News & Tips
Managing a Negative Influencer
Dear Crucial Skills, I have an employee who makes negative comments and tries to undermine leadership. She is a great teacher, but she creates a toxic environment with our staff, and she has a strong influence on them. How can I handle this behavior? Signed,Seeking Suggestions Hi Seeking, I’m...
Glassdoor Predicts the Top 4 Workplace Trends for 2022
Instability has been the recurring theme of the last 22 months, and that doesn’t seem to be changing as we enter the third year of the pandemic. Employers want to enter 2022 as prepared as possible to take on the challenges plaguing the workforce, including stress, burnout and financial...
How Good Management Skills Help Entrepreneurs Succeed
The key to success as an entrepreneur is developing good management skills. That’s right, it might seem impossible at first glance, but with a little bit of training and practice, you’ll see that the more time you put into improving your management skills, the better off you will be in the long...
3 Ways to Keep Your People from Burning Out
Encourage people to speak with trusted peers, check in on them, and approve their solutions to stave off burnout. With the Covid-19 pandemic poised to begin its third year, business leaders face a host of significant challenges. Among the most significant is that in many industries demand exceeds...
How Companies Have Adapted Their Training Under Regulation F
There is a lot of muscle memory in being a debt collector. From the time you begin training to the many similar phone conversations that are had day in and day out, there is a lot of repetition. It can be tough to unlearn certain behaviors and it can be easy to fall back into old habits. This has...
Employers Roll Out ‘Stay’ Interviews as Record Number of Americans Walk Off the Job
To keep employees happy, more companies are turning to one-on-one meetings to give key people the chance to talk about what is or isn't working in their current jobs. Americans are walking away from their jobs in record numbers as remote work has uncoupled jobs from geography, and droves of...
How to Have the Difficult Conversations Most Leaders Hate
It wasn’t my first difficult conversation as a manager, but it was one of the toughest. At the time, I was working as a consultant on a program for a large, household-name company. The team I led consisted of project managers who oversaw lots of data specialists and other technical types, all...
Goldman Sachs Says Young U.S. Workers Are Plotting Early Retirements
A survey signals that younger employees may also need more realistic expectations about how much money they’ll need in later life. They’ve only just entered the workforce, but a significant swath of the newest crop of U.S. employees are already making plans for an early exit. A full 25% of Gen Z...
Job Candidates are Ghosting Employers. Here’s How Companies Can Combat No-Shows
Home health provider Interim HealthCare of the Upstate currently has 51 open positions it's looking to fill. Since September, 17 candidates have canceled their interviews and 20 didn't even show up. Recruitment and retention tends to be difficult in the home health care industry, but it's been...