Office Communication

Asking questions is more effective than trying to know all the answers, says Andrew Sobel, author of Power Questions: Build Relationships, Win New Business, and Influence Others. The right questions “make people like you, trust you, and want to work with you.”

Organizations tend to get insular. You and your team can easily start thinking from the inside out instead of from the outside in. Some ways to get closer to your customers:

“A change agent,” write the authors of Who Took My Pen ... Again?, “has the courage to see things that are and know they could be better, and to see things that aren’t, and work, dream, plan, and learn about them, in order to bring them into reality.”

What’s the rule on these four sentence-starting and -stopping strategies? 1. Starting a sentence with “and” or “but.” 2. Launching a sentence with “There is” or “There are.” 3. Ending a sentence with a preposition. 4. Starting a sentence with “how­­ever.”

You’ve probably heard the one about Gen Y’ers wanting—and ex­­pect­­ing—constant feedback. Two things to know about that generational myth: First, it’s not ex­­actly true. Second, if you accept it at face value, it could get in the way of good intergenerational relationships.

Negative employee attitudes and less-than-professional behavior can poison the workplace atmosphere. Here are six solutions for real-life issues from subscribers on handling problem employees before morale suffers.

“The issues most people struggle with have little to do with our ability to do the work,” says Quint Studer, author of The Great Employee Handbook: Making Work and Life Better. “It’s all the things that happen around the work. ... It’s whether we make life easier for our co-workers or more difficult.” He offers these four workplace secrets:

Peter Hurley, headshot artist for celebrities and executives, tells The New York Times that the most important element of a good headshot is the eyes.

Whether you're stuck on the elevator with the CEO or meeting new people at a networking event, 'power chatting' can be your ticket to making a good impression. Here's how to make those conversations work in your favor.

Bosses aren’t the only ones who can provide feedback to employees. Giving negative feedback requires you to counsel and criticize in a way that alerts a co-worker to where the problem lies and what must be done to solve it. Follow this seven-step method: