Hard-Earned Business Lessons

Another hot topic worthy of an expanded guide is how to mitigate and navigate conflict that you experience as a professional or that people who work for you are experiencing. This guide will aim to cover this from a more or less holistic point of view aimed at both managers and direct reports but with an added emphasis to management because managers control a lot of how conflict may flow as you will see below. If you manage people or have managed people before, doubtless you will have noticed that your direct reports have been in conflict with parties internal and external to your organization. They don't always do the best job of navigating that and they don't always know how to best navigate it. There are myriad reasons for this but a good place to start is to examine the root of conflict and how we should handle it with that in mind, rather than dissect where people might make mistakes. Conflict, as should surprise nobody, is most often rooting in unclear expectations. This ...

Have you ever been frustrated by leaders or people who rank higher in your company not understanding the emotional intelligence consequences of their decisions or how they communicate to the group? Unfortunately, most of my experience and observations state that this is a pretty commonplace occurrence. I'd like to dive into the ethos of that a bit in the following. I think that it's important to understand the psyche of the people who may be bothering you with their behavior so that you might better manage how you react to and interact with those people. Let's start with entrepreneurs and executive-level folks because they have the burden of position and are therefore the easiest to target with analysis. For these people, in many cases, work is life and business is passion. It may be that you do not share their passion and that you would rather prioritize your time on family, sport, or a hobby that you really like. Probably work is just a means to an end for you. This might...

  It’s simply not a reality that everyone’s career or everyone’s work will be deeply meaningful to them. There are many reasons for this, mostly boiling down to a main aim of capitalism which is that, were it not for the monetary system, no one would perform unsavory work. There are other reasons for this too but it makes sense to focus on one prominent side effect we will likely all experience in our professional lives in one way or another: performative work. My first encounter with the word ‘performative’ was some time back in the context of social media. People have a tendency to show only their best sides on social media and that plays into this in the sense that what’s being posted on many platforms is what people think others want to see of them and is therefore performative and, in this case, not genuine. Think of all the YouTube and Streamer “apologies” (non-apologies) that you’ve seen on the internet lately. You’ve probably seen brands do this do when they did something...