The Great Resignation. The Great Attrition. The Mass Exodus. The historic turmoil taking place in today’s workplace has been given many names—and for good reason. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a record-breaking 10.9 million jobs were open at the end of July 2021.[1] This unprecedented turnover will stretch long into the future.…
What started as a book to help an author’s college grad daughter navigate the business world turned into a guide for employers everywhere who want to build a high-performing workforce. In her new book Winning the Talent Shift: Three Steps to Unleashing the New Higher Performance Workplace, Berta Aldrich explains why companies struggle to hire…
Marcus Buckingham believes some basic assumptions about work are simply no longer true in today’s business environment. He shares his insights in his latest book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World, coauthored with Ashley Goodall. Lie #1: People care which company they work for. Many companies use their corporate…
Dear Madeleine, I am about four months into a new job as a senior executive in a large global infrastructure company. I report directly to the EVP of Operations, who is the person who brought me into the company. I manage a huge team of fellow engineers, and so far, so good. (I’m an engineer…
Dear Madeleine, I started a new job as a senior leader for a large manufacturing firm about four months ago—and I still haven’t gotten to the bottom of the disaster I’ve walked into. All I heard about when I first came on was how much everyone loved my predecessor, how smart he was, how much…
Dear Madeleine, I recently took a director level job with a huge Fortune 50 organization. I have been thrown into the deep end and I am worried about completely bombing out. I have had zero onboarding, so I am constantly making errors and spending tons of time backtracking and clearing things up. I am really…
As a part of onboarding, Mike Rognlien, builder of awesome people at Facebook, would always ask new employees if the culture at Facebook was a deciding factor in their decision to join the company. “Every time, in more than six years of asking that question, almost every hand would go up,” says Rognlien. “Then I would…
Dear Madeleine, I was recently convinced by senior team members to hire someone for my team who is overqualified for the position. I am trained in Situational Leadership® II and it has served me well – but my new hire won’t let me use it. He is competent in some aspects of the job, but…
Dear Madeleine, I am a trainer in a call center. It is fast, loud, and chaotic—and I love it. I take total newbies and train them to start at the most basic levels. Once they leave me, they go on to other trainers who train them in more specialized work. They all have managers who,…
Hi Madeleine, I just started a new position with an organization that is pretty young in the association world. I accepted the job because everyone gets along really well and works as a team to accomplish yearly goals. This type of culture is something I didn’t experience at my previous place of employment, but I…