Your product can be stellar, your staff can be super talented, but the one thing that customers are most likely to remember is their direct interaction with your employees. The secret sauce to great customer service and support is the people who deliver it.

If you hire a turkey, you can train and motivate that turkey. But in the end, you'll just have a trained, motivated turkey... not an eagle. Invest 75 minutes to discover how you can improve your hiring system, eliminate the bad hires and attract nothing but eagles.

For many people, writing for work is nearly as worrisome as public speaking. Every time you send an email or submit a report, you are being judged on your writing skills. Business writing errors (even simple grammatical mistakes) can complicate your message, confuse your readers, cost you money, diminish your professional image and hold you back in your career.

Just one bad apple is all it takes to infect the entire workforce and demoralize everybody. Don't let things go too far – learn how to put a strategy in place to combat negativity.

When tensions run high at work, emotions get frayed. An angry word, foul mood or bungled interaction can significantly damage your relationships with bosses and coworkers. You can’t change the way others feel and act; you can only change the way you react to them.

Terminations are the most stressful and legally dangerous moment for any HR professional or manager. Just one mistake during the process - a discipline error, documentation slip-up or the wrong words at the termination meeting - can spark years of litigation. Plus, you have to deal with the emotional fallout... risk of violence... and co-worker response. Do you and your management team know all the right moves?

When you're asked to take minutes at a meeting, you have the role of creating the "official record of the event" and ensuring that it is accurate. Key decisions made at these meetings can involve millions of dollars, so it's critical for you to take clear and precise notes. And by delivering accurate meeting minutes you gain the perfect opportunity to shine like a star.

Will you hire (or plan to hire) foreign workers in 2020? If so, the complex employment visa system has become even more confusing and unsettled. New restrictions, new deadlines and dramatic new changes to employment-based visa programs - especially H1-B visas - are being pushed by the Trump Administration. Don't get caught without knowing the rules on how to hire the best labor available, even if that means foreign-born assets.

You've been promoted… so now what? No one is born knowing how to be a supervisor. And no other job can prepare you for this challenging assignment. Now, you not only have to worry about your performance, you have to worry about how others perform, too. The good news is you can quickly add the "secrets" of successful managers to your supervisory toolkit.

When you need to analyze database-like data, you can only go so far with sorting, filtering, and inserting subtotals. Excel’s PivotTable tool hands you dozens of display and manipulation features.