When you’re promoted to a position where you must manage former peers—or current friends—it’s only natural to want them to like you. But at the same time, as a manager, you need to demonstrate fairness. Earn the respect of the team and build trust with these tips:
Lunchwalla.com reduces the effort involved in organizing lunch meetings. The site pulls together reviews, menus, OpenTable reservations and an RSVP function into one central location. Gazelle.com gives you cash for your business’s out-of-date gadgets.
Fear of flying is common; as many as one in five people suffer from some form of aviophobia. If you or your boss must fly for business, this news should help calm your fears:
How are companies feeling about the future? A recent McKinsey survey reports executives are feeling positive about their companies’ ability to rebound: 74% of respondents say they expect companies’ profits to rise over the next 12 months.
20 years ago this would have simply been a string of pronouncable syllables to describe the noise your furnace makes when it first starts up in the fall. These days, it represents 3 of the top 4 places people go to search for information the Internet, according to The Nielsen Company. The 4th by the way is Facebook: Not going there, can’t make me; at least not for this article.
“Excel error messages aren’t always terribly clear to us,” says Melissa Esquibel, a Microsoft Certified Trainer who writes “The Office Tech Pro” blog. “We know we have a problem, but we don’t know where to go to start fixing it!” For example, she says, here’s how to decipher three of the most common messages:
“My boss is a dictating micromanager,” one of our readers recently posted on our Admin Pro Forum, “and I’m having difficulty handling the situation. How can I let him know that I can manage most situations with little or no supervision? I don’t want to be insubordinate, but he needs to stop breathing down my neck.” Workplace expert and author Roxanne Emmerich outlines three steps to cure micromanagement:
Many of the mistakes people make when job hunting could be avoided, says Robin Ryan, a vocational counselor.“I divide my time between talking to hiring executives, HR folks and working with job search clients. This gives me a very broad view of what people do that works, and what trips them up—often without realizing it,” Ryan says. The top reasons job hunters fail:
You’re taking minutes in a meeting when the conversation suddenly goes off topic. Or two attendees begin to argue. To what extent should you capture the conversation? Joan Burge, founder and CEO of Office Dynamics, offers these tips for turning meeting conversations into a valuable road map—even when the conversation is difficult to track.
Vertical look-ups or the VLookUp function in Excel has eluded many formula writers. See how a VLookUp works exactly the same way your brain does when you have to look something up.