Dear Madeleine, What do I do if I just can’t connect with one of my direct reports? I was recently promoted and inherited a whole new team in addition to the one I had before. The team is good and was well led (the leader left for another opportunity). I get along really well with…
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…
Dear Madeleine, I am a talent acquisition leader with a midsize tech company. I built my team from scratch in the past year. We are a high performing team that is greatly appreciated by our stakeholders. Like many companies out there, ours is seeing the impact of inflation and economic downturn. Many organizations are putting…
Dear Madeleine, I have a problem with lying. Yes. I am a liar. But I’m not a compulsive liar by any means. What I mean is for a long while I’ve been thinking about little lies that most everyone I know so easily uses—and it bugs me a lot. I’ve analyzed how these “little white…
Dear Madeleine, I have a new friend at work, and she is so great. At least she was. We met when we volunteered to be on a committee for a big company community outreach event. We work in different areas of the company. I have been here a lot longer, and am senior to her,…
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…
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…
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…