Personal Growth – Meaford

Death by meeting?

March 1, 2021

Are you suffering from “death by meeting”? During the pandemic, consistent feedback is people are often back-to-back in meetings from dawn to dusk. Have you noticed your meeting load has increased and are you burning out from Zoom fatigue? Is this a pandemic and work-from-home phenomena or has the upward trend of meetings been increasing ...

Should you prepare for your employer to outgrow you?

February 24, 2021

This is a conundrum. You are early in your career in the tech industry and you love working for a small start-up. You enjoy the pace, the energy, and the innovation. Every day you feel you are making an impact. The company is laser focused on growth and success and the culture is all about ...

Managing managers: Is it different?

January 25, 2021

As careers’ progress, many people aspire to become a manager and progress upwards to director, vice president and executive levels. As promotions occur, a question that I am often asked is whether there is a difference in how leaders manage a team of individual contributors versus a team of managers? I believe that there is. ...

How senior executives make decisions?

January 5, 2021

I recently was in the loop of an email thread that went something like this. A junior level candidate was referred to a senior executive as a possible hire for their team. The senior executive inquired with their management team as to candidate fit and positive feedback was provided so introductions were done. The recruiting ...

Courage

December 5, 2020

Everyone knows that an executive’s job is to achieve the outcomes that they have been tasked to achieve. “Say it > Do it, No Excuses” is a common mantra used to describe performance expectations for a senior leader. As people rise in corporate ranks, what many leaders are sometimes slow to grasp is that their ...

Are you climbing a career ladder? Or using the staircase?

November 23, 2020

After you read this title, you may be asking, what’s the difference? Many people talk about “climbing the corporate ladder”, getting promoted from an individual contributor to a Manager, then Director, then Vice President, and onwards into the executive ranks. Many think about their career as a ladder, each step moving you higher vertically. Unfortunately, ...

Think Like An Executive

November 17, 2020

I was recently asked by a client to be a guest on a monthly leadership series that they host for their approximately 200 leaders in their 1500-person business unit. The topic that I was asked to speak on was “How to Think like an Executive”. The audience ranged first line managers to vice-president level. Given the ...

41 years later, what did University really teach me?

October 9, 2020

I recently read Dave McKay’s (President & CEO at RBC) post on “Why IBM’s Ginni Rometty has me thinking about the future of post-secondary learning”. In the post, “Ginni says the half-life of most specialized skills nowadays lasts just five years.” I recall being told a similar statement when I graduated engineering in 1979, that ...

Getting a job when you are in your 50’s, and what you need to do about it when you are in your 30’s

July 1, 2020

This story reoccurs about every other month. Someone whom I worked with 20, 25, 30 or 35 years ago but I haven’t talked to for ten plus years reaches out to me. Typically, they are now in their mid to late fifties and occasionally in their sixties; have had a very successful career; made big ...

Business Hugging in the post-COVID world

May 5, 2020

I am not a “hugger”. It was not part of the cultural norm of the family that I grew up in to hug on greeting or departure. When I started work at IBM in late 1970’s, proper business etiquette was a firm handshake for any occasion, whether it be an introduction, a greeting, a good-bye ...

Category: Personal Growth