I’ve often heard managers say to employees that they expect them to go above and beyond their job descriptions.  Even most performance review forms have a category labeled “Exceeds Expectations.” As managers, we all know that the standout employee does just that; not content to just satisfy requirements these people see wider or dig deeper or broaden the context of an assignment creatively.  As I became a new manager, we looked for employees who “took initiative.”  I was great at taking initiative, seeing ways to expand assignments that allowed for a better execution or for the results to have a more far-reaching impact.  As I grew in business knowledge and managerial experience, I got better at making the decisions that allowed…

I write this essay to honor my friend Dan, another friend who died recently, and another friend whom I met at work.  To describe my friendship with Dan I first have to describe my relationship with myself at that time of my life: I was self-conscious, believed I was not good enough, acutely aware that I was the first person in my family to go to college and every day felt unworthy.  And Dan was part of the family who controlled The New York Times.  He scared me.  To be truthful everybody scared me, but few more than Dan.  He was brash and direct and funny and biting and quick-witted and I could not keep up. We were assigned to a…

Can you stand ANOTHER essay on work-life balance? The phrase is one of the most written about and studied over the last four decades as post-Feminine Mystique women entered the professional ranks in unprecedented numbers. But I think it is still a jumbled up topic that is too often focused on workingwomen and not often enough on workingmen; too often focused on children and not often enough on the other aspects of a full and a fulfilling life that we’d all like to have. As recently as June 2016 The Wall Street Journal ran an article in their Management column titled, “Male CEOs Detail Their Work-Life Rules.” The article acknowledges that male executives traditionally haven’t been expected to feel conflicted about…

Yesterday I was leaving a client’s office and found myself in midtown Manhattan, on Madison Avenue in the low 50’s, waiting to cross the street.  Two French women of a certain age, clearly tourists, approached me and asked in heavily accented English if I could tell them where to find St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  I smiled at them and pointed to the neo-gothic spires visible two blocks away and said, “You can see it from here.  It’s just a few blocks in that direction,” when a man’s voice off to my left said, “That’s not St. Patrick’s.”   The poor ladies looked panicked.  Clearly they had asked me for directions because I looked safe and trustworthy and now these two strangers were…

It wasn’t too long after becoming CEO when I realized that all of my friends in the industry were now clients and that posed a problem. How would I decompress? Who was there to talk with and occasionally whine to about the awfulness of my day? Oh sure, I had (and still do have) a wonderful, caring husband, but we had made the decision that he would stay home with the kids at a time when that decision was still a curiosity and he had his own stressful, awful days and didn’t need to be burdened with mine. The kindly founder always lent an ear and a reassuring word but I knew that he had hired me so that he did…

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone we worked with came into the office and left their troubles behind?  And by troubles, I don’t mean worry about a son’s report card or an aging mother.  Those troubles are the stuff of life and we all share them at some time or another.  Learning to look at and listen to another human being and see the world from their vantage point is the basis of empathy and is truly foundational in helping people connect to one another. I use trouble here more fundamentally.  I use it here to suggest those psychic wounds too many people carry that distort our vision and color the way we see the world and, more importantly, interact with…

My graduate school grants had run out, I was writing my dissertation, up to my eyeballs in student loans and I needed a job.  The fifth floor studio walk-up in Spanish Harlem cost us $175 per month (yes, this was a long time ago) and no matter that it “rained” in our only closet when the upstairs tenants let their sink overflow.  We didn’t have any good clothes anyway.  I had been applying for entry-level assistant professor jobs around the country but all of them required that my dissertation be completed and awarded.  It was going to be tight. Then one Sunday morning, combing through the classified ads in the New York Times I saw an ad for a Research Supervisor…

  I didn’t know very much about the working world when I had my first experience with a really bad manager.  I would write a report for him and, shortly after handing it in, he would call me into his office and force me to sit there and watch him read it.  “Scottie,” I said, “I could be working on something else until you finish.”  He replied, “Why should I waste my time finding you if I have a question?” Today, when I coach young professionals complaining about their “awful bosses” I tell them that this is probably not the worse boss they’ll ever have and they look at me as if I’ve lost my mind, thinking how could it get…