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'Tis the season to give. And finding the right gift to give the people on your team can be challenging. Oprah Winfrey once said, "It doesn't matter what the thing is; what matters is how much of yourself goes into the giving, so that when the gift is gone, the spirit of you lingers." This is especially true for leaders. When you give of yourself you build character and credibility both for you and your organization.

Below are ways you can give this Christmas that won't put a dent in your budget.

1. Acknowledge people everyday. A colleague of mine, Wayne Sellers, greets everyone with a handshake each morning. That few minutes he spends encouraging his staff is much more beneficial than one more cup of coffee or answering the emails waiting in his inbox. Too many people to make that work? Divide up by departments and appoint someone to be the morning greeter for each group.

2. Recognize important dates. Birthdays and company anniversaries matter. Add dates to your outlook calendar or palm pilot then set a reminder. Everyone likes to be recognized on their special day. And they will be impressed that you remembered.

3. Include people in decisions that affect their department. Listen to their concerns. Be open to their input. If it directly affects their department and you don't have their buy in, the decision will most likely be ineffective anyway. Even if it is a mandatory policy, let their voice be heard. Sometimes just venting their feelings is enough to get people on board.

4. Acknowledge their work. Be specific about the things they do well. A simple pat on the back or hand written note can be powerful at building an employee's professional esteem.

5. Leave your door open. This radiates an open door policy. When people believe they can come to you with any problems, issues or concerns, you open the door to know exactly what is going on in your organization.

6. Give people creative freedom. A team full of people who problem solve and brainstorm only your ideas will create a stagnate organization. Let them think 'out of the box' and watch your organization grow.

7. Be human. Admit when you make a mistake. Laugh at their jokes. Share stories about your family. People need a leader they can relate to.

You may be thinking a few of these 'gifts' are obvious. Perhaps you already give several of the 'gifts' on the list year. Or maybe you found a few new ones for your shopping list. At the core of all of these gifts is you. Whether it is the eleven gifts on this list or any of 100 others, give yourself this holiday season ? and make it a habit the whole year through.

Holly Powers (Holly@KevinEikenberry.com) is passionate about working with Clients in her role as the Client Development Princess for The Kevin Eikenberry Group (http://www.KevinEikenberry.com). She is also the editor of Unleash Your Potential. Go to http://www.kevineikenberry.com/uypw/subscri be.asp to subscribe.

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In The News:

Google on Tuesday hauled out a tool it last used nearly a year ago to warn users infected with the "DNSChanger" malware.

Microsoft has taken its Google Street View-like service Bing Streetside offline in Germany after German citizens expressed their worries about how Microsoft handles requests for blurring of images, the company said on Tuesday.

Physicians who use social networks to share clinical experiences risk violating patient privacy. A niche industry of private social network providers has cropped up to address the desire to communicate.

The U.S. Department of Justice said Tuesday it was looking into the unauthorized access of a website server in its statistics wing, after hacker group Anonymous claimed to have collected and released 1.7GB of data from it.

Lenovo's net profit for its fiscal fourth quarter grew by 59 percent, as the world's second largest PC maker saw continued growth in sales across both mature and emerging markets.

An often-repeated concern that the U.S. Patriot Act gives the U.S. government unequaled access to personal data stored on cloud services is incorrect, with several other nations enjoying similar access to cloud data, according to a study released Wednesday.

Facebook is to settle a class-action lawsuit in California that accused it of appropriating its users' likenesses for its Sponsored Stories advertising feature, according to a court document filed Tuesday.

Touchscreen laptops and tablets with the upcoming Windows 8 OS will be priced higher than their non-touchscreen counterparts, Dell's CEO said on Tuesday.

Businesses can now remotely control enterprise mobile applications developed for Apple's mobile platform with the latest version of Soti's MobiControl Software Developer Kit for iOS, announced Tuesday.

SAP is buying cloud-based e-commerce vendor Ariba for US$4.3 billion, the companies announced Tuesday.

Verizon Communications on Tuesday became the first service provider to say it will use Alcatel-Lucent's upcoming 7950 XRS core routing system, which will bring the French-American equipment vendor into the carrier core routing business for the first time in about a decade.

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Dell on Wednesday reported a drop in profits for the first quarter, weighed down by a revenue decrease and slower sales of consumer products.

In its third day of trading, Facebook's stock is still in a slump, taking the shine off the frenzy that led up to the company's initial public offering (IPO) last week.

CIOs face a common set of thorny challenges these days, namely the pressure to deliver innovations even as they seek to cut or hold down spending, according to an array of senior IT executives who spoke on Tuesday at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Besting a record set by Yahoo in 2009, the research arm of Microsoft have deployed a new technique for quickly sorting large amounts of data, called Flat Datacenter Storage (FDS).

A Florida VoIP carrier has filed a net neutrality complaint against a Georgia utility and broadband provider, after the utility accused the VoIP firm of theft of service for using its network to deliver voice service without paying for it.

Brocade this week said it added hardware-based support for the OpenFlow software-defined networking (SDN) API and protocol to its NetIron and MLX series 100Gbps routers as part of a broader SDN strategy.

Hackers claim to be just days away from jailbreaking Apple devices running iOS 5.1.1, the latest firmware release for iPhones and iPads, letting users load applications from outside of Apple's iTunes App Store.

Microsoft said that a skew toward more exploits on Windows Vista can be attributed to the demise of support for the operating system's first service pack.

The nation's space efforts entered a new chapter today with the launch of the first commercial vehicle to the International Space Station.

The price bar for PCs keeps dropping, with chip maker Via on Tuesday announcing a US$49 APC computer with a customized version of Google's Android operating system.

Preparing for the eventual widespread conversion to IPv6, the Nmap Project has updated its namesake security scanning tool so it can scan IPv6 networks using a variety of novel techniques.

Alcatel-Lucent is set to give Cisco and Juniper another run for the money in core routing 10 years after its initial attempt failed.

A new variant of SpyEye malware allows cybercriminals to monitor potential bank fraud victims by hijacking their webcams and microphones, according to security researchers from antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab.

Sony on Tuesday showed a digital media hub that uses Wi-Fi to connect its PCs, tablets, smartphones and PlayStation game consoles, a product that it hopes will be part of its comeback.

Advanced technologies such as HAMR could mean disk drive capacities from 30TB to 60TB by 2016, according to a new report by IHS iSuppli.

Google said Tuesday morning that it has closed the deal to acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion

YouTube and German music royalty collecting society GEMA have appealed the outcome of a lawsuit filed by GEMA against YouTube, in which a German court ordered YouTube to inspect the titles of uploaded videos to filter out potentially copyright-infringing content.

Google has finally closed its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, and will now start working on new devices while keeping Android open, it said on Tuesday.

With the world's largest social networking website, Facebook, going public it is quite obvious that comparisons with Google will crop up. We have collated some figures and here is a list of numbers comparing the two giants.

Trusteer expects malware used to attack several German bank sites to be reconfigured for banks in other countries

Former OMB intelligence chief Michael Daniel will take over as the debate over CISPA, for example, heats up

Sidecar, a born-again startup whose founders hail from Internet media services company RealNetworks, Tuesday is launching an eponymous app for iPhones and Android smartphones that's designed to make it easier for people to share videos, photos and more while talking on those devices.

A pair of Microsoft-backed industry groups applauded the ultimatum European Union antitrust regulators issued to rival Google over alleged anti-competitive practices.

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said Monday that its application system for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) has reopened, more than a month after it was brought down because of a software glitch.

EMC has acquired Syncplicity, an enterprise file-management service provider, for an undisclosed sum.

A judge at the U.S. International Trade Commission has determined that a Kodak patent asserted in a complaint against Apple and Research In Motion is invalid, Kodak said on Monday.

The security vendor Trusteer is warning banks to look out for a sophisticated Trojan capable of emptying the account of an online customer.

Named late last week to replace Howard Schmidt as the top White House cybersecurity adviser, Michael Daniel is a 17-year veteran of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and has been its intelligence branch chief for the past 11 years. But he has stayed largely under the radar, even in the cybersecurity community.

Traditional mobile phone plans are now on the wane in the U.S., but the country's biggest carriers are still bringing in more money and leading the world in revenue, according to a report based on first-quarter results.

Schools in the U.S. will need broadband speeds of 100 Mbps per 1,000 students and staff members by the 2014-15 school year in order to meet a growing demand for Web-based instruction and a skyrocketing number of student-owned Web devices, according to a new report by a trade group representing state education agencies.

Voyager Mobile, the startup that had planned to launch last Tuesday but said it was delayed by an attack on its website, went live on Sunday with an unlimited voice, text and data plan for US$39 per month.

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to consider the petition of Joel Tenenbaum, a former doctoral student at Boston University who faces a fine of US$675,000 for illegally downloading 30 songs.

As Avaya continues its transition from a hardware company into a communications and collaboration software provider, it is going through some growing pains, including a shakeup of executives and uncertainty around a potential initial public offering that's been rumored for months.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has hired Paul Ohm, a privacy advocate and critic of current online privacy practices, as a senior privacy adviser for consumer protection and competition issues affecting the Internet and mobile services.

Salesforce.com, which has placed ample emphasis on its Chatter social networking application, will actually begin providing real-time chat functionality as part of an imminent upgrade to its family of cloud-based software, according to a company document.

The Nasdaq computer system that delayed trade notices of the Facebook IPO on Friday was plagued by race conditions, the stock exchange announced Monday. As a result of this technical glitch in its Nasdaq OMX system, the market expects to pay out US$13 million or even more to traders.

There are many ways you can use Twitter to help build your business. For example, you can track trending topics, leverage Web analytics, and tap some 50 million daily users.

International medical vendor Mediq was expanding in a big way by acquisition and needed a standard email platform across its business, but the project's cost and the complexity of doing it alone was so daunting that the company called on outside help that costs it less in the long run.

Samsung is blocking a hack of its S Voice digital assistant software that allowed any Android phone running Ice Cream Sandwich to use the app.

Advanced Micro Devices aims to improve the quality of high-definition video and 3D graphics on equipment in casinos and hospitals with its new R-series processors, which the company announced on Monday.

Mobile operators that want help keeping their subscribers happy can get it through a new managed service from Alcatel-Lucent, the company said on Monday.

Malware writers have used Crossrider, a cross-browser extension development framework, to build a click-fraud worm that spreads on Facebook, security researchers from antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab said on Monday.

Now that Google has gotten permission from China's Anti-Monopoly Bureau to acquire Motorola Mobility, the companies are expected to complete their merger by the middle of this week.

IT management executives from large corporations worry most about how to manage employee-owned devices safely and securely, according to clients of the Directions on Microsoft analyst firm.

Silver Peak today upgraded the software for its WAN appliance to handle automated optimization for TCP and non-TCP traffic, 512,000 simultaneous connections for 10 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) infrastructures and support for a bunch of common hypervisors.

IT managers grappling with bring-your-own-device policies can expect to see an explosion in the number of smartphones and tablets used by employees.

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Version 3.4 of the Linux kernel was officially rolled out Sunday, in what maintainer Linus Torvalds called a "calm" release cycle.

Google has "a matter of weeks" to address four antitrust issues identified by European Union antitrust regulators. If Google addresses these issues the case can be solved by a so-called "commitment decision" instead of formal antitrust proceedings resulting in a fine, said JoaquAn Almunia, Vice President of the European Commission responsible for Competition Policy.

Yahoo has agreed to sell off about half of its stake in Alibaba Group back to the Chinese e-commerce giant as part of a US$7.1 billion deal, the two companies jointly announced on Monday.

If the numbers at StatCounter are accurate then the world has a new Web browser champion: Google Chrome.

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IBM is offering employees who are nearing retirement a one-time opportunity to take advantage of a program that would guarantee their employment through Dec. 31, 2013.

Europe's top court has ruled that the functionality of a computer program and the programming language it is written in cannot be protected by copyright.

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Microsoft is abandoning the 'Aero' user interface with Windows 8, calling the UI that debuted in Vista and continued in Windows 7, 'cheesy' and 'dated.'

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Taiwanese smartphone vendor High Tech Computer said on Sunday certain models of its newest smartphones have passed U.S. Customs and are being released to its carrier customers, after the company previously warned of a delay in product shipments because of an International Trade Commission (ITC) order.

So.cl, an experimental research project from Microsoft, that combines social networking and search to promote learning, is now accepting all users interested in joining the site.

Email managers have a lot at stake. After all, the volume of global electronic messages sent via email dwarfs all other forms of electronic communication, including social networking. Since the inception of electronic mail, which, according to some Internet historians, can be traced to a small mainframe app called 'MAILBOX' from the mid-1960s, human-to-human messages have been created, transmitted and stored in electronic format. But early email administrators could hardly have envisioned the complexity of current email infrastructure and the concomitant maze of technical, security, business and regulatory challenges.

Pakistan late Sunday reversed a block on Twitter in the country over material it considered anti-Islam, the country's interior minister said.

Technical problems at the Nasdaq exchange affected the trading of Facebook shares on Friday, the much-anticipated day of its IPO (initial public offering), Robert Greifeld, chief executive of Nasdaq OMX Group Inc., told reporters on Sunday, according to published reports.

Chinese regulatory authorities have approved Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility, paving the way for the deal to close within the week, company officials confirmed Saturday.

In the latest move in a complex series of patent-related cases, Apple filed a motion in a U.S. district court late Friday to ban Samsung Electronics' Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the U.S.

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An Italian court has upheld a a!900,000 (US$1.2 million) fine imposed on Apple by Italy's competition authority for allegedly violating consumer protection laws, Italian media reported late Friday.

The mobile gift-giving app Karma announced Friday it has been acquired by Facebook. The announcement came shortly after the markets closed on Facebook's first day as a publicly traded company.

The U.S. International Trade Commission issued an import ban Friday on any Android devices from Motorola that infringe one of Microsoft's patents.

The prospect of cyberwar means the U.S. needs to 'rethink every aspect of defense,' says one summit presenter

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HP is expected to announce a large layoff at its quarterly investors briefing on Wednesday, losing as many as 30,000 employees. But for now, the company isn't talking about its plans.

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Twitter has announced support for "Do Not Track," immediately implementing it to halt online tracking of users who trigger a setting in their browsers.

The first hours of Facebook's IPO got off to a shaky start today with the share price wavering around the $40 mark, never gaining the astronomical momentum many had anticipated.

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