Dear Madeleine, I work for a big internet company doing ad sales. This is my first real job out of school and I feel lucky to be hired by a company with such a great reputation. I also make enough to afford to rent a decent apartment while most of my friends live in tiny,…
Dear Madeleine, I have been working for a new boss for about six months. I think she is very organized and personable, and her whole team (me included) likes working for her. A while back, I had a rough time with the leader of another team. I won’t go into detail about exactly what happened—there…
Dear Madeleine, I don’t quite know how to say this without sounding like a total jerk, but I am really, really smart. It was useful getting through school—I got the highest possible scores on standardized tests without even trying. I have an almost photographic memory, and forget nothing. I got through college in three years…
Dear Madeleine, I am the founder and CEO of a specialty investment services company, which I started—for fun—after retiring from my first career in investment banking. My executive team is amazing. Since we are so specialized and the field is super technical, I have had to find the best and the brightest. My problem is…
Dear Madeleine, I run a rapidly growing not-for-profit. I put together a great board, our fundraising efforts paid off, and I have a great team. In a recent chat, my head of accounting made a crack about needing to wait to share something with me because he wanted to catch me “in the right mood.”…
Dear Madeleine, I am a marketing director for a medical devices company. I manage all our social media and speaking engagements, which involves a lot of details and spreadsheets with tasks and tracking results. Part of my job is to conduct interviews with experts and write them up for our website, and to write articles…
Dear Madeleine, I recently started a new job. I am super interested and engaged. I think I am doing well and my manager seems thrilled. People here think I’m much older than I am, and everyone assumes I have a bachelor’s degree. Only the HR recruiting person knows that all I have is a two-year…
Dear Madeleine, I manage a few teams—data scientists, bio engineers, research fellows, project managers—in a fast-growing biotech company. I have teams in Southern California, Canada, Eastern Europe, and Indonesia. The teams pass work off between time zones; if one person doesn’t complete their piece during the workday, it puts their counterpart behind. The pressure is…
Dear Madeleine, Is it naïve to want people to like me? I have been very successful at sales and developing partnerships in my job, partially because I am so good at knowing how to relate to people and getting them to like me. But recently I am beginning to wonder if having people like me—and…
Dear Madeleine, I was recently promoted to executive vice president in a company where I started as an entry level coordinator right out of college. I took advantage of the company’s training and generous education reimbursements, got an MBA, and rose steadily. I never dreamed I would get this far, and I am thrilled about…