Stop Email Overload
Do you have thousands of messages in your inbox, and receive hundreds more every day? Welcome to the club. Instead of being overwhelmed by email, take these steps to regain control:
Articles from Contributor
Turn Adversaries into Allies
Anyone who has faced rivals at work — bosses who take all the credit, team members who undermine things — knows how difficult it is to ignore them. Instead, turn your adversaries into collaborators by following these three steps:
Keep Gen-Xers Engaged
Generation X may be a smaller population than Baby Boomers or Millennials, but it wields great influence in today’s organizations. People in this generation are the all-important bench strength for aging leadership. To keep them around, here’s how to keep them engaged.
Stop Getting Bad Advice
People love to give advice. While it’s useful to hear what others think, sometimes they give off-target or foolish guidance. Here are a few ways to increase your odds of getting good input:
Three Tips for Creating a Realistic Budget
If you have to put together an annual budget for your department, your compensation may depend on your ability to stick to it. Here are three tips for creating a manageable budget:
Respond Thoughtfully to Online Customer Feedback
Whether you’re a small company or a Fortune 500, customer feedback matters. But it can be tough to navigate online feedback. Which reviews are valuable and which are unreliable? Consider the following when dealing with the negative ones:
Build a Better Business Case
When building a business case, many managers pick an early solution and fail to explore additional possibilities. Others fail to consider the status quo as an alternative. To avoid these traps, bring together the people who will be affected by the outcome of your proposal — these may be customers, frontline workers, or managers in …
Use Pulse Meetings to Track Projects
As a project manager, you need to actively monitor progress to keep your team on the right path. One way to do that is to hold short pulse meetings where team members share brief status updates on their activities. These can be held face-to-face or virtually. Limit the meetings to 10 minutes and discuss only the tasks started or finished …
Know When to Give Up on Your Goals
Setting goals and sticking to them is important. But you should also occasionally reevaluate your goals. Quitting isn’t fun, but sometimes it’s necessary. Here are two warning signs that it might be time to abandon your goal:
Use the Power of Pause When Speaking
Whenever effective public speakers end a sentence or phrase, they usually pause. This gives listeners time to absorb their words. Nervous presenters often do the opposite: The stress of being in front of an audience causes them to speak faster and faster, rushing past the pauses. Whether you’re speaking to a large group of strangers or …
How to Reach Your Enemy
Having enemies in the workplace is often destructive. Ideally you should try to work with your rival instead of against him. But if your collaborative efforts fail, try one of these strategies instead:
When to Share Bad News
When you’re privy to information that your team isn’t, should you share the news or protect your employees? When deciding whether to divulge bad news, do these things first: