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For the past 16 years, we've studied the background of incoming CEOs at the world's largest 2,500 public companies as part of the annual Strategy& CEO Success study. Take this quiz to assess your immediate chances, based on the data we've collected, of becoming a chief executive in your chosen industry.

In my work as a leadership trainer and a career success coach for women over 11 years, it’s become abundantly clear that the quality of one’s decision-making is not only a critical factor in her professional success and impact, but also reflects a wide range of influences that we’re typically unaware of, including core values, internal preferences, societal influences, social abilities, cultural training, neurobiology, comfort with authority and power, and much more.

To learn more about decision-making in general, and key differences between the way men and women make decisions in particular, I asked Dr. Therese Huston to share her insights. Therese was the founding director of what is now the Center for Faculty Development at Seattle University and has spent the past fifteen years helping smart people make better decisions. She has written for the New York Times and Harvard Business Review, and her first book, Teaching What You Don't Know, was published by Harvard University Press. Her current book How Women Decide: What's True, What's Not, and What Strategies Spark the Best Choices “pries open” stereotypes about women’s decision-making and serves as an authoritative guide to help women navigate the workplace and their everyday life with greater success and impact.

You're blurry-eyed and slack-jawed at your desk, staring at a to-do list so long you feel like you could wrap it around the entire earth -- twice. Yes, we've all found ourselves in this stressful situation every now and then.

Facing a to-do list that feels completely unmanageable isn't fun. In fact, it's usually enough to make me want to curl up under my desk in the fetal position and hide until all of those pesky tasks dissolve away.

But, unfortunately, that tactic has yet to work out for me. So, I've had to find another method to deal with my mile-long list of assignments.

I've tried my fair share of productivity tips, tricks, and hacks that promise to help me grab the bull by the horns and conquer my to-do list with confidence and a healthy dose of strategy. However, I've found that most of those (although, not all!) really only manage to serve as a distraction and slow me down.

Instead, I prefer to keep things basic, simple, and intuitive. So, when looking at my overwhelming to-do list, I always ask myself this one quick and easy question to pare down my tasks and channel my focus:

Does this absolutely need to be done today?

I know, it's so straightforward and obvious, you're likely groaning and rolling your eyes at me right now. But, it's actually an important inquiry that most people skip when creating their own lists. Humor me and allow me to dive in and explain why this question is so effective.

We live in an age of increased complexity, velocity and demand for multidisciplinary thinking. So much of what we do today requires the careful balance of both generalists and specialists to make great work happen.

It excites me to see more and more organizations embrace this approach by bringing together people from multitudes of fields and perspectives, enabling a new depth and diversity of visioning and problem solving. Optimally, these multidisciplinary teams are further supported through evolved organizational and management-thinking that favors meritocracy over rigidity. Organizationally, this can be achieved by constructing horizontal networks where there were once more stacked seniority-based hierarchies.

In practice, managing people and teams of this sort requires every bit as much care and rigor as more traditional structures, but the energies are directed differently — there's more attention directed toward supporting relevant possibilities and valuable outcomes than reinforcing structure. The investment is worthwhile, because when it works, the results and cultural implications are magnificent.

In the ideal meeting, all attendees participate, contributing diverse points of view and thinking together to reach new insights. But few meetings live up to this ideal, in large part because not everyone is able to effectively contribute. We recently asked employees at a large global bank a question: “When you have a contribution to make in a meeting, how often are you able to do so?” Only 35% said they felt able to make a contribution all the time.

There are three segments of the workforce who are routinely overlooked: introverts, remote workers, and women. As a leader, chances are you’re not actively silencing these voices — it’s more likely that hidden biases at play. Let’s look at these biases and what you can do to mitigate their influence.

The unconscious bias: Smart people think on their feet.

What happens: A program manager calls a meeting to think through a resourcing issue. She summarizes the situation, shares results of a recent staffing analysis, and then tees up the discussion. This works great for extroverted thinkers (those that talk to think). But from the get-go, the introverted thinkers (those who think to talk) are at a disadvantage....

You don't have to be in managerial role to be a leader. Follow these tips to inspire your colleagues and reap the benefits of a happier workplace.

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, a negotiation doesn’t go your way. Perhaps a customer pushed for a steeper discount than you wanted to give, or a potential client went with a competitor’s approach to a project. In the face of a disappointment — one where you might appear to be the “loser” — how do you save face? How do you make sure your reputation isn’t damaged and the relationship with your counterpart is intact?

What the Experts Say
Don’t worry too much about your negotiating prowess just because you lost this round. “A reputation comes from consistent behavior,” says Jeff Weiss, founding partner at Vantage Partners, a Boston-based consultancy specializing in corporate negotiations, and author of the HBR Guide to Negotiating. If you learn from the experience, there’s value to be had. A good way to start is by abandoning the adversarial mindset. “If all you’re thinking about is saving face, you’ve already made the negotiation and its aftermath into a battle,” says Margaret Neale, the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management at Stanford Graduate School of Business and coauthor of Getting (More of) What You Want. Think instead in terms of solutions so that your approach “becomes about problem solving rather than someone trying to win.” That’s where real win-win scenarios begin to emerge. Here’s how to bounce back when a negotiation doesn’t go your way.

Every day, you and the people who work for you need to make decisions. Many decisions. As the leader, you may take it upon yourself to make the most critical ones, but for the company to thrive you have to be sure that the people who work for you develop this essential skill. One of the best decisions you can make, therefore, is to devote time to helping your team improve their decision-making. Here's how.

If you have delegated authority to your employees and solicited their input, avoid dictating to them how they should do their jobs or micro-managing their approach to problem solving. Instead, spell out the goals or desired outcomes and then let them decide how to achieve them.

They said computers would make us all a lot more productive, and free up our personal lives.

Is it just me, or was that all a big, fat porkie?

The technology that was supposed to bring us this gift of freedom has entrapped us, eroding valuable time, energy and attention. Don't get me wrong, I love new technology. But let's take a reality check and go back to using it to help us do our jobs, not to dictate and distract every waking moment.

Here are seven key productivity traps to be mindful of:

Research shows that in leaderless groups, leaders emerge by quickly synchronizing their brain waves with followers through high quality conversations. Simply put, synchrony is a neural process where the frequency and scale of brain waves of people become in sync. Verbal communication plays a large role in synchronization, especially between leaders and followers. Synchrony between leaders and followers leads to mutual understanding, cooperation, coordinated execution of tasks, and collective creativity.

On the surface, brain synchrony seems easy to understand. It simply implies that people are literally on the same wavelength. Yet, at a deeper level, interpersonal synchrony involves much more. Dr. Daniel Siegel explains that “presence”, “wholeness”, and “resonance” are at the core of the ability to develop synchrony. Recent advances in brain science can help leaders learn to synchronize with followers on these deeper levels:

Your boss proposes a new initiative you think won’t work. Your senior colleague outlines a project timeline you think is unrealistic. What do you say when you disagree with someone who has more power than you do? How do you decide whether it’s worth speaking up? And if you do, what exactly should you say?

I like being happy. I like it so much that I’ve made more than a few difficult career decisions in order to avoid things that make me unhappy — things like working with people who treat me badly, long days trotting after carrots that always seem to hang just out of reach, and countless hours on planes, trains, and buses. Each “I would prefer not to” came at a professional and financial cost. But, hey, I figured, I’ve only got one life.

So you can imagine the dismay I felt upon reading The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success (Harper One, 2016), by Emma Seppälä. In it, Seppälä, the science director of Stanford School of Medicine’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, argues that the pursuit of happiness is actually a key to achieving professional success — not an obstacle to it.

Unlike much of the literature about happiness at work, The Happiness Track doesn’t approach its subject from an organizational perspective. There are no free lunches on offer. Instead, Seppälä focuses on six personal “strategies for attaining happiness and fulfillment [that] may, in fact, be the key to thriving professionally.” If you’re familiar with the discipline of Positive Psychology, it’s likely that you’ll have run across these ideas before: be in the moment; nurture your resilience; manage your energy; access your creativity; be good to yourself; be compassionate.

The co-founders of Aditazz, which uses software to design and construct hospitals and other specialized buildings, were beyond frustrated. Zigmund Rubel, an architect, wanted to design buildings in one direction, either from the outside in or from the inside out, depending on the project. Deepak Aatresh, the CEO and an electrical and computer science engineer, was interested in simultaneous outside-in, inside-out design aided by computation.

It was one of many seemingly irresolvable conflicts. "We knew we were well-intentioned, very smart, accomplished people, but it was hard to make forward progress," Aatresh says.

This type of clash is familiar to neuroscience expert Ajit Singh, a partner at VC Artiman Ventures and member of the Aditazz board of directors; it has its roots in the brain. Innovation comes from com­bining disciplines, but people in different disciplines don't think the same way. The idea that the right brain hemisphere controls creativity and the left logic has been debunked. But research shows that the left brain is more responsible for language, whereas the right takes care of spatial processing and attention. "People don't select professions," Singh explains. "Professions select people."

Time management is not cramming more into your day. Time management will help you spend your time according to your goal.

Effective time management is essential to attain your career and personal goals.

If you are unclear about what you are trying to achieve, it is difficult to achieve it.

We all have 24 hours in a given day, seven days in the week, and 52 weeks in the year. Our time needs to be managed effectively and efficiently to meet work goals and priorities, balance work and personal life, reduce stress and increase motivation.

Time management entails selecting the most relevant task to complete from all the possibilities available, and then by doing it in the best possible way. Action needs to be planned. Action is not an end in itself; rather it is a means to attain a goal.

There are misconceptions about time management. We need to control how we use our time to reduce stress and produce higher level outcomes. Both urgent and the longer term important tasks need to be completed.

When we control our time to reach our goals, we spend our time to its fullest advantage, rather than "firefighting" issues.

Research shows that an investment in planning gives us more time. We need to invest time to use our time effectively – doing the most important things first, and efficiently – in the quickest and best way.

In the workplace, we are under pressure to maximise our time to achieve set outcomes. This is easier said than done when we are confronted with time wasters. Sometimes, these can be unavoidable. Other times, these can be overcome with a change in approach. The first step is to identify these time wasters. Examples include:

We can't be the alpha dog all of the time. Whatever our personality, most of us experience varying degrees of feeling in charge. Some situations take us down a notch while others build us up.

New research shows that it's possible to control those feelings a bit more, to be able to summon an extra surge of power and sense of well-being when it's needed: for example, during a job interview or for a key presentation to a group of skeptical customers.

"Our research has broad implications for people who suffer from feelings of powerlessness and low self-esteem due to their hierarchical rank or lack of resources," says HBS assistant professor Amy J.C. Cuddy, one of the researchers on the study.

In "Power Posing: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance", Cuddy shows that simply holding one's body in expansive, "high-power" poses for as little as two minutes stimulates higher levels of testosterone (the hormone linked to power and dominance in the animal and human worlds) and lower levels of cortisol (the "stress" hormone that can, over time, cause impaired immune functioning, hypertension, and memory loss).

The result? In addition to causing the desired hormonal shift, the power poses led to increased feelings of power and a greater tolerance for risk.

"We used to think that emotion ended on the face," Cuddy says. "Now there is established research showing that while it's true that facial expressions reflect how you feel, you can also 'fake it until you make it.' In other words, you can smile long enough that it makes you feel happy. This work extends that finding on facial feedback, which is decades old, by focusing on postures and measuring neuroendocrine levels."

So there’s one management trend that everyone seems to be jumping on board with. In fact, studies have shown that 92% of companies with more than 200 employees offer an employee wellness program. This isn’t just to say they’re helping their employees. (That’s just one positive effect.) They’re using these programs strategically for talent management.

As of yet, there’s not a concrete definition of a wellness program. It can be what the company makes of it. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), though, has broken out their statistics into different styles of employee wellness. What SHRM found suggests that a vast majority of management teams are adopting wellness as a business strategy.

Tributes to the work of Prince continue to appear, more than a week after the legendary songwriter and performer passed away at age 57.

A recent story showcased Prince's strengths in the realms of creativity and talent development--and revealed how his passion for music was the key to his prolific career. Here are five highlights: 

1. Prince had a work ethic born of passion. Even after he was a famous and rich superstar, Prince's work ethic never waned. "He'd come to rehearsal, work us, go work his band, then he'd go to his studio all night and record," is what James "Jimmy Jam" Harris, Prince's high school classmate and producer, tells EW. "Then the next night he'd come to rehearsal with a tape in his hand and he'd say, 'This is what I did last night.' And it'd be something like '1999,' and you're just like, 'Who does this?'"

2. Prince was a molder of young talent--a superboss. His proteges included Scottish singer Sheena Easton, dancer Carmen Electra, and his former drummer, Sheila E. "He loved working with women and helping them and encouraging them and saying, 'Hey, I think this would be a good song for you,'" Sheila E. tells EW. Like Miles Davis and other "superboss" artists, Prince prided himself on being the foundation of a talent tree, and watching his branches find their own paths. 

If the answer to these last two questions is “rarely,” it wouldn’t surprise us. We don’t believe that swift, wholesale culture change is possible — or even desirable. After all, a company’s culture is its basic personality, the essence of how its people interact and work. However, it is an elusively complex entity that survives and evolves mostly through gradual shifts in leadership, strategy, and other circumstances. We find the most useful definition is also the simplest: Culture is the self-sustaining pattern of behavior that determines how things are done.

Made of instinctive, repetitive habits and emotional responses, culture can’t be copied or easily pinned down. Corporate cultures are constantly self-renewing and slowly evolving: What people feel, think, and believe is reflected and shaped by the way they go about their business. Formal efforts to change a culture (to replace it with something entirely new and different) seldom manage to get to the heart of what motivates people, what makes them tick. Strongly worded memos from on high are deleted within hours. You can plaster the walls with large banners proclaiming new values, but people will go about their days, right beneath those signs, continuing with the habits that are familiar and comfortable.

But this inherent complexity shouldn’t deter leaders from trying to use culture as a lever. If you cannot simply replace the entire machine, work on realigning some of the more useful cogs. The name of the game is making use of what you cannot change by using some of the emotional forces within your current culture differently.

Have you ever worked hard to improve a valuable skill and made real progress, only to have your development go unnoticed by the people who told you that you needed to improve? Perhaps this led you to look for a new job. Or maybe you’re a manager who’s been disappointed by poor performance and concluded that your low-performing employees are simply over-entitled? So you gave up on trying to help them improve and vented your frustration with colleagues behind closed doors.

Both of these commonplace experiences point to problems caused by a fixed mindset, in which we find it hard to believe that people can change. In the first scenario, an employee is judged as having low potential—and this assessment blinds leaders to the progress he’s made. In the second, the manager’s conviction that her employees will never change makes her less likely to engage in leadership behaviors that support development. The bottom line in both cases is that employees are less likely to reach their potential.

How do we improve who we are? The most effective--and often most difficult--way by far is to self-analyze. When we deconstruct our notions of ourselves and who we think we are, we are able to overcome potential obstacles standing in our way to becoming a better person.

By answering these 5 questions you can begin the journey of becoming your best self.

1. If you had one day left to live, would you be ready to go?

Although it's very easy for us to reach temporary states of complacency, reaching a level of complete fulfillment at life's end is a totally different story. So many of us end up going through the motions instead of actively enjoying what we do on a daily basis. Making sure we are content, right this moment, is a great way to keep this tendency in check.

Not so long ago, the idea that an employee could connect anytime, anywhere, was seen as a revolution in work–life balance. You could get home in time for dinner or go on vacation even when a project was at a critical point. Your smartphone could turn wherever you were into your mobile office.

But now many believe this unlimited connectivity has gone too far. Studies have concluded that late-night smartphone use has an adverse effect on employee productivity and engagement. A growing number of companies, such as Volkswagen and Atos, have enacted email policies intended to mandate unplugging. An agreement in April 2014 between French employers and unions created an “obligation to disconnect” for contract workers to ensure that they don’t burn out, and Germany is currently considering legislation that would ban communication from employers to their workers after hours.

As a leader, communicating can sometimes feel like Groundhog Day. No matter how hard you try to get your message across, it is all too easy to find the next day that you face the same blank stares, predictable objections, and questions that indicate that you failed to make it stick — that people just aren’t getting it. One reason leaders find themselves in this cycle is that their approach to communication is based on an outdated mental model. It’s a model best described as a “post office.” They view themselves as the sender of a message and others as the receivers. If problems arise, leaders look for disruption somewhere along the route.

The post office model focuses most leaders’ attention on the sending process, rather than the give-and-take of effective conversations. Even if they invite people to ask questions and truly value their buy-in, these leaders are still preoccupied with their message. This leaves them ignorant about the larger context and reality on the ground, including emerging issues and game-changing opportunities. In the extreme, thinking in terms of the post office model causes leaders to make decisions in isolation or miss the early warning signs of dysfunctional momentum.

Are you a high flyer in your 20s or 30s? Looking to add a board appointment or two to your CV now, rather than waiting another 20 years?

Seats at the big table have traditionally been the preserve of older men – and a growing number of women – who've earned their stripes in decades on the corporate battlefield. Opportunities for up-and-comers to join them can be sparse.

When we think of great leaders, certain characteristics come to mind: They have confidence in their abilities and conviction in their beliefs. They “trust their gut,” “stay the course,” and “prove others wrong.” They aren’t “pushovers,” and they certainly don’t “flip-flop.” But this archetype is terribly outdated. Having spent three years studying many of the world’s most successful leaders for my new book, Persuadable, I’ve learned one surprising thing they have in common: a willingness to be persuaded.

Alan Mulally, the vaunted CEO who saved Ford Motor Company, is, for example, exceptionally skeptical of his own opinions. Ray Dalio, one of the world’s most successful hedge fund managers, insists that his team ruthlessly second-guess his thinking. Christine Lagarde, managing director of the IMF, seeks out information that might disprove her beliefs about the world and herself. In our increasingly complex world, these leaders have realized that the ability to consider emerging evidence and change their minds accordingly provides extraordinary advantages.