Being in the communications field, I am often presented with questions from people who want to know how they should say, write or present something. Similar questions also come in from the media asking things like how a boss should tell an employee that he or she has body odor,...

Ten years ago when I started my first company, it began as a training consultancy firm. We wrote, designed and delivered soft skills employee development programs for our clients. It could be anything ranging from customer service to performance evaluation feedback. Then, that grew into requests to write management programs....

It's what makes life so unpleasant, miserable even. It's the bosses who make employees feel worthless, it's the wives, husbands, boyfriends and girlfriends who pick fights, it's the politicians who behave like utter buffoons and it's the parents who put their kids down. It's the bullies, the warmongers and the...

This country is not in good shape, an observation that will not come as a surprise to many, I know. And while it is easy, almost automatic in fact, to blame the leaders, we the people have a role, because we the people are the followers.

Normally, leading and following...

When I first began my career, and I mean like within the first few days, someone directly under me, but who was responsible for managing people, said, "Look, I'm not here to win a popularity contest. I'm here to do my job." She was describing her management style and I...

My mother would disagree. She still agonizes over how I went through living hell in school as a result of being dyslexic and undiagnosed. It pains her to think that there was something my father and she could have done to spare me the grief, humiliation and shame of not...

If you're a manager, then you know what it is to have a problem employee and are probably also familiar with how difficult he or she is to handle. It can be perplexing because no matter what you do, he or she doesn't seem to improve. In fact, more often...

In the grand scheme of things, there is a lot of information out there about what it takes to be a great boss. The problem is that much of it gets lost in the noise as we become mired in overly complicated, insufficiently realistic analyses and advice.

But if you...

There are many reasons why people dread having difficult conversations, with one of the standouts being fear of handling difficult people and their erratic, unpredictable ways. That fear is legitimate but misplaced. It's true that difficult people are expert at sucking the life out of a room and turning normal,...

Next to firing an employee and having to inform a coworker of various personal hygiene offenses, asking for a raise is up there as one of the worst, most dreaded workplace conversations of all time. Approaching the boss, asking for more money, trying to explain why you think you deserve...

When it comes to writing resumes, we are all confronted with the same, universal challenge. We have to articulate our experience and convey our personalities in a way that "sells" the reader on our "product," (which is us). To further complicate matters, we have to do this with only an...

People pay an awful lot of money for an education that is supposed to prepare them for the workforce, which in turn is presumably intended to help them create some degree of career success for themselves. But if that plan is to work, then a course needs to be added...

You're a hiring manager.... You feel the pain....

Sometimes it's more obvious than others when a candidate just isn't right for a particular job. It may be because his or her experience doesn't support the needs of a given role, or there may be an attitude problem that you fear...

It's amazing to me how often I come across organizational problems and inevitably learn that someway, somehow, there is a person with a pesky attitude problem buried at the heart of it. Each time it happens I think there must be a Buffoonery School of Business somewhere that I don't...

We should run businesses like a football game. I mean, how great would the professional world be if only the genuinely talented players made the "team" and only the best companies "won?" Where everyone had to work as hard as individuals as they did collectively? Where there is a direct...

Assumptions are often made about selling and moreover, what it takes to be a good salesperson. On one end of the spectrum, people in sales are thought of as overbearing, aggressive and pushy, while on the other, they are considered gregarious and demonstrative with "bigger than life" personalities. But these...

I've long been befuddled by Jekyll and Hyde routines of people, especially at work. But my all-time worst experience was with a boss I had early in my career who made the Tasmanian devil look like a tame soul. She was pretty in a scary way, kind of like Elvira....

Conspiracy theorist, I am not. But lately I'm feeling a bit more paranoid than usual. I don't know what's happening exactly, and I know even less why I seem to be the only one who thinks something is happening at all. But suffice it to say that almost everyone I...

This story gets worse by the minute. One more word from Ines Sainz and I think my head might explode. Just last week, she was once again in the press and making no sense. Actually, she was defending her appearance and her right to dress like a bimbo...

I don't know why I'm surprised that the banks have figured out a way to recover what the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act -- or Credit C.A.R.D. Act -- took away, but I am a little. If the Act was intended to create "accountability"...