A supervisor’s nightmare—the employee with a “problem” attitude. Makes you feel like you just drew the Old Maid card.What to do? You have an employee with a personality, work style, or temperament that is driving you crazy or aggravating others, making it harder to get the work done. And you don’t want to fire.Performance appraisal is how supervisors save us from ourselves.Good supervisors use appraisal to teach and guide....

Any idea about who has a stake in you? I mean a real money stake based on your risk-reward value. Seem like a weird question?When you’re the investment, you’re expected to deliver a return.That’s right. Every time we borrow or accept money from an outside source, we are their investment. So we have an obligation to reward the investor.Here’s how this works. Let’s say, you’re a college student. Your parents pay part of your...

Ever wonder if really bad customer service is a conspiracy? Or is bad service just about poor leadership? I had to break my foot to find out.On a very hot summer morning, I was trying to teach a strong-willed colt of mine to walk nicely when being led. Instead he’d take two steps and rear. I would dodge his feet and try again.Well, my luck ran out. Up he went and down he came, digging his hoof into the outside of my left fo...

Success is out there—somewhere. We watch others achieve it, but not us. They don’t seem any smarter than we are. So what’s the trick?We assume the answer’s in all those how-to books, so we read them. We go to presentations by celebrated experts, follow bloggers, and invest in webinars. These are all good things to do, but...No one can tell you how to get the success you want. Why? They aren’t you!We’re all in the same boat....

Trying to hire the right person can keep you up at night. Why? A bad hire can quickly turn employee harmony into raucous noise and tank confidence in you.If you know what you’re looking for, you’ll find it. If you don’t, oh well!The biggest mistake hiring managers make is not paying attention during the interview. Sounds incredible, right?Too often, interviewers are focused on themselves, specifically their:• greeting, han...

Oh, boy, it’s exciting to get a new job, especially with a new company. Everything looks so promising. We feel really good about ourselves–validated, reinforced, and successful.It’s amazing how our careers can start out in one place and morph to another.It’s all so gradual that we hardly know it’s happening until one day we realize that we’re someplace that we don’t want to be. Or, more often, a place that’s crushing us.I...

Here we go again! It’s time for the annual performance review, an experience that creates either euphoric satisfaction or stunned disbelief. Anything in the middle feels like a dull thud and doesn’t amount to much.Once we get our rating news, we’re left with several options: reach higher, get better, give up, or hide.Performance reviews often feel like verdicts by a one person jury.That’s because the process for evaluating...

There’s a lot of grousing out there about hiring. So when it’s our turn to hire, you’d think we’d be really good at it.After all, we’re hiring people all the time. Yes, hiring people to work for us. Our life is our business, remember?From the time we start living on our own, we’re hiring. Mostly, we hire temps or independent contractors.So, who are we hiring?• Personal service providers — hair stylists, manicurists, fitness...

Don’t you just hate tests? I didn’t like them in school and still don’t. At work there’s nothing worse then a training program with a test at the end. Takes all the fun out of it.Oddly enough, I’ve never hated any of my careers even though they were loaded with tests. Not the textbook type but the real life ones that come with consequences that can make or break you.Real-time career “tests” teach us things we need to discov...

The dreaded resume! Every job seeker desperately needs one but no one wants to write one. Why? Because it’s agony.The irony is that we fear our resume—the very thing that is our entry ticket to the job we want. Since we resist the things we fear, we put off writing it or suffer major distress when we must. Our concern: “What if my resume isn’t good enough!”Our “resumophobia” has three main causes:• Frustrating uncertainty a...