Much like my topic a few weeks ago about the importance of finding time to think deeply about the big issues in front of us, it takes deliberate and sometimes herculean effort to find focus in our work lives. Focus is a key ingredient on the critical path to success.
Being miserable in a job is not the normal state of existence. If this is your prevailing mood in the workplace, something is obviously wrong and needs your attention and action. Here are 5 ideas to help you move from miserable to motivated:
It’s graduation season again in the U.S. and for most newly minted MBA graduates, it’s time for a reality check. Here are some hard-won words of wisdom on how to navigate the steps immediately following your graduation.
Almost all of us get this wrong in the professional environment at some time or another. Myself included. We find ourselves in a tense situation with someone or some group who is attempting to assert a direction or insert themselves into the area we perceive as our domain, and we react by aggressively defending our position and by challenging or attacking their position. Here are five ideas to help you defuse and improve these difficult discussions:
There’s a class of professionals in the world one of my former bosses labeled as “70-Percenters.” They’re the people who are great at making noise, and even getting things started, but they don’t know how to close. They’re not finishers. Here are 5 key behaviors of finishers:
When it comes to your career, the best defense is a good offense. The odds are fairly good that at some point, you will face an unexpected interruption in your employment. The issue isn’t that it happened, it’s what you do once you’re faced with this problem that is critical to your career. Here are 5 ideas to help you jump start your career reinvention now, before the old one disappears:
“No” is one of the most powerful and under-utilized terms in your management vocabulary. Here are ten situations where “No” might be the absolute right call.
In Monday’s Leadership Caffeine post, I strongly encouraged senior managers to accelerate the pace of their leadership development activities for their high potentials. Today, it’s your turn. Quit waiting for the boss to bestow the mantle of leadership responsibility on you. Here are 5 ideas to help you gain leadership experience before the title:
Leading is lonely work. The higher you climb on the ladder, the tougher and lonelier the decisions become. Get used to it. No one ever signed on as a senior leader because of the potential for camaraderie.
One of the oddities of organizational life is the fairly frequent and sudden promotion of individuals from competent individual contributor to someone responsible for the work of others…supervisor or manager, without any visible sign of mentoring or support for the newly in-charge individual. “Congratulations…go get ‘em Tiger.” Here are 6 ideas to help you survive this challenging new assignment:
