Dear Madeleine, I work for a scrappy startup that offers a system for weight loss and coaching. It’s for folks who need extra help losing and maintaining their weight and who want a healthier lifestyle. All of the interaction is over text, with some notes being automated to offer specific messages at different points in…
Robert “Bo” Brabo learned early in his military career that values drive results. Committing fully to admirable organizational values up, down, and across the organization, every day and in every way, is a powerful formula for success. In his latest book, From the Battlefield to the White House to the Boardroom, Brabo shares examples of…
Dear Madeleine, I manage a team of project and program managers responsible for keeping software implementations on track for a global company. I have five regional directors, each of whom manage about fifteen individual service representatives. The frontline folks are highly skilled—their jobs require a lot of technical experience and real expertise. They are dedicated…
Dear Madeleine, I am sixty years old and really love my work. I have had a long and varied career and had hoped to get another decade in before retiring. The institution I worked for closed down for good last year because of COVID. Since then, I have sent out 72 cover letters and resumes.…
Now that public health initiatives are controlling the pandemic, the return to the office is a hot topic. The Ken Blanchard Companies wanted to know what leadership, learning, and talent development professionals felt about the return. In a June 23 poll, three questions were asked as a part of a webinar series exploring the hybrid…
Dear Madeleine, Before COVID, I led a high performing, intact team. There are twelve of us and we all used to work in one office. I hired three new people just as the stay-at-home order was instituted, and I worked hard to do everything I could to onboard them and get them up and running…
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 run a compliance and risk group for a large regional credit union. We have a new CEO—I’ll call him “K.” K was our organization’s CFO for several years before he was named CEO, so I know him well. We have always had a good relationship. K has been in the CEO position…
First released in 2015, Under the Hood: Fire Up and Fine-Tune Your Employee Culture by Stan Slap offers a message to leaders that is even more important in today’s work environment. Slap indicates that if you really want your business to operate at maximum performance, you need to understand the critical difference between your employees…
Hybrid teams are nothing new. Pre-COVID, many hybrid virtual teams existed. Some team members worked from the office full time, some worked from home or from the road full time, and others did a mix of the two. So what’s so different as we look ahead to work in the future? What’s different is the…