Many people will advise young professionals to stop focusing on outside interests, but doing so will only prevent you from developing a well-rounded skill set, writes Lily Herman. You can also ignore advice to stay with any job for at least a year, especially if you're miserable or better opportunities are available.

Keep your boss informed and regularly offer help if your boss is difficult to work with. Through repetition and gratitude, you can ease tensions with the boss and develop a peer network, Karin Hurt writes.

Seek out advice from mentors and then actually do what they suggest, advises entrepreneur Ivan Misner. It's better to implement a few key pieces of advice repeatedly than to try to adopt a huge number of strategies from different sources.

Leadership development should let leaders choose how they improve performance, opposed to telling them what to do, writes consultant Anne-Marie Converse. Autonomy creates higher motivation and lasting, meaningful change, Converse writes.

Dignity Health uses standardized protocol throughout the organization to gauge kindness and compassion in prospective employees. The health care network considers a job seeker's empathy to be "just as important as their skills and abilities," says Kristie Griffin, Dignity Health's director of talent acquisition.

A 3-foot-long alligator was found yesterday at the swimming pool of the Bayview Inn & Suites in Atlantic City, N.J. Animal control workers were able to safely remove the creature, but authorities are unsure how the alligator got into the pool in the first place.