As a manager, it’s your job to handle a broad range of issues that affect your workforce—engagement, morale, turnover, and communication, among others. But all these issues are part and parcel of an even greater challenge: Employee productivity, the amount of work your team produces in a given time period.

Cross-functional teams come in all shapes and sizes—marketing and sales mashups, product and engineering collaborations, customer service and web design partnerships, and more.

It’s a long and winding path to the top and when you get there you can’t just put your feet up and take it easy. Being a great leader is all about how you approach not only your work and business but also your day-to-day life. There’s a lot to stay abreast of, from office politics to the sales forecast, resolving HR problems to installing new collaboration software to ensure your team work together cohesively.  Do you have what it takes? Let’s find out!

Keeping your team motivated can be tough. In fact, only 13% of employees feel actively engaged across the globe. That's a tough number to contend with.

Are you providing leadership to your team? Do you have a good understanding of who does what in your team and how long it takes? Are you inspiring your workers to be more successful? Are you spending all of your time managing paperwork or clients, leaving no time for managing your employees? Are your employees happy and productive? If you aren’t sure about the answers to these questions, why aren’t you? Finally, how could you improve your leadership?

Being a team leader is a tough job with a lot of responsibility. It can also be massively satisfying when you see the progress made by your team over time. You can learn a lot about yourself in this role too. If you want to be proud of truly contributing to the success of a team and the personal growth of the staff then the following are a few of the best ways of going about it.

Many people go through their entire careers dreaming of becoming a leader, but without fully understanding what the role is all about. This is the type of job that is ideal for some people but not for everyone. Therefore, before setting your heart on being a leader it is worth looking at the most important skills needed and seeing whether you possess them.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve noticed that fitness watches are everywhere. You might even be wearing one right now – but even if you aren’t, you’ve seen them around. For health-minded people, these ingenious devices provide all kinds of useful feedback: number of steps taken, number of calories burned, number of hours slept, etc.

Cloud computing and related technologies are becoming increasingly attractive to smaller businesses, and it’s not hard to see why. This trend is simply following in the footsteps of all of the technological advances of the last few decades – designed to, among other things, help smaller businesses compete more effectively with large corporations. And it works.

SMBs have their own kinds of challenges and can prove highly sensitive to fluctuating market conditions. They can also be dynamic, fast-growing and innovative. Whatever the circumstances, they require great leadership – yet many business owners come close to sinking their own ship.