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Looking Ahead: Acting as Your Team’s Visionary Thinker

Posted on 09/17/2015 by ·
Looking Ahead: Acting as Your Team's Visionary Thinker by Laura Stack #productivity

"The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world." – Malcolm Gladwell, Canadian writer and theorist. Over the last two decades, authors have written hundreds of books and articles about how and why leaders must be visionary thinkers, able to pull reasonable expectations of the future out of their crystal balls and implement plans to guide their teams appropriately. But why don't more publications urge all team members to act as visionaries? This lack of initiative probably stems from fossilized ways of thinking. Both leaders and business theorists have begun to realize the roles of team leader and average worker have begun to converge, at least within the white-collar sector. Leaders more readily consider worker ideas nowadays; increased power and … [Read more...]

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Laura Stack’s Weekly Productivity Pro eNewsletter – September 15, 2015

Posted on 09/15/2015 by ·

Here is the weekly roundup of activity from Laura Stack’s blog, columns, podcast, and other featured articles. Scroll down to read the complete roundup of productivity resources to help you create Maximum Results in Minimum Time. This week on the Blog Quick and To the Point: Texting and Instant Messaging Protocols in the Workplace Communication may be the most important factor in any partnership, and it’s certainly a glue that binds a team together. But it comes in many forms, especially in the workplace. Two of those are texting and Instant Messaging (IM), which are common means of modern business communication today. How do we make the best use of each in a teamwork environment? Read the full article. This week on LinkedIn: Pairing Up: The Advantages of a Team of Two at Work Though … [Read more...]

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Weekly Productivity eNews – September 8, 2015

Posted on 09/08/2015 by ·

This week on the Blog The 15 Characteristics of a Productive Team: What Matters Most In the 25 years since I started my company The Productivity Pro, Inc., I’ve worked with literally hundreds of teams on improving their performance and collective productivity. Here are the 15 characteristics I’ve seen in those that are the most successful. This week on LinkedIn: Respectful Creativity: Encouraging Different Viewpoints on Your Team Effective teams are most often led by leaders who expect innovation and therefore encourage diverse viewpoints. (click to tweet) This is no secret, despite the fact that—as cynics will surely point out—we rarely practice the concept adequately, and I would agree. However, we also let pettiness, bureaucracy, groupthink, disengagement, laziness, and other … [Read more...]

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National Speakers Association Inducts Laura Stack into the Speaker Hall Of Fame

Posted on 08/12/2015 by ·
CPAE - Laura giving a speech with statue

National Speakers Association (NSA) Inducts Productivity Keynote Speaker and Bestselling Author, Laura Stack, into the Speaker Hall Of Fame The National Speakers Association (NSA) inducted keynote speaker and bestselling author Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE, aka “The Productivity Pro®,” into the Speakers Hall of Fame at a gala celebration in Washington DC on the evening of July 21, 2015. The NSA celebrated the careers of Laura and her four fellow inductees in an annual ceremony honoring professional speakers who have reached the very pinnacle of their profession. Laura joins a select group, including former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, President Ronald Reagan, and Stack’s hero, Zig Ziglar, who first inspired her speaking career 25 years ago. Globally, there are fewer than 175 … [Read more...]

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How to Escape a Workplace Productivity Rut

Posted on 01/12/2012 by ·
How to Escape a Workplace Productivity Rut

To the casual observer, you might seem like a great performer—you’re keeping up with all your work with perfect consistency and maintaining an empty inbox. But you personally know you’re stuck in a productivity rut—a place where you get your work done, but only at a minimal level, and certainly without flair or inspiration. Your personal return on investment (PROI) in your job is very low, and you feel “stuck.” We've all been there at one time or another, for any of a number of reasons. Basically, you end up going through the motions, doing what you have to in a just-in-time fashion and staying busy without necessarily adding to your organization's bottom line (whether fiduciary or otherwise). Think back to your school days and the kind of grade such a level of effort might earn you … [Read more...]

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Top Ten Time Management Traps for 2012

Posted on 01/05/2012 by ·
Top Ten Time Management Traps for 2012

These days, despite technology intended to make life easier, we tend to work harder and have less discretionary time than ever before. Why? After 20 years speaking at conferences and implementing productivity-improvement programs at Fortune 1000 companies, I've come to recognize certain nemeses most of us face repeatedly. While clients do occasionally surprise me with the nature of their time management headaches, about 95% of the time, the traps they find themselves mired in fall into the same familiar handful of categories. So to kick off a productive 2012, let's take a look at the ten biggest time traps faced by the modern worker. I'll discuss the common variations of each, and offer some advice on how to overcome them. Trap #1: Prioritization Setting workplace priorities is by … [Read more...]

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