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These 5 Barriers Prevent You From Being a Better Leader. Here’s What to Do Differently I spend a lot of time asking employees about how leaders can be more effective communicators. Just yesterday, in fact, I moderated a focus group with employees at a fast-growing consumer products company. The people in the group provided the same feedback I hear time and time again: Leaders are pretty good at sharing information, but they’re lousy listeners. As a leader …

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15 Ways to Lead With Effective Communication Too many entrepreneurs become estranged from their teams, turn off partners, and lose deals, all because they lack basic communication skills. Often this lack of skill gets passed down to teams and the problems are perpetuated through the organization. Does your employer know how to communicate? Do you? As important as these skills are, somehow they don’t teach this stuff in schools. Now, according to Simon Sinek, when our …

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The 4 Brain Superpowers You Need to Be a Successful Leader, According to Neuroscience  Kevin Chin wants his executives to limber up their brains. Chin’s investment company, Arowana, based in Sydney, Australia, is expanding into London, Los Angeles, and Asia, and “it is imperative to have a senior leadership team that is mentally agile and resilient,” says Chin. Last year, the entrepreneur began working with Tara Swart, a neuroscientist, executive coach, and lecturer at MIT’s Sloan …

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This Is How CEOs Unplug from Work Unplugging from work in this modern, hyper-connected world isn’t always easy. That’s just as true for people starting their careers as it is for those running large companies. So, what is the best way to find that necessary (if often fleeting) escape from a demanding career? In the latest episode of Fortune’s Tech-Cetera series, we asked several top executives how they manage to unplug and untangle themselves from their hectic …

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15 Ways to Command a Conversation Like a Boss Conversations can elicit a range of emotions. They may be daunting, or they may be dreaded. They may be awkward, or they may be monotonous. The good news is, you, as a participant in any conversation, have more control than you think about whether these emotions overtake the dialogue. Having a successful conversation is about striking the balance between preparedness and flexibility, between explaining your thoughts clearly …

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These Counterintuitive Money Management Strategies For Freelancers Really Work It may be a freelance economy, but the unfortunate truth is that many gig workers aren’t saving enough for the future. Over 40% of people who are self employed don’t have retirement savings. The top reasons cited for this was lack of income, unpredictable income, and reliance on a spouse’s retirement savings. The situation is clearly worrisome. Fortunately, there are some money management strategies that can help freelancers …

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Entrepreneurial Lessons On Resilience From The World’s Great Minds Serial entrepreneur and writer/teacher Steve Blank has said he believes many of the great entrepreneurs came from families where there was a lot of adversity.“These are people who grew up in an environment where nothing was the same from day to day, where the only predictable thing was unpredictability.  And somehow, each day, the resilient ones make order out of total chaos, just as most start-up …

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How to Manage Your Career There is no shortage of books claiming to reveal the secret truth behind successful careers. Then there are all the podcasts, TED talks, late-night motivational speakers and your relatives’ sage advice. The bottom line of most of these advice-givers? A successful career requires managing the person in the mirror – overcoming your tendencies and habits that can undermine efforts to find happiness at work. Via nytimes.com. What to Do When You’re …

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If You Want Your Employees to Stick Around, Start by Creating a Positive Experience Consumers today have high expectations for experiences. Just look at what’s happening to scheduled TV viewership. Netflix now automatically provides recommendations for what to watch using predictive analytics, letting users control their own experiences by making specific choices and providing feedback through the ratings system. But there was also a time when looking at TV Guide magazine was the only way …

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The Top Leadership Lessons of 2017 From Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Tim Cook, and Google We notice you’re visiting us from a region where we have a local version of Inc.com. As the year draws to a close, I thought I’d look back at the stories that stood out and most resonated with my readers, involving some of the biggest names in business. You’ll find great  leadership lessons here to move you forward in 2018.  Jobs …

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12 Questions to Ask Your Boss in 2018 According to 2017 Gallop research, globally 67% of the workforce is disengaged in their jobs. These individuals are difficult to spot because they generally are relatively happy but do the bare minimum and aren’t usually sure what it is they are supposed to focus on or how their performance is measured. Only 15% of the workforce can be defined as engaged, meaning they are emotionally connected to …

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4 Rules for Strategic Givers It’s likely that your company logo is sitting in the bottom of some landfill. Likely, that is, if you’re among the majority of business leaders who try to woo clients, prospects, and employees with self-promotional gifts.You know the kind I’m talking about: food baskets, towels, T-shirts, hats, coffee mugs, and poorly made laptop bags. And for the more progressive companies out there: ear buds, cell phone projection keyboards, wine bags, …

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How to Build a Successful Team Building a successful team is about more than finding a group of people with the right mix of professional skills. Over the course of interviewing over 500 leaders for Corner Office, I asked them all about the art of fostering a strong sense of teamwork. Their insights can help you lay the groundwork for a highly productive team that can communicate, cooperate and innovate in an atmosphere of mutual …

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Science Says Kids Who Become Great Leaders Have Parents Who Teach Them 8 Things Every extremely successful person I know — and every great leader I know — is extremely good at convincing other people to follow them, convincing other people that their ideas make sense, convincing other people to take action… in short, successful people are extremely good at persuading other people. (Maybe that’s why Mark Cuban says knowing how to sell is the one skill everyone needs to be successful?) Via inc.com. The Growth of the Gig Economy: A …

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The Most Powerful Thing You Can Do Is Be Yourself For 17 years, Cyndie Spiegel worked for some of fashion’s biggest brands, including Coach and Narciso Rodriguez. In 2015, with her experience as a yoga teacher as well as her work as a speaker, small business strategist and coach, Spiegel founded The Collective (of Us), a business accelerator designed to help women entrepreneurs develop their companies through networking, community building and the sharing of helpful tools …

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What Entrepreneurship Can Teach Us About Life We often think of entrepreneurs as larger-than-life characters. They take big risks. They make their own rules. They innovate and experiment, questioning things everybody else takes for granted. It can almost seem like entrepreneurs are a breed apart. But they’re not. All of us are born with the ability to take risks, think creatively and challenge the everyday way of doing things. And as hokey as this can …

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7 Clues You’re Unknowingly Sabotaging Your Strengths One of the most effective ways to take this journey to a more integrated, authentic understanding of ourselves is to explore our personal belief systems. Few psychological dynamics are as fundamental as our beliefs. Beliefs literally create our reality; they are the lenses or filters through which we interpret the world. Read more at success.com.     What drives the value of a business — and what drains it …

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Why You Should Never Schedule Anything at the Top of the Hour As you probably know, a top productivity tip and regular habit of mine, is to write my to do list the night before. I don’t have to stick to that schedule exactly, but it gives me a path to follow. However I’ve noticed they make one key mistake – they schedule tasks for the top of the hour. Many of the highly-productive people …