Dear Madeleine, I get no feedback. I like my job, my boss, the team I work with, and my company. At every annual review I write my own review first and my manager adds her two cents, always pointing out ways I contribute that I hadn’t thought about or had forgotten. So I do get…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
People want an empathetic leader. Many managers strive to be one. But ask someone to define the term, and you’re likely to be met with silence. Let’s start with the definition. According to Merriam-Webster, empathy means “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of…
Our mental health has deteriorated during the pandemic, demanding the attention of leaders and businesses. Under normal circumstances, one in ten adults in the U.S. have symptoms of depression or anxiety. That number has jumped to four in ten during the pandemic—and that might be conservative. Our data show much higher numbers. In our research…
There’s been a flood of articles lately about psychological safety—and for good reason. It is essential if people are to be engaged and productive. It is the foundation for a dynamic, vibrant workplace. And it is woefully missing at most companies. Psychological safety happens in a workplace when people feel free to speak their mind,…