Personal Growth – Page 2

Leading and Managing through the COVID Downturn

March 29, 2020

Thank you all for your likes, comments and shares of my previous post, “What do Covid-19 and Y2K have in common”. As I read your comments, it struck me that it may be valuable to some share some of my learnings from other downturns. I have now been through six significant downturns or economic crises: the recession ...

A middle manager’s guide to managing in an economic downturn

March 26, 2020

You are a manager or director in a small or medium sized company. This is your first or second management role and you have never experienced the business turmoil of the past two weeks. What should you do now and what should you be doing next? The answer to the first question is likely more ...

Crying

November 11, 2019

Spoiler Alert…rant ahead I don’t get it. As employers, we ask our employees to bring 100% of themselves to work… be who you are… yet it is okay to have a stress cry at home, but it is not okay to cry at work. Why is it okay for a person to get stressed at ...

“You 2.0”

April 26, 2018

I was catching up with a friend this morning. He is currently a senior executive at a $100+MM SaaS company, who like most of his peers, is heads-down, working long hours, grinding to a successful outcome for his company. Compared to me, he is still young, with a couple of kids in late high school, ...

Seven Lessons for New Leaders

January 1, 2018

In today’s tech world, many start-up and early stage companies are being led by a management team often comprised of first time “people managers”. Twenty-five years ago, when I became a manager at IBM, I was required to take a series of management courses that covered topics including managing performance, motivating employees, HR policy and ...

6:30 is the new 7am!

December 6, 2017

I recently re-read a blog that I published from 2011 entitled “7am”. The essence of the post is that developing a discipline of starting your work day at 7am will affect the positive trajectory of your career. Well, it seems lately that 6:30 is now the new 7am. It is 6:08am. I am at a ...

Career Advice 101 – Observations looking back over many years

September 14, 2017

When I was in my twenties and thirties, I didn’t have a career plan. Even though IBM invested heavily in employee development, I never took career planning seriously and unlike many of my peers, I never aspired to become a CEO or senior executive. I didn’t know what I wanted to do and worse, I ...

LinkedIn Behaviour & What it says about You

February 13, 2017

Frequently, I get invited to connect to people on LinkedIn whom I don’t know. Generally, I have a rule that I never accept an invitation to connect from anyone that I have not either met or spoken with on the telephone. I do this to keep my connections to people that are in my industry ...

Backing a Winner – an epilogue

June 8, 2016

It has been over two years since I wrote the blog “Backing a Winner” , which was about Larisa Yurkiw’s quest to fund her vision to become the fastest women in the world of downhill skiing. At that time, Larisa, who had her funding cancelled when the Alpine Canada cut their speed racing program, was ...

Getting Good at Email

January 13, 2015

Getting good at email. I just read an article on “Why you should get ridiculously good at Email in 2015”. I agree with everything he says in the article about “why” but he doesn’t tell you “how”. So here are my 7 tips. My apologies to those not using Outlook because that is my email ...

Category: Personal Growth