Women at Work Harvard Business Review

Our free-spirited, entrepreneurial co-host is applying advice from all our episodes on side gigs, freelancing, starting a small business — and quitting — to her own life. Emily reflects on her decision to leave her design job at HBR to fully focus on a long-time creative passion, as well as how she's thinking about her career going forward.

How do you address a falling-out with a teammate when they either won’t acknowledge you or just lash out? Amy Gallo brings her conflict management expertise to a coaching session for a woman whose project manager and former work friend went from helpful to hostile. The approaches that come out of the conversation are ones that anyone facing tension in a work relationship can use to find a way forward.

Let’s be real: You can’t do everything yourself. Delegating to others helps you manage your workload and helps your colleagues who take on the tasks, decisions, and responsibilities to learn and grow. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy to do though. A leadership coach shares practices that will ensure the work gets done and will leave you and the person you delegated to feeling good about the experience.

Having a healthy, mutually beneficial relationship with your boss doesn’t require accommodating their every quirk, demand, and weakness. We discuss respectful, constructive ways to meet in the middle, set boundaries, and help them achieve their goals while making your competence known.

We all need to sell others on our ideas and offerings. Oftentimes that requires planning, perspective taking, and patience. A social psychologist highlights principles and tactics that’ll help you preempt colleagues or clients from doubting your expertise and get them to start or stop doing something.

Advice from a manager at Google whose full-time job is finding solutions to the problems that make employees want to quit. She shares what to say and do when a valuable team member seems to have one foot out the door. We also discuss the types of proactive conversations about career paths and compensation that managers should have with their people to keep them from being poached.