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Take a moment to think about your team. Chances are your team consists of a pretty diverse group of people who all have their various strengths and weaknesses.

While a diverse team has many benefits to the workplace, whenever people get together, there are bound to be different points of views that can lead to disagreements. It’s the manager’s responsibility to take care of any difficulties that arise within teams. An important way to properly handle a difficult situation is to truly understand the personalities you’re dealing with – after all there are nine different ones to consider.

Yes, nine different personalities. According to the Enneagram of Personality, a personality-profiling tool that dates back to 750 B.C, there are nine different personality types and everyone is said to fit into one of those nine. In fact, author and speaker Michael J. Goldberg believes that one’s personality type really says a lot about how that person acts at work.

Leadership is a complicated thing. It’s not complicated in the way you might imagine a difficult math problem to be; the impossibly intricate, weaving algorithms that decide what unnecessary Facebook status you see, for example. Nor is it a scientific formula, solved via two confluent processes engineered in an elaborate way to work harmoniously together. No, the secret of leadership simply cannot be unlocked with a concrete method or procedure that guarantees results every single time.

What is the reason for all this complication? People! People are the reason that no set formula will work. People are the reason leadership only flourishes via delicate, individual cognitive processes. People are the reason people often make critical errors and end up sinking their opportunity like a dead-weight.

People don’t function socially and ethically on basic formulas and equations. They work more subtly than that, and as a leadership role is based predominantly on the social and cultural equilibrium created by you in your working environment, a basic set of formulas and equations simply won’t work. Seemingly though, many professionals, trainers and failing leaders do not know this.

Once a person makes it to a certain rank in their company, it can be easy to become complacent, especially when things are going great and seem pretty darn easy. But instead of simply sitting back and coasting along, you could be long overdue for learning a new skill.

If you’re an efficient manager, you’re always encouraging your employees to grow, learn and adapt to the workplace and now it’s time for you to follow your own advice. But where do you start? For instance, do you lack knowledge about your organization, or does your companies’ social media campaign intimidate you?

It’s safe to say that everyone in the workforce has had a day or two where they wonder where the time went. You know that feeling, you sit down for work at 8 a.m. and it feels like just five minutes later, it’s 5 p.m.

While there are many reasons the days go by too quickly, the problem could be a method of communication that you can take anywhere you go – email.

According to a new report from the McKinsey Global Institute, we all spend about 28% of our workweek either reading, writing, or just responding to email. The Atlantic estimates that this equals to about 650 hours a year. Yikes!

Whether you’re part of a company with 50,000 employees or five, there’s no reason you and your team should work in a “bubble” with minimal or no interaction with other teams. Still, for whatever reason, oftentimes people from different departments don’t work on projects together.
A cross-functional team is another phrase that is thrown around the workplace, but it does serve a very real and tangible purpose. This term is referring to a group of people with different skill sets and expertise that work together for a common goal. For example, marketing and customer service, IT and SEO are all departments where it makes sense to collaborate.