When a key employee is promoted or leaves their position for any reason, a business needs to have a dependable, knowledgeable employee that can take their place. Even so, many businesses do not have a procedure in place to formally handle these types of large personnel changes. However, succession planning can be key to smooth transitions while capturing certain benefits and avoiding pitfalls such as the cost of turnover that results from any large or small personnel changes.

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.

The world is globalizing at an increasing rate, and trends don’t show signs of this slowing down any time soon. Here in the United States, we’re increasingly becoming a more diverse nation with every business industry consisting of a large variety of people from different cultures, life experiences, family types, generations, and more. This is why the ability to work across technologies, borders and cultures has become so important.

There’s something exciting about getting your business to the point of being able to bring on new employees. Your business is growing and you’re successful enough to be able to hire people to share some of the load.

On the other hand, there’s something tricky about hiring the right person for the job. As a manager or business owner, there’s a lot on the line in terms workplace culture and customer service quality, not to mention the time and resources it takes to train them. Hiring the wrong person and having them leave is something all companies seek to avoid, but it does happen.

Office politics exist in every workplace setting and are difficult to avoid. Even though you don’t need to participate in office politics to survive, putting your head in the sand and “not getting involved” isn’t practical either — if you aren’t careful, you can be embroiled in a problem you didn’t see coming.

The following top 10 best practices for navigating workplace politics and personalities should help you stay ahead of the game and keep you focused on why you are there — to do your job.

Every business has a seemingly endless amount of data to manage. When you combine financial, customer, administrative, and all the other information your business needs access to on a regular basis, it can be difficult to find what you need when you need it. You probably already use Microsoft Excel in order to manage some areas of your business. However, many business owners and managers fail to maximize the use of Excel and realize how it can make life a lot easier for both you and your employees.

Below are some of the benefits of Excel training and how it can transform your business. By learning how to use Excel beyond the basics, you’ll be able to save yourself quite a bit of time, money and headache.