Dear Madeleine, I recently started a new job. I am super interested and engaged. I think I am doing well and my manager seems thrilled. People here think I’m much older than I am, and everyone assumes I have a bachelor’s degree. Only the HR recruiting person knows that all I have is a two-year…
Dear Madeleine, I manage a few teams—data scientists, bio engineers, research fellows, project managers—in a fast-growing biotech company. I have teams in Southern California, Canada, Eastern Europe, and Indonesia. The teams pass work off between time zones; if one person doesn’t complete their piece during the workday, it puts their counterpart behind. The pressure is…
Dear Madeleine, I manage an operations department for the headquarters of a large media company. I have six direct reports and about 70 workers who report to them. One of my direct reports recently left, and I was absolutely shocked at the things he told HR in his exit interview. He worked for me for…
Can someone be a great leader and not be self-aware? I believe all great leaders are self-aware. If you don’t know how your behaviors affect others, it’s difficult to lead successfully. Furthermore, leaders who aren’t self-aware can cause significant damage. The news is filled with reports about highly visible executives (I hesitate to call them…
“Between stimulus and response lies a space. In that space lie our freedom and power to choose a response. In our response lie our growth and our happiness.” This is one of my favorite quotes, most often attributed to Viktor E. Frankl, Holocaust survivor and author of Man’s Search for Meaning. It holds an answer to…
In our new book Simple Truths of Leadership: 52 Ways to Be a Servant Leader and Build Trust, my coauthor, Randy Conley, and I cover a lot of topics—fifty-two, to be exact. As the subtitle suggests, a primary focus of the book is the area of trust in leadership. To be truly trustworthy, a leader…
Dear Madeleine, I am a director-level leader in a national insurance organization. The culture here is that things get done slowly, and only when everyone agrees with the change. I have been tasked with spearheading a ton of change, which is desperately needed. I have not made any friends with my approach and my boss…
Dear Madeleine, I am a senior VP in a global energy company and recently had an opportunity to give a webinar presentation to the entire company. I got a lot of great feedback, which was nice, but one person wrote in the chat that my “privilege was showing.” What the heck? My family is from…
Dear Madeleine, I am a senior business leader for a global manufacturing company. I recently was on a panel with an officer of our company—not my boss, but a peer of my boss. He was very impactful with his remarks; I was okay but not nearly as sharp. Later, when I complimented him on his…
Dear Madeleine, I am a somewhat new manager in the law office of a large government agency. I stepped into my new role after my boss left. The pay raise was negligible and my workload has tripled, but I figure it’s good experience. Here’s my question. I had an epiphany last week: my new direct…