Dear Madeleine, I am the CEO of a small but rapidly growing global employee relocation services organization. It is a complicated business. One of the complexities is that employment laws are different in every country and they change constantly. Our chief legal counsel is very talented and business savvy. But when we are trying to…
Dear Madeleine, Your advice has been very helpful in the past, so I couldn’t stop myself from writing to you again about a tricky situation. I have recently taken over the area of learning and development as part of my portfolio. With that came the discussion of a resource with my boss. My boss suggested a…
Dear Madeleine, I am a junior partner in a small investment firm. My job is huge—there is always more to do than time to do it. Last year, the firm hired a junior analyst to work with me. I did my best, but things just didn’t work out. He worked very slowly, made lots of…
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 am a VP in an organization and I have a decent team, all of whom I inherited when I joined the organization two years ago. Everyone on my team is experienced and considered senior. I have done everything I can think of to make everyone’s role and responsibilities crystal clear—yet I find…
Dear Madeleine, I am a regional sales director for a company that installs gutters for houses. I have spent endless time training my people to map out exactly what is needed for each house. We created beautiful online templates so salespeople could provide the detail that the install team needs to show up with the…
As one of the first female F-14 Tomcat fighter pilots in the US Navy, Carey Lohrenz knows all about pressure. During her intense training, she learned critical lessons about navigating in the most demanding, high-pressure environment imaginable—the cockpit of an F-14 fighter jet. The genius of her latest book, Span of Control, is how she…
Dear Madeleine, I was promoted to VP of sales a few months before the pandemic hit. I feel like I have been in an industrial washing machine ever since, and am just starting to come up for air. There was a lot of training at the beginning but then our entire book of business and…
“So many of us are dealing with changes to our work routines. It’s generating a mountain of new requests and tasks that require us to get things done using new guidelines, practices, and procedures,” says bestselling business author Dr. Vicki Halsey, VP of Applied Learning at The Ken Blanchard Companies. “Leaders need to: (1) be…
Dear Madeleine, Every time I hear the word “feedback” I have a strong, negative response. This comes from a recent experience with a manager. Going into the relationship, I had always been someone who asked for feedback. This manager, however, gave me feedback so often there was no need to ask for it. She seemed…