Business & Economics

We’ve all been taught that we must suppress or avoid emotions at work, but this inevitably leads to a loss in productivity, diminished creativity, and crushing job dissatisfaction. Research shows 85 percent of us avoid communicating crucial workplace problems upward, and many of us who are employed are actively looking for a different job. What’s going on?

With The Power of Emotions at Work, McLaren teaches communication and empathy skills to workers at all levels, including:

· How to co-create a healthy and well-balanced social environment that benefits all workers in any type of organization
· How to recognize your primary emotional role―and the roles of others
· How to support people in your organization who perform the most “emotional labor”
· Where to find authentic motivation and engagement in your job
· How to go from an “unintentional community” to a place of genuine belonging, and much more

We all yearn to be our authentic selves at work, where we feel supported and can communicate our feelings and frustrations in a constructive way. Workplaces are “unintentional communities,” says Karla McLaren, because without access to our emotions at work, we are left without the tools we need to do our best work in a functional community. This is your resource to help you understand and engage intelligently with emotions at work―so you can help to create healthy and intentional communities where people and projects thrive.

Chris Bailey turned down lucrative job offers to pursue a lifelong dream—to spend a year performing a deep dive experiment into the pursuit of productivity, a subject he had been enamored with since he was a teenager. After obtaining his business degree, he created a blog to chronicle a year-long series of productivity experiments he conducted on himself, where he also continued his research and interviews with some of the world’s foremost experts, from Charles Duhigg to David Allen. Among the experiments that he tackled: Bailey went several weeks with getting by on little to no sleep; he cut out caffeine and sugar; he lived in total isolation for 10 days; he used his smartphone for just an hour a day for three months; he gained ten pounds of muscle mass; he stretched his work week to 90 hours; a late riser, he got up at 5:30 every morning for three months—all the while monitoring the impact of his experiments on the quality and quantity of his work.

The Productivity Project—and the lessons Chris learned—are the result of that year-long journey. Among the counterintuitive insights Chris Bailey will teach you:
· slowing down to work more deliberately;
· shrinking or eliminating the unimportant;
· the rule of three;
· striving for imperfection;
· scheduling less time for important tasks;
· the 20 second rule to distract yourself from the inevitable distractions;
· and the concept of productive procrastination.
In an eye-opening and thoroughly engaging read, Bailey offers a treasure trove of insights and over 25 best practices that will help you accomplish more.