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Forbes
4 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Be Easy To Work With: The Overlooked Career Skill That Drives Success
A group of professionals collaborating effectively "Be easy to work with." That was the most impactful piece of advice my mentor gave me early in my career. I had just stepped into a challenging stretch role that required me to grow quickly, learn new skills and make a noticeable impact. Eager to succeed, I reached out to her because she was an experienced and accomplished leader. When we met, my primary question for her was, 'How can I make the right impression and thrive in this new position?' I expected her to say things like "leverage your strengths," "work hard," or "be yourself." All solid advice, but that's not what she said. Her response was simple, practical and powerful: "Be easy to work with." That insight has stuck with me. Over the years, I have seen it hold true not only in my career but in the experiences of countless professionals and leaders I've coached and developed. Regardless of role, industry or level, being easy to work with is an underrated but essential skill that strengthens collaboration, builds trust and drives long-term success. 5 Practices to Be Easy to Work With Backed by research and practical experience, these five practices have consistently helped professionals and leaders become more collaborative, trusted and effective across diverse roles and industries. 1. Focus on We Instead of Me Do the people you interact with to get work done believe that you understand and have their best interests at heart, or do they feel you are leveraging the situation for selfish gain? Trust will remain low if others perceive you as focusing only on your interests. To build trust, you must approach working with others with a self-orientation of "we" versus "me." Taking the time to understand others' perspectives, goals and solutions is the foundation for successful collaboration. People will almost always bring varying views about any complex situation that requires collaboration for success. Asking open-ended questions to understand how others perceive the work at hand is a crucial first step in finding shared meaning for collaborative work. To establish a "We" perspective, you must regularly ask two types of questions: 𝗤𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗧𝗼 𝗨𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗢𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿' 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝗤𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗧𝗼 𝗚𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗦𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 Taking the time to ask questions does not stop you from sharing your perspectives about the situation; it just means you choose to ask questions and understand others' views before sharing your own. 2. Deliver Results Credibility is built by consistently doing what you say and delivering quality work. I often see articles and posts that focus solely on the relational aspects of being an effective employee (such as kindness, empathy, listening and understanding), but do not give equal weight to the importance of delivering results. To build relationships and gain influence, people must believe you can and will get the job done. Consistency is a crucial aspect of reliability. Be someone others can rely on to get the job done. When you deliver on your commitments, trust is built. Establishing clear responsibilities, next steps and timelines enables people to rely on each other, whether meeting deadlines or fulfilling their duties. 3. Demonstrate Emotional Competence Our brains and bodies are hardwired to react when we feel threatened. This instinctive reaction is why many well-intentioned, skilled and competent individuals make poor decisions that negatively impact themselves and others. Understanding our physical responses to negative emotions helps us recognize when it's time to pause. Pausing allows our minds to catch up with our emotions before we react out of anger, fear, fatigue or frustration. Emotionally competent people do not blame circumstances or conditions for their behavior. During challenging interactions, establishing a long-term orientation by aligning our "in the moment" intentions to our longer-term goals and values helps us to: 4. Seek Feedback Regardless of your talent or level of effectiveness, you will have flawed perspectives or sometimes make mistakes. Asking team members, stakeholders or managers for their feedback demonstrates that you value their perspectives, have a growth mindset and want to continually improve. Since giving feedback feels risky for people, we must be deliberate about creating a safe environment by actively giving permission and expressing openness and desire to receive feedback about our performance. To regularly receive honest feedback, we need to minimize potential obstacles while encouraging others by: 5. Practice Reflection Reflection is a humbling yet powerful tool that helps us improve our performance. However, it is not easy, as it requires us to look honestly at ourselves, including our strengths, weaknesses and areas that need improvement. A practice of reflection often leads to insights, learning and ideas to test future experiences. Research shows that regular practice of reflection increases our capacity to demonstrate emotional intelligence, social skills and learning agility. Rolfe et al.'s (2001) reflective model is probably one of the simplest reflective models, as it centers on asking three straightforward questions: What? So what? Now what? This practical approach to reflection provides a framework for assessing experiences, making meaning of them and determining what they mean for future action. Below are some example questions for you to use to customize your reflection process: What? So What? Now What? Why You Should Be Easy to Work With Being easy to work with is often overlooked when professionals think about skill sets for advancing their careers and that is a mistake. No matter how high your level of technical skill, experience or intelligence, it will be your ability to effectively collaborate, communicate and adapt with others that will make the difference for long-term success. If you want to grow your influence, advance your career and build lasting professional relationships, start with this: Be easy to work with.
Forbes
5 days ago
- Health
- Forbes
How To Better Estimate Task Time And Improve Productivity With Timebox
Woman hands holding a Time blocking weekly calendar to better estimate task time Have you ever sat down to tackle a 'quick task' and realized an hour later that you're still not finished? You're not alone. Your brain can make it really hard to estimate task time accurately, and it's costing you time, energy, and momentum. This isn't just poor planning, it's psychology. There's a well-documented cognitive bias called the planning fallacy, first described by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. It explains why we consistently underestimate the time it will take to complete tasks, even when we've done them before. Kahneman explores this bias in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, showing how our brains are wired for optimism when predicting our performance. But here's the twist: While many people underestimate task duration, others overestimate it. If you tend to overthink, overplan, or procrastinate, you might be overestimating the complexity or risks involved. This often appears in high achievers, perfectionists (check my Time Management quiz), or individuals who've experienced workplace trauma or intense pressure. Instead of thinking, 'This will only take 30 minutes,' you might spiral into:'What if I mess it up?' or 'I need more time to prepare.' This emotional reaction makes the task seem bigger and more overwhelming than it really is. So whether you're underestimating or overestimating, the result is the same: your calendar gets chaotic, and your day slips away. 5 Steps To Better Estimate Task Time Try time-tracking for just one day. Notice how long it takes to reply to emails, finish a presentation, or do a complex task, like coding or writing. You'll quickly spot patterns, such as how long you can normally stay focused, or what distracts you. You can use your watch or a Pomodoro timer. The Sunsama app, for instance, is not only a daily planner but also helps you plan your time and track the actual time each task takes. To-do lists are good for capturing tasks, but not for planning when and how you'll do them. That's where timeboxing comes in. By assigning each task a specific block of time on your calendar, you reduce the risk of overcommitment and create space for breaks and unexpected delays. In my book, Timebox, I guide readers through estimating task time based on their unique time personality and energy levels. One of the most significant breakthroughs my clients experience is realizing how much less they need to do, and how much more they can actually finish, when they plan with clarity and compassion. We often underestimate tasks because we believe we can power through them. Instead, try setting focus blocks of 30 or 45 minutes. This makes it easier to stay engaged and helps you develop more precise mental models of time. Additionally, be very specific about what you'll do during each block. For example, instead of a vague task like "Working on presentation," specify what you want to accomplish in 30 minutes: review it, create the outline, or practice speaking it out loud. It will help you get straight to work and avoid overthinking what you need to do. At the end of the day, review what got done and how long it took. Adjust your plan for tomorrow. Was the block realistic? Were your expectations too high? Challenge yourself to understand what's really holding you back. Sometimes, it's not poor planning, it's just perfectionism. If you're unsure, check in with a coach to explore whether your expectations are realistic and sustainable. Whether you're leading a team, managing your inbox, or juggling life's responsibilities, learning to estimate task time more accurately can reduce stress and help you feel more in control. Once you master this, you may discover there's more time in your day than you thought. The more intentional your day is, the more you can accomplish, I promise.
Forbes
23-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
You're Using AI — But Are You Using It Well? Three Steps To Consider
Robot and human fingers reach out to the other, symbolizing the promise of our future. Artificial ... More intelligence has the power to transform our lives. It needs humans to step up to harness this power. The other day I stumbled on a term I'd never heard before: SolidGoldMagiKarp. Originating from the anime world of Pokemon, it is the idea of something so rare to be almost unreal. The phrase was making rounds due to ability to cause glitchy behavior in AI when used as a prompt. And, I wondered if I had missed yet another concept in the ever-expanding universe of artificial intelligence. That feeling — of brushing up against something new, strange and must-know — is felt by many and more often now than ever before. The rapid transformation of AI innovation is rivaled only by its pervasiveness in our lives. According to McKinsey's AI in the workplace 2025 survey, nearly all employees (94 percent) and C-suite leaders (99 percent) use gen AI tools. And yet, just last year's Gallup's poll asking employees on frequency of AI use at work had nearly seven in 10 saying they never use AI, while only one in 10 employee reporting weekly use. This dramatic change in usage of AI in the workplace comes at a cost. Workers are more worried than hopeful about adoption of AI, those who feel hopeful comprising of mostly of young professionals and those too scrambling to keep up. Almost 80% of users are bringing their own AI tools to work (BYOAI). Lacking clear guidance on what constitutes acceptable use of AI, more than half are unwilling to admit using AI at work. If you are feeling like you are chasing a mythical carp, you are not alone- 77% of employees report being lost on how to use AI in their jobs. AI Use ≠ AI Mastery Symptom 1: Surface-level productivity The advent of AI was meant to usher a transformation of how we work. And yet, Digital Work trends report found two-thirds of employees use AI primarily for cross-checking their work. Reason? It is a precarious time at work. Despite hopes of post-pandemic balance, meetings and after-hour work dominates a typical workday. Almost 70% report struggling with the pace and volume of their responsibilities, while nearly half say they feel burned out. A Microsoft 365 study found 60% of users spend their time on applications such as Outlook and Teams—responding, coordinating, and keeping up. In this environment, it's no surprise that employees reach for generative AI tools—not to innovate, but to simply keep up. If AI has to fulfill its promise, the scope of human bandwidth will determine the extent of AI mastery. Symptom 2: AI Dependency without discernment There is a tendency to trust AI generated work without verifying facts, citations, or data sources. Seldom do users critically evaluate if the content is accurate, complete, or unbiased. Educators have been sounding warning bells about plausible-sounding answers that are incorrect — hallucinations in AI-speak. But this issue is not limited to academic world. With work pressures and looming deadlines, AI provides a welcome short-cut to keep up with deliverables. Pick any AI tool. Trained to display a 'know it all' tech-authority while spitting out abundance of information, it lulls us to forget that it does not 'know' things and is simply predicting plausible output based on training data. Is this behavior a reflection of our own tendency to 'satisfice' —make decisions that are good enough rather than optimal, bound by the limits of our finite cognitive capacity, and real time constraints? AI's limitations are architectural, not cognitive — but like humans operating under bounded rationality, it produces output that will suffice. The danger? Unlike humans, it doesn't admit when it is wrong — and never signals uncertainty. Can AI companies take steps to have their tools acknowledge when a query pushes at its predictive boundary? They can and they should if hallucinations are to be managed. Without such guardrails, our AI dependency sans due diligence will remain a liability. Symptom 3: Ethical blind spots It seems like we are living through the Wild West era of AI — where tools are advancing faster than the legal and ethical frameworks needed to govern them. Just like in the 1800s American frontier, this new territory shows promise — but also peril. Businesses are rushing to stake their claims, often with no rules of governance in sight. Consider the case of an HR manager who gets the go-ahead to integrate AI into the firm's recruitment platform to streamline resume filtering. In a short period of time, it goes live and deemed a huge success as it slashes time-to-hire by half. Months later, it's discovered that the AI systematically downgraded women and minority applicants based on biased training data — leading to legal exposure and public backlash. Such blind spots are rampant due to lack of clarity on questions such as ownership of the training data including liability for IP violations for any embedded copyrighted material or steps for auditing its algorithms and many more. Why This Happens: AI's Flooded Learning Curve Generative AI tools are constantly 'learning' and the pace of advancement is such that even tech-savvy professionals are struggling to keep up. Jargon like multi-modal, tokenization, neural networks, retrieval-augmented generation abound and even playful terms like SolidGoldMagiKarp seem like secret passwords to a club we didn't know existed. Many feel a growing pressure to sound competent with AI, even if they're privately unsure of the what's and the how's. Others, excited to explore the new features and capabilities, end up with hours of wasted effort going down rabbit holes. Watching colleagues use custom bots or showing off complex prompts may make one question one's techyness, falling prey to the classic imposter syndrome. Could it be that rather than drowning in data, today's professionals are drowning in expectations? When the learning curve becomes a tidal wave, even the best talent is likely to tread water. From Confusion to Control: Stepping up your AI journey Step 1. Identify Your AI persona Begin by assessing your relationship with AI. Reid Hoffman, in his recent work on AI and its future, introduced four personas to categorize how people think and feel about artificial intelligence: Doomers, Gloomers, Bloomers, and Zoomers. He describes Doomers as those who view AI as an existential threat to humanity; Gloomers with less extreme views but still fearful of AI's role in deepening inequality, misinformation, and job disruption; Bloomers as cautiously optimistic of AI; and Zoomers, the early adopters embracing all things AI and viewing it as a force for growth and innovation. Reflecting on one's relationship with AI is increasingly important, especially for professionals and leaders navigating rapid technological change. Being overly skeptical or overly optimistic will determine how you engage with AI. For instance, Doomer may shy away from valuable learning opportunities, while a Zoomer may be susceptible to overlooking ethical red flags. Leaders need clarity and insight on their own stance before fostering discussions around AI strategy, policy, and implementation for their organization. There is no 'One size fit all' AI strategy but auditing your AI persona can help guide what works best for you and your organization. Step 2. Audit Your Current AI Use and Go Deeper AI can accelerate your workflow, but if you're only using it to get things done faster, you may be missing an opportunity to learn and grow. Ask yourself: Am I using AI to save time — or to think better? Is there a way to pose this query from a different angle? Even if your current AI use is predominantly drafting emails, how about learning to automate this task by creating templates with AI's help! Next, reconsider how you typically treat AI output- review or copy and paste. Doing latter means you are risking errors or misjudgments or worse your job and reputation. Workplaces are increasingly adopting internal AI governance tools such as Microsoft's Purview or plagiarism software such as Copyscape and Grammarly Business. Instead consider the concept of Collab score that in essence is about well a human and AI collaborate on a task, whatever the task may be. Did you just accept the AI's first output or did you revise it, critique it, build on it or even better sough follow-up questions? Collab score is a measure of interaction quality with higher score reflecting engaged, iterative use leading to high quality outputs and lowered risk, and thus, getting at the heart of meaningful human-AI teaming. Step 3. Learn the Tool, But Also Understand the System You don't need to become a machine learning expert — but you do need to understand that effective AI use is an iterative process. The real value comes not from a single prompt, but from refining, questioning, and building on what AI gives you. Where to begin? Try LinkedIn Learning that offers concise videos on AI that targets different professions. Subscribe to credible sites such as MIT Technology Review's AI section or newsletters such Brave New Words by Salman Khan of Khan Academy is another great resource. Though written for educators, it offers great insights on how to customize one's learning journey, on using AI as an ethical guide helping navigate the web with one's own filters of do's and don'ts and finally, as an assistant willing to handle the mundane stuff, freeing time to innovate. And if all this seems effortful and time consuming, how about using AI as an entry point to AI. Reid Hoffman suggests navigating to your favorite gen AI model and starting a new chat with prompts that begin with, 'Explain agentic AI to me like I'm five', to 'Explain agentic AI to me like I'm in high school', and then graduating to 'Explain agentic AI to me like I have a PhD'. Invest in learning about prompt engineering which in simple terms is about designing effective prompts to get accurate, useful, and consistent outputs from AI systems. The best news about learning AI from AI is that it does not judge— there are no dumb questions.
Forbes
22-07-2025
- General
- Forbes
Why You Feel Guilty For Not Working On Vacation
When you normalize real time off, you model something healthier. You finally take a break. You turn on your out-of-office message, log out of your inbox and set your phone to silent. But within a day, something creeps in. You think about the project you left unfinished. You wonder if your team is struggling. You feel a quiet pull to check in. Not because you have to. Because you feel like you should. This is the guilt of not working on vacation. It is common. It is subtle. And for many high performers, it is relentless. Even when you have earned the time away, even when nothing is expected of you, the absence of work creates its own kind of tension. That tension is not about laziness. It is about identity. It is about pressure. And it is about how deeply we have internalized the idea that rest must be justified. Work Is No Longer a Place In the past, vacation meant leaving work physically behind. When you were out of the office, you were unreachable. The only connection to your job was a voicemail message and maybe a fax machine. Work ended at a door. Now, work travels with you. It lives in your pocket. It pings your screen. It follows you to the beach and the dinner table and the hotel lobby. You can be on holiday and still respond within minutes. So when you choose not to, it feels like a decision you have to defend. This is not just about technology. It is about how the boundaries around work have blurred. We no longer measure commitment by presence. We measure it by responsiveness. And responsiveness is always possible. When work is everywhere, rest feels like resistance. And that resistance can start to feel like failure. Guilt Is a Product of Culture Many workplaces celebrate overcommitment. People are praised for working late. For answering emails during dinner. For 'jumping on a quick call' while on holiday. These actions are seen as dedication. But they are often symptoms of guilt. That guilt is reinforced by silence. If you take a break and no one covers for you, you feel like a burden. If your absence creates pressure for others, you feel like a slacker. If someone sends a message and you do not reply, you feel like you are letting them down. In cultures where being always available is normal, taking real time off can feel selfish. Or even unprofessional. You start to think less about what you need and more about how your absence is being perceived. The guilt builds not because you are doing something wrong, but because you are doing something different. Your Value Is Not Measured by Presence One reason vacation guilt hits so hard is that many people tie their worth to their output. You are seen as reliable, so you are always available. You are known as efficient, so you reply quickly. You are respected because you deliver. When you stop doing those things, even temporarily, a question lingers. Will people think you care less? Will your value slip? Will your absence create doubts about your role? These questions are rarely voiced. But they sit beneath the surface. And they often lead to small compromises. A quick message here. A few emails there. Just enough to show that you are still around. Still useful. Still important. But rest is not absence. It is recovery. And your value does not disappear just because your notifications do. Time Off Is Not Something You Have to Earn Again Many professionals approach time off like a debt. You take it, but you feel like you have to pay it back. You stay up late the night before to get ahead. You return to double the workload to make up for being gone. You promise yourself you will catch up as soon as you are back. This mindset makes vacation feel transactional. You are not resting. You are borrowing time with interest. And that interest gets paid in guilt. But rest is not a luxury. It is not indulgent. It is part of the job. It is what sustains performance. You cannot do your best work if you are never allowed to step away from it. When you normalize real time off, you model something healthier. You show your team that recovery is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of professionalism. And you prove to yourself that your worth is not based on constant activity. You do not need to apologize for taking a break. You need to protect it.
CNA
21-07-2025
- Health
- CNA
Work It - Why the silent strain of menopause in the workplace is too costly to ignore
Brain fog, insomnia, mood swings – many women brush aside these symptoms of menopause, thinking it's just stress. Senior HR leader Julie Lee, shares how the biological changes affected her career and explains why companies need to rethink their policies to retain talent.
