Dear Madeleine, I am 43. Two and a half years ago I needed to get back into working after nine years as a stay-at-home mom. It was slim pickings out there, but I was finally able to secure a job with a local chain restaurant as a marketing person. Today I feel I’ve outgrown the…
Dear Madeleine, I am about eight months into my first senior department manager position at a government agency. I have a lot of experience in this sector and was brought in to shake things up and make some changes. My boss literally told me that my job is to kick *ss and take names. After…
Dear Madeleine, I run a large team of developers. I am really concerned about one young man who has been with me for about a year. My crew seems to party pretty hard on the weekends, which I figure is none of my business. The guy I am worried about negotiated at his first big…
Dear Madeleine, I hate my job. I am just bored to tears. When I completed graduate school, I was recruited into what I thought was the perfect job for me—the job description was exactly what I was looking for. A year later, I am doing a ton of mindless administrative work and almost none of…
Dear Madeleine, I like my boss and I think she is smart—but she is a total flake. She loses documents, she is always late, and she can’t seem to understand how our calendaring system works so she misses meetings because they aren’t on her calendar. This isn’t obvious just to us, her team; her peers…
Hi Madeleine, I just started a new position with an organization that is pretty young in the association world. I accepted the job because everyone gets along really well and works as a team to accomplish yearly goals. This type of culture is something I didn’t experience at my previous place of employment, but I…
There is a great deal of controversy these days about what mastery in coaching actually looks like. The International Coach Federation has created stringent rules regarding coach competencies that make it simpler to identify the criteria a coach must meet to achieve the Master Certified Coach (MCC) designation. As of May 2017, only six percent…
