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.
Almost every professional navigates periods of extreme busyness. However, when the workload turns into perpetual overload, motivation flies out the window and productivity and quality (not to mention enjoyment) disappear. In this article, we look at the primary causes of workplace overload and offer some ideas for you to regain control.
In construction, a strong foundation is fundamental to creating a solid, resilient structure. The same applies when it comes to developing new managers. In this article, I share guidance and a framework to help with the development of strong, resilient new managers on your team.
The transition to manager from individual contributor is one of the more difficult in all of organizational life. Here are 9 tips to help smooth out this transition a bit and get you started heading in the right direction with your team and boss.
We write and talk about the challenges, trials, and pitfalls of those getting started in management. What we don’t do enough of is offer some perspective on the potential for the role of manager to evolve into a rewarding career. Here’s my attempt to balance the scales a bit with at least six ideas why you will love managing. While it’s not all unicorns and rainbows, there are some truly rewarding aspects to this role.
Challenging workplace conversations and even confrontations are inevitable. The key is to be at your best when many might be at their worst. Learn to tie these three together—own your message, manage yourself in the moment, and practice positive persuasion—and you have a bright communication future in front of you.
New manager development in many organizations is ad hoc at best and non-existent at worst. And while short-term pressures often drive sudden decisions to move people into first-time manager roles, the potential for misfiring is high. For managers responsible for identifying and developing new managers, effort expended ahead of time in assessing the individual’s fit for the role pays dividends for all parties. Of course, this takes some time and effort ahead of the need. As my old boss would say, “You have to put your back into it.”
There’s a process to reinventing your career. Unfortunately, for those who like things nice and tidy and linear, the process regularly involves pivoting and back-tracking plus the occasional unanticipated course correction. And while there’s no straight line or stage-gate process, the general flow of your career reinvention work eventually passes through these six steps.
