Episodes

As we approach the end of the calendar year, it's the time of year when many employees are evaluated against their goals and considered for merit increases and potentially promotions.  Have you positioned yourself to be one of the ones to be...

Today, we're tackling a question that's crucial for everyone navigating the professional landscape: how much faster does your career progress if you actively own it instead of waiting for your career to happen to you?   To truly grasp the impact...

For many companies, the end of the year is a time when employees have their annual reviews.  Today, we'll talk about the things you can do with what's left of the year to prepare.   Review your incomplete goals.  Start by looking at...

During a recent one-on-one with a member of my team, the question came up as to whether someone can be successful when working remote.  I'll start with the answer.  Yes…..assuming your work can actually be done somewhere other than the...

If you are in any of the LinkedIn groups related to your profession, you've likely come across posts that list questions and answers that are core to your field.  These are the types of questions I would expect to see on a university or...

These past six episodes have covered a lot of good content.  Have you spent any time implementing the ideas in your career?   was about how some people default to Ask mode where they will ask for everything expecting to get a "Yes" only...

If you're listening to this podcast in real time, the calendar has just flipped to October.  This is often when discussions begin within a company that a reorganization (often shortened to "reorg") might be necessary.  Many reorgs take...

This week, we take a break from looking at career advancement and we focus on the "life" side of the work/life balance equation.  While everyone has a different idea of what their non-work life should look like, ensuring that you have adequate...

As I covered in last week's episode on the , you may eventually reach a point in your career where the next rung has a limited number of opportunities to progress.  In , I talked about how luck is when preparation meets opportunity and that...

For the majority of people, their career is going to last somewhere in the ballpark of forty years depending on when they start and when they decide to retire.  While there are no hard and fast rules about how your career should or will progress,...

When your career begins, your key responsibilities are to do your tasks and to grow your skills.  With enough time, this is often sufficient to justify a promotion.  However, as you reach higher career levels, there comes with it, the...

The other day, I was reading a series of articles by on Substack (link to ).  These articles outline how ask-culture and guess-culture can clash at work and how to navigate the differences.   Ask Culture is when members of the group are...

As with any career, it's important to periodically check your progress.  Since this podcast started you should have held at least two career development discussions with your leader.  Hopefully you're making the most of these session and...

The Roman philosopher Seneca has a quote about how luck happens when preparation meets opportunity.  When it comes to your career, this is so very true.  If you spend your time waiting for an advancement to fall into your lap, you'll often...

I was inspired to cover this topic by a post that I saw on LinkedIn by .  In that post, she listed .  This was a good follow-up to my previous episode on how to structure your one-on-one.  One topic in that structure was focused on...

An important aspect of managing your career is having regular conversations with your manager about your career goals and performance.  What does a GOOD career development one-on-one look like?   First, when discussing timing, I think that...

If you imagine a medieval battlefield there were four main groups involved in the fighting.  There were the mele fighters who were the front lines -- the men carrying swords and spears or other similar weapons.  There was also the calvary --...

So, the answer on how to choose a future career path is…..it depends.  It depends on you and your desires and it depends on the company you work for.   So, obviously, "it depends" isn't a very useful answer.  So let's dive in to...

So, the company I work for has an annual employee survey and my results recently came out.  In most areas, I score well, over 90% positive.  But one question that I have consistently scored between 80 and 85% favorable (for multiple years)...

In , I talked about how you should be looking for opportunities to increase the scope and impact of the work that you perform.  Delegating and automating process driven tasks and soliciting for work that involves more discretion and judgement. ...

Based on the lead quote, Stephen Covey popularized the concept of the "Eisenhower Decisions Matrix" in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  The basic premise is that you should rank the things you need to do based on two axes - Is...

One of the things that I often tell my team is "if you're the only one who can, you're the one who always will".  What I mean by that is that if you're a single point of knowledge, as a manager, I can't assign those tasks to anyone else and...

In the corporate world, being scared leads to self-doubt and inaction.  If your goal is to advance your career, those are two attributes that you CAN'T let take over.  So, when you find yourself feeling fear, what then?  The strongest...

Whether official policy or not, in many companies in order to be promoted, you have to have already begun doing the work of the next level.  When that next level is a position of leadership, it isn't always easy to have that work line up with...