From Inside the Room Where Decisions About Your Career are Made.
From Inside the Room Where Decisions About Your Career are Made.
Be the one who lands a promotion to manager
Promotion to Manager: The Advice Most Early-Career Employees Don’t Want to Hear
I get one question from employees early in their careers more than any other.
It isn’t about résumés or interviews.
It’s about why some people get promoted to manager while others, who appear just as capable, are passed over.
What makes this question uncomfortable is that most people believe they’re already doing the right things.
This guy has no fear of providing employee feedback for improvement (and a little something extra)
Employee feedback is hard
As a manager, one of the most common, anxiety-causing moments is when we need to provide “ employee feedback” for improvement. No one wants to tell a colleague they are doing something wrong. A few decades ago, you could yell, scream, and abuse employees. As a good friend in the military explained to me,
Is your company training setting the right work ethic?
A 9-5 work ethic and nothing more?
I would suggest that a number of company training programs are not pushing new hires fast enough. I especially believe this is the case in a few areas:
Do you have new employees who leave as soon as the clock ticks 5:00 PM?
The bad attitude is tough to coach
Is a bad attitude coachable?
As managers, I am confident we can train employees to learn our products, our software and to a certain extent our culture. Coaching an employee attitude is a different animal. How we think about life, our careers, our managers and our companies success is usually a reflection of our personal outlook on life. If we don’t like life, we probably aren’t going to like our job,
No trees were cut, bound, lashed, or had melted candle wax dripped on them
Company Christmas tree
Given the heightened sensitivity in the workplace and the insensitivity in the political arena, I thought I would update a classic post. Every year, I am asked an age-old HR question. “Can we have a company Christmas tree at work?” Questions start coming in hot the day after Halloween and continue mercilessly through December.
Let there be cake!
Disclaimer: *The following story is a true workplace diversity story. I wrote the post below, which was uploaded on our company website, and am reposting it here with permission. The names have been omitted to protect them from poaching.
Celebrate
Today, one of our Senior Developers brought in carrot cake for the entire company.
A compensation philosophy isn’t just about the Benjamins
The interview question of questions
I don’t think a week goes by without my being asked how to answer the standard interview question, “What is your desired salary?” Truthfully, I don’t hear about this topic as a question; I hear about it as an accusation. If you have ever asked yourself any of the following, this post and the next post (How to answer the ‘desired salary’
Take responsibility for your career and your retirement
Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)
I just read a stat that stated that the average American household has less than $5000.00 in savings for retirement. With the start of a brand new year, I thought it might be a good time to help folks with new years resolutions and think about increasing the nest egg. Today we are talking Employee Stock Purchase Plans.
The Employee Stock Purchase Plan or ESPP for short can be confusing.