Leader POV: It took you nine months to hire him. He's just passed probation and is already involved in client work that nobody else can do. Then he calls from his bereavement leave to say he needs to extend it and he doesn't know for how long. 🤦‍♀️ This one isn't hypothetical. It happened in one of my previous HR roles, and I've thought about it many times since. Nine months, by the way, is long enough to grow an entire human being. That's roughly how the search felt. His ex

If you haven't decided what your team needs before you interview someone, you will end up judging the iced coffee 🧊 ☕ If you've been on LI for even 5 minutes this past week, you've read about Gen Z candidates bringing iced coffee to job interviews. Half the comments call it unprofessional - the other half couldn't care less. My question is: What was the interviewer/OP in question really assessing? In my years in talent acquisition, I heard one sentence in intake meetings mor

Twice this month, someone tried to recruit me for a job that does not exist. 🤦‍♀️ I did not fall for it but only because I was paying proper attention that morning. On a different morning, at the end of a harder week, I am less sure. Here's what happened The first email arrived at 1:32 AM CET. A recruiter at a large US insurer, writing about a confidential search. My background, she wrote, had stood out during their shortlist review. I had never applied to anything. The seco

A client of mine apologized to me recently. Her words: "I don't know if you coach less ambitious people that don't want a corporate career path." She is a senior Program Manager. Decades on large-scale international projects with the kind of career that a lot of people strive for. Then her contract ended, and instead of diving head-first into a #job search, she stopped and asked what she actually wanted next. We spent the first part of our #coaching #work on self-awareness. W

What do you do when two people in your team simply cannot stand each other? Every few weeks my client has to deal with this exact situation. One member of his team comes to him privately to say his colleague is unprofessional and lazy. Then the other one comes separately to say he can never get a straight answer and that nothing is communicated openly. His plan was to keep the whole thing strictly factual. What was supposed to be delivered, what actually arrived, who said wha

What do you do when you inherit a low performing team in your new leadership role? Last Monday, a client asked me this question 3 weeks into his first job as a #people manager. He had inherited two people. Before his first leadership meeting, he sent them detailed instructions about what to prepare. One of them came back with a presentation that my client described as lazy and low-quality. Needless to say that he was not only disappointed but also furious. In fact, he was pre

My leadership style can be described as two weeks in the Bahamas with no wifi. 🏝️ It's summer break season again and I was recently reminded of my answer to an interviewer's question a few years ago about how I like to lead my team. It was a witty effort to describe in short the servant leadership style that I strongly believe in and apply. But don't let the tempting visual of a tropic vacation fool you; servant leadership takes a lot of hard #work and focused effort. Accord

Back in my hiring days, signing the contract with a newly hired member of my team was just the final step in my decision-making process. The probation period was more or less a formality, not another reason for the new person to prove something to me. It may sound overconfident but hear me out. By the time I made an offer I had run a structured process. Same questions in the same order, scored against pre-agreed criteria, with multiple people scoring and giving feedback. The

More than half your team is staying out of necessity, not because they actually enjoy their jobs. That doesn't stop organizations from tracking retention as a success metric. What the numbers are saying 77% of employees say they intend to stay with their current employer, up from 73% the year before. On paper, that reads like a good year. Look closer, though, and only 18% say they are staying because they genuinely want to be there. The rest are staying out of necessity. In t

Picture this: Oxford, 2023. A researcher named William Fleming stops asking whether the mindfulness pilot at one company worked and instead pulls together data on tens of thousands of workers across hundreds of organisations. He looks into mindfulness sessions, resilience workshops, and apps with breathing exercises in survey data covering 46,336 workers. His findings? Participants making use of these company-provided initiatives appeared no better off than everyone else. Mea

If you have ever worked in a corporate of almost any size, HR has probably sent you a survey built around a single question: How likely are you to recommend our company to others? And if you are like most people, you scratched your head and wondered why this even matters, and why they cannot just leave you alone to do your #job. 2026 has been a year of massive change, and we are only halfway through. Despite all the layoffs, restructures and reorganisations, your company is s

A client came back from two weeks in Greece and told me the calm lasted until Wednesday. By her second week back, she said, it was as though she had never left. All the work stress, rumination, anxiety, sleeplessness - it all came back totally unchanged. Holidays in Greece is always a good idea (trust me). But, are holidays even enough anymore? Or, do we all collectively need to embrace the concept of micro-retirement instead? Admittedly, the idea is rather seductive. At leas

Are your friends at work helping you with your burnout, or are they actually making it worse? If you ever needed proof on how much we value relationships at #work, take a look at these numbers: 57% of employees would accept a job paying 10% below market just to work with a close friend, and 87% say that friendships are crucial for staying with the company (KPMG). The Conservation of Resources theory offers a solid explanation backing these statistics. Good friendships provide

This year I stopped managing people. For the first time in a very long time, there was no team, no 9AM stand-ups, no weekly 1:1s, no banter with people on the same boat. What replaced it was managing Claude: writing detailed prompts, checking every output, correcting all the little details. At some point last week I realized that I was working in a way that would terrify me if Claude was a real person I was supposed to lead. You see, for most of my career, my approach to #lea

Recognition is now cited as a driver of #burnout at roughly twice the rate it was a year ago. The organisational response has been MORE: more structured Comp&Ben programs, more public shoutouts on Slack, more AI-generated appreciation messages. But more is NOT better, and it's definitely not addressing the deeper issue. Three forms of recognition, three kinds of protection Research identifies 3 distinct forms of #recognition, each protective against a different dimension of b

"My problem isn't just getting through the workday. It's that I've stopped believing that it's going to get any better." If that sounds like you, you may be struggling with more than just tiredness - and it's a surprisingly common pattern. The truth is we have been naming #work exhaustion for a long time. In 1869, neurologist George Miller Beard called it neurasthenia, a nervous exhaustion from the pace of modern industrial life. A century later, Herbert Freudenberger gave it

How can I be burning out and still keep going? Someone once described it to me as feeling like a car running on the reserve tank. You’re still moving but you’re ignoring the red light signaling low fuel on your dashboard. I’ve heard versions of this more times than I can count, in #coaching sessions, exit interviews and individual conversations with people who were DOING absolutely fine, and yet, not FEELING fine. So, what is actually going on here? A 2024 DHR Global survey o

There’s a moment in a Simone Stolzoff talk that gets me every time. He’s at a hostel. He asks a Chilean man, "What do you do?" The man responds, "You mean for work?", genuinely puzzled, as if the question could obviously be about dozens of other things. Across sectors, organizations have been shedding layers, and the middle management tier has taken some of the heaviest cuts. These are not people who lost a #job and will find the same one elsewhere next quarter. Many of them

ASML posted record sales of €32.7 billion last year. Then cut 1,700 management roles. ABN Amro announced 5,200 job cuts by 2028. Philips has been reducing layers for over a year. Globally, over 80,000 tech #jobs were cut in Q1 alone. Google removed 35% of its managers last year. None of these companies are in trouble. All of them are removing the middle. This pattern showed up in last week's Q1 2026 overview and it's shaping the current landscape so much that I wanted to do a

Q1 2026 didn't feel like a normal quarter. AI adoption accelerated. Org structures flattened. New terms entered the workplace like "workslop", "burn-on" and "coffee-badging". Underneath all of this sits the same pattern: organizations making big moves without a plan behind them. The Flattening of Middle Management Gartner's 2024 predictions report estimated that by the end of 2026, 20% of organizations will use #AI to flatten their structures and cut more than half of their m