Not all micromanagers are created equal. Some are a lot more vexing than others. If you’re unfortunate enough to fall under their purview for a while, instead of letting the frustration get to you, it pays to develop coping and navigation skills. Here are some ideas to help you finesse a difficult situation:
For some individuals navigating the mid-career blahs involves taking on added job responsibilities or even changing positions within their firms. Others seek out new experiences by shifting firms or possibly taking on like-kind roles in new industries.While there’s work involved in all of those cases, the degree of difficulty is relatively low for job changers compared to the challenges faced by those I reference as career reinventors. For this latter group, the process of determining what to do is the first big challenge.
I created our online/on-demand program, First-Time Manager Academy, to fill a gaping hole in the market for practical, actionable new manager development, and, to fulfill a career-long promise to myself.
The transition from individual contributor to new manager is awkward and filled with unexpected challenges. Our free mini-course, Overcoming and Succeeding with the Top 5 Challenges of New Managers, is filled with practical advice to help smooth a few of the bumps out of the journey.
If you’re fortunate enough to be working with a coach in your professional or personal life, know that there’s a formula for success with this endeavor. Success starts with the right mindset—a beginner’s mind—and the commitment to listening, processing, and applying and experimenting with yourself and your behaviors daily. In other words, it’s hard work. Here are five additional ideas that will help you succeed:
The gravitational pull of the status quo is powerful in every organization. It takes rebels and rebellion to change. While breaking the rules always comes with risk, learning to guide others through constructive rule-breaking in pursuit of needed changes is a great way to grow your success.
I’ve long been convinced we work our way to professional success one challenging conversation and one challenging situation at a time. (Think about it.) Of course, learning to succeed in those moments is the critical part. That’s why we put together our online/on-demand program, Crushing It with Challenging Conversations.
If you’re feeling that tug of “It’s time to do something different,” it pays to spend some time sorting through whether you are best served by a job change or a wholesale career shift. As you might imagine, the two paths are radically different in scale, scope, timing, effort, and risk.
We have all become unwitting participants in a massive unregulated social experiment. For a little over a decade, we have forced ourselves to evolve from beings who communicate face-to-face, to beings who spend a significant portion of our work and personal lives communicating virtually. What’s to be done? There is no single cure. Instead, we need to learn a new language of emotion, one that begins to replace the human intent that’s left out of the virtual conversation.
For many of us, the idea of an encore career is an appealing fantasy that never grows closer or more tangible. At least part of the problem for why we remain locked in place stems from our attempt to answer the wrong question. Try a simple reframe of the question, “What do I want to be when I grow up?” to open the floodgates of ideas essential to help us move from fantasy to reality. We have some great design thinkers to thank for this simple, powerful reframe.
