Words on Wise Management

Resilience (noun): the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness; the ability to spring back into shape.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of career resilience and how every single working person will have to show it at some point in their lives. Two years ago this week, at the age of 50, I left a job of 17 years—a job that I loved . . . and didn’t love.

If I had assigned it a Facebook relationship status, it would have been: “It’s complicated.”

2018 has come to a close, and a new year is upon us. As the new year begins, it’s a perfect time to re­flect and reassess personally and professionally. Businesses use strategic planning and budgets to re­flect that same thinking at an enterprise level. How­ever, all too often those choices are rushed—and even forced—based on constraints and lack of time. More importantly, people tend to be considered last on the list.

Recently, a friend called me wondering if her employer could ban Nike apparel at work following the Colin Kaepernick “Just Do It” ad campaign controversy. In the midst of this much politicized time, a photo of a sign outside an unknown employer’s business informing employees of its new zero-tolerance policy banning any Nike apparel from the workplace went viral on social media. Many employees are now asking, “Can my employer really ban me from wearing a brand that I like?”

Should you ban a brand at work?

On June 25, 2018, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) turned 80 years old! I didn’t notice much fanfare or celebrating. Did you? Remember, just two years ago many of us were frantically implementing new pay policies as the deadline loomed for implementation of the “new and improved” FLSA overtime regulations.

It seems like the FLSA hasn’t gotten much attention since November 2016, when the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) final rule was put on ice by a federal judge. The national conversation about minimum wage has not diminished, however.

Starbucks recently closed more than 8,000 com­pany-owned stores for one day to conduct implicit bias training in response to a viral video that showed two African-American men being arrested for tres­passing at one of its Philadelphia stores. Starbucks also announced that its new training curriculum, de­signed by several national experts, will be available to other companies for use with employees and leader­ship. Implicit bias training has become increasingly widespread after several highly publicized incidents of racial profiling. But is the training effective?