If you're on the receiving end of a vague end-of-year review from your manager, Karin Hurt offers a wealth of empowering responses that both highlight your accomplishments and provides an opportunity for your manager to give you some valuable feedback on improvements you can make in the next year. "The best performance reviews are future-focused conversations," Hurt writes.

When actor Michael Keaton auditions for a role, he says he acts like he already has the part, a lesson aspiring leaders can follow by stepping out of their comfort zone and finding "adjacent possible" ways to lead from wherever they are, writes Larry Robertson. The phrase, coined by chaos theorist Stu Kaufman, means "that what's actually possible isn't some theoretical thing far away and out of our immediate reach, but something that begins adjacent to where you are right now," Robertson writes.

To prevent employees from becoming disengaged "quiet quitters" who do minimum work, conduct a job description audit and coach managers on how to adjust the description, writes Ethos CEO Alida Miranda-Wolff. "Make sure the employee can chime in with what's missing in the job description, what they might find most fulfilling and enjoyable and what their take is on what is potentially being eliminated or shifted to someone else," Miranda-Wolff writes.

The labor market could be cooling, with job postings down from last year in areas such as software development and human resources, according to the job site Indeed. Despite the decline this year, overall job listings on Indeed are still significantly higher than before the pandemic.

Ashley Campbell, brand director at Connelly Partners, writes about taking advantage of the agency's perk of working from its Boston, Vancouver or Dublin offices for up to three months each year and offers advice to other working mothers on how to make such flexibility work. "We often place mental limits on what we can accomplish due to the hurdles of having a family," Campbell notes, before urging others to take the opportunity to live and work overseas.

This piece is sort of a follow-up on an article a couple months ago about how the movies stars of today consist of the same movies stars from the late-1990s and early 2000s. Except this time, the story focuses on the genre of romantic comedies. Attention to rom-coms has slipped in the last decade or so as movie studios focused on making other kinds of movies (Read: Superhero franchises). But now, rom-coms are making a comeback ... and many of the faces in leading roles will look very familiar.