7 Ways to Enliven Your Next Brainstorming Session

7 Ways to Enliven Your Next Brainstorming Session: Even in the most creatively booming of small businesses, there are times when you hit an ideas wall. The well of brilliant thoughts dries up and it usually happens right around the time when you really need something innovative to come along. Don’t feel down – these moments of creative stagnation happen to even the best and brightest. If your company’s brainstorming sessions have been lackluster of late, pull from this list to give yourselves an exciting mental jolt.

6 Ways to Build Customer Loyalty

6 Ways to Build Customer Loyalty: Effective ways to follow up that ensure your business is always in the customer's mind.

Train Your Brain to Overcome Fear

Train Your Brain to Overcome Fear: Three tips to help you get over your fears and take bigger risks.

3 Essential Skills Every Leader Should Cultivate

3 Essential Skills Every Leader Should Cultivate: Changing your way of thinking can change your whole approach to your business. Here's how.

4 Tactics To Build Your Word of Mouth

4 Tactics To Build Your Word of Mouth: In my last blog we established the importance of Word of Mouth in building your brand.  You can have a great product or service, but if people don’t know about it then it does no good.  We know it is important to keep track of what people are saying about you and your brand online and off, but how do you insert yourself in the conversations?  MarketShare calls this overall Word of Mouth (conversations occurring online and offline) your brand’s Social Voice.  It is more than just creating a Facebook and a Twitter page.  Successful Word of Mouth requires strategic thinking and serious work.  Here are the most important steps to take when carving out your Word of Mouth strategy:

The 3 Things All Humans Crave--And How To Motivate Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere

The 3 Things All Humans Crave--And How To Motivate Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere: What human beings crave at their deepest levels, and how as leaders we must provide these to boost performance, trust, emotional engagement.

How To Give Difficult Feedback

How To Give Difficult Feedback: For most of his career, Thomas D’Aunno has been studying how people give one another feedback. As a professor of health policy and management at Columbia University‘s Mailman School of Public Health, he focuses on health care, where the failure to give or take feedback can have life or death consequences. Think of a surgeon supervising a resident who may cut into the wrong artery, or an obstetrician training a young doctor who must deliver a premature baby.

The Secret to Getting Really, Really Good at Something

The Secret to Getting Really, Really Good at Something: Recently my husband and I were talking about the human will to mastery.  The conversation started as a discussion of the attraction people have toward precision tools as they advance in a craft.  For instance, I was noting how, as I get deeper and deeper into my knitting hobby, I get pickier about the needles I use, and I find I'm accumulating a variety of little tools (row counters, cable needles, stitch holders, needle sizers) that I didn't even know about - and wouldn't have understood the use of - when I was starting out.

Seven Steps to Negotiating Success

Seven Steps to Negotiating Success: Tried-and-true negotiation tactics from author and negotiation expert Selena Rezvani.

Read “Tipping Sacred Cows” to Uncover Behaviors that Hold You Back

Read “Tipping Sacred Cows” to Uncover Behaviors that Hold You Back:
You seek balance, collaboration creativity, fairness, excellence, passion and preparation?  Good for you.
But did you know that these virtues can easily turn into vices that hold you back from everything you’re envisioning?

10 Tips For Communicating Across Generations

10 Tips For Communicating Across Generations

Four wildly different generations are now working together in one office, and it can be a Petri dish for problems. Veterans (born before 1946), Baby Boomers (1946-1964), Generation X (1965-1979), and Generation Y or Millennials (1980-2000) grew up in different times, have wide-ranging value sets and often conflicting communication styles. Can't we all just get along? Dana Brownlee, a corporate trainer and president of professional development firm Professionalism Matters, offers 10 guidelines for communicating across generations.

How To Spot An Opportunity

How To Spot An Opportunity: While no one can provide a fool-proof way to always spot an opportunity, of course, there are some simple tests you can apply in order to increase your chances of success.

How To Fast-Track Your Way Up The Corporate Ladder

How To Fast-Track Your Way Up The Corporate Ladder: As a 19-year-old college student, Justin Hutchens began work as a resident assistant at an intermediate care facility in Greeley, Colorado. Over the next 18 years he worked his way up at six different companies in four states, from a care giver to admissions director, regional operations director and chief operating officer. In 2009 he joined National Health Investors, a health care real estate investment trust, as president and chief operating officer. Two years later, at the age of 36, he was appointed chief executive.

10 Things Every Leader Should Challenge

10 Things Every Leader Should Challenge:

News Flash - innovation, growth and development cannot occur by pretending we live in a world that has long since passed us by. Leading in the 21st Century affords no safe haven for 20th Century thinkers. Old, static, institutionalized thinking will gate the pace of forward progress faster than just

How to Turn Any Setback Into a Success

How to Turn Any Setback Into a Success: I will never forget the day so many years ago that a too-slim envelope arrived from my first-choice college. I had applied Early Decision, and when I opened it up to find out I'd been deferred, failure washed over me. It was the amplification of every less-than-perfect test score, every time I'd worked hard on something and struggled to do as well as my peers. I told myself I must be stupid.

7 Steps To Lead Effective Meetings

7 Steps To Lead Effective Meetings: This month, I’m taking it back to the basics with my “Career Boot Camp” blog series. Next up in the series is leading effective in-person meetings, which is a requirement if you want to climb the career ladder. Why? Because meetings occur in every business, in every industry, and in every country in the world – there’s no way to avoid them. Use these seven steps to dazzle colleagues and management with your leadership skills and watch the level of your credibility soar:

What Makes Effective Coaching Sessions

What Makes Effective Coaching Sessions: For many business leaders, the open door policy is a mainstay of employee engagement. It?s like an old friend. The one policy you can rely on. You never have to question it because ? intuitively ? it just makes sense. I mean, you want to be approachable and supportive, and you want employees to come to you with issues and concerns. Right?

10 Things Every Leader Should Challenge

10 Things Every Leader Should Challenge: News Flash - innovation, growth and development cannot occur by pretending we live in a world that has long since passed us by. Leading in the 21st Century affords no safe haven for 20th Century thinkers. Old, static, institutionalized thinking will gate the pace of forward progress faster than just about anything. If you want to expose yourself as an out of touch, dated leader, keep trying to address today's issues and opportunities with yesterday's thinking.

Become Successful By Understanding Peoples Personalities

Become Successful By Understanding Peoples Personalities: Have you gotten annoyed at your colleague for being too loud or rambunctious? Or impatient at your employee for not getting to the point quick enough? How about thinking that your boss is a lunatic for wanting everything to be exactly the way he/she wants it (even if it makes no sense)?

Smart Leaders and the Power of Collaboration

Smart Leaders and the Power of Collaboration:

Collaboration is the keystone of leadership success. Don’t believe me?  Google  > sequestration < Anyone? Last week in Washington we saw an infantile exercise in acting out. Driven by rigid ideology, inflated egos, and a desire for revenge that put party above country, potentially serious damage was self-inflicted on our economy

4 Steps to Successful Brainstorming

4 Steps to Successful Brainstorming: Almost everybody does brainstorming wrong, Ralph Keeney says, and turns it into an enormous waste of time. He wants to tell you how to do it right.

Office Stress: His vs. Hers

Office Stress: His vs. Hers: Women report higher levels of work-related stress than men, along with the sense of being underappreciated and underpaid.

10 Ways To Be More Confident At Work

10 Ways To Be More Confident At Work: There are many reasons you may lack confidence at work. Maybe you’re in a job that requires skills you don’t have, or you’re less experienced than anyone around you. Perhaps you’re new to the company and feel uneasy about your ability to succeed—or you feel threatened by colleagues; you fear losing your job; or you are simply too hard on yourself. Public humiliation and errors in judgment can also do the trick.

How to Be More Creative

How to Be More Creative: According to research by Clayton Christenson, Jeff Dyer and Hal Gergersen — the co-authors of  The Innovator’s DNA — recent research has found that most creative skills are not a special gift conferred on us at birth by the Magical Gene Fairy.  They can be learned.  In fact, between 60 and 75 percent of our innovation skills are developed and fostered.

How To Become a Successful Young Leader at Work

How To Become a Successful Young Leader at Work: Most young, new employees aren’t typically thought of as leaders in the workplace. Not only do they inhabit a low spot in the office hierarchy and lack experience and skills, but also many are too timid and insecure to assume a leadership role. But with the right attitude, an observant eye and a desire to learn, any young professionals can prevail early on.

Six Things to Put on Your Not-to-Do List

Six Things to Put on Your Not-to-Do List: What really sets high achievers apart is not that they do a lot, but that they don't do a lot. The most successful people filter out thousands of opportunities every day, and focus on a very few important tasks.

Your Ego and the Bad Decisions It Makes

Your Ego and the Bad Decisions It Makes: In my work with business leaders and executives, I talk a lot about ego – and how egocentric behavior can sabotage their careers and hold them back from the success they desire. These conversations are invariably spirited, often challenging and sometimes contentious. In any case, let’s just say the ego is on my radar.

5 Ways to Earn Respect and Get Noticed in a Meeting

5 Ways to Earn Respect and Get Noticed in a Meeting: According to a Microsoft survey, the average worker spends 5.6 hours a week in meetings.  For many of us, 5.6 hours in meetings is probably a light day!  And all of the time that we are in those meetings,  we are being evaluated by  our peers.

How to Hire Successfully: Focus on Mission, Values, Talent

How to Hire Successfully: Focus on Mission, Values, Talent: Like many leaders I feel like I am becoming a hiring expert. Between building my own organization and serving on multiple search committees, I have spent a lot of time thinking about hiring and developing talent. That’s a good thing, because there’s nothing more crucial to the success of an organization than bringing the right people on board and encouraging their growth, especially if you consider a bad hire could cost you tens of thousands of dollars.

Top Leaders Share The Best Advice They Ever Received

Top Leaders Share The Best Advice They Ever Received: Sage advice can go a long way. In fact, some of the most accomplished people in business suggest that good advice was the secret to their success.

5 Ways to Build a Resilient Organization

5 Ways to Build a Resilient Organization: Disruption seems to be everywhere these days – industries collapsing, storm surges shutting down major urban centers, financial markets imploding, and more. Preventing these calamities would be everyone’s first choice, of course. But in an increasingly complex world, it’s very difficult. “There’s a deepening appreciation that we’re living in a time of increased, intrinsic volatility,” says Andrew Zolli, the Executive Director and curator of PopTech and the co-author (with Ann Marie Healy) of Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back.

5 Simple Steps To More Efficient, Effective Meetings

5 Simple Steps To More Efficient, Effective Meetings: Have you ever heard anyone complain a meeting was too short?   (Neither have I.)  Ever been frustrated at a meeting by rambling chitchat chewing up time while work remains undone... or by stragglers routinely wandering in 10 minutes late?  In the spirit of brevity and productivity, here are 5 simple  steps for more efficient, effective meetings.

Seth Godin on Dealing With Critics and Rejection

Seth Godin on Dealing With Critics and Rejection: The popular marketing guru on how to deal with rejection and still unlock your ability to do amazing things.

How to Determine Motivation in a Job Interview

How to Determine Motivation in a Job Interview: Everyone knows someone like my friend, Gary. Gary swears that he's an extraordinarily good interviewer, with a strong track record of making great hires. His technique? He can sit down with someone and, using pure gut instinct, determine if they're a good fit.

Top Leaders Share The Best Advice They Ever Received

Top Leaders Share The Best Advice They Ever Received: Some of the most accomplished people in business suggest that good advice was the secret to their success. And thanks to LinkedIn, we know which pearls of wisdom they cherish most.

The #1 Shift to Move from Management to Leadership

The #1 Shift to Move from Management to Leadership: Converting complexity to clarity may be the most critical competency to move us from management effectiveness to leadership excellence. In his book, Beating the Global Odds, Paul Laudicina, managing partner and chairman of the board of A.T. Kearney, writes: “Not surprisingly, people (and organizations) everywhere are feeling disoriented, bewildered, and even paralyzed. From crisis and scandal to the proliferation of product choice and the relentless 24/7 ‘information smog’ of always-on news, email, and social media, we are not feeling smarter and wiser. On the contrary, our ability to think and act decisively with the future in mind has diminished. Imagine having—at last—the entire knowledge of human civilization at your fingertips, and finding it basically gives you a migraine.”

5 Tips To Put A Crisis Behind You

5 Tips To Put A Crisis Behind You: We all experience a crisis now and then. It can be large or small, personal or professional. You forget a loved one's birthday. You get caught up in an office scandal. Or you do something that’s just plain wrong.

The Top Ten Challenges in Time Management

The Top Ten Challenges in Time Management: We all have 168 hours a week. Yet, some people get so much more done than others. Furthermore, the people who get more done are usually less tired than those who are perpetually frustrated. What are some of the common obstacles keeping people from getting what they want, and what can be done to leap over these hurdles?

10 Steps You Can Take To Become A Successful Young Leader At Work

10 Steps You Can Take To Become A Successful Young Leader At Work
Most people near the starts of their careers aren't typically thought of as leaders in the workplace. Not only do they inhabit a low spot in the office hierarchy and lack experience and skills, but also many are too timid and insecure to assume a leadership role. But with the right attitude, an observant eye and a desire to learn, any young professionals can prevail early on.

What It Takes To Have Influence

What It Takes To Have Influence: What makes a person good at – and comfortable with -- persuading others?