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Sotomayor Had It Easy
A severe company-wide crisis is underway and, as a mid-level manager, you have to decide: Push forward with a risky new plan that could save jobs and bring in more revenue — if it works — or scrap your costly team now and stay the course. But wait. Now you’re a lower-level worker facing the same situation from a different perspective. How do your elegancies shift? Would you remain loyal to the company? Or stand by your fellow co-workers as part of a team?
Such role-playing games are the type of exercises Hallie Crawford, a certified career coach in Atlanta, Ga., says some of her clients are being run through in job interviews. “It’s kind of a no-win situation,” Crawford says of the above scenario, which a recent client faced. Side with upper management and you’re a yes man; side with co-workers and you‘re disloyal.
Think this week’s vetting process for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor was tough? Try sitting through just about any mid-level job interview these days …
Graduation to Nowhere
I’ve spent no small amount of time thinking about how my life could have been different if I had graduated in another year.
From the first day of senior year in the fall of 2007, (like all seniors) we avoided mentioning the “G word” and cringed when anyone asked what our plans were for the next year. We were still safely ensconced inside the safe, dependable collegiate bubble. The outside world, where concerns over subprime mortgages were slowly mounting, hardly penetrated. Besides, people we knew had graduated and gone to get jobs. Just as we expected we would.
When I did finally graduate in May 2008, Bear Stearns had already collapsed, but I couldn’t see how my experience could fold in on me: I was a double major, graduated magna cum laude, had put in my time as an unpaid intern, and was an editor of a campus magazine at Syracuse University. I expected success and moved to New York so I would be here to interview at a moment’s notice. I signed a one-year lease on an apartment and waited for the interviews and offers to roll in…
Clear Fear from Your Career and More
There’s more fear than usual floating around these days. Fear about savings, spending, housing, but most of all fear about work—and that holds true whether you’re unemployed or looking, employed and scared about losing your job, or just plain stuck.
On March 31, motivational speaker Gabrielle Bernstein will give a lecture for women, Clear Fear from Your Career, with step-by-step advice on how to remove the psychological blocks that hold you back. Full disclosure: She’s a friend. But that also means we’ve experienced her workshops. Aimed mostly at women in their 20s and early 30s, they’re positive, practical, and have a strong spiritual element.
If it sounds too heady for you, you can’t make it, or you’re a man, there are plenty of other career events coming up in New York:
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