Hi, I’m Tom Catalini, author of Career Leap Year and other books on professional development.
I’ve struggled and succeeded as I worked my way up from the front lines to the executive suite, across a dozen different industries.
Along the way, I’ve hired, managed, and mentored professionals at all levels. I’ve consulted with the largest organizations and the smallest startups.
Now, I’d like to help YOU.
Whether you want to find a new job, grow your skills, find greater happiness at work, increase your earnings—or all of the above, I’m here to help.
Soon you too can start enjoying work more while you reach new heights in your career.
One of the best ways to work smarter is by running better team meetings. As a leader, this is one of your most important jobs.
Grab this free cheat sheet to learn 8 Ideas for Running Great Team Meetings right now!
You can use it to immediately start building a stronger and more capable team.
Use these to shift your mindset, hone your communication skills, build your leadership skills, and more.
It might be easier than you think for you to be a thought leader for your team. Because, with just a few simple steps, you can help see beyond the current situation and help create better solutions to today’s challenges. All it takes is a bit of stepping back from a narrow and near-term view that is too often a group’s default. Social science alerts us to the dangers of what they call groupthink where human dynamics create a natural…
Why do you want to learn how to ask better questions? Walk me through the next steps of how that might help you? What else will have to be true for that to work out for you? Who will help you? Who is going to resist and prefer the status quo or some alternative? Questions like these will help you to find the best insights, which will help you to develop the best plans. Because if you want better answers,…
Winning support for your project means becoming a change agent. Success comes from engaging people along the entire journey from idea to approval to implementation. Their interests and contributions need to be seen and incorporated into your plans, otherwise they will almost certainly derail your progress at some point. Get them on board early instead and you are well on your way to getting the green light. What’s more, your proposal becomes stronger as you work this way. As questions,…
The time has come for you to figure out how you are going to enhance your online presence. Maybe you have dabbled here and there—sharing an article, liking a tweet, or posting some thoughts on LinkedIn. But now it’s time to get serious. With in-person networking curtailed by the coronavirus, your online presence is more important than ever. Maybe you have been reluctant to build an online presence because you don’t like the idea of selling yourself or feeling fake….
I had a bunch of fantastic meetings today, said nobody, ever. Instead, people lament meetings for all their inefficiency, annoyingness, and, particularly in this virtual era—exhaustion. Wouldn’t your time be better spent doing work? Probably. But also, meetings help fill a fundamental human need—to belong to a group. The identity of a team is defined by who is at the meeting. The shared understanding of the situation is established and maintained in that group. And the focus and intent of…
Thinking is a messy process. But, if you were to create a checklist to make it more organized and thorough, what would that look like? A good place to start would be to make sure your basic analytical thinking is in order. That’s the part where you gather information and data and then examine it carefully to make sure that you understand the component parts of something and how all the pieces fit together into the bigger picture. This would…
Everything worthwhile that I have done started at a place of ignorance and inexperience. I have to remind myself of this each time I am faced with learning something new. It’s uncomfortable to confront the unknown and the unfamiliar, but it is always worth it—even if the payoff comes from hard lessons. I’ve always enjoyed riding bikes. Two-wheeled freedom was something I cherished in my youth and also rediscovered later in life. I enjoyed cycling so much that I joined…
Consider the difference between Edward Norton appearing on a late night talk show for 6 minutes to his podcast interview with Tim Ferriss that went on for 2 hours. One gives you a flavor about some snippet of his work and personality. The other gives you a deep dive into one of his most ambitious projects, a sense of the wide range of his accomplishments, and a clearer picture of his creativity and business savvy. In the full story of…
Paul McCartney and John Lennon were a great songwriting team. Their time together produced magic—but only because of the important work each did alone. One of them would create an idea or even an entire song before bringing it to the other, allowing the best of individuality and togetherness to shine through in the final product. I saw how time alone can make time together work better when I was teaching a marketing class at Bentley University. The same few…
If you were following the pallet industry news back in 2014, you would know that it was one wild ride. Wood costs and availability fluctuated dramatically. To offset the rising cost of pine, a manufacturer would switch to hardwood. But as the housing market rebounded from the Great Recession, hardwood prices soard. Innovative solutions were needed. Innovation is not so easy when the product is part of a complex supply chain made up of loggers, sawmills, remanufacturing operations, pallet manufacturers,…