Over the past decade, workplace leaders have preached about the importance of employee engagement. But as a leadership consultant, I have found that very few organizations actually take employee engagement seriously. It’s time leaders admit it. The moment has come when leaders must stop pretending we care about engagement. Let’s quit asking workers to fill out surveys that everyone knows are insincere, “check-the-box” activities

Success is a highly subjective concept defined by intentional achievement and aligning actions with personal values. It may mean earning a degree, securing a promotion or gaining confidence. However, the greatest barriers to success are often self-imposed. Your personality can be a significant hurdle, with traits like perfectionism or fear of failure sabotaging your efforts. Understanding and managing these traits is crucial to staying on track and achieving your vision of success.

Google has spent years, collected tons of data, and invested millions trying to better understand its people. One of its most prolific projects, Project Aristotle, aimed to crack the code on what makes a team super effective.

Google's big question: Why do some teams excel while others flop?

When it comes to getting a promotion at work, several factors can either hold you back—or help you get ahead. Elements like your performance and experience play a crucial role in determining your career trajectory, as well as things out of your control, such as the number of available positions and budget constraints. But when it comes to personality, are there traits that might hold you back from getting promoted?

Let’s face it, we’ve all turned into number nerds. Every day, we’re tracking everything from our steps and sleep to our screen time and even how many coffees we knock back. Why? Because data cuts through guesswork — it shows us what’s working and what’s not. In sales, we’re always swimming in data, from call logs and emails to deal closures and client feedback. All this data isn’t just useful — it’s essential to success.

Personalized learning is revolutionizing sales training. By making training more responsive to the needs of individual sales reps, you increase engagement and skill acquisition, leading to more effective training outcomes, crucial for staying competitive in today’s fast-paced sales environments. Personalized training can not only speed up skill acquisition but also increase proficiency levels, directly impacting sales performance and organizational success.

Transitioning from a top salesperson to an effective sales leader is more than just a promotion—it's a significant step up that demands new skills and perspectives. And it’s risky. Elevating top sales performers into sales leadership roles doesn’t naturally make them effective sales coaches. They may not possess the skills or desire to transition into leadership roles, potentially leading to misalignment and dissatisfaction.

When a company makes a mistake—such as a marketing misstep or a product failure that leads to a recall—a good apology can make a big difference in how we as customers feel about them. Things can go wrong for all kinds of reasons. On top of addressing the immediate fallout of something going wrong, a company must be prepared to explain what happened—and in many cases, apologize.

U.S. employees are increasingly struggling with mental health challenges tied to their jobs, such as depression, anxiety, and burnout. We’re professors who research how employees interact and workplace well-being. After noticing that research on mental health and work had not kept up with the increasing prevalence of mental health challenges, we reviewed existing findings on mental health and work to see how scholars can best investigate these issues going forward.

Imagine having 12 extra hours per week -- that's how much time Thomson Reuters predicts AI-powered tools will save professionals in future. A new survey of more than 2,200 professionals by the information services company found that 77 percent of professionals think AI will have a "transformational" impact on their careers in the next five years. While those surveyed work an average of 46 hours per week, more than half of respondents said they feel they do not have enough time to do everything they want to.

Being a leader isn’t about a title or a role. Instead, it’s about taking the initiative to chart new paths forward and make innovation possible. Developing this capability makes professionals very valuable, but as the Harvard Business Review notes: “Innovation requires deviation.” And deviation can be scary. Working up the courage to challenge your workplace’s status quo is a start, but it’s not quite enough.

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.

Differentiation often starts with marketing, but it truly comes alive in the selling process. Even if your company’s products and services are superior to all others, this means nothing if you can’t convey that to your buyers. Differentiating in sales is more than a good pitch—you need to differentiate in the right areas, adapt to your buyer’s needs, and build value.

You know the story. COVID-19 came, everyone had to sell virtually. The amount of virtual sales outreach exploded. And now, with sales teams across the globe feeling the pinch of a tight economy, it hasn’t relented. Buyers have had enough. Reply rates have plummeted, email providers are increasingly marking sales outreach as spam, and the gap between seller and buyer has never felt wider. And we haven’t even mentioned AI, which could take this to a whole new level.

While Kurlan & Associates has successfully helped thousands of companies optimize their sales functions, performance and maximize revenue generation, there have been a number of companies which, instead of getting our help, or the help of another sales consultancy, decided to do nothing. In most cases it was because they either didn’t want to upset anyone, thought they could do it themselves, or thought their mediocre growth didn’t need improvement. In other cases the fear of change was simply too paralyzing for the decision makers and they “couldn’t commit” to making the necessary changes.

A functional organization requires capable and engaged leaders at every level; from senior executives to front-line managers, engaged leaders can elevate daily operations and accelerate big-picture initiatives. Yet one of the main challenges learning and development (L&D) organizations face is tailoring training to leaders at different levels. Raising great leaders doesn’t happen by accident. It requires structured and individualized training throughout a leader’s career.

Starting a business requires a delicate balance of risk, passion, intel, research and confidence in yourself. You have to trust your instinct — and rest on the hard work you've done to prepare for business growth. You also have to weigh potential risks against the confidence and belief that you have what it takes to succeed. I know this dance well; I've started over 300 businesses.

Most of us can remember a couple of favorite ads. They’re funny, clever, thoughtful. Creativity can delight, even inspire. But does it generate business value? The short answer is yes. That conclusion came through clearly in McKinsey’s analysis of one widely recognized proxy for creativity. To have a quantitative measure that could be used to examine the linkage between creativity and business performance, we developed the Award Creativity Score (ACS)

As potential use cases for artificial intelligence continue to emerge, professionals across industries are discovering resourceful ways to leverage it to optimize their workflows. In the world of coaching, leaders are using AI to improve the efficacy and impact of their coaching methods and empower their clients to achieve their goals.

You're likely not as targeted in growing your business as you think. Most service-based business development efforts are too diffuse. You have too many vague opportunities without a clear, actionable path to increase your chances of winning any of them. Your team is smart, dedicated, and hard-working -- but their efforts aren't resulting in meaningful progress.