An acquaintance of mine was looking for someone to clean her house once a month.  Because the safety of her home and her family is important to her, this woman held interviews in her home.  She asked the standard questions that one would think to ask a prospective housekeeper, but then she took it a step further.  Although this ...

A WCW reader writes:  “Dear Alexandra, I’ve read your advice about the right way to leave your job, and I think it’s good.  Only trouble is, the people I work with aren’t exactly helping me out.  I gave them six weeks notice so that I could find and train a replacement, but no one except me seems to feel this major urgency to hire ...

Bob Sutton’s book, the No A**hole Rule:  Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't,  has been generating buzz since it was published last year.    Sutton, a professor of management science at Stanford University, argues that a**holes—those who deliberately make co-workers feel bad about themselves and who ...

One of my friends has been complaining that her team is running wild.    Much as I love her, I know that this is happening because when my friend took over the group a few months ago, she really wanted her new reports to like her, so she put up with a lot from them.  They would tell her they weren’t going to do an assignment ...

In their January/February issue, Details Magazine has a provocative article on how to break up with a boss who’s holding you back.  The article tells the story of Michael Rogers:   “Michael Rogers had lunch or cocktails a couple of times a week with the CEO of the New York public-relations firm where he worked. They’d split a plate of ...

With Iowa behind us and the New Hampshire primary tomorrow, everyone I know who’s remotely interested in politics was tuned in for the Republican and Democratic candidate debates, sponsored by ABC News and Facebook, that took place this weekend.   Myself included.   A huge issue was likeability.  After Iowa voters said that ...

A few days ago, I was scheduled to be on a local NPR radio show with one of my biggest and longstanding influencers, Bruce Tulgan.  For those of you who might not know, Bruce is internationally recognized as a leading expert on young people in the workplace and has his own consulting firm, Rainmaker Thinking, that has trained employees in ...

Scot Herrick over at Cube Rules is doing a great series of 30 career management tips.  I especially liked the post this week on watching what people at work do more than what they say.  Scot tells the following story:     “My father, when I was very young, told me something that has worked well throughout my life. We were ...

I recently wrote a few career advice articles for Yahoo!, and on Friday one of them was on the home page.   I’ve talked a bit with my colleague Penelope Trunk about the joys and perils of writing for Yahoo!, and the “spirited” conversations that take place as a result.  Penelope writes a great Yahoo! Finance column on careers, and from ...

This week I was in San Francisco, and while I was there I took my grandmother to a hair salon that had just opened in her town.  We’d made an appointment for 10:30, and we waited and waited until 10:45 and then 11:00 had come and gone.  There was only one stylist working, and he had spent over an hour fussing over this extremely ...