Business

No one fully comprehends what it means to be a leader until they are in a top leadership position. Good leadership in business can be the difference between mediocre results, and a thriving department, branch, team, or business overall. Whether you are in charge of shift scheduling software, sales teams, operations, design team, or other below are some tips to implement, or refresh yourself with when looking for ways to improve your skills as a leader.

1. Refresh: Never stop learning and exploring ground breaking leadership tips, tools and techniques. Psychology is always making leaps and bounds in understanding the human psyche and how teams can reach their potential.

2. Listen: Listen to your team’s input. Your team could have great ideas to improve a process, product, or strategy. Without listening or encouraging your team to provide feedback and ideas you’ll miss out on brainstorming activities that can assist the company or your division.

3. Communicate Effectively: Most people think they are getting their points across, but many studies have shown what we think we are communicating and what people perceive can vary wide and far. If you’ve never taken a communication class this might be the time to find a good class to sign up to take. If you don’t have the time to dedicate to a class, sign up for a webinar, purchase high rated books and read them on your time at your own pace. Your team will thank you.

4. Set Goals: Set goals in your personal life, for your team, and encourage your team to set their own person goals so they have other motivating factors besides the bottom line. Create a fun game out of it, and reward those that reach their personal goals. Then encourage them to help their teammates reach their goals as well. Create a teambuilding and teamwork environment of inclusiveness so your team builds trust, wants everyone to perform well, and will work well together.

5. Develop Thick Skin: Since you’re at the top, if your team fails you will be the one to take the blame. However, on the plus side all failures bring lessons learned. Take those lessons to heart, learn from them, and create processes in place to avoid those mistakes in the future. You’ll take the burden on your back, but don’t go pointing fingers at why the project failed. Instead, engage in meaningful conversation with your team to determine what went wrong, and how to avoid it going forward.

6. Build Your Team’s Confidence: A team that doesn’t believe they can reach their goals most likely will not reach their goals. Confucius is to have said, “The man who says he can, and the man who says he cannot are both correct.” Build your team’s confidence, give them access to tools to help them, and most of all tell them you believe in them.

7. Invest in Your Team and Yourself: Just as you as a leader need to recharge, stay up to date on current leadership tips and tools, your team also needs to be invested in to help them grow. Think of great leaders you had in your past (if you were lucky enough to have one!), and think about how they motivated you, invested time and resources into you, and pay it forward.

8. Organization: A team must be organized to get their job done. Ensure your shift scheduling software is set up properly so your team knows when meetings are, and arrive on time to optimize your meetings’ efficiency. Have your most organize staff member keep notes and communicate them to the team. Keep track of goals, and overall strategies. Most importantly develop and organize your departments’ or company structure.

9. Respect: Respect goes both ways. If you don’t respect your team, their thoughts, ambitions, and ideas they probably won’t think much of you as a boss or a leader. While not every idea is great and can be implemented you can thank your team member for their input in a way that doesn’t put them down. Command respect, but don’t be unkind.

10. Recognize Your Team: Rewarding and recognizing your team is also important. While some of your employees might need more encouragement than others, it is always a good idea to recognize your team for their hard work. You can have a fun fake awards luncheon, let someone go home an hour early for reaching their sales goal, or come up with your own fun way to recognize your team’s hard work and dedication.

11. Develop Trust Both Ways: Trust goes both ways. Sometimes stress and pressures of leadership can make you feel like you need to have more control over the goal, strategy, or project to make it perform better which can lead to micromanagement. Ultimately, this stifles your team and doesn’t allow them to do what they are capable of doing. You have to learn to trust your team to do what they were hired to do.

You can implement some of these tips and tactics no matter what your position is within your company. Everyone can have a positive impact on their goals, team, or project by stepping up. If you are the organization’s leader its always good to refresh to improve your results. If you are currently on a team, or in a lower-level position, acting like a leader and cultivating your skills will help get you noticed and can help you move up into a leadership position. Go lead, go learn, and create positivity in your team!

Money moves that you think sound great at the time can actually end up being big mistakes. Bottom line is, there are many potential investment opportunities for you to select from, but many don’t give you a rate of return that’s in line with your goals of retirement. In fact, many can’t even keep up with the inflation rate, so you won’t even make money on the deal.

Let the voice of reason guide you in your investments, and heed these warnings about the top worst things you can do with your money.

Investing too conservatively: This is one of the worst offenses. You may want to just dip your toes in the investing waters, but you may be taking it too safe with CDs, bonds and the like. Take an average CD, for example, which will give you a return of maybe one percent a year. With bonds, you could probably eke out about two percent. Of course, checking accounts are the worst, giving you not much better than a half percentage point. Inflation is about two percent right now, so you can see you won’t be making any money with these options.

Purchasing annuities: People hear that they can get a regular cash disbursement for the rest of their lives, so they go with annuities. However, this is something insurance companies offer their customers as a consumer investment product that can provide either regular fixed-income payouts (a fixed annuity) or variable payouts based on the performance of the underlying investments, according to The Motley Fool. The investments in fixed-income securities can’t keep up with the inflation rate, meaning you lose money in the long run. On top of that, you’ll pay large commissions and annual maintenance fees.

Helping others out: While your parental protective instincts will kick into overdrive when your adult children ask you to bail them out of a dire financial situation, take a moment to think that over. If you are well off and have the means to do so without compromising your own retirement, good for you. However, if your own retirement account is modest at best, keep your interests at heart and decline helping family and friends. Your children are young enough that they can recover, earn degrees for more earning power, get better jobs, and eventually get back on their own feet. If you are already in retirement and use a good portion of it to help them out, what are you left with? You could live another 30 years. How will you live it?

Chasing high-yield stocks: While high-dividend stocks can form a solid part of your portfolio, going after a stock because of its past performance and high yield is foolish. Always do your research to determine the sustainability of the dividend payout and the business model.

Of course, the top mistake you can make is not protecting your investments by letting a stock broker handle everything while you turn a blind eye. Stock fraud happens all too commonly in this country, which is why you need a securities lawyer on your side.

2016 was a busy year for everyone, especially for the FDA. Last year, the FDA passed several guidance documents and drafts relating to digital health. They also cleared a huge number of devices and had notable conversations with vendors throughout the year. The FDA even turned down certain devices that were considered certain to be cleared in 2016. A lot can change in a year in digital health.

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A Year for Guidance

The FDA spends a lot of time clearing new devices for publication. In June 2016, the FDA brought out a draft guidance that is designed for companies to help with FDA 510k. The guidance that was published was also brought out to help makers of medical devices understand how the FDA thinks about the patients and their access. It is a hot issue to talk about, but patient advocacy and the rights of patients allowed to access their own medical data is an important one.

According to an article by Healthcare IT News, technology evolvement is powering patient access, access to care, and access to new ideas. The connections that can be discovered with patients via smartphone, messaging and video offers an infrastructure to remotely monitor patients. Digital health and platforms pointing to analytics allow the medical devices in the home to remotely identify and help health issues. Healthcare can move forward with the ability to capture the data of real-time patients, which will put medical help light years ahead. People looking for companies to help with the FDA 510k process are going to be better off as the FDA are clearing devices better than ever.

Not Cleared

The FDA is more than just a rubber stamp on innovation and new devices, and this is proven by the fact that there are still several medical devices that have yet to be cleared. In 2016, the FDA refused the approval of what could have been the first drug on the mass market that included an ingestible sensor. Companies such as http://www.fdathirdpartyreview.com/ are there to help those looking for FDA approval and walk them through the process to hopefully avoid being declined.

Digital healthcare services are continually evolving, and like most things that relate to the federal government, the FDA’s future is still unclear right now despite a general assumption that incoming President Trump might relax FDA regulations.