Managing upwards

How to Work with a New Boss When Your Manager is on Leave

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Leadership transitions are tricky — even more so when your trusted manager goes on temporary leave, and you suddenly find yourself reporting to a skip-level boss. The dynamics shift, the expectations aren’t always clear, and even well-intentioned communication can be misunderstood.

In a recent coaching conversation, we explored Chelsea’s situation: a smart, capable team member grappling with this very challenge. If you’ve ever felt frustrated, confused, or unrecognized during a leadership transition, her story — and the lessons from it — may resonate with you. ...  read more

How to Obtain Meaningful Feedback from Your Manager

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I was initially surprised when Raina (not her real name) asked this question – how to obtain meaningful feedback from my manager. As we had 10 minutes left in our coaching call, Raina shared her situation and her question. She acknowledged that her manager was quite busy. However she still wished that her manager would give her more concrete feedback in her performance reviews so she knows how to improve.  ...  read more

3 Common Traits of Incompetent Leaders & How to Work with Them

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Unfortunately most of us spend at least 50-75% of our life working for incompetent leaders! Why? Four reasons:

  1. The working world in general continues to promote the wrong kind of people to leadership positions.
  2. It sometimes take us awhile to realize we are working for incompetent leaders.
  3. Finding a new job is hard work. Sometimes it’s just easier to stay working for a crappy leader vs find time to find a better job.
  4. There is no guarantee the next job we find doesn’t have an incompetent leader. It’s not easy to tell if your future manager is any good.

3 Common Traits of Incompetent Leaders

There are 3 common traits of incompetent leaders. Your leader could have one of these traits or worse all three.

Trait 1: Absentee leader – this leader “lets” the team do all the work and doesn’t really set strategy, lead, or coach others. Their style is often to outsource any or all efforts that a leader usually need to do to one of his or her team members. ...  read more

Working From Home – How to Build Your Reputation with Your Manager Remotely

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There are so many perks when working from home including saving commute time and the ability to work in sweat pants. However working remotely makes it a lot more challenging to build relationships, including the one you need to build with your manager. Whether you always worked remotely or just started due to COVID 19 crisis, you should know how to best build your reputation with your manager remotely.  ...  read more

How to Manage and Deliver with Limited Resources – 15 min coaching call

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This is such a common issue as well as a highly stressful one. I am so glad one of the members asked me to talk about it in our January group coaching call. Here is her question

“We are asked to be financially savvy and not outsource any activity during Q1. We still have smart goals to achieve and I am understaffed. I am already running a lean organization. To continue to deliver results with all activities done in-house I need to overload the team. What should I do? Should I do the right thing and continue to explain the need for outsourcing activities or do the right thing for my career?” ...  read more

How to Write a Good Self Evaluation – Follow 5 Tips

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how to write a self evaluation

It’s self-evaluation time.  Are you ready to put your best foot forward? This is your chance to put the best representation of your work on permanent record and build your brand.

Many people are too humble or too general in their self evaluation.  Don’t fall in that trap.  Being too humble will work against you.  It’s important to take full advantage of  the annual performance review and invest time in writing a good self-evaluation.

This does not mean you should lie about your performance.  What it means instead is you should:

  • Invest significant time to write a good self-evaluation.  Consider doing 3 drafts over a 2 week period, so you can really push yourself to be succinct and powerful in your final draft.
  • Be the best marketer of your work brand in this self appraisal.
  • Address any hiccups in performance and share your perspective on what happened.
  • Show that you are self-aware, and are striving to improve every day.

    •  ...  read more