While some of us enjoy a lively debate with colleagues and others prefer to suppress our feelings over disagreements, we all struggle with conflict at work. Every day we navigate an office full of competing interests, clashing personalities, limited time and resources, and fragile egos. Sure, we share the same overarching goals as our colleagues, but we don't always agree on how to achieve them. We work differently. We rub each other the wrong way. We jockey for position.

Every organization has its share of political drama: Personalities clash. Agendas compete. Turf wars erupt. But you need to work productively with your colleagues - even difficult ones - for the good of your organization and your career. How can you do that without compromising your personal values? By acknowledging that power dynamics and unwritten rules exist - and navigating them constructively.

Are your working relationships working against you? To achieve your goals and get ahead, you need to rally people behind you and your ideas. But how do you do that when you lack formal authority, or when you have a boss who gets in your way, or when you're juggling others' needs at the expense of your own?

Written by team expert Mary Shapiro, the HBR Guide to Leading Teams will help you avoid the pitfalls you've experienced in the past by focusing on the often-neglected people side of teams. With practical exercises, guidelines for structured team conversations, and step-by-step advice, this guide will help you pick the right team members; set clear, smart goals; foster camaraderie and cooperation; hold people accountable; address and correct bad behavior; and keep your team focused and motivated.

Meetings. They hold such promise for moving your business forward but are rarely executed well. We all know what we're supposed to do to run meetings effectively, but we seldom do it. Why? Perhaps we think it's just not worth the time to clarify what we hope to accomplish, craft an agenda, handpick participants, issue pre-work, and send out notes. But preparation and follow-up is time well spent. This guide offers tips to make your meetings easier to prepare for, more enjoyable to run - and more productive.

To help your employees meet their goals and fulfill their potential, you need to provide them with regular feedback. But the prospect of sharing potentially negative news can be overwhelming. How do you construct your message so that it's not only well received, but also expressed in a way that encourages change? Whether you're commending exemplary work or addressing problem behavior, the HBR Guide to Delivering Effective Feedback provides you with practical advice and tips to transform any performance discussion.

Whether you're managing your first project or just tired of improvising, this guide will give you the tools and confidence you need to define smart goals, meet them, and capture lessons learned so future projects go even more smoothly.

Help your employees help themselves. As a manager in today's business world, you can't just tell your direct reports what to do: You need to help them make their own decisions, enable them to solve tough problems, and actively develop their skills on the job. Whether you have a star on your team who's eager to advance, an underperformer who's dragging the group down, or a steady contributor who feels bored and neglected, you need to coach them: Help shape their goals - and support their efforts to achieve them.

As a manager you have to make decisions - from daily choices about team priorities to deciding which long-term innovation projects to pursue. But most decisions don't have a clear-cut answer, and assessing the alternatives and the risks involved can be overwhelming. You need a smarter approach to making the best choice possible. The HBR Guide to Making Better Decisions provides practical tips and advice to help you identify the problem, evaluate your alternatives, select the right path forward, and follow through successfully.

Can you prepare a breakeven analysis? Do you know the difference between an income statement and a balance sheet? Or understand why a business that's profitable can still go belly-up? Has your grasp of your company's numbers helped - or hurt - your career?

The best leaders know how to communicate clearly and persuasively. How do you stack up? Leading experts such as Deborah Tannen, Jay Conger, and Nick Morgan provide the insights and advice you need.

The critical leadership practices - the ones that will allow a leader to make the biggest impact over time - are well established. They're about how you create a vision and inspire others to follow it. In this comprehensive handbook, strategy and change experts Ron Ashkenas and Brook Manville distill proven ideas and frameworks about leadership from Harvard Business Review, interviews with senior executives, and their own experience in the field - all to help rising leaders stand out and have a big impact.

This book will inspire you to: thrive on pressure like an Olympic athlete; manage and overcome negative emotions by acknowledging them; plan short-term goals to achieve long-term aspirations; surround yourself with the people who will push you the hardest; use challenges to become a better leader; use creativity to move past trauma; and understand the tools your mind uses to recover from setbacks. 

In his defining work on emotional intelligence, best-selling author Daniel Goleman found that it is twice as important as other competencies in determining outstanding leadership. If you listen to nothing else on emotional intelligence, listen to these 10 articles by experts in the field. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you boost your emotional skills - and your professional success.

The path to your professional success starts with a critical look in the mirror. If you listen to nothing else on managing yourself, you should at least hear these 10 articles (plus the bonus article "How Will You Measure Your Life?" by Clayton M. Christensen). We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles to select the most important ones to help you maximize yourself.