No matter what your career, you cannot avoid other people. Every career requires you to work with people for one or the other reason. In order to be truly successful at your work, people skills are important along with technical knowlegde and experience.

Performance appraisals are never the best time of the year. Often we only get a glimpse into one side of the story - either the manager's or the employee's side. This article gives you a glimpse into the side that you do not know about.

Giving negative feedback is dreaded in the personal and professional contexts. Lack of sensitivity and skills in giving constructive feedback can result in feelings of dissatisfaction, unhappiness, resentment, and/or discouragement, none of which serve the purpose for which feedback is intended.

Who is a perfect boss: the one who is cheerful, professional, experienced and fair. But in reality this does not exist. Building a productive working relationship with the existing imperfect boss is a more practical solution. 

The building, protecting and repairing of relationships is at the center of all our lives - personal and professional. As a supervisor or manager you will build and maintain thousands of relationships during your career. This makes it worth developing your relationship skills. Here are some tips on building good relationships at work.

We spend a lot of time with colleagues in the workplace. It's only natural that at least some of those relationships would turn romantic. Romance can certainly make coming to work more interesting! However, getting involved can be somewhat risky both for your career and for your relationship. So get to know some 'rules' before you get into a relationship.

Work is not just about projects, numbers and negotiations; it is also about relationships with your co-workers. Maintaining healthy boundaries with your co-workers plays a big part in a successful professional life and a healthy organization. It is a fine balancing act to be friendly and approachable and at the same time not to overstep boundaries. When colleagues become friends it is a completely different ball game, one that needs to be played with sensitivity and finesse.

The Sexual Harassment Act stipulates Sexual Harassment as an offence. As more and more women join the work force in India, men and women work in close proximity for long hours. The possibility of mutual attraction between colleagues and even romantic involvement becomes very strong and so does the issue of Sexual Harassment. We all have a responsibility towards ending sexual harrassment at the workplace.

We all have moments when our emotions get the better of us. Not surprising, considering the fact that we face stressors at the workplace that include budget cuts, layoffs, deadlines, irate customers or an unreasonable boss maybe. Of course when things are going well,  work is a breeze but it is when things get rough that negative emotions come into play.

32 year old Shiamak is brilliant, creative, energetic and aggressive. A financial and strategic genius is what some would call him. Despite his brilliance and talent Shiamak is perceived by his peers and subordinates as self promoting, remote and intolerant. Relationships with his peers and subordinates were not a priority with him. He has just discovered a major production setback in an extensively publicized new product. Thousands of orders have been delayed, angry customers are furious and who knows how this news will affect the company's stocks. Things would not have reached such a crisis for Shiamak, if he had understood the value of building relationship with his peers and had his subordinates found him approachable, he might have been able to appreciate the cross-functional challenges of developing this particular product. Like so many other talented people he lacks the emotional competencies that would help him work better as a team.