Must-Have Answers from ‘Ask a Manager’ Author Alison Green
For many employees, the work itself is easy. It’s the office politics that are hard. That’s partly why Alison Green started her blog, “Ask a Manager,” 11 years ago. A chief of staff at a non-profit organization at the time, she kept thinking that coworkers would have made different decisions if they’d had their boss’ or HR’s perspective.
“As a manager, I could see that people weren’t going to get the outcome they thought they were,” Green recalls. “It occurred to me that a lot of people would benefit from knowing what their bosses are thinking when they hear x or what they mean when they say y.” Read More
How to Stop a Bad Boss from Impeding Your Career
If you have a difficult boss, you know what it is to feel stuck. You can always quit, of course, but leaving without a new job is risky. Most people can’t take the financial or professional hit. Or maybe you are at a great company and simply don’t want to leave.
The thing to remember in this situation: “Your career is a marathon and not a sprint,” says Mary Abbajay, president and CEO of management consultancy Careerstone Group. “Every long run has rough patches, but that’s when you grow—when you’re being challenged.” Read More
Office Hours: What to Do When You Get a New Boss
Changes in management can be unsettling, whether they’re part of a major restructuring or due to just one person’s departure. We asked Suzanne Quigley, director of community and corporate responsibility at QVC and PA Conference for Women board member, for her advice on what to do when you get a new boss. Read More
2017 Session | Draw Your Big Idea: The Ultimate Creativity Tool for Turning Thoughts into Action
In this increasingly visual age, images speak louder than words. Studies show that images also help people think. Visual note-taking such as doodling increases memory retention rates by nearly 30 percent, and opens creative pathways, strengthens focus, and inspires self-expression. Driven by these groundbreaking findings, entrepreneurs Nora Herting and Heather Willems founded ImageThink, and can help you visualize your ideas and transform your creative processes using simple drawing techniques that anyone can master. Do you have lots of ideas but feel immobilized and overwhelmed, and find yourself unable to turn those ideas into action? Attend this session and learn how to incorporate “Draw Your Big Idea” into your daily work life. This session will feature interactive drawing exercises tailored to help you brainstorm, refine, and execute ideas in the office, within your teams, and even at home. Learn how to beat creative block—for good—and turn your thoughts and dreams into reality! Read More
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2017 Session | How to Get Taken Seriously as a Woman in Tech
Whether you are just getting your foot in the door, negotiating your next promotion and raise or trying to get backing for your big entrepreneurial idea, the tech field is a tough place to be a woman. From a lack of visible mentors and role models to underrepresentation in startup communities and pontification about including more women in tech, without much action, the challenges that women face in the tech field are well-known. This panel of experts will share how they found their way in this field and the tangible strategies that can help you do the same. Read More
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Life Lessons from NFL Official #53 (the Only One Who Wears Mascara)
Many female firsts are lifetime dreams come true. But some are more a matter of chance, the happenstance of finding something you’re good at when barriers are coming down.
The latter was the case for Sarah Thomas, the first woman to be an NFL official. “I was working as a paralegal when my older brother said one day that he was going to a football officials’ meeting,” she recalls. “I thought it could be a way to give back to organized sports—I’d played basketball in college—while earning some extra cash.”
Immediately, she was enthralled. “It’s actually funny, because as an athlete, I hated the officials and they hated me,” Thomas says. “But I fell in love with studying the rulebook. It’s fascinating.” Read More
How She Got There: Micho Spring’s Path to Becoming Chair of Global Corporate Practice and New England for Weber Shandwick
Take a young woman coming of age in the 60s, when many careers were closed to her gender. Mix in political awareness from having fled communist Cuba as a child and add courage and flexibility from forging a new life with her family in New York. What you get: a college dropout, a 31-year-old deputy mayor of Boston, a top executive at one of the largest communications firms in the world—as well as a Massachusetts Conference for Women Board member.
In other words, you get Micho Spring, whose name ought to be under “maverick” in the thesaurus. Be inspired by the most unconventional career path of Weber Shandwick’s chair of global corporate practice and New England and the lessons she learned along the way: Read More
How Women Can Get Ahead in Technology
What’s really holding women back in technology? You may have read about the “pipeline problem”—girls don’t study science, technology, engineering or math in equal numbers to boys—but that’s a red herring, says Gina Helfrich, founder and organizer of Feminist Hack ATX.
“The biggest obstacle, in my opinion, is poor retention numbers,” Helfrich says. “Research shows that more than half of women in technology leave the field by mid-career.” Read More
Update on Happiness (It’s All Good!)
Happiness is largely a choice. That may sound like magical thinking or like what no-guff grandparents meant when they said to buck up, but it’s actually the finding of a field of scientific study called positive psychology.
“Many people think they can’t be happy right now because of their biochemistry or their job or life situation, but research has shown that we are not just our genes and environment,” says Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage and Before Happiness and co-founder of the Institute for Applied Positive Research. “We have a different picture of what it is to be human. We can train our brain to become more optimistic and thus happier.” Read More