My first kindergarten assignment was to go home and find out the family home phone number. The next day we practiced memorizing those digits. As I recall the teacher helped us put the number sequence to some kind of rhythm not dissimilar to those 800 ads that help you remember where to buy a mattress or donate your car to charity. To this day, I still remember the Longfellow Street number. [Read more…]
Passed Over for a Promotion: Career Management Steps Before You Quit or Stay
You just heard the news — you were passed over for the big promotion. Now what should you do?
Here are some simple steps that might ease the frustration, give you some insight and help you plan your next career move. [Read more…]
Having the Difficult Conversation
No one likes having the difficult conversation whether it is in his or her personal life or at work. Unfortunately they often are essential.
What makes the interaction scary is the unpredictability of the response and reaction of the receiver as well as your issues about the topic at hand. [Read more…]
Workplace Productivity and Quality – Executive Coaching Tips
“You need multi-colored Post-its, a white board or large piece of paper and some yarn.” This was the advice from the GM of Toyota’s Production Systems to the host of New Tech City, a tech-driven public radio podcast. In a sense this executive was coaching the broadcaster in how to increase her workplace productivity and maintain or improve job quality in her weekly program production as his car manufacturing company does on their plant assembly line. [Read more…]
Should I Change Careers?
Many people are asking themselves, “Should I change careers?” Whether it is because the industry you know has lost its purpose (CD anyone?), your lifestyle demands your increased presence (twins!), or you are unmotivated, disenchanted, burned-out, under-stimulated, or just can’t face looking at that guy in one more meeting, the thought of making a radical change probably has occurred to you. [Read more…]
Increase Effectiveness with Checklists
Atul Gawande is an accomplished scholar (Mac Arthur Fellow), a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a Harvard professor, in addition to being a well-respected surgeon. He is also an astute observer with a curious mind. In the world of surgery, infection kills more people than the operations. Gawande thought there must be a way to increase survival rates. He stumbled on the effectiveness of the checklist, not a to-do list, but a step-by step form that is brief and effective even under the most critical situations. [Read more…]
Do Women Lack Ambition?
Have you recently observed the steam coming out of the ears of a few women over forty? Not sure what’s up and what started it all? Let me clue you in. It’s a reaction to a just published McKinsey & Company report in conjunction (some would say cahoots) with The Wall Street Journal. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit I am a WSJ subscriber and have been quoted by the publication a number of times. The title of the research is “Women in the Economy — a Blueprint for Change.” Staff writer Joanne Lublin was the one to give us a hint of what was to become a special section of the newspaper on April 11 of this year. She called her piece, “Coaching Urged for Women.” [Read more…]
Become a Better Boss
Each of us, at some time in our career, dreamed of “designing” the perfect boss. You know what I mean. Type in the specifications and out would come exactly who you needed to get your job done with none of the flaws we’ve all tolerated in mere mortals. The question is “what would you want in a boss?”
Google laid down this challenge, after years of a low interference management style where highly intelligent people with significant expertise reported to equally intelligent people with even greater expertise. The “people operations,” aka HR heads, decided it was time to re-evaluate the strategy as well as address a need to enhance and improve the quality of the leaders at the Googleplex. Project Oxygen was born. [Read more…]
Work Life Balance — A Coaching Perspective
“The secret to work-life balance is to have no life” is the advice Wally gives to a colleague in the comic strip Dilbert. And as ridiculous as that might sound, we all have had a boss, who if they did not say it, thought it. Maybe there have been times when you contemplated the notion?
In a recent Harvard Business Review survey of over 4,000 executives most participants, male and female, agreed they couldn’t compete at a high level if they lived a life with the classic idea of work life balance. Rather, they believed focus, on either work or home, at any given time, was more effective. In reality work got most of their weeks’ time. No wonder the US ranks 28th out of 36 developed nations in getting these two aspects to balance. [Read more…]
Are You Telling Yourself the Truth
“Liars, Bigger Liars and d’em that figure.” An uncle often used this expression when knocking politicians and accountants. This week his words resonated with me as it seems everyone is accusing everyone else of either not telling the truth or lying by omission. The political debate is more about denying what is not true than defending it. Wall Streeters and their customers are accusing financial leaders of painting a rosy picture based more on hope than fact. And of course there are always a few celebrities using or doing something totally addictive and illegal, denying to magazines where fact checking is a part-time distraction, that anything is wrong. [Read more…]