I heard a story last week from a woman (let’s call her Emma) who’s dealing with a bully boss — actually, Emma is doing more than just “dealing” with her, she’s directly reporting to her.

Among the daily miseries Emma faces at her boss’s hand:

• The boss schedules meetings, then cancels them. She will eventually reschedule but will almost always arrive late. When she does show up, she will be unclear, unfocused and easily distracted. And if the meeting runs over the allotted time, the boss will be completely unconcerned about how the schedule creep will impact Emma or anyone else.
• Her emails are ignored.
• Her previously well-regarded standard of work is consistently found lacking.

Emma is suffering badly. She is not sleeping well and has gained weight. Not only is she getting abused by her boss, she’s been beating herself up as well. She finds herself obsessing about different ways she can “do better”. While she knows on an intellectual level that her skills are excellent, she no longer faces the day feeling equipped to nurture her team. She puts in a lot of worry time before presentations because her boss is such a loose cannon that anything could happen. She second guesses herself all the time, finding it very difficult to make a decision.

The bottom line is that Emma has lost her confidence.

The emotional abuse her boss has dished out has damaged her to her very core. It’s time for Emma to take care of herself. If you are ever in a situation like hers, here is some advice:

• Keep a journal.
  Document, on a factual basis, what happened. Note dates, times as well as who was there. You probably will never need it but if you do, it is very difficult to recall details of things that happened when you were under a considerable amount of stress. In any case, many people find the act of journaling cathartic.
• Recognize that no matter how much you care or how hard you work, you will not be able to change his/her behavior.
  You don’t own this. Only he or she can prevent office dysfunction — and when someone is seriously disruptive, it is not realistic to expect he or she will change.
• Anticipate what’s coming and seek higher ground.
  Try to determine whether there are any patterns to the behavior— is there a particular time of day or day of the week that tends to be worse? Perhaps you can avoid him or her then.
• Talk it out.
  Find people with whom you can freely share (you must trust them implicitly), give them a chance to provide you with some guidance. If you are in a situation like this, don’t try to manage it alone. You may be able to approach someone more senior in the firm if you have a good reputation and strong relationships.

  While you may feel strongly that you should have legal options available to you, chances are that you don’t.^*
  

• Plan your exit strategy.
  While it may seem as though you have no choice but to continue to tolerate the situation, most likely you do have options. You may be able to transfer to another department or you may find something outside the company. Be careful not to speak ill of your boss (people will certainly wonder what part you played); rather, focus on why you are a good fit for the position for which you are interviewing.

* This post has been prepared for information purposes only. It is are not intended to be nor does it constitute legal advice.  Please consult a lawyer to obtain advice specific to your situation.

TAGS: bully boss, LinkedIn, managing your boss

A while ago, I wrote a post about keeping your personal life private. But what can you do if you’ve already made the mistake of sharing too much information? Consider this dilemma posed by a reader (edited):

Hi. True confession time. I’m an assistant manager and over the last year, I’ve been a total idiot: sharing the things you mentioned about my private life.

Divorce, medical problems, problems with my daughter. I did this with subordinates I should have NEVER confided in. The big boss is retiring soon and passing the baton to me, so to speak and I’ve made a MESS that unfortunately has stained my reputation here. I get a lot of disrespect from the other employees who will be working under me. I feel that they know too much.

I wish I could go back with an eraser and erase their minds but it is too late. Was I mentally ill at the time I did all that revealing and chatting with them??? I hate myself for that! I feel I have spoiled the chance at being an effective manager with them.

What can I do now besides keeping my mouth shut about my personal life, which I have started doing. Or is it too late? Should I resign and turn over a new leaf somewhere else? I have been with my company 16 years.

I’d appreciate any advice that would help me. I do realize the error of my ways and now need advice on what to do about it. Thanks.

Here’s how I responded:

What’s done is done. Time to move on. Your situation is complicated but I don’t think it’s hopeless.

Suggest that you think about having one-on-one conversations with people who work for you, focusing on their careers and how you plan to support them.

Once people understand that you are on their side and want to develop them, they will probably be only too happy to forget the past. What they may be concerned about is whether your personal problems will overshadow them; you will have to turn that perception around.

If someone brings something personal up that you’ve shared with them, I’d recommend that you deflect it. You might say something like, “Thanks for your concern but that is behind me now. Let’s spend our time figuring out the best way to get this work done without having to stay late.”

It won’t be easy but demonstrating your competence (and concern as a leader) is the way to reinvent yourself in the eyes of your co-workers.

The reality is that once you make a mistake like this woman did, you have to re-negotiate the relationship.  In order to be an effective leader, you must have and use power wisely and well. While she now does have positional power (she is or soon will be the boss), her personal power has suffered because her vulnerabilities are public.  She’ll have to regain her standing one colleague at a time – and negotiation is the way to do that.

TAGS: LinkedIn. recovering from mistakes, privacy, too much information

You may have read about Sonia Sotomayor‘s inspirational journey from the projects to the Ivy League to the steps of the United States Supreme Court. It’s difficult not to be moved by the story of a woman raised by a single, working mom and who, against all odds, will likely become the third woman to sit on the Court. There are, of course, some thinpinkline innuendos about her “temperament”─ evidently Judge Sotomayor expects the lawyers in her courtroom to be prepared and if they are not, she lets them know she is not pleased. Yet, I don’t recall much concern being raised regarding Samuel Alito’s disposition. But I digress.

What can Judge Sotomayor teach us about success?

• Do what you can to raise yourself up.
  When Sotomayor arrived at Princeton, her previous education had left her unready to compete. She knew she had to compensate so she spent hours in the library reading the books her classmates had already read at boarding school.

  If you wait for someone to pave the way for you, you may be waiting a very long time. In fact, your time may never come.

• Ask for and accept help.
  Although Sotomayor is reported to have confessed to a friend at Yale Law School that when she got to Princeton that she could “barely write”, clearly, she was able to improve her skills. How? In part by approaching her history professor who tutored her to write more critically.

  Sometimes, we’re embarrassed to ask for help. Sometimes, we don’t know whom to ask. Other times, we’re just too proud. But if you have done all you can to help yourself and still aren’t able to accomplish what you set out to do, figure out who can help you and ask.
  

• Find a support system.

Sotomayor had an incredibly supportive mother who believed that education was the antidote to poverty. Celina Sotomayor may have purchased the only set of the Encyclopedia Britannica ever to be found in the Bronx housing project.

While not everyone is blessed with a supportive mother, we all need support. Find people who believe in you, whether they are relatives, teachers or friends. Let them know when you need an emotional booster shot to keep you on track.

TAGS: Inspiration, sotomayor, success, US Supreme Court

If you’re like most people who work in organizations, you’ve got plenty of meetings. On average, people spend almost 6 hours per week in meetings (that seems low to me!) and 70% report that the meetings are “unproductive”.

My experience has been that meetings can be magical, however. Okay, perhaps that’s a bit dramatic, but meetings can certainly be productive when they are well planned and well executed. Good meetings can unleash creativity, help people to collaborate and find ways to solve critical business problems.

Tips for the Meeting Leader:

• Consider whether a meeting is the best way to get the work done.  Can you accomplish the objective in another way – e.g., one-on-one conversations, through use of an internal wiki or via an email discussion? Sometimes a meeting is that best way but it should not be the default way to move things along.

• Have a clear purpose and expected outcome for the meeting.  Communicate it to meeting attendees in writing before the meeting, reiterate it at the beginning of the meeting and loop back to it at the end of the meeting.

• Create an agenda; you may even want to circulate it in advance and invite others to add to it.

• Be clear about the roles you want people to play and let them know what they are. Also set the ground rules ─ for example, “So that we can accomplish what we need to, I’d like to be sure we stay on track.  So, if there are some times that we get into an important discussion that won’t help us to meet our objective for this meeting, I’ll take note of that and we’ll figure out when and how to deal with it afterward.”

• Anticipate what will be on the minds of meeting attendees and figure out a way to get them engaged. If you know that one person tends to dominate, have a plan to shut him or her down.  For example, “Thanks so much for your contribution, George. Now, I’d like to hear from Bill and Mary to get their team’s perspectives.”

• Consider basic human needs─ room temperature, appropriate breaks, etc.

• Start and end on time.

Tips for the Meeting Attendee:

• Be prepared.  Read the agenda and bring the information you’ll need to contribute.

• Be on time.

• Be present.  Pay attention ─that means no surreptitious sneak peeks at your blackberry

• Don’t make a comment just to say something.  On the other hand, don’t be shy about sharing your ideas about the issue under discussion.

Particularly these days when time and resources are so strained, having good meetings is more important than ever.

What other tips do you have?

TAGS: creativity, meetings, productivity

Recently, I heard a tale of a woman whose usual modus operandi was to get things done through fear and intimidation — but every once in a while (perhaps out of guilt?), she’d try to get close to those who reported to her by sharing gruesome details of her personal life. Of course her staff listened with rapt attention to her individual version of “Sex and the City” but still gave her a failing grade when completing her 360 degree feedback evaluation.

What was she thinking?

Clearly, fear and intimidation are not motivational techniques. Bosses who confuse compliance with commitment do so at their own peril. As she learned the hard way, the people who work for her aren’t grass. They have their own interests top of mind and expect leadership from their boss — not wildly alternating behavior.

Admittedly, she’s an extreme case. Most women who share personal information at work aren’t bragging about their conquests. Yet, we are often tempted to discuss personal matters at work. My advice:

Don’t do it!

It is not worth the risk to share intimate details of one’s life with colleagues. Don’t confuse your colleagues with your friends.

Things to avoid:

• Providing play by play updates about how badly your divorce is going, indeed mentioning relationship glitches of any sort
• Discussing your meds, either prescribed or not
• Complaining about the usurious interest rates you pay on the boatload of credit card debt you carry
• Recounting stories about worrisome behavior on the part of your children or pets

Trust me – none of the topics above are useful personal brand building strategies.

The workplace is competitive; some people have no qualms about using what they’ve learned either in the office or after hours in a social setting to advance their career at your expense. Don’t give them the chance — keep your private life private.

TAGS: information, personal brand building, personal branding, politics at work, privacy

I recently read about research that’s been done about how people protect their egos from a fear of failure by self sabotage – they set themselves up to crash by engaging in behavior that later provides them with an excuse for less than stellar performance. One example given was the story of the psychologist who initiated the theory – he experimented with drugs right before he took the SAT, on which he expected to get a perfect score. While the article didn’t report his SAT score, the theory is that he could attribute his results to the fact that he was just coming down from the drugs and therefore, not at his best. It seems that it’s often unclear whether people who do this are even aware that they are hurting themselves.

While not observing anything as destructive as drug use, I’ve seen people set themselves up to fail all too often in the workplace. And they don’t keep the excuses to themselves, they proffer them to others.

For example:

• People who are scheduled to give a major presentation yet don’t get to the conference room in time to be sure that their equipment works. They then blame the technology for their lack of credibility at the meeting.
• People who wait until the last possible minute to write the report due to the client sent and then rationalize that the content wasn’t up to snuff because they didn’t have time.
• People who suffer silently when colleagues miss deadlines and then use the lack of timely data from others as a justification for their late submissions to the boss.
• People who don’t ask for feedback regularly and then are shocked when their year-end performance review rolls around. “How could I have known I wasn’t meeting expectations?” they ask. “You never told me!”

The researchers say that as a short term strategy, excuses often work – must be the empathy factor. But those who offer excuses with regularity should know that, in the long term, they stop working. People become less forgiving when they catch on to the fact that the problem could have been averted.  In fact, other research shows that after a while, people tend to see those who offer excuses as whiners.

Interestingly, it seems that men are more likely to engage in such behavior than women are but both sexes play the blame game.  I believe that the career risk to women is even greater, though, given that women have to walk the thin pink line.

While everybody makes mistakes, this research points out that when our performance is less than we expect of ourselves, it is time to think about how we may have contributed. What did we could we do next time to be better prepared? To meet the deadline? To get the input we need before it is too late?

In the end, excuses are like vacation days – you only have so many to use before you run out.

TAGS: ego, excuses, whining

Many women keep their heads down, deliver great work (and excellent results) and hope that someone notices and rewards them appropriately. Unfortunately, such recognition doesn’t happen very often. So why do some women wait and hope?

Some don’t want to appear “greedy” for claiming credit for the contributions they make. After all, most of us work in teams ─ the team deserves the credit, not any one individual, correct?

Others feel that it is awkward to have to point out their accomplishments. Somehow, it seems more meaningful if others notice our contributions without prompting. It’s purer, more meaningful…

Even those who recognize the need to be more proactive about letting people know what their contributions have been and the value derived from them, sometimes aren’t sure about how to do that in a way that feels authentic and is culturally acceptable.

If you have been fortunate enough to have had champions who’ve made sure you were given the credit you deserve, you have been lucky. But how long will your luck hold out? The reality is that doing a great job ─ delivering above expectations excellence is necessary but not sufficient. You have to make sure that the right people are aware of your contribution.

How? The answer depends on your particular situation. Here are some ideas:

• Perhaps you can pass along a compliment you received from a colleague or client with a note that says something like, “Wasn’t it thoughtful of X to let me know how much the fact that he got what he needed on time and in the right format meant to his ability to deliver to the client?

• Send your boss a report on a regular basis providing an over view of your accomplishments. You might preface it like this, “So that you have the information easily accessible, I wanted to provide you with a quick update regarding the progress I’ve made on the various projects I’m managing…”

• At a minimum, keep a journal detailing your accomplishments and kudos you’ve received so that you have them handy when performance evaluation time rolls around.

The workplace, for the most part, isn’t cruel but it is callous and crazy busy. If you simply hope that others will notice your contributions, you’ll probably be disappointed.

Hope is not a strategy; making your value visible is up to you.

TAGS: adding value, contributions, Performance reviews, personal brand building, self-promotion

I’ll never forget my experience with a truly bad colleague. The warning signs were there but I just didn’t believe them.

I was part of a team of people who interviewed her before she was hired. She impressed me — experienced, intelligent, knowledgeable, and witty.  With no reservations, I recommended that she be hired. To my boss’s dismay, she turned down the job. A couple of months later, however, she was back. She said she had made a mistake, that the position (it was still open!) was indeed a good fit and asked us to renew the offer we’d made. My boss was hesitant but I felt so strongly that she was a great choice that I talked him into it.

Things were fine for a while. Then we started to work together on a client engagement she was leading because it was squarely in her area of expertise. Part of the project included interviewing client senior executives regarding the Company’s strategy, current situation as well as learning more about the challenges they faced. She agreed to create “interview guides” that we would both use so that the approach we used to gather data would be consistent as well as the data itself. She failed to deliver and when I told her I was concerned that I didn’t have the experience to “wing it”, she assured me that I could observe as she conducted the first few sessions so that I could learn the methodology. Not wanting to make waves, I agreed. (more…)

TAGS: Building workplace relationships, career derailment, colleagues, difficult economy, gaining confidence, sabotage, Women at Work

Americans witnessed history in the making last night.  It is a poignant reminder that all things are possible with vision, values, strategy, and perseverance.  I am elated at the outcome, but disappointed that this was not the year for a woman to make history.  It begs the question, “Is America ready for a woman president?” If President Obama makes good on his campaign promises we won’t know the answer to that for at least eight more years.  In the meantime, all women, Democrats and Republicans, Caucasian and women of color, must follow Obama’s lead.  Most of do not aspire to become President of the United States, but most of us do aspire to achieving our fullest potential — just as Obama did in his quest for the White House. 

As a woman walking the thin pink line  take the lessons of this campaign and apply them to your life and career:  

• Be clear about your values and live them with consistency.  Don’t we swayed by the way the wind is blowing in the moment.  Exhibit the courage to live what you believe.
• Be strategic about your direction. Don’t wait to noticed, promoted or given the raise you’ve earned.  Develop a plan for making the things you want a reality.
• Stay the course. One of the things that distinguished Obama from McCain was his unrelenting focus on his message.  All of his actions supported that focus and, with the exception of changing his mind about taking public money, those actions were consistent throughout the course of his long campaign.
• Surround yourself with people who aspire to excellence.   There’s truth to what our parents used to tell us — birds of a feather, flock together.  Be certain that the members of your flock help one another to soar.  
• Rise above petty politics.  As our friend Dr. Reardon might say, politics are a part of life and you have to be savvy enough to maneuver through them.  But petty politics only serve to bring us down. 
• Don’t allow your imperfections to hold you back.  How many times did we hear Obama say he was an imperfect human being? We all are, but it doesn’t mean we can’t learn from and compensate for those imperfections by striving to be our best selves.   
• Break free from stereotypes.  Just because there’s never been a woman at the helm of your department or there aren’t many women in your field doesn’t mean you can’t be the exception.  Obama didn’t let race, age, or relative lack of experience dissuade him from believing he could achieve his goals.  You shouldn’t either.

If you’ll follow these lessons learned you not only can, you will achieve great things in your lifetime and, in the process, widen the thin pink line for generations to come. 

TAGS: Campaign 2008, lessons learned, Politics, President Obama

When we were writing Her Place at the Table: A Woman’s Guide to Negotiating Five Key Challenges to Leadership Success, we talked about the “special tests” that the workplace reserves just for women.  We described one of them as “The Token Test” ─ the question that often follows a woman when she takes on a leadership role: “Did she get the job because she is a woman?”

I must confess that I was a bit skeptical that the Token Test was still operative in 2004. I thought we had come far enough and that there were so many clearly qualified women that there would be no reason to offer an unqualified woman a leadership position. What I have learned from this election is that I was wrong —John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin was, in my opinion, a setback for qualified women in politics and in business.

If the polls and the pundits are right, the American public wasn’t fooled by a charismatic politician who claims she didn’t have a second of doubt about her readiness for the VP role. And, unless McCain wins the election, I think Palin will shoulder a great deal of the blame. Even last week, she was being described as a “diva” and a “whack job” by unnamed McCain campaign officials. Hmmmm…

So what can we learn from this?

• Ask lots of questions when you are offered your dream job. Why me? Why now? What are the expectations that I will have to meet? What kind of support will I get? What kind of resources can I expect? (Make it clear you are not asking for a clothing allowance!)
• While women should take appropriate risk to enhance their careers, taking on a role when you do not have the requisite knowledge and skill is harmful to your professional reputation. Be realistic about what you have and what you lack. Then build your knowledge and skills incrementally in a strategic way to set yourself up for success.
• There’s nothing wrong with being reflective; moments of doubt make us stronger and better prepared.

Apologies to all thethinpinkline readers who have election fatigue, especially those who read from outside the US.  It’s almost over.

TAGS: gender, gender and leadership, John McCain, Leadership, Sarah Palin, The Token Test