While it can seem daunting, building a strong network is pivotal to success in your professional life. You need reliable connections that can help you or your business grow. Even if you are not the most outgoing person, you can develop the skills you need to be an effective and memorable networker.

After an exciting promotion to a management role, the transition from co-worker to manager needs to be as smooth as possible. Follow these do’s and don’ts to ensure you earn the respect of your team as well as your organization’s leaders.

Do you look around and think your employees or colleagues are bored in your meetings? Are you, perhaps, bored yourself? If this sounds familiar, your meetings are unproductive, and you and your employees would be better off getting work done, rather than meeting. Though meetings ranked as the number one office productivity killer, according to a survey of U.S. professionals by Salary.com, meetings are important in every business and necessary to get tasks accomplished. Learning how to conduct effective meetings will change the way work gets done in your business. Your employees will look forward to their meetings and leave feeling excited about the progress. With a little planning, leadership, and monitoring, meetings can be both effective and enjoyable.

When one of your employees is delivering a sub-par performance, you need to have a difficult discussion. Talking to employees about bad performance can be uncomfortable, but having a script for bad performance reviews can make your job easier and give your employee the best chance at improving.

Persuasion is perhaps one of the most misunderstood word in today’s culture. People think of “Persuaders” as phoney people in suits, trying to convince people to do or buy something that only benefits the persuader themselves.

Bret Cody works in customized training at PCC CLIMB. He is an expert in various technical services.

George Knox is an instructor for PCC CLIMB's Professional Development and Training Center who specializes in writing. He teaches such courses as Business Writing, Business Grammar, Writing On-line Content, and Note Taking & Minutes.

 Christopher Dennis is a professional development instructor at PCC CLIMB. His classes include Project Management, Process Mapping, Change Management and custom topics.

Updated May 13, 2022

Why do people hate change? Because most people feel comfortable doing what they have always been doing. Psychologically speaking, it’s not just that people fear change, (although they absolutely do). They genuinely believe what they’ve been doing, and how they’ve been doing it, is the best possible way to do it. And the longer they’ve been doing it this way, the better, more efficient, more economical, etc., it is (or so they believe).

This is the summary of a paper written by Global Corporate College, a partner with CLIMB.