Career Skills

Imagine if you had the magical ability to read people's minds. You would always know what they were really thinking, and how they formed their opinions. You would be able to tell if they were lying. You would know what decisions they were going to make even before they did. Wouldn't it be great if you could always know just the right thing to say to influence them effectively? Well, it turns out that this isn't a magical superpower at all - it is simply the ability to analyze people.

The HBR Guide to Dealing with Conflict will give you the advice you need to understand the most common sources of conflict; explore your options for addressing a disagreement; recognize whether you—and your counterpart—typically seek or avoid conflict; prepare for and engage in a difficult conversation; manage your and your counterpart's emotions; develop a resolution together; and know when to walk away.

Do you want to overcome stress? Do you want to learn to assert yourself? Do you want to be understood? Do you want to understand other people? These are just some of the concerns that developing your emotional intelligence will address. Having a high intelligence quotient may not be enough to achieve success. Psychologists say that emotional intelligence affects performance. It has a huge impact on your professional success.

Whether you talk, text, or email, Effective Communication at Work has everything you need to help boost your workplace performance and productivity. From honing listening to polishing speaking and writing skills, this essential guide delivers simple, powerful strategies and timely tips that can help you increase the impact of your business communication and correspondence both online and offline. Learn how to build stronger relationships and advance your career by mastering the art of effective communication.

Most of us want to choose inclusive, respectful, and empowering language when communicating with or about others. But language—and how we use it—continually evolves, along with cultural norms. When contradictory opinions muddle our purpose, how do we align our word choices with our beliefs? Who has the final say when people disagree? And why is it so hard to let go of certain words? Afraid of getting something wrong or offending, we too often treat words as right or wrong, regardless of context and nuance.

Carol Fleming wants to show you that small talk is not as “small” as you might think. It’s the foundation of every relationship, professional and personal. It is the sound of people reaching out to each other, searching for similarities, shared interests, goodwill, connections, and friendship. And it’s something we all do every day with people we know. It’s just the one little bit about strangers that throws some people off. Graceful social conversation can be learned, even by those requiring the smallest of baby steps.

The best and the brightest use advisors and experts. Whether in business, sports, entertainment, academia, or politics—expert help is a fundamental enabler of success. That means that the demand for expert advice will grow and the competition will increase for such help. This isn't a matter of "certificates" and "universities," it's a matter of specific skill and behavioral sets that create a trusting bond and reliance. Trusted advisors are beyond coaches—they are comprehensive resources and supporters.

Strategic thinking has become a core competency for business leaders globally. Overused and under-defined, the term is often used interchangeably with other strategic management terms. This book delineates and defines strategic thinking as an advanced, conceptual cognitive capability, focusing on the nonlinear, divergent, a-rational, and informal nature of strategic thinking. This unique and practical book is an original primer of how successful strategists learn to think strategically.

Are you a new manager or struggling to get your employees on track? Are you struggling to get your people motivated, or not sure what it takes to push them to be high performers? How to Manage People is a great guide to help you make a move from being the boss to being someone your people admire and respect. Leading people can be a complex and daunting task, but those complexities are broken down into seven easy and actionable steps.

Addressing the distinctive communication skills expected of attorneys - and based on three decades of experience coaching lawyers - this manual of practical, useful solutions integrates cutting-edge discoveries in human factors, linguistics, neuroscience, gesture studies, and sports psychology. These techniques will transform any attorney into a more confident speaker, whether addressing colleagues in a conference room, counseling clients in a boardroom, or presenting a CLE in a ballroom.

Personal presence is difficult to define but easy to recognize. People with presence carry themselves in a way that turns heads. When they talk, people listen. When they ask, people answer. When they lead, people follow. Personal presence can help you get a date, a mate, a job, or a sale. It can help you lead a meeting, a movement, or an organization. Presence is not something you're born with - anyone can learn these skills, habits, and traits.

Master negotiator and New York Times bestselling author of You Can Negotiate Anything Herb Cohen says, "Negotiation is the game of life." With his signature humor and self-deprecating style, Cohen explains how to learn powerful yet subtle negotiating ploys to help in business, career, and even family relationships. With his extensive international negotiating experience and unique presentation style, Herb offers this essential guide to the art and practice of negotiation in the 21st century.

As a manager, you know it takes more than just delegating tasks to your team to succeed. It takes building trust, having open communication, and offering complete transparency. That's where this book comes in. Offering innovative concepts and practical tips, it will help you build strong relationships with your team, communicate effectively, and empower them through coaching and delegation.

Help! I Work with People is not a book about leadership theory, but rather a handbook on how to connect with people and influence them for good. With his signature transparent and relatable storytelling, Chad Veach uses modern research and biblical principles to encourage you to lean into your leadership potential regardless of your level of influence or experience. In short and easily digestible chapters, he addresses the three phases of becoming a quality leader: learning to lead the hardest person you will ever be in charge of-yourself and more.

The flood of information, unprecedented transparency, increasing interconnectedness - and our global interdependence - are dramatically reshaping today's world, the world of business, and our lives. We are in the Era of Behavior and the rules of the game have fundamentally changed. It is no longer what you do that matters most and sets you apart from others, but how you do what you do.

Highly acclaimed author, trainer, and presenter Paul Sloane demonstrates how the lateral leader develops the vision, culture, and processes that transform a regular business into an innovation hothouse. With a lively, energetic and practical approach, The Leader's Guide to Lateral Thinking Skills will teach you dynamic, up-to-date techniques to unleash the creative energies of your people and reveal how to put the techniques to work immediately.

Getting an MBA takes time and money, making it inaccessible to many people who want to take charge in the business world. Now The 12-Week MBA offers an alternative way to learn business essentials, focusing on the skills and knowledge required to succeed as a manager and business leader. The 12-Week MBA’s unique premise is that there is a core set of business skills that entrepreneurs and future leaders of organizations can learn and will need regardless of their industry, function, or level.

This comprehensive guide to training your brain to do more for you presents a pragmatic set of tools to apply critical-thinking techniques to everyday business issues. Think Smarter is filled with real-world examples that demonstrate how the tools work in action, in addition to dozens of practice exercises applicable across industries and functions. Think Smarter is a versatile resource for individuals, managers, students, and corporate-training programs.

Getting heard is a tricky business: It’s what you say and how you show up, filtered through your audience’s assumptions and biases—and maybe even your own. For women, people of color, immigrants, and queer folks, there’s often a dissonance between how you speak and how we collectively think powerful people should speak: like the wealthy white men who’ve historically been in charge. But, fortunately, the sound of power is changing.

Your projects, programs, and career turn on the difference between "no" and "yes". Yet selling ideas, especially the kinds of ideas that make organizations work, is a skill shrouded in mystery. Part emotional intelligence, part politics, part rhetoric, and part psychology, selling ideas is not like tricking someone out of his money. It's about helping others to see things your way: engaging their minds and imaginations.