OG Tuesday Issue #296

⭐ Steal these employee recognition examples for your team.

📈 At every career level, these are the leadership skills that actually move you up.

💰 The salary negotiation framework for the raise you’ve been talking yourself out of asking for.

💬 The conversation you’ve been dreading has a seven-step playbook behind it.

The workplace doesn’t always come with clear, respected boundaries. Coworkers are human, organizations have their own cultures, and pushing back on existing norms can feel risky even when those norms aren’t working for anyone.

That’s exactly why someone has to do it. Sometimes it takes a brave soul to speak up and create new ones. If you’ve been waiting for permission to protect your time, your peace, and your self-respect at work, consider this it. Here are the scripts to help you do it.

When you need to say no to a meeting

Meetings are expensive, even when they don’t feel like it. A one-hour meeting with ten people doesn’t cost one hour. It costs ten, plus the focus time lost before and after. Pushing back tactfully is fair game. Filling people’s calendars with meetings that could have been a document is the actual rude move.

• When you want to go async instead: “In the spirit of reducing meetings, is this something we could try defaulting to async, with a shared Google doc to brainstorm? It would also broaden the pool of team members who can participate.”
• When you’re protecting your focus time: “I batch my meetings on Mondays and Fridays to protect time for deep work in the middle of the week. Do you have any availability on those days instead?”

When you don’t want to be the default notetaker

Taking your own notes is good practice. Becoming the team’s permanent secretary is a different thing entirely, and it’s okay to name it directly:

• “I’ve been taking notes for the past few meetings and I’d like to fully engage in the discussion today. Could we rotate the notetaker role so everyone gets a chance to contribute?”

When your performance review gets personal

Performance feedback should be about your work and its impact, not your personality. When feedback starts to feel more like character critique than professional guidance, you have every right to redirect it toward something actionable.

• When the feedback is vague: “Can you give me a specific example of when you observed that?” This one question does a lot of work. It either surfaces something concrete you can actually address, or it reveals that the feedback doesn’t have much to stand on.
• When you want to tie it back to results: “What was the impact of that on the project or the team’s deliverables?” Shifting the conversation toward observable behavior and outcomes keeps things grounded in facts.
• When you want to redirect entirely: “I’d like to focus on specific, measurable actions I can take to improve my performance metrics going forward, rather than subjective traits.” You’re asking for the feedback in a form you can actually use. The goal is to walk away with concrete examples, clear expectations, and a path forward you both feel good about.

When a coworker is trying to make you look bad

Difficult coworkers come in a few forms, and most of the time the behavior is less about malice and more about competition. That doesn’t make it okay, but it does mean the right response is usually calm, direct, and grounded rather than reactive.

• When they interrupt you: “Let me finish this thought and then you can have your turn.” Said evenly, without apology. No need for more than that.
• When they try to take credit for your work: “Yes, that’s the approach I recommended earlier. The key is X. Glad we’re aligned.” You’re not accusing anyone. You’re restating the record clearly and moving forward.
• When they try to minimize or dismiss you: “Comments like that make it harder to work together.” Short, professional, effective. It names the behavior without escalating it, and puts the discomfort exactly where it belongs.

The through line across all of these situations is the same: you can be calm and still direct. The right words, said with confidence, are usually enough to change the dynamic entirely.

The first day back after a long weekend is its own kind of brutal. Your inbox got worse while you weren’t watching, you’re an hour short on sleep, and you still need to walk into your 9am looking like a functional adult.

Jones Road Beauty is Bobbi Brown’s newer, cleaner line, built for exactly that morning. Clean formulas you can apply with your fingers between calls, in the car, in the bathroom mirror you barely had time to use. Skin-first, finger-friendly, finished before your coffee goes cold.

Miracle Balm doubles as blush, lip tint, lid color, and highlighter (the closest thing to a Swiss Army Knife in your makeup bag). What The Foundation feels like skincare and looks like skin. Just Enough Tinted Moisturizer covers what needs covering and disappears everywhere else.

This week is the lowest-stakes way to test all three and more. The Memorial Day Mini Sale lets you build a custom set of trial-size minis so you can sample the line before committing to full sizes. And the more you try, the more you save.

👉 Build your mini set here.

P.S. Code ASSIST adds a free Best Blush on top of the sale!

“My biggest challenge is being older with not a lot of opportunities for advancement. I am a supervisor that does the work of more of a manager’s position. We are a small town company and I have worked there for 25 years. I am almost 50 years old and I’m not sure if finding another job would even be beneficial to me at this point.” — Amy S.

First, let’s address the story running in the background here. The one that says you are too old, too rooted, too far into your career to make a meaningful move. That story isn’t true, and more importantly, it isn’t yours to keep.

Men well into their 50s and 60s climb the corporate ladder every single day without anyone questioning whether their best years are behind them. So let’s look at this from a completely different angle.

Reframe who you are before you do anything else

You are not someone aging out of opportunity. You are a manager with 25 years of institutional knowledge, a reputation that reaches senior leadership, and a track record of showing up across multiple plants and functions. Stop looking at it as a liability. That’s a profile most candidates can’t touch.

The way you think about yourself will show up in your resume, your interviews, and the opportunities you allow yourself to pursue. So before anything else, get the mindset right.

Stop waiting on one door to open

Pinning your advancement hopes on one possible retirement a few years away is a position of scarcity, and you deserve better than that. The Supply Chain Manager (SCM) role may happen, and if it does, you should absolutely be positioned for it. But that can’t be the only play on the table.

Start thinking in parallel paths. What else could be opening up, inside or outside your current company, that your experience directly qualifies you for?

Challenge the geography limitation

Small town doesn’t mean small opportunity anymore. Remote work has fundamentally changed what is available to experienced professionals, and your skills are far more transferable than you might think.

Consider the industries and companies that serve your current field. A software company that builds tools for your industry might be looking for a customer success manager, someone who has actually done the job their clients are trying to do. Consulting is another avenue worth exploring. Your 25 years of operational knowledge is exactly what smaller companies or growing teams pay good money for.

Lean into the new rules of work

The workforce has changed. Loyalty to one company for decades used to be the path to reward and advancement, and that contract has shifted. Younger generations figured it out first, moving between companies to gain experience, increase salaries, and take on more responsibility faster.

That same playbook is available to you. Job hopping carries far less stigma than it once did, and your depth of experience gives you a negotiating position that someone five years into their career simply does not have.

Get visible and get moving

Your name is already known by senior leadership, which means you have a foundation most people spend years trying to build. Use it. Make sure the right people know you’re ready for more. Update your LinkedIn. Reconnect with your professional network. Let people know you are open to new challenges.

Fifty is not a finish line. For someone with your experience, it might just be the beginning of the best chapter yet.

Nobody hired you to become the Director of Who Wears a Medium.

And yet here you are, three tabs open, one spreadsheet away from madness, trying to remember if Alex is a Large or “kinda between.”

Employee gifting should take 20 minutes. Somehow it always takes 20 days.

Swag.com exists for the person who just sighed reading that. You order, store, and send branded gifts from one platform, so you build the kit once and send it anytime without redoing the whole process from scratch.

Use it for:

• Onboarding kits that make Day 1 feel like a warm welcome, not a login scavenger hunt
• Promotions and milestones that deserve more than “👏👏👏” in Slack
• Event swag without turning your office into a shipping warehouse
• Client and manager gifts that feel thoughtful, not last-minute

One great item beats five forgettable ones. A ready-to-send kit you can deploy in two clicks is the real perk.

👉 Explore Swag.com here and stop being the office sizing database.

👉 Join 240,000+ readers who get Mindstream’s daily AI brief — the sharpest takes, free, in under five minutes.

💸 Two minutes and zero awkward phone calls is all it takes to get matched with a financial advisor.

💛 Soft, defined curls start strong when quench’n stretch cream joins the routine.

🧳 Another reason to love the Beis weekender? Its removable bottom compartment.

 Upcoming Events

• Tues May 26 @ 8AM PT: Speed Meet (SGS Only* | Join the waitlist)
• Thurs May 28 @ 4:30PM PT: Virtual Happy Hour (SGS Only* | Join the waitlist)
• Fri May 29 @ 10AM PT: Automate Your Life Workshop (SGS Only* | Join the waitlist)
• On Demand: Harassment Training Employees Actually Want to Watch

* Smart Girl Society is our private community for women who want deeper conversations, accountability, and tools that actually make life easier. Join the waitlist to get in the next round.

 Work Wisdom of the Week:

“But did you die? I literally have a sticker inside my laptop as a reminder and perspective shifter. Work can feel so important and daunting, and my work is impactful! It’s also not the end of the world, and keeping that mindset in check helps so much. There is no mistake or work situation we can’t pivot on and move forward from”

Amy B., Director of Advancement Services

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