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