Companies have been bracing for a recession all year. Although GDP continues to grow, most firms are still anticipating an economic downtown, and many have made talent changes already. With so much economic concern, experts say, it’s essential that employees continue to show their value, particularly as managers begin preparing for year-end performance reviews.

You can be a manager without being a leader. Management is a position bestowed upon you, which sets out roles and responsibilities, in relation to yourself and your team. But you cannot be a truly successful and highly competent manager without learning and integrating key leadership qualities. And in today’s fast-changing and increasingly remote business world, managers need to be effective leaders.

We all thought we knew what he wanted to hear—“semantic memory”—which was what he was studying. There were five guys there, all of us first-year students (and all male). The first one got up and he said, as you would predict, “semantic memory.” The second and third guys said the same. I knew at least two of them were lying and just sucking up.

Looking holistically at talent is crucial for recognizing the full range of an individual's abilities. Enhancing adaptability, fostering diversity and psychological safety, and creating more inclusive environments whereby everybody has the opportunity to thrive shows that the uniqueness of each individual is valued. Not to mention, it harnesses their potential for the benefit of the individual and, ultimately, the organization.

Taking things personally at work is not a sign of weakness, but a reflection of your passion, commitment, and deep sense of responsibility. But what if your professional role has become too intertwined with your sense of self. While equating your value as a person with your performance at work is common, it’s also possible to break free from the pattern. In this article, the author offers five strategies for how to approach situations with more objectivity so that you can navigate your professional journey with greater clarity, balance, and effectiveness.

In 1968, Charles Portis’ book True Grit was released. The book and two subsequent movies told the story of a young woman’s pursuit of justice in the American West circa the 1870s. But that plot was more window dressing for a far more interesting story of an aging, curmudgeonly U.S. marshal who went by the moniker Rooster Cogburn. Cogburn was the agent through whom Mattie Ross would seek justice for her father's death.

Times of crisis and terror bring out the worst in some and the best in others. The latter are the stories that need telling. No one could reasonably expect these kinds of largess. Most of us might reasonably wonder whether we could summon the generosity and creativity to emulate such acts of generosity. But a word describing this sort of expansive impulse is this week’s addition to the Ethical Lexicon

I once interviewed Karl Pillemer, the Cornell sociologist and author of “30 Lessons for Living: Tired and True Advice from the Wisest Americans.” He’d seen numerous studies showing that people in their 70s, 80s, and beyond were far happier than younger people. He was intrigued: “I keep meeting older people — many of whom had lost loved ones, been through tremendous difficulties, and had serious health problems —

The pandemic has forced major changes in how, when, and where people work. It has also bedeviled employers. Due in part to new hybrid and remote-working models, companies are struggling to find objective ways to gauge employee effectiveness—a critical challenge as labor costs have increased and worker productivity has declined.

The future of work will not be determined by technology, but by creating the right mix of education, exposure, and experience needed to develop skills and put them to work, creating a vastly more productive workplace and economy. In this article, the authors recommend a “70/20/10” learning model, in which only 10% of learning comes from formal instruction (education), 20% from social learning or mentorship (exposure), and 70% from hands-on, experiential practice with feedback (experience).

Back in the early years of this century, the U.K. had gone years without any real success in the sport of track cycling. Then, along came David Brailsford, a former professional cyclist who happened to have an MBA. As an article in the Harvard Business Review recounts, he transformed a team that had won a single gold medal in 76 years of trying into a superpower that won seven of the 10 gold medals available at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and then matched it four years later in London.

Dr. John C. Maxwell has been a public speaker and motivational teacher for more than 50 years. In his new book, The 16 Undeniable Laws of Communication, he shares everything he’s learned from a lifetime of communication. This blog post is adapted from the book’s sixteenth chapter, “The Law of Results: The Greatest Success in Communication is Action.” Good leaders want to influence people to take action, make changes, and achieve goals to make the world a better place.

When providing feedback, we often stand in judgment of others, seeking to impart wisdom or tell others what to do. If we instead frame feedback as an invitation to solve problems collaboratively, we’ll often find that we achieve better short-term results while bolstering our relationship with others over the long term.

Behavior change is hard, but it’s a skill leaders who want to succeed amid near-constant organizational change need to develop. By increasing their self-awareness, committing to change, overcoming limiting thoughts, and deliberately practicing new behaviors, leaders raise the likelihood that the change initiatives they’re tasked to lead will be successful.

Before disregarding your likability and attributing any personality defects as something your coworkers just need to deal with, it’s essential to recognize the invisible impact these skills have on your overall performance. Your ability to effectively communicate with others extends beyond solving your own problems. Your proficiency in listening builds trust and establishes integrity. Your friendships inspire others to reach higher and stretch alongside you.

After a vacation, it can be tempting to double down on work in an attempt to make up for “lost” time, or to try to hurry through the time it takes to get back up to speed. Other times, the urge to overwork stems from a well-meaning effort to relieve team members of the extra work they were covering for you, or a desire to demonstrate that even though you were away, your commitment remains high and you’re still valuable to the organization. Whatever the motivation behind post-vacation overwork, it can leave you boomeranging from one extreme to the other, which increases stress and actually undermines your efforts to catch up.

Team and group leadership skill is the next development frontier. Does your team feel inspired and uplifted with you as their leader? Ask them. Engage in a 360-degree feedback process so you can learn about how your team perceives you. Then fix the stuff that doesn’t work for them. Make changes that matter. How strong are you at clarifying roles? How swiftly and compassionately do you offer needed feedback?

As much as it’s your role to set the pace for the team, that can be harder to do for yourself. It is very easy to feel overwhelmed in leadership roles because of the demanding deadlines, the people problems that fill up your day, the second-guessing and criticism, the pressures to do more with less, and dealing with the crisis of the moment. Work can become a three-shift day the morning emails, taking care of problems at work all day, and then the night shift to catch up on reading and writing and responding to more emails.

BMW is one of the world’s most recognizable brands, the maker of “the ultimate driving machine.” While Ford became famous for the moving assembly line and Toyota for its participatory work methods, the German firm usually made the headlines thanks to technical breakthroughs. Over the years, BMW’s legendary engineering prowess yielded innovations.

Leadership performance is under threat. Many leaders assume that leadership development is a reward rather than an intentional, structured plan to move them through a growth process in support of their continuous improvement on their leadership journey. There are also leaders who assume that excellent financial performance equals excellent leadership performance. For these leaders, the end result justifies the means.