How to deliver service with a smile when no one’s smiling back.

More than 11,000 business books are published every year—an overwhelming choice for busy professionals. Therefore, in partnership with getAbstract, Training brings you April’s top three business books recommended to our readers.

Welcome to Training magazine’s second annual Top Training Videos (Ttvs) Awards Program. Here’s your chance to showcase your filmmaking abilities. Submission deadline has been extended to July 7, 2015.

The annual Curtain Call Program provides an opportunity for Florida Blue sales representatives to demonstrate their ability to conduct strategic and consultative sales discussions with agents, brokers, and clients.

Contrary to popular belief, people don’t do better just because you tell them they’re doing something wrong. Some things to consider before you offer feedback.

Do you have to be staring at your phone every time you have an idle moment, or are you compelled to reach for it because that’s what you’ve trained yourself to do?

Getting clarity is the first practice of personal leadership. It allows you to connect to an inner source of inspiration that will call you forth and compel you to achieve a powerful new vision.

Quality is almost always harder to monitor and measure than productivity. Tracking quality requires regular auditing of work product, close attention to the details, and plenty of subjective judgment calls.

A partnership with speech analytics company CallMiner has helped contact center provider Afni harness the power of big data, become more effective in coaching its agents, and identify opportunities for targeted training.

The more you know your customers and how each of their interactions with you is experienced, the better you can enhance their total experience to make it legendary.

Versatility is the ability to recognize differences in communication preferences and to adapt to make others more open and receptive—creating more effective and productive relationships.

Research shows that common characteristics of what makes a good boss include: My best boss listened. My best boss backed me up. My best boss respected me.

Host leadership is about building relationships—at work, in the community, in society, at home—to engage others. This engagement is the key ingredient that leads to increased performance and results.

As you move your programs to the virtual classroom, start by making sure your instructional designers are virtually competent. Then, task your trainers with the following goal: facilitate virtual classroom learning experiences that meet or exceed the learning outcomes expected in a traditional face-to-face experience.

When people become comfortable questioning and challenging assumptions about work, it often becomes clear that redesigning the work—doing it in a new way than was originally specified—is often the best option.

Sixty-seven percent of employees report that more than half of the meetings they attend are of no value, according to a recent study. Apparently, we’ve cured many diseases, but not one for the common meeting.

Nearly 50 percent of Tenaris’s white collar employees indicated on two separate surveys in two years that their performance reviews were not helping improve their job performance. In response, Tenaris implemented the Feedback Actions Campaign to improve the annual performance evaluation process for more than 7,000 employees.

No matter how thoughtful and well-designed the training, you still need to make sure all the right factors are in place to care for and nurture it through that critical and precarious incubation period. If the climate is suitable for learning transfer, the training sticks, thrives on its own, and ultimately blossoms into fruitful returns.

We need to think out of the box to create social learning environments that foster communication.

When people learn about positive accountability—holding themselves and others accountable in a way that motivates everyone to get the results expected of them—results begin to improve immediately.

IT products and services company Cisco’s Leadership Breakthrough is a nomination-based leadership development program for high-potential directors and principal engineers in Cisco’s Development Organization.

This is not a skill set reserved for politicians or CEOs. It’s a skill anyone will benefit from. The more people you know, the more access you have. The deeper each relationship goes, the easier it is to work together.

Training should be treated as an opportunity to prepare sales reps through repetitive practice that makes the steps of the sales process easy to perform while still being attuned to the needs, wants, and resistance of prospects.

Approximately 72 percent of 191 organizations surveyed in Brandon Hall Group’s recent Team Development and Performance Study said team performance has a positive or extremely positive impact on overall productivity.