Management Tip of the Day

If want to communicate that your project’s goals are “right on target,” it’s tempting to present your colleagues with the all-too-familiar image of a bull’s-eye. But nothing gets an audience’s eyes a-glazing like a visual cliché. To make your presentation stand out, throw out the first visual concepts that come to mind. …

If you want to encourage people to take healthy risks, you need to make sure they’re not afraid to fail. The first step in doing that is defining what a smart failure — a thoughtful and well-planned project that for some reason didn’t work — looks like. Chances are that everyone in your organization knows what success is. Far fewer …

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 …