Dear Madeleine, I manage a large team of accounting professionals for a company of about 4800 employees. I have worked very hard to create a great team, and I have excellent, dedicated people. My problem is our payroll manager (PM). He is generally very easy-going and a hard worker. He is a whiz at working…
Dear Madeleine, I am the founder and CEO of a specialty investment services company, which I started—for fun—after retiring from my first career in investment banking. My executive team is amazing. Since we are so specialized and the field is super technical, I have had to find the best and the brightest. My problem is…
Dear Intern, I’ve appreciated watching the interns in our company work on different projects in different departments. I’m always amazed by how fast the interns work, how well they collaborate as a team, and the high quality of the work they deliver. My question is this: How do we, the current employees, look to them? Do…
Dear Intern, I just got hired as head of sales for a marketing services firm. I’m really excited to drive the future growth of this small and mighty company. My new team includes several very young team members. For some, this is their first professional job. I have always led more senior sales professionals and…
Dear Madeleine, I have a high performer on my team (HP) who does very good transactional work. They work with speed and most people outside our team like them. HP has managerial ambition but does not have capabilities to be a manager. We are a small, lean team after two rounds of layoffs, and there is…
Dear Madeleine, About six months ago, I went above and beyond to help out a new colleague. He had misread a deadline and needed to scramble to get a bunch of time-sensitive work done over a long weekend. I willingly jumped in to help him, finding documents, getting permission to give him access to materials,…
Dear Madeleine, I am a regional president for a global services company. One of my executive team members recently retired, leaving rather suddenly as the result of an unexpected health issue. We interviewed some candidates to replace him but, ultimately, I took his recommendation to go with the person who had been his chief of…
Dear Madeleine, I run a rapidly growing not-for-profit. I put together a great board, our fundraising efforts paid off, and I have a great team. In a recent chat, my head of accounting made a crack about needing to wait to share something with me because he wanted to catch me “in the right mood.”…
Dear Madeleine, I had a big job and got a lot of manager training early in my working life. Then a series of events (I had a child with special needs, then another one, parents needing care, husband making enough to sustain the family) conspired to make me leave the workforce for about a decade.…
Dear Madeleine, I am the COO for a medium sized, mostly US-based specialty product business. Our CEO was always the idea guy and I was execution. Our business used to be straightforward, but we recently expanded with services and a couple of storefronts—against my recommendation. Our CEO is a visionary and expects his executive team…