Launch Your career

My colleague Katie Stanfield recently wrote about a well-known decision-making framework that asks you to categorize a decision before you make it: Is it a hat, a haircut or a tattoo? A hat is easy to reverse. Don’t like it? Take it off. A haircut takes longer to undo, but eventually it grows out. A […]

You figure out pretty early in your career that work has a whole set of rules nobody actually explains to you. Nobody tells you exactly how much you can push back before you’re labeled “difficult.” Or when you’re being asked for an honest opinion as in what do you really think? versus an “honest” opinion […]

There should be a Yelp for career decisions. There isn’t.  Five stars: Took the promotion. Would absolutely do again. Four stars: Changed industries. Rocky start, solid outcome. One star: “Follow your passion.” Passion did not cover rent. No such site exists, so we piece one together ourselves. Rankings. Reddit threads. LinkedIn posts. Salary reports. Alumni […]

Raise your hand if you’ve ever found yourself at work wondering: Why not me? Maybe it was during a promotion cycle and someone else got the role you thought you were in line for.  Maybe it was when you were certain you’d be sent to lead the project abroad, only to watch the opportunity go […]

Even at this point in my career, I often find myself wishing there were a dashboard for my career. Not a performance review. Not a five-point rating scale. An actual dashboard. Like the Canvas portal my daughter checked daily during undergrad.   SUBJECT GRADE Respect from colleagues 87 Chances of receiving a meaningful raise this year […]

A colleague of mine said something the other day that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. We were talking about career ladders, the metaphor, the model, the whole idea, and she paused and said: Why did we all assume the ladder went up? I mean, what are ladders for, other than to get […]

This is the time of year when people who are famous, accomplished, or both get invited to stand in front of a room full of graduating students and say something memorable. Graduation speeches are supposed to be inspirational. They are meant to give you good advice. And they are supposed to send you out the […]

In the last post, I introduced the difference between signs and signals. At the simplest level, signs are the observable inputs. Signals are what those inputs get interpreted to mean. From an individual perspective, that shows up in familiar ways: your resume, your experience, your credentials. These are the signs. What people believe those things […]

For reasons that probably say something strange about me, I’ve been thinking about traffic signals a lot lately. Not because I’m secretly passionate about municipal infrastructure or have taken up a side hustle in urban planning. If anything, I’m the person who still gets irrationally annoyed when a left turn arrow takes too long. But […]

The 30-second pitch has been in the world of career advice for so long that it now feels less like advice and more like a professional rite of passage. We are told to keep it polished and ready, just in case someone important appears and asks us to summarize our entire professional existence before handing […]