Understanding your employee's perspective can go a long way towards increasing productivity and happiness.

Done right, a performance review is one of the best opportunities to encourage and support high performers and constructively improve your middle- and lower-tier workers.

Keeping a 'CEO blog' or 'founder's blog' can be a great platform for engaging your users in a nontraditional way, reaching people outside of your product pitch and building rapport without selling them anything except a belief in your ideas.

Sure, it's fun to chat with people with interesting backgrounds who seem to have a passion for your company. But a job interview is not a friendly chat. You need to determine whether candidates, can they really do the job. So ask them to prove it.

Launching a start-up, you need to get a lot done quickly. Every day is different. Everyone pitches in with everything. It's easy for the founding team to say, 'We're flexible. We all help out with everything!' But when it comes to making decisions - that flexibility can spell inefficiency and disaster.

When you start a new company, you have to do it all. Yes, all of it.

I am a big advocate for having an open discussion about team norms and preferences. At The Muse, some of us like to start working at 7:30 A.M. Others focus best from 10 P.M. to 2 A.M. Create a culture where it's acceptable not to be working when someone else is working.