Your performance review is your time to shine. To increase the odds of a positive review with fewer unpleasant surprises, meet with your supervisor to discuss specific goals you would like to accomplish over the next year. Write them down. Find time every three months to meet your boss for 15 minutes to discuss performance, the goals you're working toward, and three key performance measures--quality of work, quantity of work, and initiative. Ask for feedback, and note concerns. At each meeting,…

Work teams can be powerful tools for productivity, but they lose impact when dysfunction affects five critical areas. Diagnose your team's health by examining how well your team performs on each of the following:

1. Trust and ability to be vulnerable with one another.
2. Ability to share and offer ideas freely, without inhibitions, and with acceptance.
3. Forming a consensus, identifying a project, and pursuing it to completion, with each member feeling important to its successful outcome.
4. Silence…

Are you a critical thinker? Critical thinking is your ability to make decisions or judgments based on thoughtful steps taken to produce more answers that accurate and reliable. Critical thinking isn't just an expression suggesting one think through a decision. Critical thinking is also a learned skill and a large field of study that includes examining techniques for describing and analyzing a problem and knowing how to evaluate potential solutions, reasons through the data, and use sound…

Dealing with difficult people is one of the most queried topics in workplace wellness. There are 92 titles on Amazon.com that contain this phrase. Virtually all guidance focuses on changing yourself, not on changing others. Coping falls into three broad personal intervention categories: actions to take, attitude adjustments to make, and interactions that you make with those who rub you the wrong way. These three prongs of coping include options ranging from accepting the quirkiness of a certain…

Knowing how to break down cultural communication barriers in the workplace is essential to maintaining productivity. Fail to tackle this important goal and productivity losses will be almost certain. Thankfully, there are thousands of resources that discuss cross-cultural workplace communication, but just a few tips will make you a pro. Be aware and accept that biases and stereotypes about other cultures affect you - and everyone else. With this awareness, think before you speak, learn about…

All of us eventually receive constructive or negative feedback at work. How do you respond to it? Accepting feedback is one of the toughest soft skills to learn because it is usually surprising and often unplanned, and it confronts something initially outside our awareness. Even if delivered softly with a smile, constructive feedback can leave you feeling vulnerable and off guard. There's power in accepting feedback graciously because of the relief felt by the person giving it to you. This will…

Why volunteer in your community? The obvious answer is to help an altruistic, nonprofit organization meet its goals without it incurring extra labor costs. Beyond a loving act of giving, volunteering has powerful personal benefits. Volunteerism can fight depression and anxiety because it offers a positive distraction away from negative "self-talk" scripts that often accompany these conditions. The act of giving back serves as a strong counterbalance. The result is you are happier helping…

Sales copywriters persuade, and good ones are paid big bucks for their craft. You may never write a sales letter for American Express, but you can follow the secrets of sales copy pros. Follow this basic outline to write more persuasively and you will see more success in your attempts to inspire change: State the problem, state the impact (issues, symptoms, etc.) caused by the problem and state how the problem has been managed ineffectively until now, and discuss the risk that will continue if…

It's tough to watch a coworker suffer with a personal problem, and it's natural to want to help. But when does helping turn to enabling? This question helped give rise to employee assistance programs to assist employees with personal problems and is a popular route by which many clients seek help. But when should you recommend the EAP (or another source of help if your organization does not have an EAP)? The answer is simple: at the very beginning. You can be a friend and recommend the EAP at…