As an employer, you can better understand your employees’ traits and roles within your organization by using personality tests. Personality tests can be extremely valuable to all employers across many different industries and organizations.

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.

The Holidays are such an important time of year for small businesses. For many, especially in retail, the Holidays may make or break the entire financial year. Craft fairs and holiday markets have become popular among both consumers and small businesses during this time. But are businesses doing all they can to maximize their retail sales from holiday markets?

Owning your own retail business can be an exciting, albeit challenging, undertaking. When you look around at some of the larger brands you can see how shifts in consumer behavior and brand loyalty has changed the success and trajectory of a once rather predictable industry. For instance, Wal-Mart announced earlier this year that they would close 269 locations in 2016, accounting for roughly three percent of their stores.

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.

No matter what market or industry you’re in, running a small business can be tough. Because competition and consumer demands are so high, you’re constantly looking for ways to increase market share and grow the business.

But what can you do on a strategic level that will have a big impact? Quite a bit, actually. One thing many business owners fail to realize is the importance of having a mission statement, and recognizing their value proposition.

No matter what industry you’re in, there’s bound to be some kind of workplace politics at play. People are always striving to look good, jockeying for a promotion or strengthening connections with the “right” people. And more often than not in these situations, there is some kind of power dynamics in play.

These power dynamics become even more evident under certain stressful situations, like when you’re giving feedback to another colleague in the office. Giving feedback to others is a key part to team success, but you need to consider who you’re giving it to, their position, and how responsive they might be based upon the power dynamics at play.

Since the dawn of the workplace, the relationship between management and subordinates has been a complicated one. Managers are trying to maximize the performance of their teams and a necessary part of that process is providing constructive criticism to individual contributors.

But knowing how to provide feedback to subordinates in a way that doesn’t ruffle any feathers can often get tricky. There’s always the danger of someone taking things too personally, creating drama, or damaging team morale.