by Stephen Danos

When leaders move with speed, whether in decision-making or in running efficient meetings, the benefits can spread throughout an entire organization.

Studies show that leaders ranked in the top 10 percent based on their leadership speed see positive results in the attitudes of their direct reports — 63 percent of whom say they would do everything possible to make their company successful.

That’s according to the book Speed: How Leaders Accelerate Successful Execution, in which the authors propose that there is no statistical downside to speed, as long as leaders take the time to periodically pause and reassess whether their efforts are aligned to their organization's overall strategy.

Business leaders who avoid these five common pitfalls can motivate their teams to execute more quickly — and at a higher level.
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by Stephen Danos
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At the enterprise level, these undesired outcomes tend to stem from problems caused by increased organizational complexity, murky accountability, and an overabundance of data that cause decision makers to suffer from analysis paralysis.

Getting on the path to better decision making starts with recognizing and addressing these challenges — often with the help of the right enterprise-grade work-execution tool.
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by Katy Beloof on January 24, 2018
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According to Gallup’s recent State of the Global Workplace report, 85% of employees are not engaged — or are actively disengaged — at work. The economic consequence of this translates to approximately $7 trillion in lost productivity.

Gallup defines this overwhelming majority of disengaged employees as those who consistently give you their time, but not their best efforts. These are employees who show up on time, put in their eight or nine hours, and head home, without contributing their best work or ideas. 

Finding and retaining top talent has been a concern for companies for quite some time. But keeping that talent engaged at work proves equally challenging — and failing to do so is costly. There may be an answer to this lost productivity in using automation to free up employee time to focus on more meaningful, business-critical work. 
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by Stephen Danos on April 20, 2018

In today’s workplaces, the borders between teams, departments, and roles are blurrier than ever before. “Borderless teams” can be distributed across the globe or just down the hall from one another. They offer increased flexibility, reduced costs, and can be a powerful recruiting tool.
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by Katy Beloof on March 12, 2018
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Is organizational complexity making it difficult for your teams to successfully accomplish projects on time and within budget? Multiple communication channels combined with cross-functional teamwork can cloud accountability and muddle decision-making authority, resulting in a lack of employee ownership in a project or process.

One solution to this lack of ownership and its effect on performance is “clear pressure”, a form of peer pressure based on the idea of giving employees real-time visibility into the progress of everyone’s work, so they can hold each other — and themselves —  to a higher standard. But are the tools that provide visibility enough to create a culture of clear pressure? Or do leaders need to think more broadly about a solution?
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by Katy Beloof on February 23, 2018
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How many times have you walked out of a meeting and realized that no decisions were made, no action steps planned, and really, nothing was accomplished? While meetings are essential for collaboration and making critical decisions quickly, many meetings are unproductive debates or status updates that don’t achieve anything.

Before you schedule your next meeting, ask these five questions to ensure you’re using meetings the right way.
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by Ignacio Martinez on January 12, 2018

As more and more of our daily lives take place online, it’s only natural that we’ve become more accustomed to sharing personal, sensitive, information online. Email communication is a constant part of our daily communication – and unfortunately is also a common tool used by hackers to attempt to gain access to your sensitive information in a scheme known as phishing.

Smartsheet will never email you to request sensitive data, such as passwords, credit card details, and social security numbers. As you head into a new year resolute with new intentions, we’d like you to add a renewed commitment to online security to your list. Here’s some helpful information about phishing – and how to keep yourself safe.

What’s the best way to stop your team from maximizing their potential in the new year? By unintentionally impeding progress. It’s time to ask yourself — have you turned into a bottleneck?

It’s all too easy to become a hindrance for progress, and little things that make it challenging for your team to move quickly add up to one big stop sign. Luckily there are a few ways to identify whether or not you’re the problem. Here are three signs that indicate you are a bottleneck – and what you can do to get out of your team’s way.
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When was the last time your department’s best new idea came at the end of a day of data entry or back-to-back status meetings? History’s greatest innovators (Albert Einstein, Warren Buffet, and Bill Gates to name a few) regularly tout the importance of creating space for reflection and deep thought to unlock their best ideas, yet employees are busier than ever and logging increasing hours. Even with these longer hours, workers report they spend almost half of their time on repetitive, low-value tasks.

This is significant time that is taken away from high-value, innovative work. So what’s at the root of this rampant repetitive work? Rework caused by human error, suboptimal meeting culture, and email overload are three of the biggest factors preventing your team from maximizing their potential. To gain a competitive edge, organizations must find a solution to remain relevant. Here’s a look at what’s keeping your team from innovation and what you can do about it.
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There’s been a lot of talk lately about the promise of automation to transform business, but most of the discussion has focused on self-driving cars and robots. These are significant advances, no doubt about it -- but if you focus on only these high-profile examples, you might miss a much larger opportunity: automating the repetitive work performed daily by millions of information workers.

Automation in the office isn’t new, but efforts to date have focused on a handful of key processes that are hardwired into applications. To get them up and running, the business user needs to involve IT, which adds time and expense. What’s more, the resulting solution is built for a single use case, leaving the vast majority of work in the enterprise untouched and unautomated.
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The far greater opportunity lies in automating the great diversity of loosely defined, unstructured work that business users perform every day, in every department. Although this has traditionally been hard to do, doing so frees up valuable time for workers to focus on higher-value work.