1. “Several months ago I inherited a part-time employee we thought we would have to fire. She’d been with the company a few months and wasn’t picking up the basics, and working with me was the last chance. She is in a new field, and I realized quickly she was nervous and had also received a lot of negative feedback from several people, which made her even more flustered. She responds well though to constructive feedback and thrives when she gets praise. Giving her deserved praise seemed to really raise her confidence. I took the constructive/praise approach to coach and manage her, and last week we asked her to step in and fill a temporary need that has her in the office more and doing higher-level work. Today, we had a problem I just couldn’t solve, and guess who solved it? The employee I thought we were going to fire three months ago.”
Update from this week: “She is now permanently in the role she was helping us with, and is ROCKING it. I’m just thrilled for her. She’s an asset.”
2. “I have been reading your blog for a few years now after my sister mentioned how much she loved AAM. I always read the Friday Good News posts and thought ‘yeah right, that will never happen for me’ — but now I have some good news of my own!
I have been a non-profit/legal services attorney for my entire career. As much as I love the work I do with clients, it became more and more apparent to me during the pandemic that the work was not worth the lack of support from leadership, being severely underpaid, and little ways to further develop my skills as an attorney. About 4 months ago, leadership announced that our retiring ED would be replaced with an internal candidate who was unpopular enough that it has set off a wave of people looking for new jobs, or even quitting without a job lined-up. It was the kick in the pants I needed to start applying. I revamped my cover letter and resume with your (wonderful!) guidance and started applying to jobs both in and out of my current industry. Alison – this application process has been a night and day difference from any of my previous job searches! I feel so much more confident and am able to see an interview as a conversation where both parties are looking for a good fit.
During my interviews, I was able to give thoughtful answers (especially to behavioral questions I was not familiar with until reading AAM) and I received great feedback on my cover letter. Eventually, I was offered a position at a private law firm which would allow me to grow as an attorney but have a percentage of my clients from the firm’s pro-bono practice (which is a dream come true for me!) The benefits are astronomically better – and the pay is nearly about a 90% increase over what I currently make. I normally am very shy about asking for flexibility around a start date or other work accommodations, but after I received an offer, I felt confident enough to ask upfront. The company’s response was great and they were more than willing to be flexible, which I saw as a great sign. Best of all – I finally feel like I deserve to be treated well at a job. Especially as a child of immigrants, we are sometimes told by our families that we need to just take whatever we are offered, no matter how toxic. We do not. I finally feel like I am going somewhere where I am valued. I don’t think I would have gotten there if it wasn’t for this blog.”
3. “I wrote to you a while back to ask about getting ghosted on an internship application where the employer (a national lab) had specifically asked me to apply and helped me apply to positions they helped me find, then dropped all contact with me afterwards. I later wound up getting interviewed (and sadly rejected) for two internships at a different employer I much preferred to the national lab. I was pretty devastated, but I went ahead and continued applying … and I got not one, not two, but three offers for internships within a two week period! I chose the one that meshes best with my career goals, which also happens to be a pathway to a permanent job in a field I love and a company that I used to think I could only dream about working for.
I also want to encourage any other students out there looking for internships to keep on applying. Everyone I talked to said the most important factor in getting an internship is persistence — there’s so many people wanting them and only so many positions open, so you have to apply to many, many positions to get a single offer. I’d also like to give a shoutout to your resume, cover letter, and interview guides. I used all of these to sculpt my application materials, including my ‘about me’ spiel for the beginning of interviews/introductions to people at career fairs, which I think helped me stand out from others and helped me secure three offers in a short period of time.
Again, thank you so much, and good luck to all.”
#Friday #good #news #Manager
