We once rehearsed difficult conversations in the shower, during the drive home, or with a spouse trapped at the dinner table. Increasing numbers of employees use AI’s chat capacity to prepare for salary negotiations, performance reviews, conflict conversations, resignations, and uncomfortable discussions with colleagues. Continue reading Mastering Difficult Conversations with Dry Chatting
Before you say “yes” to returning, learn what you’re walking into. Nothing stood still while you were gone. Your role evolved. Your team shifted. Informal alliances formed and hardened. You’re not stepping back into your old seat; you’re entering a moving system with new dynamics. Don’t expect things to feel like they used to. It’s a brand-new set of relationships.
Continue reading Boomerang Employee? Read This Before You Return
Your company has had years to notice your experience, your credentials, and track record of fixing high-stakes problems. Yet you’re still under-leveled and underpaid.
What value do you deliver? What level are you operating at? What risk does the company take if they underpay you?
Continue reading My Coworker Makes More than Me. Now What?
One of my coworkers shares deeply personal details about her life in meetings. Divorce updates, medical procedures, and how she’s navigating all of it. She’s always so excited to tell us and expects the rest of us to be interested and happy for her.
At first, I tried to be supportive. So did everyone else. Now we exchange uncomfortable looks when she starts talking, like we’re all bracing for impact and want to find the quickest exit.
Continue reading The Office Over-sharer: When “I’d like to share” hijacks your workday
She’s not using AI as a productivity aid. She’s leaning on it as a cognitive prosthetic. AI speeds the drafting of reports, emails, and presentations. It cannot replace judgment or the ability to think through a messy problem from scratch. Those muscles matter even more in roles where employees need to decide what the work should say, not just polish how it’s said.
Continue reading AI is Our New Employee
Turns out the workplace and thrillers have more in common than you might think. Most people know me for writing about work.
Conflict at work. Leadership mistakes. The strange things humans do in conference rooms.
But there’s another side of my writing life that fewer people know about. Continue reading Workplace and Thrillers Have a Lot in Common
If you’re a manager flirting with AI’s seductive promise: faster drafts, smoother prose, less emotional strain, you might be tempted. But pause first. Yes, AI can help. It also creates risks that many managers haven’t thought through. Continue reading Should Managers Use AI to Write Performance Reviews?
“I’m done, and I need you to know why.” The resignation hits the internet before the CEO’s coffee finishes brewing. Maybe it first arrived as a company-wide email or detonated in Slack, reactions stacking like spectators at a parade. Or it migrates to LinkedIn, a scathing paragraph wrapped in professionalism with a thin icing of fury. Continue reading Rage Quitting
When managers don’t handle problems but complain about one employee to another, our trust erodes. We don’t want our managers to talk to us about our coworkers. We expect our managers to have difficult conversations with those who need them. To set and uphold standards. To name what isn’t working. To offer support and correction.
That’s leadership.
Continue reading Hey Boss, It’s You
You’re the human shock absorber between her disengagement and the consequences. At the moment, she isn’t paying for your withdrawal. Your manager isn’t. You are.
Quiet quitting thrives when others quietly compensate. Think of it this way: if someone leaves her trash in the hallway and you keep taking it out, your manager doesn’t realize there’s a trash problem. Continue reading When You Sit Next to the Quiet Quitter: How not to be become the office life support system