Everybody needs sales skills. We all have something we want others to buy into, whether it’s an idea we have, a proposal we want supported, or a product we are pushing. When our pitch is successful, others help us achieve our goals. When it’s not, we feel disappointed (and often less wealthy than we had hoped). I learned to sell when I was building my company, leadership communications firm The Humphrey Group, over a 30-year period.

BambooHR recently released its quarterly Employee Happiness Index report, showing employee happiness is down 5% year over year, hitting a four-year low. The survey revealed some bright spots, with construction remaining the happiest industry and education achieving the highest June scores the sector has seen in four years. Still, the results raise concerns, given the steady decline in employee satisfaction since 2020.

Are you a “boss” or a “leader”? What’s the difference, anyway? The terms are often used interchangeably, but they don’t point to the same skill set at all. A boss is someone who’s focused on the day-to-day operations, prioritizing things like scheduling, hiring, firing, supply management, processes, compliance — keeping the trains running and keeping people in line. Bosses are often guilty of micromanagement. They don’t trust people to be fully functioning adults.

Roger Federer is going viral. This time, it's not for a tennis victory. Rather, it's for his remarkable commencement address, which he delivered on Sunday to the 2024 graduating class of Dartmouth College. Federer's speech is an amazing case study in emotional intelligent speaking: It's funny, motivating, inspiring. It's emotionally moving. And most important, it has valuable takeaways--

Micromanaging might not seem like a crucial workplace issue, but it can destroy a team’s morale, engagement, and productivity if left unchecked. We’ve shared how micromanagement affects employees, but that’s only one side of the story. What circumstances cause a leader to become a micromanager? Can they change that behavior for the better?

The skills that can make you highly successful aren’t necessarily innate. You can practice them, and get better at them. That’s according to bestselling authors and leadership researchers Brené Brown and Simon Sinek, who sat down with Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant for a recent episode of his “ReThinking” podcast.

A study of B2B companies found that just one in 20 was able to consistently grow sales faster than sales and marketing expenses. As companies seek to cut costs in an uncertain economy, increasing this commercial productivity is a smart strategy. Research shows the three ways companies can do this are to refine the go-to-market model, turn every rep into an A player, and make sales and marketing support more efficient.

Just because you’re communicating, it doesn’t mean you’re doing it well. At the core of every great relationship is great communication. The same is true of great teams. Effective communication is necessary for any leadership team to work together cohesively, engage employees, and create loyal customers. Some of the symptoms of poor communication include disconnection, gossiping, and inefficiency.

Sales reps never seem to have enough days in the month for all the phone calls, emails, meetings they need to have with buyers. Add to that the management and administrative tasks that go with every sale, and even top performers may end up exhausted and frustrated. They need help improving their productivity—to maximize sales results while reducing the cost, energy, and time spent on each deal.

What is a scary hour? In her video, which has more than 1 million views, Wheeler says she sets a timer for one hour and works only on tasks she’s been avoiding because of anxiety. Indeed, feelings of stress make us more likely to procrastinate, according to Alicia Walf, a neuroscientist and senior lecturer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. According to research, 20% of U.S. adults are chronic procrastinators, meaning they procrastinate at home, at work, in relationships, and more.

In today's changing economic landscape, businesses need solutions that can boost productivity while saving time and cutting costs. As customer expectations continue to evolve, sales teams in particular need to do more with less. The pressure is on to close more deals and meet sales targets today. But at the same time, sales teams also need to identify opportunities for tomorrow. Tiffani Bova, Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce, calls this dual challenge the ‘seller’s dilemma’.

It’s been a tried-and-true corporate strategy since the 1980s. If layoffs need to be done, fire the middle managers. They’re the group responsible, in the minds of many executives, when an organization becomes inefficient. True to form, the rounds of restructurings recently announced in technology, logistics, and other industries have targeted corporate midsections. But experts warn that removing too many middle managers—and putting too much pressure on those that remain—can jeopardize many corporate priorities, such as innovation and diversity initiatives.

Most of us have a love/hate relationship with meetings. We dread attending because there’s usually a thousand other things we’d rather do with the time. Part of the problem with meetings is that we don’t think enough about them, says Donna McGeorge, author of The 25 Minute Meeting: Half the Time, Double the Impact.

Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a professor emeritus at Yale. The author of six books, his writing has appeared in Nature, Science, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic.

Below, Paul shares five key insights from his new book, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning.

Anytime you're selling, you're trying to balance the price you're asking for with the amount of value you're providing your customer. If you want to get the highest price possible, for instance, your goal is to convince your customer of the amount of value they're getting in exchange.

The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly finite. If you’re lucky and you live to 80, you will have lived about four thousand weeks. This truth, which most of us ignore most of the time, is something to wrestle with if we want to spend our limited time on this earth well.

Whatever managers previous fears about remote work, the pandemic has proved that most knowledge workers can get their daily tasks done just as well from their living rooms as from the office. Study after study confirms most people's personal experience that, at least for those without child care, health, or other challenges, productivity has actually inched up with the advent of widespread remote work.

Jay Mount is the CEO of basix.ai, an industry-leading company that increases its clients’ conversion rates by boiling sales down to its simplest components. He joined Predictable Revenue to discuss how increasing pressure to meet growing revenue targets without scaling processes can reduce the productivity and morale of a team. He also provided five key pieces of advice to help team leaders increase their sales productivity.

You’ve decided to take the plunge and change careers. You are ready for a brand new start, excited to take on a new challenge. One major mental obstacle stands between you and your new start; the uncomfortable, but obligatory, interview process, which comes equipped with the dreaded “why did you leave your last job” question.