Dear Madeleine, It’s the new year. All my friends and colleagues are talking about New Year’s resolutions. I got nothin’. I am plugging away at my work goals, but they don’t change much. I like my job. I am good at it. I am not gunning for a promotion. I go to the gym and…
Dear Madeleine, I have been managing people for decades. With the advent of Covid, I put a lot of focus on getting better at managing hybrid teams. (This blog really helped me.) I have some people who come to the office and about half the group works remotely. I go in four days a week.…
Dear Intern, What do today’s interns want out of a summer internship? My company—like many others—hosts six to eight summer interns every year. I’ve been participating in the program for over fifteen years and during that time I’ve had one, two, or sometimes three interns working for several weeks in our marketing department. It’s been…
Dear Madeleine, I recently hired a new member for my team. She was great in the many rounds of interviews, seemed to have the skills we needed, and was unanimously the first choice of the hiring committee. She is now about six weeks in, and I keep waiting to see the person I met in…
Dear Madeleine, I am a mid-level manager in a global software company. I have been working here for about ten years and I lead three teams. Right now I am working with my manager on our goals for 2024 and I can already tell that there is no way my teams are going to be…
Dear Madeleine, I love my job and I am good at it. When the COVID lockdown was settling in for a then-unknown period of time and everyone in my company was working from home, my partner and I took advantage of the crisis, rented out our condo in the city, and moved to our dream…
Dear Madeleine, In the middle of the pandemic, I took a job that I love and am good at. At the time, my boss made it very clear that the job was classified as “remote” and the deal was that I would never need to work in the office. This wasn’t just because everyone was…
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…
Dear Madeleine, I have been reflecting on 2020 and have just read the document with my goals for the year. I may laugh someday, but right now I am sad and demoralized. I accomplished literally not one single goal I had set for myself in 2020. I wanted to lose some weight and get in…
Dear Madeleine, It still will be months until my company invites us all back to work in the office, so until then, we are all WFH. I miss my work friends and the hallway conversations that helped us deal with situations on the fly. I definitely don’t miss the commute or having to make myself…