By Trina, September 22nd, 2009
We all dread hearing, “Company X has been acquired by Company Y,” especially when Company X is your current employer. In my mind, the word “acquisition” conjures up images of a company’s logo on a billboard being dramatically taken down and a new one unveiled in its place, hordes of men in suits marching arrogantly down their newly acquired corridors and worker bees spending their entire days speculating on what this new deal means to their jobs. That quote and the last of those images have never been a reality for me until this morning.
In between 6am alarm snoozes, I noticed some new text messages on my iPhone. They were tweets from my boss (yes, I have my boss’s tweets texted to my phone…) saying that our big company had been acquired by an even bigger company for X amount of dollars. Now, if that doesn’t make a person wake up, I don’t know what does!! I fired up my laptop and read the news via email from our CEO, various links on twitter and our official press releases.
By Trina, September 14th, 2009
We have all known a bully, been a bully or been bullied at one point in our lives. Learning to deal with bullies is an unpleasant but essential part of growing up. As we enter the real world, we are hopeful this sort of traumatic treatment is over. Unfortunately, bullies are as alive in corporate America as they are on the grammar school playground, only now they come in the form of leaders and managers.
By Trina, September 6th, 2009
There’s always a tough decision ahead when opportunity comes knocking: is this really the right thing for me to do at this time?? I’ve designed my twenties to be convenient for seizing opportunities, and it’s hard to know what the best move is when you’re completely open. That being the case, it’s best to look at opportunities from a realistic standpoint without letting fear of the details scare you away.
By Trina, July 28th, 2009
This post is one I wrote for Leading Associates in April 2009. I’m proud of the posts I wrote for LA, and I wanted to include them here at Trina Left Iowa.
I’m an emotional person, and I have accepted that. Perhaps I got it from my grandmother, who announces, “Here come the waterworks,” when [...]
By Trina, July 28th, 2009
During our training session, we were told to understand and memorize (for testing purposes) the difference between stereotypes and generalizations. A long debate ensued about the difference between the two words, and we got so busy debating the semantics that we almost missed the purpose of the discussion. The reason for having this discussion was to make us better aware of diversity and the problems that stereotypes/generalizations pose in today’s work place. For this entry, I would like to refer to them as the same thing and discuss stereotypes/generalizations about young millennials.
While on a family vacation I was quite surprised to find that everyone in my family had a strong opinion about hiring young people, except my niece who mainly says “cookie” and “dog”. All of my family members (parents in their sixties; brother and sister-in-law in their thirties) are in management positions, and together they threw out almost every stereotype about young millennials. I have highlighted a few of the main ones
By Trina, July 28th, 2009
During our development program, we had a C-level executive come to discuss leadership with our class. He made it clear that when it comes to success, the failures we endure are just as important as the wins, and failing is essential to being a great leader. He told us that if we hadn’t experienced a big failure in our lives, one would be coming soon. He was right on.
A fear of failure spans every generation. Not too surprisingly, many have said that millennials do not know what do with failure. For many of us this is completely true, because we haven’t had much experience with it. Most of our parents saw to it that we were on teams whose mottos were “everybody wins” which is precisely why I have a box full of “participant” ribbons (I just wanted to be on the team…). We have seen mainly positive or neutral feedback thus far. It is when we get out in the corporate arena that the potential for failure begins to mount.
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on this blog are all mine.
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