Harvard Business Review

It’s challenging to work with someone you don’t chat with every day at the coffee station. But you can still build strong connections and work successfully together. Here’s how:

To succeed in today’s busy world, you need to decide what to excel at and what to do just adequately enough. Break down activities you do into three categories: invest, neutral, or optimize. “Investment” pursuits are areas where more time and a higher quality of work lead to an exponential payoff, such as strategic planning. Aim

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It’s natural to feel helpless or uncomfortable when someone cries in front of you in the office. But remember that tears are a normal human reaction, not a sign of weakness.

If you’re in the market for a job, you need to be able to communicate your value as a potential employee in 15 seconds or less. That may be all the time you have with a recruiter or hiring manager. Your message has to be crisp and tailored. Say specifically what value you bring — for instance, “My specialty is streamlining messy, …

How many times have you promised to exercise more, or start meditating, or spend less time at the office? To make changes that last, create rituals — highly specific behaviors that you do at the same time every day (or on specific days you select). Willpower is a limited resource, so use less of it by making challenging activities …

When deciding whether to give you their business, prospective customers trust one source of information above all others: their peers. To sell more, you need to get your current customers marketing and selling — advocating — for you.

When displaying data in a presentation, clarity matters above all else. Your audience has to get meaning from your numbers before you click away. This means you need to pick the right chart for the job. The most common charts in business are pies, bars, matrixes, and line graphs, which will serve different purposes depending on the …

A clear head produces the best insights. But it’s a challenge to take time off in the midst of a busy day to rest your brain. Here are three easy ways to build breaks into your day:

We tend to trust what we can see, which makes it difficult to evaluate employees who don’t spend time in the office. Here are three ways to make sure you’re being fair in your assessment of remote workers

The most valuable people in any organization have deep smarts — business-critical expertise built up through years of experience which helps them make wise, swift decisions. If you wish to become this go-to person in your company, but don’t have the time or opportunity to accumulate all the experience of your predecessors, acquire …

Getting tone right takes work — but it’s critical to the success of your business documents. If you sound likable and professional, people will want to work with you and respond to you.

Through social sharing technologies like Facebook and Twitter, your employees may be unwittingly exposing company secrets. Even seemingly innocuous information like travel schedules or what online groups an employee joins can give competitors inside intelligence. Here’re a few ways to shield your organization from prying eyes