Are you laying awake at night because you are not satisfied with where you are at in your career? It doesn’t make sense, but yet it bothers you so much that you are losing sleep over it. And you can’t understand why.

You really knew what you wanted to do as a career.

You knew it in high school. You picked colleges that had majors in your functional area and you got selected to a great program. You studied hard and got good grades. You did a couple of internships and got terrific experiences.

When it came time for interviews, every one you applied for was accepted. …

I have recently read a lot of articles regarding how the promotion of a good or even great worker to a management position does not always work out well.

In my opinion being a good worker is not a main qualification to being a manager of others. Just because one knows and does his or her current job well, does not mean that they are qualified to manage or lead others. There is a different skill set required to be a manager, one that a worker, no matter how good, may not possess. Also, the worker may be perfectly satisfied…

You wonder if it is truly possible to enjoy a life where you can ‘Play Longer.’ You wonder if the rat race our society seems to be in is all that there is, and would love to find another way to enjoy life with your family and friends. Tara Ross, Work Smarter, Play Longer

There are many things regarding work that keep us awake at night.

These can include one or more of the following:

· Poor Project Management

· Poor leadership

· Not meeting your goals

· Not being respected or liked

But, perhaps one of the biggest reasons…

Very much so and will come back to hurt you one way or another.

We were now perking along with the outline and plan we had devised to meet what we thought Rich wanted.

Rich told me that he didn’t want to hear from me until it was completed. So, I again followed his direction and did not contact him, even though he sat no further than 50 feet from me.

That didn’t last long.

Within a week or so he would call me into his office and ask me why he hadn’t heard from me about the progress we were making. At first this threw me and I would fumble for an explanation, not daring to say. “Because you told me not to”.

I spoke with one of his other reports, whom he was quite fond of…

“I firmly believe that respect is a lot more important, and a lot greater, than popularity.” Julius Erving

I managed many people during my career.

One in particular stands out when it comes to the matter of whether it is better to be liked than respected.

This individual was my tooling engineer. In that regard, he was responsible for the building and maintenance of all of the injection and blow mold tooling owned by the company, whether used internally or run at an outside molding house.

Ron was very knowledgeable about tooling.

He knew what needed to be done and when it needed to be done. But, he wanted to be liked by…

So I survived The Day I Swore I was Going to Die. But you probably already know that since I wrote about it and am now writing this part 2 piece.

After Rich had berated myself and the other managers who reported to Terry, he was ready to clean up Operations. He got myself and the Plant Managers from the Lindsay Ontario. Winfield Kansas, and Easton Pennsylvania plants together.

Interestingly, he did not include the head of our Bedford England or La Romana Dominican Republic plants, as they too worked under Terry’s direction. He also, didn’t bother with Logistics, Purchasing…

Have you ever had the feeling that based on the situation you were in that you weren’t going to come out of it alive?

I did, although I did survive in order to relate my experience to you.

I was in a special assignment role, reporting to the Vice President of Operations. I had been the Director of Operations for the Arts Division, but the powers that be decided to roll our division into a larger one. The Vice President and all of the directors were all given new positions. Mine was to work on special projects for the company.

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