e-lifeandwork: Learn New Skills Online | Online Courses & Real-World

What are the four powerful steps to build your confidence? On paper, even the most successful and high achieving among us can lack in confidence. Oftentimes, a lack of confidence is the sole reason why we don’t take certain risks or seize opportunities. It is a key component in success and in life, and yet it escapes us at a different point throughout our journey. What if we knew how to get it back? Angie Morgan is a retired U.S. Marine and founding partner of LeadStar. She is also the author of Spark: How To Lead Yourself And Others To Greater Success. I recently interviewed Angie to talk about where confidence comes from and more importantly, how to get it. (This interview has been lightly edited for space and clarity.) Watch on Forbes: Kevin Kruse: Why is your book titled Spark? Angie Morgan: Well, with the work that my colleagues and I have been doing, what we do is go into organizations and train and develop leaders. What we always find is that the people who stand ou...

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Short-term business goals are the secret ingredient to achieving long-term company goals. Short-term goals act as the bridge between the broad, strategic view of the C-suite and the focused, tactical lens of managers and employees by breaking the over-arching vision into smaller pieces. They allow employees to take on manageable workloads while demonstrating progress towards that larger goal. When setting short-term goals, you must define how, how much and who. These components are critical for turning strategic planning into tactical execution. The How: Defining objectives If the goal is the destination, then objectives are the directions. Objectives are tactical steps taken to achieve an outcome. But like directions, there can be more than one way to reach a destination. It's important to remember that unlike goals, which are fixed, objectives can be changed. How a goal is achieved is not as important as at...

In a world that is evolving in so many ways, faster than ever before, CEOs, C-Suite leaders, and boards of medical device and diagnostics companies often find themselves in a challenging position. On the one hand, rapid changes in digital technology and societal expectations for healthcare delivery have resulted in unprecedented opportunities to innovate and transform for game-changing growth. On the other hand, investors and shareholders often demand consistent short-term returns, frequently quarterly. Many top leaders know about best practices and fundamental principles of leading to their companies' aspirational purpose, vision, and mission. However, despite this, they share with us that there can still be a gap between this aspiration and the reality of the sometimes "strange" responses that employees, partners, and other stakeholders may have to moving in a different direction to create long-term value. These dynamics can include persistent conflicts across the...

Happy and healthy employees can help enhance a team’s overall productivity. The more productive and collaborative your team is, the more successful your business will be. As a leader, part of your role is to model good habits to increase productivity, whether it’s by making time for self-care routines or by creating the perfect organizational system that works for your team. Below, 15 Fast Company Executive Board members share the unique habits they believe can help boost the personal and professional productivity of staff members across the company. 1. Practicing self-care Self-care looks different for everyone but for me it includes things like observing a regular skincare routine, getting in a few yoga sessions per week, and switching to reading books when I realize I’m doom scrolling or watching too much trash TV. By taking care of yourself, you’ll have more energy to be your best self at work and you’ll be more empathetic to team members when they’re struggling. – Maddy O...

Upskilling DevOps is a Key to Building a Resilient Organization Businesses without effective strategies to upskill DevOps will find it challenging to ingrain resilience in their organizations. With the entire globe embracing innovation-first culture, there is a significant amount of evolution in the business landscape. Recent developments in cloud computing, virtual reality (VR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML) are helping enterprises to revolutionize their workflows. Many enterprises are finding it challenging to leverage these technologies to get a competitive advantage in the new business paradigm. CIOs should consider developing a resilient DevOps team to ensure the organizations’ security, efficiency, and scalability. Today customers expect a quicker and simpler application deployment and development process, improved stability, and product quality. To suffice and exceed this customer demand, enterprises need to invest in upskilling their DevOps te...

Low-Skilled Workers Are An Untapped Asset If You Invest In Them Organizations around the world continue to struggle to attract the talent they need, with the shortage leading to intense competition between companies. This is prompting organizations to look wherever they can for the skills they need. A recent paper from Harvard Business School highlights how low-skilled workers are often an untapped resource, and that improving the skills of workers already on the payroll is often a more effective solution than looking externally. The report reveals, however, that low-paid workers are often criminally underinvested in by their employers, with many succumbing to the belief that there is a naturally high turnover of such staff, so there is no point in investing in them. "Most employers show little engagement in workers’ lives, provide minimal support for skill-building, give infrequent or unclear feedback, and offer almost no guidance on career pathways," the authors ...

As the jobs market remains tight (mass layoffs and hiring freezes in tech aside), companies are laser-focused on retaining staff. One of the areas they’re investing in is upskilling, which aims to teach employees new skills in departments with which they’re unfamiliar. For example, Walmart announced in 2021 that it would invest nearly $1 billion over the next five years to provide its employees with access to higher education and training. Unsurprisingly, “skilling” platforms have benefited enormously from these investments. According to Crunchbase, upskilling and reskilling startups raised $2.1 billion from VCs between early 2021 and 2022. One of the winners is GrowthSpace, founded by Omer Glass, which leverages algorithms to match individual employees and groups of employees with experts for development sprints. The company today announced that it raised $25 million in Series B financing led by Zeev Ventures, with participation from M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund) and Vertex Vent...

Countless things can distract business owners and leaders from their primary roles. Often this is to drive sales and push their company forward. To succeed, however, you must manage and guard your time well. The key is not only getting everything done but also avoiding burnout and feeling satisfied and accomplished at the end of the day. With that said, check out these 12 tips for fresh ideas or reminders that will assist you in stepping up your time management game. And, in turn, become the most productive boss ever. 1. Pick your rubber balls and glass balls. Taking on multiple tasks at once can be detrimental to your productivity and health. Because of that, priorities are critical. And, to prioritize, you need to think in terms of rubber and glass balls. When you drop a glass ball on your team or business, you will suffer long-term consequences. You should take care of these ones by yourself if you don't want them broken. Rubber balls, on the other hand, can be ha...

As more folks move to work remotely or hybrid, it can become difficult to keep track of tasks and projects. It’s not so easy to pop over to a coworker’s cubicle and ask about the status of a project, and it can be annoying to message a coworker about the status of a project over and over. Because teams are no longer working in close proximity to each other, there has to be a way to all be on the same page when it comes to time management for businesses.  Queue time management applications. By signing your company up for a time management app, you can track everything from your desk. This makes it much easier to keep track of everyone and everything, from start to finish. Time management apps are a great way to make sure nothing is forgotten while staying on track to complete your tasks.  Here are five of the best time management apps for businesses.  Monday.com Monday.com is relatively new to the time management and project management game, but it packs a punch...