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.

In 2009, Simon Sinek delivered a TED Talk that explored his notion that all great leaders share a trait--what he called "knowing the why." It has become the third-most-watched TED Talk of all time. Some 14 years later, the best-selling author's ideas continue to resonate with entrepreneurs, and he's now scaling his message of servant leader­ship through his new online learning platform, the Optimism Company. Begun as a pan­demic pivot, it boasts 20 employees working to infuse a spirit of helping others into the self-help industry.

If you want to succeed really, really badly, the paradoxical solution proposed by many successful people is to ease up. Albert Einstein was obscenely productive, but his productivity came in bursts. Between those bursts, he was gentle with himself. “If my work isn’t going well,” he said, “I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination.”

Embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is a valuable step that employees are pushing for, and companies are leaning into. As organizations strive toward inclusive work environments that harness the potential of diverse teams and mindsets, DEI training initiatives play a vital role in promoting understanding, respect, and appreciation for individual differences. However, without addressing cultural competency, organizations might find their DEI efforts falling short of achieving true inclusivity.

To be a leader in 2023 is to encounter challenge after challenge. We are living through an incredibly tumultuous period, from waves of layoffs at tech companies large and small, to thorny financial situations like Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse. Often when you’re managing through turbulence, you have to stay calm on the surface, while you’re paddling like crazy underwater.

Sooner or later, almost all of us will find ourselves trying to cope with how to manage conflict at work. At the office, we may struggle to work through high-pressure situations with people with whom we have little in common. We need a special set of strategies to calm tempers, restore order, and meet each side’s interests.

Growing up, I was social and outgoing, but I was never fond of putting on a show, even in smaller settings. In my high school years, I hosted several online and offline events that improved my public speaking skills. Shortly after moving to the Netherlands, I got a speaker slot at a TEDx event happening at the University of Groningen. Funny enough, I'm a first-year student at the university myself, so the pressure from age discrimination was definitely on. Plus, my family and friends were in the audience, making it infinitely harder.

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.

Objections are unavoidable on sales calls, but encountering one doesn’t necessarily mean an end to the conversation. If you’re able to anticipate what your prospect’s objections will be, you stand a better chance of overcoming them. At Trellus, their AI sales coach detects objections, provides real-time suggestions to guide reps during the call, and measures the effectiveness of those suggestions based on different metrics.

It has always been essential for businesses to maintain a solid reputation. However, this has taken on another level of importance in the modern context. Social media, 24-hour news cycles, and the ubiquity of information have put reputational issues at the forefront of any organization’s strategy. Efforts must be made in terms of public relations, brand management, and leadership reputation, but it cannot stop there.

Businesses are bound to make mistakes and disappoint their customers. But how you build your apology message and your careful attention to executing it appropriately can make the difference between losing those customers or increasing their loyalty. When delivered well, your apology message can improve the customer relationship to the point where it is stronger than if the mistake had never happened — a phenomenon known as the service recovery paradox. In this article, the author outlines five steps for writing an effective apology message and explains why it’s important to share the apology process internally and with external stakeholders. It not only shows vulnerability from the organization but also shows other customers that the company can be relied upon in times of distress.

I recently had the opportunity to be on the Lead on Purpose podcast with founder and host, James Laughlin. We geeked out on rugby, drumming, sports, and leadership. James is a world-renowned high-performance leadership expert and has won seven world championship titles. He now has the opportunity to interview former world leaders, pro athletes, Navy SEALs, and CEO's. I am not a world leader nor pro athlete, but I do fall into a couple of those categories and run a management consulting firm focused on building high-performance teams and leaders in organizations across the globe.

Are you having a hard time making a big decision?

Maybe you're trying to work your way through a thorny business problem. Maybe you can't make up your mind about what to do with a promising employee. Maybe it's that you're caught between two choices in a personal or relationship matter. Good news: There's a simple question you can ask yourself (grounded in neuroscience) that can guide you through indecision, overcome analysis paralysis, and ultimately help you make better, bolder choices.

When tasked with implementing large-scale organizational change, leaders often give too much attention to the what of change — such as a new organization strategy, operating model or acquisition integration — not the how — the particular way they will approach such changes. Such inattention to the how comes with the major risk that old routines will be used to get to new places. Any unquestioned, “default” approach to change may lead to a lot of busy action, but not genuine system transformation. Through their practice and research, the authors have identified the optimal ways to conceive, design, and implement successful organizational change.

We are spending more time indoors and online. But recent studies suggest that nature can help our brains and bodies to stay healthy. I’ve been an avid hiker my whole life. From the time I first strapped on a backpack and headed into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, I was hooked on the experience, loving the way being in nature cleared my mind and helped me to feel more grounded and peaceful.

In a recent article, we explained that achieving sustainable, profitable growth requires companies to actively choose growth through a holistic approach comprising three elements: developing an aspirational mindset and culture, activating pathways, and executing with excellence. We then set out to bring those pathways to life through the ten rules of growth (see sidebar, “The ten rules of value-creating growth”), based on an in-depth study of the growth patterns and performance of the world’s largest public companies.

Are the training initiatives at your organization meeting stakeholder objectives? Improving employee performance? Showing measurable success rates, based on goals and key performance indicators (KPIs)? If not, there are five “usual suspect” areas where you can make improvements that will lead to better (measurable) outcomes.

Success is not about winning a competition. It’s about making a contribution.

That was the thesis of my first book, Give and Take, which came out 10 years ago today. It was about the surprising consequences of being a giver—rather than a taker or matcher. Takers are selfish: they aim to be better than others. Givers are generous: they strive to bring out the best in others. Matchers try to be fair: they trade favors evenly. But they often come across as transactional. You didn’t really care about me—you were just paying off a debt or racking up credit.

Ask many corporate workers what they think of human resources, and they’ll rattle off a litany of stereotypes: HR is incompetent, any brush with HR spells bad news, or that HR will always toe the company line. Above all else, people tend to believe that HR represents the employer and simply can’t be trusted to have their best interests at heart. Multiple studies have found that, on average, nearly half of employees don’t trust HR or feel comfortable confiding in their HR leaders.

If you’re an ambitious salesperson, building and delivering compelling sales presentations should be your focus in the new work environment. Salespeople who master sales presentations in the virtual and hybrid workplace will outshine their techno-novice counterparts and make a mark on the prospects they seek to convert into clients.