Creating a strategic plan to maximize employee productivity requires understanding employees and the work environment; the strategic plan should therefore be focused on them. Key elements of this plan will include effective leadership and motivation. Being named leader of a project and/or a group of colleagues is both an honor and a responsibility that should not be taken lightly. Effective leaders are intelligent, ambitious, charismatic, outgoing and have character. Being intelligent contributes to a leader's ability to solve problems; their higher level of intelligence also improves their perceived competence relative to their followers. Since motivation is linked to the level of effort people put into what they do, leaders should create roles that tap into employees' know-how and full range of abilities, thereby utilizing their superior intelligence, to create an incentive plan to recognize and reward superior performance that includes all employees (not just senior management/employees) and is structured carefully enough to avoid excessive costs for t...