Women think mentors are important when it comes to their career advancement but many don’t have one.

That according to a LinkedIn survey released today. The study found that nearly one in five women have never had a mentor, even tough 82 percent say they believe having a mentor is a career boon. And Baby Boomers are dropping the mentor ball more often than Gen Y.

Many women polled said they couldn’t find an appropriate mentor. But when women were asked why they don’t mentor women they said, “no one ever asked.”

“Half of getting a mentor is asking,” said Betsy Myers, founding director for the Center of Women & Business at Bentley University, during her talk at the Pennsylvania Women’s Conference today.

It may be a dumb career move, for both men and women, not to find a mentor, especially if you’re trying to climb the corporate ladder.

A well-placed, successful, encouraging mentor can be your champion if you want to get noticed by the higher-ups but don’t have the stomach to let everyone know how great you are. And a mentor can also help you navigate the ins and outs of what is still a good-ol’-boys network in the upper echelon of the business world, which includes less than 20 percent women in executive officer positions or corporate board seats.

Sharon Allen, the former chair of Deloitte’s board, once told me: “I can’t stress enough how important mentoring is to achieving success in one’s career.” She credited the mentors she’s had in her career with helping her enter the small club of high-ranking women executives.

Here are some details from the LinkedIn study: (more…)

A few high-profile individuals have jumped on the regret bandwagon recently.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is apologizing today for raising fees and making customers angry:

“I messed up. I owe you an explanation,” he said in a letter to subscribers.

And, in a statement on the Netflix site he said:

“In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success. We have done very well for a long time by steadily improving our service, without doing much CEO communication. Inside Netflix I say, “Actions speak louder than words,” and we should just keep improving our service.

I want to acknowledge and thank our many members that stuck with us, and to apologize again to those members, both current and former, who felt we treated them thoughtlessly.”

And tennis star Serena Williams is regretful for verbally smacking down an umpire during the U.S. Open:

“My emotions did get the best of me this past weekend when I disagreed with the umpire. It has been a long road to get back to the US Open this year, and I am thankful to have had such a great two weeks in New York.”

Both these individuals probably felt compelled to offer some sort of apology. One was seeing his business hit the skids, the other was getting flak for her umpire attack.

But do such words of justification ever help a career? (more…)

Most people who’ve been on the receiving end of a performance review are probably not big fans, even those getting great ones. I think we hate them so much because it reminds us of being in school and getting report cards.

OK, we’re grownups now and it’s time to kill performance reviews — not change them, not do new funky things with them, just kill them. Right?

Noooo, we have to keep reinventing the stupid things.

There’s a story in the Wall Street Journal today on how some companies are now throwing out yearly reviews for more frequent ones. One company is actually doing these every week.

With many younger workers used to instant feedback—from text messages to Facebook and Twitter updates—annual reviews seem too few and far between. So companies are adopting quarterly, weekly or even daily feedback sessions.

I’m all for feedback, but it seems counter productive to be reassessing what employees do over and over again. They were hired to do a job. Are they doing it? Great. If not, then tell them and move on. Why the formalities?

Samuel Culbert, a UCLA professor and management guru, is an anti performance review advocate, and he’s even more extreme than me. He thinks no one other than God should give such reviews. (more…)

Gals! Time to be obnoxious at work; and what ever you do, don’t let men be pleasant to you when you’re on the job.

I know, I’m promoting a decline of civility but that’s what two recent studies have found.

Women who are disagreeable earn more money than those who just go along. And allowing guys to open the door when you go into work in the morning is actually bad for gals in terms of how competent they’re perceived at work.

Now, don’t think being a bitch is going to get you as much money as it does bitchy men, but hey, we get the short end of the stick at work no matter what we do. A study by the University of Notre Dame lends further credence to the notion that being a good girl gets you little when you’re trying to further your bank account or career but (more…)

The one thing I hear over and over again from women struggling to climb the ladder of success is they have trouble tooting their own horns.

Well gals, if you don’t toot or get someone to toot for you no one will hear you.

There are two great examples of women who’ve unabashedly taken out big trumpets recently and it may be a good idea to follow their playbook a bit: Christine Lagarde, the French foreign minister, and Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor.

Lagarde just got the job of head honcho at the International Monetary Fund, the first woman to hold that position, after lobbying for it like a relentless heavy weight in the ring; and Warren is vying to become the head honcho of the nation’s new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She’s gotten consumer groups and Democratic political heavy weights to lobby for her.

You can call these women pushy, but that’s a good thing. (more…)

I got a tweet recently from @MichaelCTak that got me thinking:

what do think about getting your MBA these days for the working prof[essoinal]?

I often get asked about the merits of an MBA but the question typically comes from someone already working in the business world. Many people working for corporations often see an MBA as a good way to help them climb the ladder, but MichaelCTak, who I found out later is actually Michael Tak, works for a social services supervisor for a government agency in Georgia and wants to leave his government and non-profit background behind and go into business.

The question on Tak’s mind was whether an MBA would help him make the transition easier? And he also wondered if getting an online MBA in particular was as worthy as the in-school variety? (more…)

The boards of Corporate America are getting even whiter and even more male these days.

According to a new study the numbers of minorities and women on boards at Fortune 500 companies are shrinking, SHRINKING!

Collectively, women and minorities lost ground in America’s corporate boardrooms between 2004 and 2010, according to Missing Pieces: Women and Minorities on Fortune 500 Boards―2010 Alliance for Board Diversity Census.

It’s sad news for women, minorities, corporations, and society at large because so many studies have shown diversity on corporate boards helps a business’ bottom line and also helps give a boost to integrity on the job. The decline in diversity isn’t totally unexpected, but why is this a persistent problem? Is it the fault of a discriminatory system that keeps women and minorities down, or are women and minorities not stepping up to the plate? (more…)

I just finished a story on the teen summer job market and one thing I kept hearing from business owners was that kids today just aren’t independent, and as a result don’t always make the best employees. One woman who owns a water ice shop in Dover, DE told me parents come in to ask if she has jobs for their kids instead of the kids coming in themselves. “That’s a bad sign,” she said, when it comes to how they’ll perform on the job.

Are we not hard enough on our kids? Do we do everything for them to the point of progeny paralysis?

In the last installment from my book, “From the Sandbox to the Corner Office,” I share one CEO’s experience with stern parents who toughened the executive up for life. (more…)

Did you make a mistake today? If you didn’t you may be losing out.

For the next week or so, I’m going to include excerpts from my book: “From the Sandbox to the Corner Office” and offer a peek at the lessons leaders from all walks of life learned on the way to the top.

I start out with MISTAKES. Almost every great leader I’ve ever interviewed was proud of the mistakes they’ve made during their careers because they were able to grow from those blunders. (more…)

There’s a great report by the Wall Street Journal today on women in the workplace, and one of the most eye-opening lines came from a female titan in the financial industry, Sallie Krawcheck, president of global wealth and investment management for Bank of America Corp.

I’ve met Krawcheck, and I thought she was quite savvy and a tough cookie, and she’s known by some as being a bit of a hard ass. The interviewer asked her if she got emotional at work. “You don’t scream or shout or throw things?” he asked.

Her response: “It’s been rare. I’ve done it strategically a couple of times where I actually wasn’t mad but I figured OK, I’m going to act mad because I really want to make the point.”

I just loved that statement, even though it may seem manipulative. But does this type of strategy pay off? (more…)