Career

Career

Linked – Culture Fit – Another Way to Discriminate?
ByMike McBride July 13, 2023July 12, 2023 Reading Time: 2 minutes

There’s no simple answer here but I would look at how you define culture. There should be an organizational culture that includes diversity. Think more about “we value a variety of experiences and viewpoints” as opposed to “we like to work in a locker room environment” and then find the diverse group of people who “fit” your culture.

I will agree with Kevin on this though, “culture fit” is too frequently just code for people like me, and that needs to go away.

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Career

What is a Career Anyway?
ByMike McBride July 12, 2023July 12, 2023 Reading Time: 2 minutes

The idea that I would leave college knowing what I wanted to do, find a company to dedicate myself to, and spend my adulthood doing that thing is a joke to me. It’s been an unrealistic expectation for a long time. GenZ is just the first generation where we stopped even trying to convince them of it because it’s become too obvious.

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Career

Linked – Investing in middle managers pays off—literally
ByMike McBride July 6, 2023July 6, 2023 Reading Time: 1 minute

Great managers are developed by great managers. If you look around your workplace and don’t see great management, senior leaders might want to look at learning how to be great managers and leading by example. If your workplace, like many others, would be better off with far fewer middle managers, it’s likely because there is too much bad management happening. So much, in fact, that it might be better to not have middle managers at all.

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Career

Linked – What does productivity mean? Bosses aren’t really sure
ByMike McBride June 29, 2023June 29, 2023 Reading Time: 2 minutes

I sense there are a lot of managers in those industries who have it confused. I also think it might be a good idea to ask a boss what productivity measurement they use when making claims about how much more productive we’d all be in the office. If they can’t make a clear case showing the gains in output, it’s possible they do not understand how to measure productivity and have always been using placeholders like time in the office.

That’s not good management.

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Career

Notes or No Notes During an Interview?
ByMike McBride June 22, 2023June 22, 2023 Reading Time: 2 minutes

Maybe instead of telling interviewees that they should be doing immense company research, and practicing their questions and responses so that they don’t ever have to refer to notes we should be calling out interviewers who do exactly zero prep work before an interview. Instead of making excuses about how busy hiring managers are and how we can’t possibly expect them to do any research into a candidate when they are interviewing so many, we should consider how many interviews the candidate is doing and how many companies they are researching. If the hiring manager can have my resume and any notes in front of him during the entire interview, why can’t I have notes too?

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Career

Linked – You don’t have a culture problem, you have a management problem
ByMike McBride June 16, 2023June 15, 2023 Reading Time: 2 minutes

What I appreciate about the newsletter that I’ve linked below is that they go out of their way to point out how often we use language about a workplace culture that makes it seem like something we have no control over. It reminds me of the weather this time of year in South Louisiana. Everything we plan in the Summer is subject to the weather. An outdoor activity might get canceled because of storms, heat, hurricanes, etc. Weather events happen to us. We get no say.

That’s not what is happening in your workplace.

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