Dear Madeleine, I have a couple of questions about networking that I was hoping you could help me with. I am pretty good at walking up to people and networking with them these days. I also message people on LinkedIn asking for chats. But I struggle to turn network connections into something deeper and more…
Dear Madeleine, A few years back, I started working for a boutique real estate investment trust (REIT) company. I was inadvertently so good at it that I was made a junior partner in two years. I relocated to California to open the West Coast office and my opening move was to land a massive deal.…
Dear Madeleine, I am a senior leader who reports to an SVP. I lead a business unit for a region. I recently had a one-on-one with my boss—a rare thing—and she gave me some feedback I am grappling with. My company recently started doing pulse surveys, so I thought she might want to talk about…
Dear Madeleine, I manage a team that has been working together for a long time, although one person recently left. Her replacement is a new high performer who is settling nicely into the job. He has all the experience and skills we were looking for, but he hasn’t quite figured out our culture or the…
Dear Madeleine, I manage a massive sales function for a software company. I am so exhausted from all my people quitting! What is going on? At the end of the Q1, FOUR of my managers quit. And a month ago, my right-hand person, who followed me from our last company, submitted her resignation. At least…
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…