1. The Wild Ride from the Office to the Home.
Former CNN anchor Craig Melvin once worked as the anchor on FOX and reached a point where he was working more than 70 hours a week. Then the company added his manager to the schedule, which caused Melvin to barely get to leave the office, whereas he had before. Melvin’s argument went like this: “I’m a broadcaster. I’m not a journalist. I’m a broadcaster, and so I would ask you to look at what I’m doing here, and if this was a journalist, then when I do a five-minute interview, I also have to follow it up with a four-minute interview. I was asked to do that by you, not because I suggested it, but because you just — if I did it the way you want, that’s the equivalent of killing me.” Melvin left CNN, but not the company, and now works for MSNBC. He’s trying to find a balance.
2. Knowing What To Do When Somebody Touches Someone’s Phone.
Sarah Barbee, a human resources manager at the Oakland Metropolitan Medical Center, had never dealt with this before. “People called and, you know, I said, ‘You’re calling someone’s mobile phone.’ Sometimes people would hear me, and I just quickly put the phone down and, you know, just maybe wait for that moment to pass by. And I would never get that chance because of all of the incoming phone calls, and so I mean, that’s just really quite amazing to me that I could handle that for two and a half years,” she says.
3. Knowing How To Entertain Someone In A Workplace.
When he was the reporter in charge of keeping the news under control for a large media company, Thomas McCarthy grew tired of the jokes and office politics during his team’s poker game. So he decided to make his own rules instead of having a boring game. McCarthy hid his poker chips and wore his cardigan instead of a suit jacket. The others followed suit. McCarthy played it up — he had his cigar and champagne and told the boss what he’d won. McCarthy stayed on the team for two and a half years, while his colleagues went to rival company.
4. How To Work With A Tough Boss.
Sarah Greenberg was working as a lawyer with the Environmental Protection Agency when her boss blew her off for a relationship. Greenberg decided to file for a transfer instead of getting fired. “Then I started to feel horrible about that and then I thought, this doesn’t matter. This is all about winning this case. Do the best you can. If you don’t win, if you don’t really deserve it, you still did the best that you could. And so I ended up being transferred to Capitol Hill. And then I did very well on Capitol Hill, which made the original manager think that I could do this well in the field, and so I ended up working in the EPA for years and years and years,” she says.
5. How To Move On From a Relationship.
If a woman gets fired for a one-night stand, that’s the worst thing that could happen, says Julie Fleming, a small business owner and author of “Need More Love: Your Guide to Start and Grow a Firm That Embraces Work, Life, and Love”. But if she doesn’t get fired, the one-night stand won’t hurt her career. The best thing for Fleming was to move forward. But once she found another successful job, she learned her lesson and learned that it’s not always fun to get back together with your ex.
6. The Best Way To Be A Boomerang.
Corinne Dew, CEO of GradientHealth.com, had left a job as a doctor to take a maternity leave. She worked from home to become more flexible, and on the first day back she tried to get her boss back to work. She got something on paper, sent it off to HR, and waited anxiously to see what was in it. “There was just a lot of back and forth about what he could and couldn’t do, and he really wanted to be able to go back to work. But when he got to the bottom of the pile and he saw I was being quoted heavily, his lack of writing skills, I’d never written, and I had no experience in writing, it really was very frustrating,” she says. So the company gave her a