"I Keep Hearing ‘No’—How Do I Pivot Careers Without Giving Up? Coach Me!" with Claire Wasserman

Transitioning into a leadership role is a time of excitement and uncertainty. According to leadership development consultant Michael Watkins, whether you thrive or falter in your new role depends on your actions early on. In The First 90 Days, Watkins provides a roadmap for making your job transition smooth and rewarding. You’ll learn how to avoid common pitfalls by gathering critical information, building strong relationships, and achieving initial successes. If you follow Watkins's advice, you’ll be ready to ease into your new role with confidence and start creating positive momentum for your career and your company.

In this guide, we’ll review Watkins's guidelines on quickly assimilating and making an impact in your new role. We’ll also consider how other business leaders’ perspectives on management compare with Watkins's—including ideas from Gino Wickman in Traction and Julie Zhuo in The Making of a Manager.

Organizations must change to survive, and yet periods of transformation are often when companies are most likely to fail. But that doesn’t have to be the case.

Managing Transitions is a guidebook for any leader who wants to survive organizational change. Renowned organizational consultants William and Susan Bridges argue that in order to accept external change, organizational leaders and team members must first go through the three-step emotional (internal) process of transition. Using the well-established Bridges Transition Model, William and Susan Bridges outline a set of human-centered management strategies that enable organizational leaders to support their teams through the necessary transition and emerge a more stable, cohesive, and purpose-driven organization.

In this guide, we’ll highlight common themes in the outlined strategies and compare the Bridges Transition Model to the work of other leading voices in the field of change management.

Whether you’re unhappy at work, interested in another field, or worried your job will become obsolete, it’s never too late to make a career change. Barbara Oakley asserts that whatever your age or occupation, you can have a mindshift, which means opening up new opportunities through transformative learning. In Mindshift, she writes that it’s possible to overcome perceived barriers—such as age, imposter syndrome, or a lack of money—and gain new skills so you can reinvent yourself.

Oakley is proof that it’s possible to make a big change and flourish despite presumed weaknesses. She grew up thinking she was bad at math and science but developed a passion for those subjects later in life, obtaining a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering.

In this guide, we’ll discuss why it’s important to have a mindshift in the modern world. Then we’ll outline Oakley’s strategies for overcoming perceived limitations so that you can have your own mindshift. We’ll also supplement Oakley’s ideas with other experts’ tips for supercharging your learning and maximizing your potential.

Fast-growing companies often focus on scaling key aspects of their business, such as their sales, marketing budgets, and manufacturing process. But, according to management veteran Claire Hughes Johnson, they often forget to focus on their greatest resource: their people. In Scaling People, Hughes Johnson outlines the four key processes you should implement to successfully manage employees in a high-growth environment.

In this guide, we’ll discuss Hughes Johnson’s four key processes: process #1, defining your guiding principles and solidifying your operating system; process #2, building a promising hiring pipeline to hire the best candidates; process #3, turning these new hires into thriving teams; and process #4, continuously coaching employees through informal feedback and formal reviews. We’ll also supplement Hughes Johnson’s advice with more concrete strategies for employee management and consider alternative management approaches from other business experts.

Organizations must change to survive, and yet periods of transformation are often when companies are most likely to fail. But that doesn’t have to be the case.

Managing Transitions is a guidebook for any leader who wants to survive organizational change. Renowned organizational consultants William and Susan Bridges argue that in order to accept external change, organizational leaders and team members must first go through the three-step emotional (internal) process of transition. Using the well-established Bridges Transition Model, William and Susan Bridges outline a set of human-centered management strategies that enable organizational leaders to support their teams through the necessary transition and emerge a more stable, cohesive, and purpose-driven organization.

In this guide, we’ll highlight common themes in the outlined strategies and compare the Bridges Transition Model to the work of other leading voices in the field of change management.

Transitioning into a leadership role is a time of excitement and uncertainty. According to leadership development consultant Michael Watkins, whether you thrive or falter in your new role depends on your actions early on. In The First 90 Days, Watkins provides a roadmap for making your job transition smooth and rewarding. You’ll learn how to avoid common pitfalls by gathering critical information, building strong relationships, and achieving initial successes. If you follow Watkins's advice, you’ll be ready to ease into your new role with confidence and start creating positive momentum for your career and your company.

In this guide, we’ll review Watkins's guidelines on quickly assimilating and making an impact in your new role. We’ll also consider how other business leaders’ perspectives on management compare with Watkins's—including ideas from Gino Wickman in Traction and Julie Zhuo in The Making of a Manager.

Do you feel like the job market is changing faster than ever? Does job stability seem like a thing of the past? In The Startup of You, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and entrepreneur Ben Casnocha argue that to build a successful career in the modern world, you must approach your career as if it were a startup company—something that’s always growing and adapting. By applying principles of entrepreneurship to your career, you can overcome unexpected career obstacles and react quickly to opportunities.

In this guide, you'll learn about the changes to modern work and how to approach your career as if it were a startup company using three entrepreneurship tactics. We’ll supplement Hoffman and Casnocha’s strategies with those of other business professionals and provide suggestions on how to apply their strategies to your career.

Many successful leaders and businesspeople are lauded as “great geniuses,” but psychologist Angela Duckworth argues that talent and intelligence matter less to success than grit: the personality trait behind perseverance, hard work, and goal-setting. In Grit, she explores what grit is, where it comes from, how it drives success, and how you can develop it.

Duckworth is primarily interested in how to raise gritty kids, and her insights have inspired parents and educators around the globe since the book’s publication in 2016. However, she believes that adults, too, can develop grit, and she lays out specific, measurable ways to do so.

Her work has fueled debates about which matters more—talent or effort. In this guide, we examine these controversies and consider insights from other psychologists who either support Duckworth’s ideas or reveal nuances of them.

Imagine you have a product or service that can change people’s lives—one that can help them reach their most ambitious goals financially or personally. If you don’t know how to effectively market it, your idea won’t make a difference in anyone’s life. Russell Brunson, who made his name selling online marketing tools and advising startups on building a brand, aims to solve this problem with Expert Secrets, a how-to guide for creating excitement for your idea that turns potential customers into lifelong buyers.

In this guide, we’ll give an overview of the main “secrets” Brunson discusses, focusing on how you can tap into your audience’s emotions to create loyal customers. Along the way, we’ll examine the human instincts that drive purchasing decisions and how other sales experts advise you to close a sale.