Creating Connections

Many people agree: a workplace culture of fear limits employee engagement, productivity, and retention—and by turns, the bottom line. But often, leaders aren't cognizant that they've created that environment.

According to researchers at Duke University, habits account for about 40 percent of our behaviors on any given day. 

Understanding how to build new habits (and how your current ones work) is essential for making progress in your health, your happiness, and your life in general.

But there can be a lot of information out there and most of it isn’t very simple to digest. To solve this problem and break things down in a very simple manner, I have created this strategy guide for building new habits that actually stick.

Social technologies with their inherent democratic, anti-hierarchical quality easily transcend internal and external boundaries, suddenly creating a powerful thrust for horizontal collaboration and participation. They give each and every member of an organization a creative voice and enable real-time virtual connectivity in a way we have never seen before. This makes them a great catalyst for the organizational principles that are required by the new leadership context of the 21st century.

Giving a webinar or remote presentation? These tips will help you engage your audience even w...

A simple view of negotiation presents a cold transaction between what one person has and what the other person is willing to pay for it. If the price is right, the deal gets done.

As anyone who has recently bought a car or sold a house knows, however, negotiations are rarely so dispassionate. As soon as the checkbook comes out a flood of emotions comes out with it—fear, anxiety, competiveness, anger, annoyance—all of which can influence what either side is willing to accept.

Can we really judge a book by its cover? When it comes to making snap judgments about others, it turns out, we may be pretty good at doing just that.

We've all heard the truism, "You only make one first impression." It's true -- and these impressions may be more powerful than we would imagine.

Our brains take in a huge number of verbal and non-verbal cues almost instantaneously when we meet someone (or just look at a photo of them) to calculate powerful impressions that are often as accurate as the impressions we form over longer periods of time.

Plenty of people work from home occasionally, and plenty of managers work with people in different offices. But what if no one is in the office? What if your entire company consists of people working wherever they want to work?

That’s the reality for a growing number of companies that find central real estate unnecessary. Managing an entirely virtual team can be a challenge, but a few strategies make it quite possible, so you can reap the benefits of this new model.

“It is a big recruiting draw for the right type of person,” says Lisa Breytspraak Jasper, managing partner of IT strategy consulting firm Thought Ensemble, whose 13 employees are all virtual. “It allows us to lead our lives very flexibly”--and still get stuff done.