Climbing to the top of corporate America requires near complete abnegation of one’s personal life, not in a sacrificial way, but in a child-like way. In most cases, when there are children, there is a wife at home taking care of the executive’s life in the same way she takes care of the children’s lives.
This …

By Bruce Tulgan — Forget the idea of being a hands-off manager. That doesn’t help anyone. In the early 90s it became popular for managers to not manage. Today’s mangers need to reverse the trend.(requires the Flash 9 Player)
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By Bruce Tulgan — Sometimes people who make insane demands are actually giving you the clues to getting better work out of your team.(requires the Flash 9 Player)
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By Bruce Tulgan – We know that writing stuff down helps us remember. But we don’t do it all the times that we should. Here are the ideas that will cause you to write down more, and writing down more will help you do a better job.(requires the Flash 9 Player)
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Bruce Tulgan tells the four reasons you have to fire a low performer, and the best way to get low performers to leave on their own.(requires the Flash 9 Player)
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When I was a new manager, one of the steepest learning curves I had was how to adapt my communication style for the various groups I interfaced with: Technical, creative, executive. Fortunately, I had learned from my days as an arbitrage clerk that each group of workers requires a specific type of communication, so I …

Bruce Tulgan runs through 8 things in 2 minutes — tactics that will make you feel confident and effective as a manager.(requires the Flash 9 Player)
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At a point when I didn’t have the money to hire an assistant, I ran an ad for an unpaid intern. I ran it on a lark, thinking I’d be lucky if anyone in the world would want to work for free.
The number of responses I received was incredible, not just in quantity, but also …

Bruce Tulgan is back. Here he talks about what to ask for and what to give when recognition is deserved and the coffers are empty.(requires the Flash 9 Player)
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I know, I know, I spent a whole post ranting about how almost everyone should not be video blogging. So it’s surprising to hear that I’m launching Bruce’s video blog here, right?
The reason I love Bruce’s video blog is that he is a great speaker, and he has great ideas, and he gets them out …

A lot of you know you’d like to be doing something more significant for your company, but no one is giving you the chance. This is your wake up call. You don’t need to wait for someone to bestow a title on you — you can take on a bigger role right now.
The key to …

Most of my girlfriends who make more than $100K a year were cheerleaders in school. We are from all over the United States. We are from all different types of companies. Only a few of us can do the splits. Yet we all bounced in short skirts and cheered for boys.
I chalked this up to …

What do you do with your ideas? How do you get them traction? It used to be you made a sales pitch – to venture capitalists, to customers, to your boss.
But today young people are deconstructing the sales pitch – paring it down to its core information and parodying the BS that surrounds it.
The nail …

On my last post, where the comments are especially good, Diana wrote that delegating has always been hard for her and she asked how a manager can overcome the following problem: “If the people I was managing didn’t know what I was doing that was more important than what I was delegating for them to …

There are lots of rules for running a good meeting — always have an agenda, start on time, make sure no one is hungry. But this rule is more important than all others: Be a cheerleader for your objectives. When you run a meeting you have an objective and you are trying to convince everyone …

What’s the problem with most managers? They are so involved in getting their own tasks done that they fail to manage. Bruce Tulgan writes that undermanagement is an epidemic, and Adecco reports that half of American workers think their managers don’t take performance reviews seriously.
Continue this behavior at your own risk. The Financial Times (subscription) …

Here’s a new word for the workplace: Rankism. File it in your brain next to racism and sexism. And brace yourself for a big change at the office, because rankism is another kind of discrimination we should not tolerate.
What’s rankism, or rankist behavior? It is hiring an intern and ignoring her all summer. Or pointlessly …

Here is one of hundreds of reasons senior investment bankers make life for analysts worse than it already is: Voicemail.
First of all, no one under thirty uses voicemail unless they are making a joke. If you make a call and the person does not pick up their phone, send an email. That’s why they gave …

The idea of having a perfect online identity is not realistic. Instead, maybe you should focus on making your offline identity one that you’re proud of.
First of all, no one is getting away with anything online. Today recruiters are expert and tireless Internet researchers when it comes to scoping out candidates. I just read a …

One of the best ways to get what you want is to be an extraordinary performer at work. Stars get more training, more mentoring, better projects and greater flexibility. Fortunately, you don’t need the perfect job situation in order to be a star, because most star qualities come from you — from taking your basically …