Team Member Accused Another of Sabotaging Their Work? Ask Madeleine

Dear Madeleine, I manage three large global teams. They do similar customer service, but for different product lines. They all have very seasoned team leads and produce excellent results. Our business really took off because of the pandemic and we implemented a data-driven way to measure results that has worked well. For a long time…

Hungry for Constructive Feedback? Ask Madeleine

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…

Managing Negativity at Work

“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…

Six Keys for Setting Team Priorities and Delegating

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…

Make Career Conversations a Regular Agenda Item in One-on-Ones

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…

Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace

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…