Dear Madeleine, I am a partner in a medium-sized professional services organization headquartered in a large metropolitan city. I was recently at a private social function that some employees of my company also attended. It was quite a party, and pretty much everyone had way too much to drink, including me. One employee, a person…
Dear Madeleine, I recently logged into a web conference meeting a few minutes early. Some of my direct reports were already on and they didn’t notice I had joined. I heard them talking about one of their colleagues who also reports to me, and I was shocked. They were talking about their political beliefs, which…
Dear Madeleine, I have been assigned to handle a new team and we are currently in the developmental stage. Yesterday as I did a few one-on-one sessions, one of the new hires on my team (let’s call her Laura) mentioned that one of my tenured team members (let’s call her Carol) was cold to her.…
What managerial problems got people talking in 2017? Coaching expert Madeleine Homan Blanchard responds to reader’s dilemmas every Saturday. Here are the five most read Ask Madeleine columns starting at #5. New Hire Is Dressing Inappropriately? A manager writes, “Her taste in work clothing is wildly inappropriate. She dressed perfectly for the interview phase, but…
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 work in a very large company and have managed a small team for a couple of years. About a year ago, my department got a new leader, who is my manager’s boss. This new leader came from another part of the company and apparently is being groomed for the senior leadership team. …
L&D professionals have a unique role to play in supporting senior executive vision—but only if they are fully equipped to operate in the same high level of executive space. Generally speaking, training is a fixed and tactical instructional event. As a result, the challenge for L&D professionals is how to have the mindset, as much…
Working from home can improve employee productivity and satisfaction and provide substantial cost savings for businesses. But is it right for everyone? Not necessarily. Even organizations with the most successful work from home programs confirm that some individuals work better in an office environment than they do from a home office. What about you? Here…
“I’m sorry, we need to let you go.” Oomph! Those words feel like a punch to the gut of the employee on the receiving end, and for the leader delivering the bad news, those words create anxiety and many sleepless nights leading up to that difficult conversation. No leader likes to see an employee fail…
You walk into a bank. There are 50 customers inside. Suddenly a robber runs in and fires off one shot. The bullet hits you in the right arm. Quick: What will you tell your friends later about this? Were you lucky or unlucky? Harvard’s Shawn Achor poses this dilemma in his book The Happiness Advantage.…