As the new year dawns, promotions season kicks in. Companies who are evaluating and revamping their yearly goals are likely to move personnel around to fulfill new needs, thus opening up spots for promotions. If you’re just sitting in your cubicle watching everyone around you pack their things for the corner office, it’s clear that something’s wrong. Here are a few possible reasons that you haven’t gotten that promotion yet, and what you need to do to break the rut.
The number one thing to ask yourself is whether or not your boss knows you want a promotion. Although you may think it’s obvious that you don’t want to be sitting around in your tiny cubicle for the rest of your life, your boss will assume you’re happy where you are unless you tell him or her about your ambitions. Now is a good time to bring this up with your boss if you haven’t yet – with all the goal-setting going on, getting you on a management track is just one more thing to add to the mix.
If you have managerial ambitions, be sure to make them clear to your boss before you start telling your co-workers about them. If everyone but your boss knows that you’re applying for the new position that just opened up, it can make you seem overconfident. Your boss is the best resource you have when it comes to getting a promotion – make sure you take advantage or his or her suggestions and advice.
Finally, don’t try to start doing a managerial job before you’ve actually got it. You may think that you’re proving your leadership skills to the boss, but you’re really just disrupting the office dynamic and making life harder for yourself with all the extra work. Focus on doing great in the job you’ve got, and you won’t be overlooked the next time promotions season rolls around.
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As members of Generation Y (or “The Millennials”) start taking over office spaces, older managers may have trouble relating to the work styles of their young employees. If you count yourself as one of those confused by Generation Y, it may be helpful to try catering to their working style, rather than forcing them to blend in with yours.
After sitting through God-knows-how-many interviews in your life, you’re finally going to be on the other side of the table. Getting promoted to an interviewer or hiring manager means that the company trusts you to make choices regarding new personnel who could shape the future of the business. It’s a big responsibility, and it can be nerve-wracking to take over the hiring process. Here are a few mistakes that hiring personnel commonly make as well as how to avoid them.
You have noticed a change in the work sub-culture, and in fact it’s been going on for the last 15 years or so. How would you describe it, this change? Well, the big picture seems to shift drastically every couple of weeks or so. Any notion of a stable long-range plan no longer exists. People are rapidly pulled off assignments and given new things to do, creating a chaotic atmosphere that sometimes feels like a dizzying disaster. And it becomes harder and harder to explain to anyone what the company is about, what its mission and goals are, and where it will be in a year, let alone five.
Whether you have hundreds of employees or just one, deciding on which gifts to get them can be a difficult process. You want to give them something a little more thoughtful than cold hard cash, without overstepping office propriety. As we’ve said before, always keep the professional relationship you have with your employees in mind when picking out gifts and get them something that is relevant to their job or a commonly held social interest, like baseball or table games.
As the holiday season approaches, most of us are thinking about taking a vacation. If you’re in a position to take time off work in the coming month, here are some tips to make sure things keep running smoothly in the office while you’re away.
If you’ve gotten tired of being passed over for promotions and have decided to march right in to your boss’s office and ask for one, more power to you. But in the heat of the moment, watch out for these common mistakes people make when asking for promotions.
So you got the promotion. Finally, your old boss is out and it’s you deciding how things should be done around the office. While you’re busy moving in to the corner office, you look at all the cubicle-dwellers around you and realize that they were your friends and co-workers until yesterday – and now your relationship with them has to change. Don’t worry – although you’re not going to be as in on the office grapevine as you were before, it’s possible to switch to the other side of management and still maintain the connections that you had with your former co-workers.
As the new director or development officer of a non-profit organization, you have a lot of leeway in crafting and carrying out your management style and routine. If you’re lucky, you will work with a national board, perhaps even an international board that will meet physically only once or twice a year. The rest of the time, you’ll be teleconferencing with individual board members and committees.
As it becomes increasingly common for employees to work remotely, changes in management must be made to reflect this new workplace dynamic. If you are placed in a position of virtual management, it can be difficult to be effective using the same techniques as you would use in a brick-and-mortar workspace. To succeed as a virtual manager, you must adapt traditional management techniques to the virtual setting.