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 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, 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, My company offers a lot of classes, and about six months ago I learned SLII®. I have been managing people for about a decade and honestly, learning SLII® changed everything for me. I realized my biggest issue was that I hold back when it comes to giving people crystal clear direction or providing…
Dear Madeleine, I was let go from my last job due to a massive reorganization. I didn’t like it, but my entire department was eliminated so I didn’t take it personally. I got a new job soon afterward and I like the job and the company a lot. I have been in my new position…
Dear Madeleine, I have been a student of leadership ever since I became a supervisor in my first job in the early 90s. I am now a VP of services for a collection of call centers across the UK. I have practiced to the best of my ability everything I have learned from Ken Blanchard’s…
Dear Madeleine, My boss is just awful. He is the son of a friend of the owner, and the owner has no idea how he treats people. Although he comes from a company in our industry, where he was the operations manager, he really doesn’t understand how different things are here. I love my job.…
Dear Madeleine, I just read one of your past columns entitled Latest Team Member Causing Chaos? I recognized the person as what I call HOF—“Hair On Fire”—and we have someone like that at our company. I have been working here for 35 years. I now work directly with HOF herself, and I’ve begun looking for…
Dear Madeleine, I am a financial analyst and have always been very good with numbers. I am young and this is my first job out of college. I was happy to get the job. My problem is that my boss is just mean. If I can get through a week without crying, it feels like…
Dear Madeleine, I manage a few teams—data scientists, bio engineers, research fellows, project managers—in a fast-growing biotech company. I have teams in Southern California, Canada, Eastern Europe, and Indonesia. The teams pass work off between time zones; if one person doesn’t complete their piece during the workday, it puts their counterpart behind. The pressure is…