Tag: boss

In the office, the professional methods of communication are generally pretty clear.  Pick up the phone, shoot a quick note by e-mail, or make a visit to someone’s office.  However—during holiday season—many employees wonder, "Should I send members of my management team some sort of holiday greeting card? If so, is it appropriate to dash off an e-mail with holiday wishes, or is a traditional paper card the way to go?"

Satisfaction in the workplace is on a decline according to surveys and backyard conversations. Dissatisfied employees are opening up about feeling stressed and having difficulty with the underlying anxiety and mood swings that often accompany such responses.

Passive aggressive responses are not unusual when employees become resentful. There seems to be an increase in workplace gossip whether presented openly in the lounge or break room or heard more subtly through whispering gossip. A domino effect amongst other employees can readily ensue.

Other passive aggressive responses in the workplace may include:

Working for a boss who you butt heads with is never pleasant. In fact, surveys consistently show a top reason people leave their jobs is because of a bad relationship with their boss. So it won’t surprise you that many of my clients come to me because they want to leave a boss they can’t bear to work with anymore, even though the work may be just what they want. Below are three actions anyone can take to shift their perspective and find new solutions to workplace strife.

Is your company in a bad mood? The signs aren’t always overt. People aren’t biting each other’s heads off or glaring sullenly across the conference table. (That’s home, not work!) Instead, it feels like everyone is just… coasting. Rather than digging for solutions, they make a cursory effort and then lay the problem at your feet. They’re not cage-rattlers and idea-sharers; they’re "yes men" and passive compliers. If you could be the proverbial fly on the wall (instead of the boss in the hall), you suspect you’d hear far more bitching and blaming than the faked enthusiasm you usually hear.

Grace, 14, is a straight A student, a star on her basketball team, and tries desperately hard to be perfect in everything that she does. And, in her words, it’s not enough to be perfect; "I feel every day like I have to be amazing!" That’s obviously an impossible benchmark to live up to, but Grace continually strives to reach it each and every day.

If that’s not bad enough, even being an amazing young girl seems not good enough these days. The level of competition amongst girls in academics, sports, socially, and with their appearance is incredibly intense, and it’s a 24/7 contest with no end in sight.

Sleep. All business leaders need it, most crave it, but throngs don’t get the kind of restorative and rehabilitative sleep required to optimize mental clarity, focus, ideation, awareness, productivity and overall job performance. The result is egregious opportunity loss relative to realizing one’s full leadership potential. In addition to the CDC declaring "insufficient sleep an "important public health concern," a RAND Corporation study sheds more ominous light on the issue, finding that business losses in the U.S. resulting from deficient sleep reaches a staggering $411 billion (2.28 percent of its GDP)—the highest economic loss incidence of the countries studied.

A recent study has revealed that we are 70 percent more likely to spread false news on Twitter, according to Laboratory for Social Machines (LSM) at the MIT Media Lab. In all categories, falsehoods diffused signifi­cantly farther, faster, and deeper than the truth. True stories take about six times as long to reach the same number of people as do false ones. While the effect was most pronounced for false political news, it also included terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends and finan­cial information.