Plan Now for the Second Half of Your Career !

 Tue 25 Aug 2020

Plan Now for the Second Half of Your Career !

As we climb the corporate ladder, many of us reach a point where we wonder, “Where do I go from here?” After all, there are only a handful of positions in the C-suite, re-orgs happen regularly, and technological disruptions change the nature of our jobs. But this doesn’t mean you have to retire early. As you think about building the second half of your career, keep these four concepts in mind.
(1) First, cultivate an entrepreneurial spirit, even if you have no intention of starting a business. Think of your career itself as a startup — what problems are you eager and able to solve, who is your target audience, and what's the most effective way to provide your service to them?
(2) Next, share your expertise with a sense of confidence. Your experience is unique, so let the world know about it! (3) Third, hold on to a growth mindset. You'll never be done learning and improving, so stay curious, skeptical, and be ready to fail.
(4) And finally, prepare to reinvent yourself. The times are changing at an increasing pace. Are you ready to change with them?
This tip is adapted from “How to Reimagine the Second Half of Your Career,” by Jeff Gothelf

Ensure Your Next Employer Is Family-Friendly

 Wed 16 Sept 2020

Ensure Your Next Employer Is Family-Friendly

If you’re a parent trying to make a career move, you probably want to make sure that you work for a family-friendly employer. But how can you assess what your work-life balance will be like before you accept the job? Start by going online. You can learn a lot just by browsing a company’s website. Does it mention resources for working parents? Is there information readily available about parental leave policies? Read reviews of the work environment on sites like Glassdoor. Also, tap into your network to get personal anecdotes about the company. Reach out to friends, friends of friends, former colleagues, or people in your school alumni network who have worked for the company. Ask about their experiences, and take note of any patterns that emerge. Finally, ask pointed questions during the interview process about company culture, work hours, and general flexibility, and pay close attention to what information your interviewer shares — and doesn’t share. Take the time to fully understand the opportunity — both on a professional and personal level — before you sign on.
This tip is adapted from “How to Identify a Family-Friendly Employer,” by Suzanne Brown

Define the Right Constraints to Drive Innovation

 
Fri 16 April 2021

Define the Right Constraints to Drive Innovation

What drives big, breakthrough innovations? Often it’s constraints — limitations that force people to rethink the problem at hand and come up with a new means of addressing it. There are two ways to impose helpful constraints upon your team. First, present constraints around outcomes. This means defining what a good solution would accomplish for users, customers, or investors, and working backwards to identify the process and workflow that will help you get there. Second, impose constraints around timeframes. Deadlines push people to focus and work faster — as long as the timeline doesn’t trigger stress or other performance-killing reactions. The key is to set deadlines that are appropriate for the outcomes you’ve established. Being realistic is more important than being ambitious when it comes to timing. If you effectively marry constraints around outcomes and timeframes, you’ll give your team the best chance at coming up with a truly innovative solution.
This tip is adapted from “Innovation Starts with Defining the Right Constraints,” by Fiona Murray and Elsbeth Johnson

Do You Really Need to Send That Email?

 Mon 12 April 2021

Do You Really Need to Send That Email?

As a business tool, email is both essential and incredibly annoying. Many of us aren’t using it in the right way and are guilty of sending way more emails than we need to. So when should you actually send an email and when should you look for another way to communicate? Email is most effective when used in these four ways:

   (1)  To formally communicate a decision
   (2)  To confirm or schedule meetings or appointments
   (3)  To document or recap important conversations
   (4)  To send company or team-wide announcements
(5) Or anything that has to be formally put into writing for the sake of record.

In other words, email is a great way to give someone all the information they need in one place, especially if that information is going to be shared among a group of people. If this isn’t your goal, think about what might be the more effective way to communicate. Is it a Slack message, a call, or maybe even a meeting?
This tip is adapted from “Stop. Does That Message Really Need to Be an Email?,” by Colin D Ellis

Boost Morale with a Thank You

 Thu 08 April 2021

Boost Morale with a Thank You

As your organization faces the twin challenges of strained budgets and burned-out workforces, what can you do to keep your employees engaged? While it may not be as impactful as a promotion or a raise, don’t underestimate the power of symbolic awards, such as private thank-you notes or public displays of recognition. These simple interventions can significantly improve employee motivation, according to research. To maximize their effect, it’s essential to customize these rewards to each unique context. Specifically, ask yourself: Are you the best messenger, or would this expression of gratitude be more impactful coming from someone else? When is the best time to offer the message? And should it be communicated privately or publicly? Whatever you decide, your message can be short and sweet — as long as it’s thoughtful. When employees feel that it’s sincere, a symbolic gesture of recognition can go a long way.
This tip is adapted from “Research: A Little Recognition Can Provide a Big Morale Boost,” by Shibeal O'Flaherty et al.

How to Manage a Chronic Complainer ( Dukhee aatmaa )

 
Wed 14 April 2021

How to Manage a Chronic Complainer ( Dukhee aatmaa ) 

Chronic complainers can have a damaging effect on those around them. So what should you do if you manage an employee who’s prone to perpetual pessimism?

 First, be realistic with yourself about the situation. If the person is truly a chronic complainer, offering sympathy or solutions is unlikely to change their behavior or mindset. You need to set clear boundaries instead. Tell your employee that you're prepared to listen and discuss whatever is bothering them, but that your conversation needs to focus on a specific issue that can be resolved. Going over the same, unsolvable problem repeatedly won't do either of you any good. If the issue at hand doesn't have a solution, or is entirely out of your hands as a manager, urge your employee to change their perspective and re-frame their thinking around appreciation and gratitude for the things that they value. Of course, fostering this kind of a behavioral change takes time and may require support from a coach or therapist. Present these options to your employee, and explain that while you care about their well being and happiness, you may not always be the best person to help them work through all of their personal struggles.
This tip is adapted from “Managing a Chronic Complainer,” by Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries

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Demonstrate Your Value in a Performance Review

 
Thu 15 April 2021

Demonstrate Your Value in a Performance Review

Performance reviews can be nerve wracking, but they’re important for ensuring your boss recognizes your value. Here are three tips for these anxiety-inducing conversations:

  (1)   Highlight your achievements. Remind your boss of your accomplishments and how they’ve contributed to the outcomes your company cares about. You might say something like: “I know one of our team’s biggest priorities this quarter was to increase our social media following by 20%. The social media plan I developed is something I’m really proud of because it helped us achieve that goal.”
  (2)   Demonstrate how you’ve helped your boss. Remind them of times you’ve built upon their ideas, helped them execute their goals, and brought your own ideas to the table that helped advance their cause.
  (3)   Reemphasize your commitment to your organization. State your excitement about contributing to the future of the team and improving upon the work you’re already doing.

This tip is adapted from “Do the Words “Performance Review” Scare You?,” by Bret Sanner and Karoline Evans

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Keep Growing When Your Career Feels Stalled

 
Wed 07 April 2021

Keep Growing When Your Career Feels Stalled

Short-term issues can require us to temporarily change course: If you’ve lost your job, you urgently need income. If in-person schooling isn’t available, someone has to stay home and supervise virtual learning. If you’re the primary caregiver to a family member, you need to secure flexibility for responsibilities at home. Prioritizing these short-term concerns over long-term goals, while painful, may be necessary right now. But a temporary detour from your professional path doesn’t mean you have to put aside your ambitions. You can regain control over your career arc with these strategies:

    Reframe the situation. Even if you’re not advancing toward your professional aspirations right now, you’re still making a difference and providing value in other areas of your life.
    Push back against standard options. The WFH boom has led many organizations to provide more flexible work arrangements. Express what you want; most offers can be negotiated.
    Allocate small amounts of time toward your goals. It may not seem significant to spend three minutes sending a networking email or reading a few articles on a topic you’re interested in. But these little investments add up.

This tip is adapted from “A Career Detour Doesn’t Have to Compromise Your Long-Term Goals,” by Dorie Clark

Address the “Red Flags” on Your Resume

 
Tue 06 April 2021

Address the “Red Flags” on Your Resume

Resume “red flags,” such as employment gaps, short stints with multiple companies, or unplanned departures, can sound the alarm with a potential employer. When you develop a narrative in which you unapologetically own your decisions, you can proactively address these concerns and make the best possible impression. Here’s how:

  (1)   Employment gaps. Explain how you filled your time with relevant activities, consulting, or contract work.
  (2)   Job hopping. Focus on your accomplishments rather than your time spent in each role. Emphasize how working alongside different leadership styles has contributed to your professional growth. And highlight how each experience exposed you to best practices in different types of organizations and increased your breadth of knowledge, competence, and adaptability.
  (3)   Unplanned departures. Whether you resigned, were laid off, or were fired, leave blame and negativity at the door. Be transparent, and explain concisely what happened, emphasizing the lessons you learned and how they’ve contributed to your professional development.

This tip is adapted from “How to Overcome Red Flags on Your Resume,” by Patricia Carl

Don’t Let Self-Awareness Become Self-Doubt

 
Don’t Let Self-Awareness Become Self-Doubt
It’s important to have a healthy awareness of your own limitations. But what should you do when your self-awareness starts to spiral into self-doubt? Here are four strategies to help you restore your confidence:

    Channel an alter ego that can help you gain some perspective. Taking on the persona of someone more confident can help you acknowledge the challenges you face without letting them completely take you over.
    View yourself through the lens of others. How would a friend respond if they heard you being hard on yourself?
    Learn to recognize and ignore unhelpful, uninformed feedback. Recognize that not every opinion is useful.
    Reframe negative self-talk. Identify your internal voices and intentionally replace them with a more positive, productive narrative.

This tip is adapted from “Don’t Let Self-Doubt Hold You Back,” by Alisa Cohn

4 Tips to encourage Small Talk on Your Remote Team

 Thu 01 April 2021

4 Tips to encourage Small Talk on Your Remote Team

Small talk is something many of us miss about going into the office, and for good reason: It helps people feel emotionally connected and boosts collaboration and creativity. As a manager, how can you ensure your team has a healthy culture of small talk, no matter where employees are working from? Here are a few strategies.

 (1)    Encourage new social rituals. Build in time at the start of every meeting for members to greet one another, exchange pleasantries, and ask playful questions. You may even schedule recurring, virtual coffee hours where employees can just hang out and chat every week.
  (2)   Re-create “casual collisions.” Use virtual tools to facilitate internal networking events that pair up employees who don’t already know one another for real-time social interactions.
 (3)    Keep it light. No matter where small talk is happening in your virtual workplace, be sure to steer your team away from serious topics and gossip.
   (4)  Emphasize the upside. Small talk, especially over Zoom, may be uncomfortable for the introverts on your team. So it’s important that you publicly tout the benefits of informal social interactions to encourage those employees to take part.

This tip is adapted from “Remote Workers Need Small Talk, Too,” by Jessica R. Methot et al.

Make Workplace Relationships a Priority

 Wed 31 March 2021

Make Workplace Relationships a Priority

 
Ensuring that tomorrow’s workplaces are engaging, innovative, creative, and inclusive depends on one key factor: relationships. As a leader, you need to ask yourself: How can I set up a remote or hybrid workplace that’s conducive to healthy social ties? It starts with being proactive. With remote and hybrid work, you can’t count on bonds to form in the hallway or by the water cooler. Make it your job — and the job of other managers — to be the glue that brings people together. Host virtual events, invite people from other teams to your meetings, and look for ways to decrease workloads and balance resources, so people have time and energy to make workplace relationships a priority. It’s also crucial to make your meetings inclusive. Going forward, meetings will likely include a mix of people together in physical offices and those in videoconference mode. When you’re moderating a hybrid meeting, be sure to integrate all team members, regardless of where they’re working from. Healthy relationships at work aren’t just nice to have. They improve information flow, spur innovation, help retention, and lead to better overall organizational performance.
This tip is adapted from “What a Year of WFH Has Done to Our Relationships at Work,” by Nancy Baym et al.

Foster Psychological Safety for Your Remote Team

 Mon 29 March 2021

Foster Psychological Safety for Your Remote Team

Research shows that high-performing teams have a sense of psychological safety, which means employees feel they can speak up, ask for help, and offer ideas without being punished or ostracized. Here are some ways to promote psychological safety on your team, especially if you’re remote:

 (1)    Ask questions. Proactively check in and show curiosity about your employees’ lives outside of work.
  (2)   Show vulnerability. Share your professional and personal experiences and encourage your employees to do the same.
 (3)    Build a sense of collective responsibility. Invite team members to participate in meetings by asking: What do you think? What’s your perception of this? What are we missing?
  (4)   Encourage risk. Give employees the latitude to try out new ideas, pitch new projects or processes, and experiment on the fly.

This tip is adapted from “What Is Your Organization’s Long-Term Remote Work Strategy?,” by Erin E. Makarius et al.

What Can You Really Accomplish in a Day?

 Tue 30 March 2021

What Can You Really Accomplish in a Day?
Many of us overload our workdays, only to find ourselves facing an unfinished to-do list at the end of the day. How can you break free of this magical thinking that causes you to disappoint others, miss deadlines, feel depleted, and lose your inspiration? To get a realistic sense of how long your current and future projects will take to complete (and how to prioritize them), start by reviewing your major projects from the past year. Which were planned and which were opportunistic? This self-audit will help you paint a more realistic picture of how your future calendar will be populated. It will also help you prioritize the top of your to-do list and renegotiate the rest by saying no, lowering expectations, or requesting help. Crucially, you need to stop convincing yourself that next time will be easier. This kind of optimism may be misguided, leaving you at risk of falling short. Always lean toward building in more time for your work, not less. Finally, look for opportunities to build your team’s capacity, and delegate when you can. You don’t need to go it alone.
This tip is adapted from “Be More Realistic About the Time You Have,” by Sabina Nawaz

Develop Junior Talent to Build a Diverse Company

 Fri 23 April 2021

Develop Junior Talent to Build a Diverse Company
For employers to make meaningful progress around diversity, equity, and inclusion, they need to focus less on hiring and more on creating systems to develop, promote, and retain diverse junior talent. Here are five steps to help you do that in your organization.

  (1)   Don’t just track representation, track mobility.
 To evaluate progress toward a truly inclusive workplace, it’s important to understand who is moving up within the firm, not just who is employed.
(2)    Benchmark to set actionable goals. How does your firm’s mobility compare to other firms in your industry? New data sources mine the online profiles of tens of millions of workers to offer benchmarks for specific peers, roles, and locations.
  (3)  Identify internal reservoirs of talent.
Chart the skills your employees have, not just the roles they are in. This will help you identify capabilities that these employees can leverage as they progress in their careers.
 (4)   Assess the health of your pipeline.
Audit and analyze the diversity, or lack thereof, at every level of your organization.
 (5)    Build “talent escalators” for your junior talent.
Invest in training resources and learning opportunities, and proactively roadmap the career paths of your junior employees.

This tip is adapted from “To Build a Diverse Company for the Long Term, Develop Junior Talent,” by Matt Sigelman and Johnny C. Taylor, Jr.

Practice Mindfulness During Remote Meetings

 
Tue 23 March 2021

Practice Mindfulness During Remote Meetings

Remote work is taking its toll in the form of chronic stress and burnout. Cultivating mindfulness can help you maintain your energy, reduce your stress levels, and reconnect with your teammates. It’s all about establishing your virtual presence — and being present — even if you're remote. First, eliminate distractions and truly focus on the people you’re speaking to in the moment. This means taking a minute to reflect on your physical and emotional state when entering a meeting: Are you thinking about the conversation you just had, looking ahead to your next meeting, or itching to look at your inbox? Others will notice if your attention is elsewhere — even through a Zoom. Then, foster connection and community by practicing deep listening and paying close attention to what people are saying — and how they're saying it. Remote work doesn’t have to be a barrier to your capacity to deliver leadership presence, empathize and connect with colleagues, and build strong workplace communities.
This tip is adapted from “Staying Mindful When You’re Working Remotely,” by Alyson Meister and Amanda Sinclair

Managing an Employee Who’s Checked Out

Tue 16 March 2021
Managing an Employee Who’s Checked Out

 
There are many reasons an employee might mentally check out. They could be experiencing burnout or a personal issue, or they could be totally unaware that they’ve been slipping.

 Before you initiate a conversation, learn about (1) any available support systems — including employee resource groups, assistance plans, and health networks — that could help your employee if they need it. 

Next ask yourself: (2) What are the specific requirements of the job that this person is not meeting? Be ready to present this evidence. (3) Then, open an honest and empathetic dialogue. 

(4) Give your employee a chance to tell you what’s going on before sharing your assessment of their performance. Be compassionate and make it clear you have a sincere desire to support them. 

(5) Then discuss your priorities, be straightforward and specific about your concerns, and come up with a plan to re-engage them in their work. You need to be patient — but to a point. Lighting a spark under a disengaged employee won’t happen overnight ! 

(6)  But if an employee is truly checked out, it ultimately might not be the right role for them.

This tip is adapted from “What to Do When Your Employee Is Totally Checked Out,” by Rebecca Knight