I’ve been keeping a list of the unique behaviors I observe in the best and worst managers I meet. You might be surprised how much you miss when you’re not really paying attention and how man …
While I was on vacation this week I re-read one of my favorite management books: Turn that Ship Around by David Marquet. This is a massively underrated leadership book in my opinion. If you haven …
I hear this question more than you might think: Am I management material? I most often hear it from new managers and individual contributors on the path to management. But in fairness, I’m …
At least half the people I coach complain to me about a micromanaging boss. The irony, which I won’t dwell on today, is that several of them lean towards micromanagement themselves. The fact is, micro …
“What does it take to get to the Director level?” “I’ve been a manager for 8 years, when will I be ready to be a Director?” “I want to be a Director; how do I get there?” I get these questions all the …
The lion’s share of coaching moments I have with managers of the teams I manage revolve around cross functional projects. Even if you’ve managed a hundred of them, they’re still really hard. I have to …
Its offsite season. The year is half finished and we’re starting to get picture of how things are going. Are we on track? Are we going to hit our numbers? Do we need to make changes? Is the team perfo …
The worst thing you have to do as a manager is fire someone. To this day, I can’t sleep the night before doing it. I take it very seriously and so should you. Anyone who says they like it or don’t min …
It seems I can’t go out for coffee anymore without someone talking to me about the crazy interview process they just went through. Puzzles, presentations, portfolios, psychometric tests. Not a new thi …
Multi-tasking is a trap. I am convinced of it. For a long time, we glamorized multi-tasking. We put it on a pedestal as a business virtue to be proud of. Many people still do. But I have come to learn …
A few months ago I started a blog series on how to improve your chances at each stage of the interview process. In the first two parts I focused on the top of the funnel – specifically, how to make yo …
How much can you really tell about a candidate in a 30 second resume scan? In my experience, you can tell quite a bit. Not everything, but enough to make a decent judgment call. Here are the three thi …
Employee engagement was right up there on the list of top corporate buzz terms for 2016. And company-wide engagement programs are quickly becoming the silver bullets de jour to unlock hidden wo …
Consensus hiring can kill a company. That sounds a bit dramatic I know, but I mean it. I don’t know exactly when it began, but these days most corporate hiring processes include groups of at least fou …
I’m a little surprised to be writing about this topic because it has been written about many times before. But I recently participated in a couple of interviews where this question was asked, and I wa …
I get asked a lot of questions about salary negotiation. New job offers, internal promotions, annual increases … there still seems to be a lot of discomfort out there when it comes to negotiation. I c …
Sometimes when I look at successful executives, I am disheartened because it all just looks so easy for them. They seem to effortlessly rise up the corporate ladder. They appear to win at everything t …
I started a new job this week. I was pretty nervous. I don’t care how long you’ve done this for, the first week at a new job, with a new team, is always very exciting but also a bit unnerving. I’m not …
I’m always thinking about how to advance my career. Like many of you, I want to maximize my success so I can achieve my personal goals and do nice things for my family. Whatever your reasons ar …
Q – I’ve been with my company for three years now and part of me thinks it is time to move on to pursue new opportunities. I’ve become extremely frustrated with my boss lately and I don’t see a clear …
I want to become a better interviewer. In fact, I’m quite obsessed with it at the moment. The irony of this is that for the longest time, I placed little or no value whatsoever in the practice of inte …
Q – I’ve been managing a team for two years now and every time I try to give someone a promotion it’s like pulling teeth. Between my boss, the HR team and finance, it couldn’t be more difficult to get …
Getting a job offer is a very exciting time. It often comes as a huge relief after a prolonged period of emotional and financial stress for you and your family. It feels like a massive wei …
Q – I’ve been managing a team for a couple years and I’ve had my ups and downs from a hiring perspective. I’ve made some good hires and some not so good hires along the way – nothing crazy, but not aw …
Q – I think I’m at the end of my rope. I’ve been working my butt off for the past two years and I keep getting passed over for promotions. I swear if I didn’t know better I’d say there was a giant con …
When I got my first management job I was really excited. Of course, I pretended like it was no big deal and I tried to act like I’d been there before, but on the inside I was giddy. When you ge …
Self directed learning is probably the least appreciated career skill out there. If you want to advance in your career and certainly if you have hopes of getting to the executive level, you need to bu …
Q – I just started managing a new team and one of my staff members is close friends with my boss. I keep noticing them having personal powwows and secret strategy sessions without me. And there have b …
I was just given the chance to move into a new role in a different department at my company. It’s a lateral move, but I think it presents a ton of potential opportunities if I play my cards right. Unf …
There are three questions I get asked over and over again by friends and readers who care about advancing their careers. How do I convince my boss to give me a promotion or raise? How do I deal with a …
“There is someone on my team who hasn’t been performing well for a while now. I’m almost embarrassed to say he’s been on my radar for more than a year. I keep finding reasons not to make the hard deci …
In my experience, the greatest moments for career advancement come in times of uncertainty and disruption. I know this sounds counter intuitive but its very true and something most of us overlo …
For years now, as content marketing has braised in ubiquity and flirted with saturation, most marketers have felt growing pressure to produce volumes of searchable, shareable, Mashable, HuffPost-able, …
“I have a lot of trouble communicating with my boss and other senior executives at work. I’ve tried so many different approaches and none of them have worked. At this point I’m pretty sure I’m over th …
“I’ve got good news and bad news … The good news is, I just got assigned a big project that has the potential to give me all kinds of visibility in the company. The bad news is, I’ve been paired wit …
“I’m a new manager. What’s your advice for managing people with more experience than I have?” New managers tend to ask this question a lot. Unfortunately, there’s no rule book out there with in …
Q: I just got promoted to my first management job. I will be leading a team of five people and I don’t have a clue what to do. What advice do you have for new managers? A: This is a pretty exciting mo …
Q: I finally got a raise this year … woot woot. I know, I know … I should probably be happier than I am. I have been waiting so long for this. But when my boss finally gave it to me, it was a 4% i …
Q: I get the basic purpose of a 30 60 90 day plan but I’m not exactly sure when I should be using it. Can you give me some pointers? A: Of all the topics I blog about, the 30 60 90 day plan seems to g …
One of the most common questions I hear when I talk to people about their careers goes something like this: “How come nobody cares about the work I’m doing? I’m reliable, I’m never late with my projec …
Unicorns “A” Players Game Changers Full Stackers Just about every manager I know has hung their hiring hopes on the pursuit of mythical creatures. The unicorn in particular. To one degree or another, …
