Posts Tagged ‘executive careers’
3 Ways to Avoid Taking the Wrong Job — and What to Do About It When You Do January 11 2012 3 responses
You may have missed the story with all of the coverage on the New Hampshire primary, but White House chief of staff, Bill Daley, resigned this week after just about a year on the job. Daley is a high profile example of the oft cited statistic that anywhere between 25% and 40% of newly hired or promoted executives don’t last in their jobs for more than 18 months.
As it happens, a senior executive friend of mine recently let me know that she had left a new job less than three weeks after accepting it. Now, that’s fast! Intrigued by her news, I asked her if I could interview her for the Next Level Blog to learn more about what she thinks she missed during the hiring process, how she figured out so quickly that she had taken the wrong job and how she gracefully extracted herself from it.
Obviously, to protect her confidentiality I’m not going to get into all of the details of her situation, but there are some good lessons here for any manager or executive who’s considering taking a new job:
3 Dozen Predictable Situations That Executives Will Face in Their Careers April 28 2010 3 responses
There probably aren’t many kids who grow up thinking, “Someday I want to be a Wall Street executive and testify in front of a Senate committee that’s loaded for bear.” Yet, that’s what happened this week for eight or nine executives from Goldman Sachs. Who would have predicted that a few years ago? Probably about as many people who predicted the subprime mortgage crisis that Goldman shorted while selling a lot of their clients the long position. Call me strange if you like, but I spent a lot of the morning listening to the hearing on CNBC while I was working on the second edition of The Next Level (manuscript has to go to the publisher this week, hence the big push). There really wasn’t a lot of light shed on what actually happened but it was interesting to hear all the ways that questions could be asked and not answered. The star of the show had to be Fabian “Fabulous Fab” Tourre, the young Goldman banker who put together a lot of the questionable deals. For the color commentary, check out Dana Milbank’s column in the Washington Post.
The whole issue of predictable and unpredictable situations that executives will face in their career has been on my mind for the past couple of days. One of the appendices in the next edition of the book is an expanded Situation Solutions Guide in which I list a series of situations that executives will predictably face in their careers and provide some tips for how to deal with those situations. As I was thinking through the list last weekend, I put out a question to my friends on Linked In, Facebook and Twitter asking for their take on the situations that executives will likely face. The first person to respond was my blogging friend, Wally Bock at Three Star Leadership. We ended up having a nice conversation and talked through Wally’s experience in advising leaders in how to handle both predictable and unpredictable situations.
So, testifying before Congress is probably on the unpredictable side of the equation. I did, however, hear back from a couple of dozen people with their predictable situations. It’s a really interesting list and I thought you’d want to see it. Here’s my two part request. First, what predictable situation would you add to the list? Second, what’s your best advice for handling one of the situations already on the list? I’d really like to hear from you on either or both questions.
In the meantime, here’s the list. (It’s about a page long. I think you’ll find it worth the read):
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
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