Most lawsuits are not triggered by great injustices. Instead, simple management mistakes and perceived slights start the snowball of discontent rolling downhill toward the courtroom. Here are 6 of the biggest manager mistakes that harm an organization’s credibility in court. Use these points as a checklist to shore up your personal employment-law defense:

In case you missed it, The New York Times recently profiled the new CEO of Xerox, Ursula Burns. The article, and her quotes within it, focused on one of my favorite topics: leadership transitions. There’s a lot of valuable perspective and advice in the article, but I want to pick up on one particular aspect: How do you handle it when you move from being a member of the team (no matter how big) to the leader of that same team?

Being an effective manager means confronting those “challenging” employees who, while typically good at their jobs, too often display unprofessional or downright obnoxious behavior. Simply tolerating such workers is a finger-in-the-dike approach, and it runs counter to two traits of good managers—leadership and decisiveness. Managers who silently put up with such behavior will undermine their own authority.

Nothing right is going to happen with your team if the basic structure isn’t right. Some guidelines: 1. Look for signs that it’s too big. 2. Dispense with tactical trivia. 3. Enforce healthy norms. 4. Have your team review its structure.

How do managers miss out on ideas that might turn them into leaders? Here’s one scenario, as relayed by a midlevel federal employee: “My manager is not a mean person. Outside of work, he’s really nice. But the way he manages has sucked the morale out of our office ..." With some changes in behavior, this manager could invigorate his staff. Here's how:

Being an effective manager means confronting those “challenging” employees who, while typically good at their jobs, too often display unprofessional or downright obnoxious behavior. The best way to tackle such problems is to meet with employees right when you spot the problem behavior. Follow these guidelines, which have the side benefit of protecting the organization from employee claims that they weren’t treated fairly.

A perfect social networking policy to cover these new social media could be drafted using only a few words: “Be mature, be ethical, and think before you type.” Ultimately, you may decide that such brevity is what you want for your business. For the sake of completeness, though, here are the seven most important questions to ask yourself when drafting a social networking policy.

Drafting  performance reviews is always a daunting task for supervisors, for many legitimate reasons. In reality, it doesn’t need to be that way. One simple way to reinvent performance appraisals is to shift the responsibility for initial evaluations back to your employees.

“A meeting is an event where minutes are taken and hours are wasted.” This old saying may be true in many cases, but it doesn’t have to be that way. A bit of preparation, discipline and solid follow-up can help you conduct more productive and focused meetings. Here are 11 guidelines for supervisors and department managers as prescribed by meeting consultants:

Sometimes it’s not clear how cross-team projects should proceed. Follow these guidelines for accomplishing as a group what individuals can’t do alone.

When employees request leave, especially for unforeseen circumstances, they don't need to assert their FMLA rights explicitly by saying, "I need FMLA leave." In fact, they don't need to mention FMLA ...

With fewer people doing more work, here are three ways to ease the workload: 1. Give people more choices. 2. Help them prioritize. 3. Don't overload star performers ...

Pay attention to how you sound in response to being questioned or contradicted. If your people get the slightest whiff that agreement is what you prefer, that’s what you’ll get. To fight that possibility, take these steps:

Although many of the biggest changes in the new health care law won’t take effect until 2014, others kick in this year. These changes mostly affect insurers and the benefits they must offer. It’ll be up to you to understand (and explain) these changes to employees. Among the health insurance changes to expect in 2010:

Workplace budgets remain tight, yet recession-weary employees are more in need of morale boosters than ever. Now’s the time to use a little creativity to reward workers. Here are a few ideas from Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, whose advice appears on a Harvard Business Review blog:

I need some good employee-appreciation ideas—that don’t cost a lot of money. My company has about 500 employees working in different departments. I just started in HR about six months ago, and they don’t even recognize birthdays! I’d like to start an employee appreciation program. Some examples would help me sell the idea to top management. Can you share what you do in your company?—Rhonda, Miss.

Anything less than a completely honest performance appraisal will only cheat the employee out of personal development, plus it could set the stage for a discrimination lawsuit. Here are eight important do’s and don’ts:

Whether a group is dividing a restaurant bill or working on a shared budget, the more cooperative the group is, the more likely it can rise above a challenge. It helps a leader to understand, then, why some groups cooperate more than others.

If you're relying solely on your memory to evaluate employee performance, you're making appraisals far more difficult than necessary. That's why it's best to institute a simple recording system to document employee performance. The most useful, easy-to-implement way is to create and maintain a log for each person. Follow these six steps:

Inappropriate attire … tardiness … poor work habits ... sexually offensive behavior … personal hygiene. HR professionals are routinely forced to discuss those uncomfortable topics with employees. What's the most awkward conversation you've ever had to have with an employee? How did you approach the discussion? How did it turn out?—The HR Specialist Forum Editors

President Obama’s 2011 budget plan calls for the U.S. Department of Labor to hire 100 new enforcement personnel and gain $25 million in new funding to target employers that misclassify workers as independent contractors (ICs). This comes on the heels of a huge IRS audit program starting last month that randomly selects 6,000 employers for audits over IC and other employment tax issues. Here's a three-factor guideline on how to classify employee or Independent Contractor based off the IRS checklist:

The FLSA allows employers to round off an hourly employee’s arrival or departure time to the nearest five minutes, tenth of an hour or quarter of an hour. But your rounding practices can’t always favor the employer. Rounding must be neutral or it must favor the employee. That means if you round down, you must also round up. You have several ways to make rounding fair:

At real estate settlement firm Title Source, President and CEO Jeff Eisenshtadt doesn’t care who’s right. He cares what is right. Around the office, Eisenshtadt has posted signs containing what he calls “isms”: They’re the words of wisdom that he expects his employees to live by—and that he uses during their evaluations.

Nothing irks like jerks at work.  But some workplace behavior goes beyond being merely annoying.  When the actions of “challenging” personality types land you in court, these workers become a liability – in every sense of the word.

You know the saying: One bad apple can spoil the whole bunch. If you’re a manager, you may occasionally encounter a bad apple. So what does a leader do to stop “problem” employees from spreading their negative influence?