Career inflection points are stages in your career when you are considering your future direction, which could be a positive move as long as you navigate the feelings of ambivalence that come during such events. Give yourself time to reflect on your emotions and examine all options available to point you toward the best path to take.

Leaders who inhabit their power in a positive way can be more effective in attaining the good of everyone on their team than those who use their positional power in a command and control manner, writes Alaina Love. Love offers five questions leaders can ask to step into their true power, including queries focused on defining purpose and desired outcomes and creating a healthy company culture.

Managers must open up their thinking to the new workplace in which "traditional talent management is no longer valid," writes Anna Rasmussen, founder and CEO of workplace conversation platform OpenBlend. Individual employees should guide their own career development, with help from managers who know how to talk with them in a "human" way, Rasmussen says.

Estimates of the upcoming jobs report for November suggest that the numbers could show the sort of downward trend sought by Federal Reserve policymakers working to bring inflation under control. In addition, hourly earnings are expected to be up 4.6% on a year-over-year basis, which would be the lowest annual gain since August 2021, according to a Bloomberg survey.

As the economy slows, corporate travel managers are tightening budgets, according to Atmosphere Research analyst Henry Harteveldt, who predicts that business travel could soften slightly through the rest of 2022 and remain lukewarm into the beginning of next year. Hotel markets where business travelers take "bleisure" trips are doing well, says CoStar Group's Jan Freitag, who is "very bullish on group travel, trips for meetings, association events, to build internal culture."

The University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business is running a new course, Difficult Conversations: Conflict Lab, which is teaching future leaders how to navigate tough conversations relating to poor performance and other issues they'll face in the workplace. "I so often both personally and professionally just see people shying away from feedback," says Hannah Levinson, a role player in the course.

With the holiday season in full swing, this piece offers some easy tips you can follow if you want to be known as an awesome gift giver. There are three gift-giving boxes you should consider when shopping for a gift. If you can check one of the boxes, you'll be in business. If you can check all three, then the gift (and the giver) are truly great.