What would you do if you were faced with a "take it or leave it" announcement that dramatically impacted your job and work life?

Elon Musk reportedly sent an email to Tesla’s salaried employees requiring their physical presence in the office ... or else. This ‘take it or leave it’ edict raises an interesting career management lesson and question.

How immune and resilient would you be in the face of the "comply or resign/take offered severance" scenario. 

This isn’t far-fetched. Here are some common…

In the gig economy which characterizes the modern job market, with opportunities flying left and right, more power of choice to the employee, and companies becoming increasingly agile, people have never switched jobs as quickly as they are now. This dynamic movement can, in turn, be a key driver of career progression by providing the experiences required to remain relevant in ever-changing industries and complex organizational contexts. The silos in which professions were once isolated are falli…

Is Your Job at Risk this Year? I recommend that you do a short job risk-assessment exercise.

A best practice for your well-managed career is a periodic threat analysis. What is on this year’s horizon that could be a threat to your job, your income, your market position or your career growth?

The idea is simple. If there’s a reasonable likelihood that something could occur outside of your control to threaten your professional well-being, it’s worth anticipating and preparing for it.

The Horizon

As y…

I encourage you to leverage some quiet time to define your professional theme(s) for the coming year. In order to make progress, take more ownership, and be more intentional about your professional journey, taking stock of your situation and the road ahead is an important step. Your strategies, decisions, and attention will be driven by this theme.

The 5 Professional Themes that Drive Your Career this Year

Where are you today and what’s next for you? What kinds of emotions do you experience when y…

Holiday Review

Beyond strengthening bonds with those around you, the holidays offer an invaluable opportunity for reflection. While the value of New Year’s resolutions has been questioned, I have found that there is a natural cycle occurring during the holidays that I can leverage to reflect on progress, learnings and create plans for the coming year.

Take advantage of this convergence to invest in some reflective time.

Questions to get you started

1. What happened this year that I want to record? …

I have an important concept for you this week. In our arsenal of key concepts, the career management trap that we call accidental career progression resonates with a lot of mid and late-career people. So much so, that part of the tag line for the Bold Career Project contains its opposite: Intentional Career Growth. If in looking back at the years of your professional journey to date, you feel that your decisions and moves weren’t intentional, that you took the first decent job offer, sometimes s…

Holiday Professionalism

A Happy Thanksgiving for US-readers if you celebrated this weekend. We are at the beginning of a holiday season. The holidays are not, contrary to common belief, a career development wasteland. In fact, December & January can be a powerful time. One of the types of career development actions we can take in December and January is to meaningfully connect with the people that matter in our professional life.

How

Consider how you can leverage these three types of connection opp…

I am in the process of onboarding a part-time executive assistant service and in support of that, this week I read a book by Michael Hyatt titled Your World-Class Assistant (Hiring, Training, and Leveraging an Executive Assistant). Each of us has key accountabilities that drive our success. These are our highest level priorities. And yet, we are buried in a wide array of work and personal tasks. It isn’t always clear which directly supports these priorities and which don’t.

More Time. More Impact…

Career management is not crisis management

I wanted to share with you an important lesson that I was reminded of from two full-process career transition clients that I started working with this week. If you want a career management definition, let's start with what it is NOT. You see, both of these clients, independently, communicated the same thing: If they could go back in time, they would have put more attention, while in the job, on their external profile, network, and relationship management…

Great Books on Professionalism

As a follow-up to my previous article on building a professional development reading habit, here's a selection of the 21 now 22 professional development books I've read (not including fiction and general interest non-fiction) so far this year.

Atomic Habits

Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results by James Clear: At least 70% of our daily actions are done by habit. If you want to find ways to install good habits and get rid of bad habits, this is the book. Huge recommend.

What…