Imagine crafting a sustainable career for yourself. Year after year, you perform work that makes full use of your skills and challenges you to develop new ones. Your work not only interests you, it gives you a sense of meaning. You enjoy opportunities for learning and development. You work with…

How can you cultivate career success even when possibilities for promotion are limited or nonexistent? In an era of flattened organizations and self-directed career development, learning how to do so is vitally important for your adaptability and satisfaction. Last year, I asked a group of master’s students what companies can…

Few things are more valuable in high-demand organizations than people who are both excellent at getting their work done and deeply humanistic. One of the people I coached most recently is a security professional operating in an active conflict zone. “It’s good to talk,” he told me. He supervises a…

There is an intergenerational sweet spot we should aim for, a point of maximum engagement for all employees. But we miss it by fixating on minor differences and taking them out of context, and by failing to appreciate the similarities among employees of different ages. The stereotype Millennials get tagged…

The great thing about careers in the 21st century is that you get to decide what you want to do. And if you don’t like what you’re doing, you can change. While this is liberating, it’s also scary and confusing. The complexity of today’s employment landscape is overwhelming. Managing your…

Meaning in work and life is not just a “nice-to-have”. We need it in the way we need oxygen. There are few things more life-enriching and life-prolonging in human experience than a sense of meaning. Critically important to performance and well-being, meaning helps people thrive. Conversely, a lack of it…

“Traditional approaches to staying focused don’t work for me.” “I know what I should do to be more productive, but I just don’t do it.” I hear sentences like these repeatedly from coaching clients. Many have read articles and books — and have even been trained in productivity methods —…

Imagine that you’ve been working in your job for a while. You enjoy your work, know how to do it well, and take pride in the results you produce. And then one day things change. Perhaps a new boss is hired from the outside, who doesn’t talk to you or…

You have the right to have work that enriches and enlivens you, rather than diminishing you. This is my own personal declaration of human rights at work. It informs everything I do as a coach, management professor, and human being. Yet it’s surprisingly controversial. Managers and employees in organizations around…