Shutterstock As a manager, watching an employee ask for a raise can often create cringes, forehead slaps, and even worse, anger and annoyance. While conversations about compensation and career paths are important parts of cultivating teams and organizations, not enough employees prepare for the talk. Worse, they often commitbasic errors that effectively kill the conversation, and make mistakes that can easily be avoided.

Shutterstock It’s exciting to start a new job. A new job gives you a blank canvas on which to paint your new brand and identity. You can make your mark in awhole new way in your new job, but a new job and a new environment can also be overwhelming. New employees worry about making mistakes like these: Watch On Forbes: 1. Having to ask a co-worker their name after you’ve already been introduced (perhaps two or three times). 2.

(Photo courtesy of Shutterstock) It is frustrating to invest the time and energy into applying for a job opportunity and not hear back about your application. If you want to know the status of your application and stay top of mind, you will need to follow up.

Shutterstock In high-stress situations, our emotions often lead us to act in ways we later regret. Renown psychologist and Harvard Medical School instructor Susan David offers invaluable lessons for navigating our inner world of thoughts and emotions in her new book, Emotional Agility. We can easily get “hooked” by our feelings when facing difficulty, says David.

Managing extraordinarily creative people is challenging if not impossible. But you can bring out their best if you give them leverage, inspire and enable them. Their leverage comes from understanding and taking full advantage of their own natural talent, temperament and inclinations. Inspiring them is about protecting them, pointing the way forward and encouraging them. Enabling them is about giving them the resources, time and space they need to imagine, play, practice and create.

Credit: Shutterstock It all started in elementary school. You remember the kid who thought he or she had the answer to every question, right? They interrupted others, always wanted to have the last word, and even had to be right on the playground. Unfortunately, the workforce is not all that much different. Many of those know-it-alls never seem to change. In fact, one might be sitting across the room from you right now, or even worse, they’re in the corner office down the hall.

Shutterstock I was speaking recently with a friend who was relatively new to his job and was confused: He had two major project responsibilities with deadlines approaching, didn’t have adequate time to complete both of them, and was uncertain about which one to focus on. “Well, do your job objectives provide a clue?” I asked. “Which of the two projects is the higher priority?” “I don’t have any job objectives yet,” he replied.

Call me old-fashioned, but I’ve found person-to-person networking is still one of the most powerful business tools there is. Twitter, LinkedIn and the rest have their place, of course. But in a digital era when everyone is swarming virtual channels, old-school networking is especially important. It’s a lost art, and one that’s worth re-learning.

Today, the foremost priority for working millennials is finding the right balance between achieving success and finding our purpose. In our fast-paced world where emphasis is placed on delivering results at all times, sometimes, the lines between success and purpose are blurred. Eric Termuende, founder ofDRYVER, a tech-based people consultancy focuses on helping organizations become “future-ready”, and close the talent and age gap in the workplace.

Shutterstock Change is the only constant in today’s ever-evolving business landscape and with it comes the need to stay nimble. Reacting to customer needs and an increasingly competitive industry, Western Union has done just that – shifting away from a traditional business model and undergoing a significant transformation to support new digital initiatives and expanded global offerings.