Sometimes, bosses have to make difficult decisions, which is why Louie Bernstein once fired his best salesperson.

In 1986, the then 34-year-old founded an Atlanta-based IT training company called MindIQ. A few years later, he hired someone who quickly became his top salesperson, Bernstein told LinkedIn’s “Catalyst” video series last week.

“I interviewed this one woman who presented herself great. She had a good personality — so I thought — and I ended up making her an offer … She just started making sales right away,” said Bernstein, now a 72-year-old sales executive and leadership consultant.

Once he started working with her, he discovered that she lacked a key soft skill, and without it, she was a nightmare to work with, he said: coachability.

“In the end, I felt like we had cancer and I was the surgeon that needed to cut it out to save the company,” Bernstein wrote in a 2022 LinkedIn post. “Shortly after her departure, sales picked up along with the attitude and harmony of the office.”

Bernstein’s salesperson would often boast about her performance, and how her co-workers weren’t on her level, he wrote. This left a bad taste in her peers’ mouths, and when Bernstein caught wind of her behavior, he advised her to change. She refused, but because of her stellar sales record, he swept it under the rug, he said.

“I had ignored the toxic traits of my top salesperson,” said Bernstein. “The red flag started going up, but I still gave her the benefit of the doubt.”

When Bernstein’s employees grew dissatisfied with each other, he told them to work out their differences on their own, instead of handling the issue himself, he added. The result: an explosive argument with yelling and crying, said Bernstein.

The ordeal was the push he needed to fire the employee and learn the importance of taking control as a boss, he said: “There comes a point when the manager has to realize they have to make the hard decisions. You can’t outsource them.”

After that, Bernstein said, he started asking job candidates questions like “How well did you work with someone when you encountered a problem in the middle of a project?” and “How do you deal with people you don’t agree with?” — and taking their responses seriously.

Acting like you’re owed something — or, in this case, like you’re above reproach and constructive criticism — is a major red flag in any workplace, workplace culture expert Tom Gimbel told CNBC Make It in April.

But plenty of people struggle to receive tough feedback gracefully. If you fall into that category, leadership and mental toughness expert Scott Mautz has a few tips for you.

First, focus solely on managing your reaction and trying to avoid an initial outburst. “Take a breath and focus on that breath [and] name what you’re feeling so that the emotions lose some of their hold over you,” Mautz wrote for CNBC Make It last month.

“Then you can listen and ask questions to fully understand the feedback,” wrote Mautz. “It’s not about minimizing your emotions, it’s about managing them … Mentally strong people manage their emotions so they can respond with intention.

Finally, try to separate the ego-bruising part of the feedback from anything that could be interpreted as genuine advice meant to improve your performance. The more you can hold on to the helpful criticism and filter out the fluff, the more you’ll show that you’re coachable and able to incorporate feedback into your job performance, Mautz wrote.

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As a kid, Jack Cowin shoveled snow, delivered newspapers and sold Christmas cards for cash. By the time he reached his 20s, it was burgers instead of cards. Fast forward to today: The 82-year-old is a billionaire, thanks to his fast food empire.

Cowin is the founder and chairman of Competitive Foods Australia, the company that operates Burger King as “Hungry Jack’s” in Australia. He is also the largest shareholder of Domino’s Pizza in Australia, and backs a plant-based meat substitute company called v2food.

Before founding Hungry Jack’s, Cowin opened a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Australia in 1969 — his first of many. Then in 2013, he sold off his KFC franchise of 55 stores in a deal worth about $71 million, according to a representative at Competitive Foods Australia.

Today, his business is worth over $3 billion and brings in over $300 million a year, Cowin told CNBC Make It.

Growing up in Canada, Cowin realized early on that he wanted freedom in life. His father was an employee at the Ford Motor Company and was required to travel frequently for work.

“He had a phone call one day, you’re going to Brazil, or you’re going to Mexico, or things like this … When you work for a big corporation, the corporation decides where you’re going to be, [and] what you’re going to do,” Cowin said.

“And as a kid, I wanted to have the freedom to do what I wanted to do. I think I saw that relatively early, because [I saw that] dad’s on the treadmill of here, there and everywhere,” he said. He didn’t want to be at the “whims and beckon call of a corporation.”

So as a child, Cowin spent his time outside of school mowing lawns and delivering newspapers. “I never had to ask for money as a kid,” he said. “I was a sales guy from very early, like 8 or 10 years old.”

By the time college rolled around, Cowin was going from farm to farm selling “trees, shrubs and nursing stock,” he said. He was so successful at it that he was making $8,000 a year while his university professors were making only $5,000 a year, he said.

He graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Western Ontario in 1964, and went on to get a job selling life insurance he said he was very good at.

“I had a reputation of being someone that could sell,” he said.

By the late 1960s, Cowin had begun to settle down in Canada with his wife and his first child when he one day received a phone call from a couple of high school friends.

His friends had landed a job with the American Kentucky Fried Chicken company and were sent to Australia to do some market research about whether they should expand into the country.

“Since my father had been there [for work], and I was the only guy … that knew where Australia was on a map … they phoned me up and said: ‘You should be down here. You should come and see this.’ So without a moment’s notice, I’m on a plane and I fly to Australia,” Cowin said.

Cowin landed in Australia in February 1969, and spent three weeks there helping his friends conduct research — ultimately finding that there was indeed a market for fast food in Australia.

“At that stage of the game, the restaurant business in Australia was fish and chip shops, Chinese restaurants and fancy white tablecloth restaurants,” he said. Meanwhile, McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC and other fast food restaurants were all rising in popularity in North America.

“So at the end of the three weeks, I pay $1,000 as a deposit on a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise [and] if the American company is going to open a store, then I was going to have a 10 store franchise,” he said.

Six months later, he received a phone call saying that the American KFC company agreed to expand into Australia and Cowin had the opportunity to own his first franchise location. But he didn’t have the funds, so he started raising money.

Imagine this “kid comes into your office and says he wants to borrow $10,000, which is probably about $100,000 today or more … he’s got no experience in the business, no interest on your money … how long before you throw him out of your office for wasting your time?”

“The biggest break I’ve had in my life was … I got on my bike and I got 30 Canadians to lend me $10,000 each, so got $300,000,” he said. “Otherwise I’d still be shoveling snow in Canada. I hadn’t had the finances back then.”

By December 1969, Cowin moved his family to Perth, Australia, where he opened his first KFC franchise. “It was like drilling oil and hitting oil on your first wildcat well, because it was a booming success,” he said.

“Then, you open two more, you get into the hamburger business, you get into the pizza business, you get into the food manufacturing business, and today, that business is a $3 billion business and makes $300 million a year.”

Today, Cowin owns 98% of his company while the other 2% is held by some of his original investors and shareholders, he said. “That original $10,000 is $40 million at book value [today]. So everybody’s got their money back, and those that stayed in have done increasingly well,” he said.

When asked what his secret to sales is, he said, “I think the secret is, whatever you do, do it well … The people that lent me the money really backed me as the investment. I was the investment.”

″And an expression [I have is] when you can’t tell the difference between work and play, you’re in the right place … I’ve never really worked a day in my life because I’ve enjoyed it.”

Correction: This story was updated to make it clear that Jack Cowin opened a KFC store in Australia in 1969.

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If there’s one thing Terry Petzold knows about how to stand out in the job market and get hired, it’s that in-demand technical skills can come and go.

Petzold has 25 years of experience in recruiting and is currently a managing partner at Fox Search Group, an executive recruitment firm for tech leaders.

Take the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, for example. “Just two-and-a-half years ago, everyone was saying, ‘We need to hire coders,’” Petzold tells CNBC Make It.

“I was even talking to my own children about, ‘Oh, maybe we need to go the crowd coding route,’” he jokes. “Not six months later, ChatGPT comes out, and now coding is not the future.”

To be sure, having up-to-date digital skills is important for workers across industries and career levels, Petzold says. “If you’re in marketing, or if you’re in a warehouse, you need to understand technology.”

But because companies can train workers on learning developing tech to serve their business, Petzold says leaders are most interested in hiring people with a different set of skills.

“I’ll tell you where the future is,” he says. “It’s not even necessarily in technology space. It’s in soft skills. It’s in emotional intelligence — that is what we’re noticing is the future for talent.”

Emotional intelligence, or EQ, is the ability to manage your own feelings and the feelings of those around you, which can make you better at building relationships and leading in the workplace.

For Petzold, job candidates with great technical skills really succeed when they can demonstrate high EQ.

It’s good to be specialized in an area of expertise, like data, security, infrastructure or enterprise solutions, for instance, “but it’s really those with strong EQ and those soft skills and business skills — those are the future IT leaders,” he says.

By hiring professionals with high EQ, Petzold says companies are really looking for people who can do crucial things like:

• Handle and deliver constructive feedback
• Manage conflict
• Have critical conversations with urgency
• Work cross-functionally by persuading peers and other leaders
• Effectively present ideas to leaders above them

“The general EQ skills we’re noticing really have to do with communication [with] others and the ability to push through challenges and come out unscathed,” Petzold says.

He adds that some companies are getting better at helping leaders develop stronger EQ skills, especially around managing effectively and navigating challenges or conflict.

Good employers can further develop their workers by offering mentorship programs and facilitating networking, Petzold adds, so people can see what good models of leadership and high EQ look like.

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Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck is perfectly content watching the rockets his company builds reach the heavens while his feet remain firmly planted on Earth.

“Some people have this burning desire to go into space. I just have a burning desire to create things to enable others to go to space,” says Beck, 47.

The native New Zealander launched Rocket Lab in 2006 with no college degree or space industry connections. His Long Beach, California-based company now has a market value of $11.9 billion, as of Wednesday afternoon, with dozens of successful rocket launches — making it one of the world’s fastest-growing private space companies.

Beck has a net worth of $1.3 billion, Forbes estimated in November. Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, two other billionaires with aerospace companies, have made the trek to outer space. But Beck insists he’s not interested, citing one of the very traits that helped him successfully build his company: “a healthy degree of paranoia.”

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The Rocket Lab CEO says he’s extremely hands-on while planning and preparing Rocket Lab’s missions, and his obsession with the granular details would prove too distracting for him to relax and enjoy the space travel. He has “so much respect” for astronauts, particularly those with engineering backgrounds, who understand the danger of space travel and do it anyway, he says.

“I would just be thinking of all the safety factors on the valves and the structures that are beneath me,” says Beck. “So I don’t think it would be very enjoyable at all … There’s a rare group of people that can do that, and I’m not one of them, unfortunately.”

Beck isn’t completely risk-averse. He’s fairly comfortable taking big risks, provided the stakes aren’t potentially life-threatening, he says.

Founding Rocket Lab at all was a risky longshot, considering Beck’s lack of experience. Years later, when the company launched its first Electron rocket, “we were [only], like, 92% sure that it was going to be fine and work,” says Beck. That attempt failed to reach orbit due to an equipment glitch, but fixing it paved the way for future successful launches.

“You have to take risks,” he says. “If you take no risk, there’s no reward … [and] you end up as a traditional, dinosaur kind of player if you want to remove every last percentage of risk.”

Beck’s advice for anyone in the workplace: Identify the risks you feel are worth taking, and then do as much as you can to mitigate their potential consequences before taking the leap. That means doing a lot of research and preparing for every potential outcome — good, bad or in between — before choosing to take action, he says.

Broadly speaking, Branson shares a similar outlook on risk-taking. While the billionaire has a well-known penchant for thrill-seeking — leaping 400-feet off a casino, crossing oceans in a hot-air balloon — he’s adamant that the key to his success is the calculation behind those risks.

“I’ve always believed in protecting the downside, thinking through what could go wrong and how to limit the damage,” Branson told Forbes last month. “That’s the smart way to approach risk. At the same time, trusting your instinct is key. If something feels right, even when the odds are tough, I’m a believer in going for it.”

But Beck maintains a more analytical stance when it comes to stepping foot on a rocket and propelling himself into outer space. “Never say never,” he says. “Look, I would do it if I had to. If my life depended on it … [But] if you do it for enjoyment, that seems counterproductive.”

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In her nearly 18 years working at Google, from November 2006 to September 2024, Jenny Wood had occasion to hire many people — especially when she reached more senior roles like director in media operations. She also “founded one of the largest career development programs in the company’s history,” she says.

These days, Wood offers career advice in her newsletter and is releasing a book about achieving your goals, “Wild Courage,” in March 2025.

For those looking for work or simply for more job opportunities in the new year, here are two of her resume green flags.

First, Wood likes short bullets under job titles. Specifically, “I like it when a bullet doesn’t go beyond one line,” she says.

It’s easy to want to cram a lot of information under a job description, but keeping bullets concise “shows such intentionality,” she says. “It shows such discernment, and it shows you’re being brutal, right? You’re cutting what doesn’t need to be there.” It also shows you’re being considerate of the person reading your resume. Multi-sentence bullets take much longer to read.

Big picture, “it makes you look like an absolute superstar when you have bullets that are one line only,” she says.

Second, Wood loves some personality on a resume.

This could come in various forms. Wood has a muffin and a mic icon in the “passions” section of her resume to represent her love of baking and performance, she says as an example, and she’s seen some great specificity when people mention their hobbies.

She tells the story of a woman she profiles in her book named Carlye. When Carlye applied for a job at Google, the last line on her resume read “that she was in constant pursuit of the perfect oatmeal raisin cookie recipe,” says Wood.

This gave a glimpse of her personality, it showed she was willing to take risks by being quirky and that she was curious and keen to learn. In a sea of other qualified candidates, it made Carlye stand out. After the interview process confirmed she was just as qualified — and fun — as her resume implied, Carlye landed the job.

“In a competitive candidate pool with a lot of people to the right and the left of you who have the same skills, background and experience and pedigree,” says Wood, “personality is a differentiator.”

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