There’s been much discussion recently about job candidates ghosting potential employers, and perhaps even worse, employees ghosting their actual employers. But there’s another longstanding practice that creates disruption and negative feelings: Some managers ghost their own employees. Managers can be slow to respond to employee requests and other communications for all kinds of legitimate reasons. They may experience the common stresses of inbox and meeting overload, or delay their responses while they’re trying to triage urgent issues. But that’s no […]
This article originally appeared on Forbes.com The conventional wisdom is that when team members can’t be in a single location, video-conferencing is the next best thing to the face-to-face meeting. Virtual meetings are downright necessities for creating relationships among geographically separated employees who need to function like an integrated team. After all, we want to see the person who’s speaking, and we interpret their body language, gestures and facial expressions as part of recognizing who’s who and to understand the […]
If you work with at least five people, there is a high likelihood that one of them is suffering from some form of mental illness, according to data from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). And yet we usually treat mental illness like a secret personal issue, the way people used to whisper about cancer or divorce. But this is a business issue. As a reader from Guatemala wrote to me, “Nobody is planning on this, but we get […]
This article originally appeared on Entrepreneur.com Plenty of leaders say they offer an “open door policy” to encourage employees to bring them problems or concerns. Many of these leaders also ask that employees voicing concerns come prepared with solutions in order to take responsibility for the problem rather than just “dump” or “vent.” But employees in those scenarios may get the idea that it’s unacceptable to raise problems in the business if they don’t know how to fix them. In […]
The other day, I gave a leader feedback about how to develop one of his team members, prepared for a coaching session with a different executive, and sat in on a leadership team meeting with a third. These three interactions, with three very different people, sounded a recurring theme: When we rely too much on our historical strengths and patterns, we sometimes avoid the new work we need to do and wind up impeding our continuing success. Even good, solid […]
This article originally appeared on hbr.org. In an ideal world, your boss would support you and your career goals, open up opportunities, and pave the way for you to be successful at your company. But the world isn’t ideal and even managers who once seemed quite supportive can make a sudden shift. For example, the boss of a technical director I worked with seemed to lose confidence in her and would effectively embargo her comments, not sharing them with other […]
Sometimes things happen at work that seem just plain wrong. Most of us stand by, hoping conditions will get better. But all too often, they don’t, and we continue waiting, meanwhile becoming more and more worried or disengaged. When we see something going wrong or not working well, it can be hard to know what to do. Is it appropriate to say something? And if so, who should we tell? You don’t need to suffer in silence. If your boss […]
This article originally appeared on Entrepreneur.com. A common refrain I hear from business leaders is, “We hire them, we train them and then they leave!” Those leaders are referring to millennials, who have been a management punching bag for a while, and are starting to be joined by Gen Z. Turns out these leaders aren’t wrong: Gallup research has found that millennial turnover is over three times the rate of other generations; Gallup also estimates “that millennial turnover costs the U.S. economy $30.5 […]
Thanks to the #MeToo movement, we all know not to tell colleagues that they look “hot.” But language that isn’t overtly sexual can also cause problems. Even a seemingly innocuous word like “lovely” can be used in a gendered way that has surprisingly bad outcomes for productivity and effectiveness. Here’s a real-life illustration of why avoiding “lovely” matters, and some suggestions for what to say instead. The Lowdown on “Loveliness” At a leadership conference I attended recently, I bristled a […]
