Dear Madeleine, I want to be a rock star at my job. I have always been driven and ambitious—but now, a few years into a professional job after college and grad school, I find myself a bit at sea. I work in a big company and I love what I do. Here’s the problem. My…
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…
Dear Madeleine, I need your professional advice on career goals or growth. I worked in the construction industry for 25 years, starting out as an electrician and moving up to a field manager. I essentially went from pulling wiring through conduit to managing the entire field operation on very large, multi-million-dollar commercial and industrial projects.…
The business world is only going to keep moving faster, which is forcing leaders to become increasingly adept at managing their team’s priorities and delegating tasks. But that can be a tricky undertaking. The way leaders manage their team’s priorities and delegate runs the spectrum. On one end are leaders who don’t know what their…
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 was recently promoted to executive vice president in a company where I started as an entry level coordinator right out of college. I took advantage of the company’s training and generous education reimbursements, got an MBA, and rose steadily. I never dreamed I would get this far, and I am thrilled about…
Why would anyone want to be a career builder when they risk losing the people they develop? It’s a provocative question many leaders answer by not developing their people. But this strategy doesn’t work—because people who aren’t nurtured by their leaders end up leaving anyway. Career development is about the employee experience. It’s about the…
Feeling psychologically safe in the workplace has never been more important. The storm of the past two years has generated tidal waves of competing priorities and pressing demands, all vying for urgent attention. Hurricane-force winds of unrelenting and pervasive change continue to swirl around us. Without the critical lifeline of psychological safety, employees can feel…
Dear Madeleine, I run a large team for a media company. The CEO has a lot of strengths but is inconsistent and often irrational. My team is constantly on the hook to respond to endless PR issues, so we never quite know what is coming at us. Before Covid we all came to the office…