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May 2008 (Part I): Do Your Leaders Need to Make Better Strategic Decisions?
 Executives today face an avalanche of information clamoring for action and attention. It is vital that Leaders quickly navigate through the hype, spin, and manipulation to separate the relevant from the irrelevant, the important from the trivial, and the myths from reality.
Failure to make key strategic decisions will result in incorrect actions based on invalid information and in a waste of valuable resources. You can afford neither inaction nor knee-jerk action. Critical thinking principles and procedures are what you need to prevent dysfunction.
Our proven strategic decision-making workshop takes a few of your organization's key past decisions, analyzes the variables that led to action, and applies those lessons to key future decisions.
Learn more about Strategic Decision Making for Leaders...
May 2008 (Part II): How to Fast Track Your Leaders
 Are your leaders prepared for the #1 challenge that they will face in the next 12-36 months?
91% of Senior Executives responding to a recent survey said that the "challenges that their organizations face are much more complex than they were five years ago."
This complexity means that leaders must be better and faster at formulating, choosing, and implementing more complex strategies. To do this, they must take a different approach.
Read More about How to Fast Track Leaders...
March 2008 (Part I): Selling to Executives - Don't Let This Happen to You
 Selling to executives is different. Executive barriers are higher and more complex to hurdle. Before executives or senior directors approve a purchase decision, they need to understand specifically how the product or service will specifically impact their overall corporate goals.
To sell to these high level decision makers successfully, you must be able to effectively accomplish 3 main objectives: - Identify your target customer's key business and financial goals, objectives, strategies, and operating issues.
- Link your ....
Learn more about the 3 keys to Executive Selling...
March 2008 (Part II): Moving Beyond Consultative Selling
 While solid product knowledge and advanced consultative selling skills can deliver increased revenue, they will not deliver industry leading sales results.
Industry leadership comes when real business acumen is added to the mix and you become a trusted advisor as opposed to merely acting as one.
For your company to maintain or achieve industry leadership your sales force must be fluent in three areas...
Get the White Paper to learn more
February 2008 (Part I): Training Assessment - How to Do it Right
February 2008 (Part II): Training Measurement - The Case for Why and How It Should Happen
 Even though we have completed over 400 successful training measurement projects with Fortune 1000 clients around the world, we continue to hear concerns about training measurement.
More often than not the hesitation involves three central arguments:
- There are too many variables.
- It is too expensive.
- No one else is doing it.
All three arguments are not valid. Training measurement can be efficient, accurate, and cost effective.
With that said, training measurement projects should only take place for business relevant training when answers to the following questions are valuable to you and your organization.
Get Whitepaper
January 2008 (Part I): Organizational Savvy - Political Skills to Successfully Navigate Power and Politics with Integrity
 Despite excellent intentions, many employees, managers, and executives become victims of "behind- the-scenes" political forces operating in their organizations.
These include power and politics dynamics, perceptions, turf and ego, and even sabotage.
This high-energy intensive political skills workshop adjusts attitudes about power and politics, confronts naivete about organizational dynamics, and provides practical political skills and strategic influence skills for building organizational impact with integrity.
Clients like CitiBank, Wells Fargo, Constellation Energy, CVS Caremark, Autodesk, Apple, and Genentech find this workshop extremely valuable.
Learn more about becoming politically savvy...
January 2008 (Part II): How are Politics Affecting You and Your Company?
 Each business day, a corporate version of "survival of the fittest" is played out. Power plays, turf battles, deception, and sabotage block individuals' career progress and threaten companies' resources and results.
Being Organizationally Savvy means never having to say, "I didn't see it coming."
It also means achieving career success, maximizing team impact, and protecting your company's reputation and bottom line. How? - By utilizing ethical but street-smart strategies for navigating corporate politics to gain "impact with integrity."
Clients like CitiBank, Wells Fargo, Constellation Energy, CVS Caremark, Autodesk, Apple, and Genentech find this workshop extremely valuable.
Download Whitepaper...
December 2007 (Part l): Coaching for Sales Performance
 Did you know that effective sales management can create a competitive advantage that greatly impacts revenue growth, sales retention, and client satisfaction?
Sales leadership training can create effective sales managers and elminate a long- term problem for many organizations. Promoting highly effective salespeople to the role of sales manager seems to fail as often as it succeeds, and there is little documented evidence of sales managers' independent contribution to organizational value.
Our research shows a 29% increase in top-line performance due to some critical few skills of sales managers independent of the skills of their salespeople. Learn more about how to use Sales Management as a source of competitive advantage...
December 2007 (Part ll): How to Manage Top Sales People
Did you know that effective sales leadership training can create a competitive advantage that greatly impacts revenue growth, sales retention, and client satistaction? Creating effective sales managers has been a long- term problem for many organizations. Promoting highly effective salespeople to the role of sales manager seems to fail as often as it succeeds, and there is little documented evidence of sales managers' independent contribution to organizational value. Our research shows a 29% increase in top-line performance due to some critical few skills of sales managers independent of the skills of their salespeople. Learn more about how to use Sales Management as a source of competitive advantage...
November 2007 (Part l): Powerful Project Management Post Mortems
 Research suggests that up to 75% of projects fail to meet original expectations or success criteria. In our minds, this number is unacceptable.
Each year, we conduct project post mortems with experienced, qualified, and motivated project teams that did not succeed. Our experience shows that spending a little bit of time to take stock throughout the project and at the end of a project can pay big dividends.
Post mortems also help ensure that you do not build irreversible walls between stakeholders, developers, departments, and team members. If you are not making major improvements in cost, quality, stakeholder satisfaction, and time between projects, then our Post Mortem Methodology is for you. Learn more about how to use Post Mortems to drive success...
November 2007 (Part ll): How to Manage Stakeholder Risk on Projects
Would it surprise you to learn that being on time, on budget, and fulfilling all requirements does not necessarily mean project success? Whose requirements are we trying to meet anyway? And who decides if the original due date can be changed when the scope grows?
The key to many complex projects is optimizing stakeholder involvement in a way that makes sense.
When it comes to stakeholders, you better be asking yourself the following 3 questions:
Who cares?What do they care about?What am I going to do about it?
To most good project leaders, these questions are pretty elementary. Here's the twist. As we developed a workshop on stakeholder management built on those three questions, one of our project risk management experts put all the pieces together when he said, "That's just risk management for people."
We think he's right. Read how to effectively manage stakeholder risk...
October 2007 (Part l): Truly Managing Performance
Performance Management is a hot and confusing topic these days.
First of all, the term has different meanings for different people.
Secondly, business leaders who plan to introduce a Performance Management initiative have a variety of important concerns that they are trying to address:
- Inability to execute key strategic goals.
- Need to reduce overall costs and increase productivity.
- Retention of top performers in key positions.
- Lack of bench strength and succession risk.
- Desire to formalize and actively develop cultural philosophies and values.
Just as concerns vary, so do Performance Management implementation strategies, practices, and tools. Whether the initiative is focused on aligning goals, integrating systems, or performance coaching, the underlying objective is to positively influence and align individual performance. Yet, most PM initiatives are still founded on the initial premises and assumptions of traditional performance management approaches. Learn more about how to manage performance...
October 2007 (Part ll): 5 Keys to Successful Performance Management
 If you want better performance from your employees, the following four statements may surprise you:
Forget about making managers' lives easier.Dump your performance appraisal and "coach" moniker.Shift accountability away from employees.Stop paying them off.
While these statements may seem to contradict what you have heard about successful performance management practices, we have found that the following five practices break away from conventional thinking to help solve the age old problem of the cumbersome, ineffective, and often ridiculed performance management process.
September 2007 (Part l): How to Sell to Executives
 Are you having difficulty accessing and influencing key client executives to increase revenue?
Before executives or senior managers approve a purchase decision, they need to see how the product or service will impact their key corporate goals. Sales industry leadership and true differentiation requires (1) Product and service knowledge, (2) Consultative selling skills, and (3) Applied business acumen. Solution selling is the key to succeeding with executives, you must address both current technical needs and strategic business needs - the critical needs that keep executives awake at night. Learn more about how to sell higher ...
September 2007 (Part ll): Upgrading Your Sales Force
 Sales leadership training can help you to increase revenue, margins, and personal success by turning more of your "B" Players into "A" players?
Typically A players represent the top 10 to 15% of your sales force. Giving you're A and B players the tools to uncover complex business issues that are relevant to their customers and the skills to be able to link their solutions to those issues is the key to upgrading your sales f orce. The results will reveal themselves in the numbers. When it comes to investing in your sales force the greatest return comes from concentrating on both your A and B players. First, provide your A players with...
August 2007 (Part l): Project Management Diagnostic Tool
Would you like to work on improving project management skills to start off on the right foot, continuously improve, or support some key decisions?
Our experience and research tell us that up to 75% of projects fail to meet original expectations due to at least one of the following 5 key problems:
Lack of commitment. Inability to define project scope and manage change. Lack of resources. Unrealistic schedules. Poor definition and planning.
The LSA Project Management Best Practices Diagnostic Tool is based upon multi-industry project best practices and research. The results, combined with face-to-face interviews, are used to develop a targeted Project Results Blue Print to concretely define the action steps necessary to meet your goals.
August 2007 (Part ll): #1 Reason Executives Believe Training Fails
When we talk to HR and training, they consistently tell us that learning initiatives such as sales negotiation training, performance management training or any other type of training fail for one of three reasons. Business executives tell us that all three assumptions are incorrect.
Do any of these actual quotes from HR and training clients sound familiar?
People do not have the time to attend training.We do not have enough executive support or budget to do this right.We need to do a better job marketing what we are offering to employees so we can fill these classes.
These unfortunately common statements reflect the #1 reason that business unit executives and line managers believe that training initiatives fail...
July 2007: 5 Key Succession Planning Trends
Did you know that "talent mobility" is increasing as fast, if not faster than the performance expectations of most companies?
While the majority of companies with more than 500 employees have already taken some steps to begin a succession planning process for senior management positions, most agree that they do not have the right talent ready at the right time.
One of the key goals of any succession planning effort should be that there is no "hiccup" in seamlessly executing the business plan, at least from a talent perspective.
To ensure success, we recommend implementing 5 key lessons learned from the field.
Read more about the 5 keys lessons...
June 2007: Channel Objectives, Metrics, and Dashboards
More and more leaders are finding that their Channels are not living up to their original expectations.
Channels are a complicated business, filled with nuance, complications, and outright complexity. What works in one situation might be counterproductive in another.
As a result, an important job for a channel leader or manager is to evaluate, adapt, and execute within a flexible framework that allows alignment across multiple objectives and metrics.
Read more about the 5 keys lessons...
May 2007 (Part I): 5 Project Success Factors
While almost every industry and profession continue to commit a greater proportion of their time and resources to key projects, up to 75% of their mission critical projects continue to fail to meet original expectations.
Few projects are easy. Even when the technology is proven, the requirements are clear, and the budget is sufficient, for various reasons, problems arise. span>
While many projects fail, others exceed or meet expectations.
If you have led or been involved with projects, you know that you must start with agreed upon goals and key stakeholders.
Read about the 5 Keys to Project Success...
May 2007 (Part II): Project Management Tools & Templates
 Are you looking to save time, reduce costs or improve project quality?
Best Practice templates, applied correctly, can greatly increase your chances for success by providing guidance, a common language, and proven concepts to integrate into your project.
With over 15 years of project management experience with leading organizations around the world, these templates were created by PMI certified PMP experts to help project leaders and project teams succeed.
Get Project Management Best Practice Templates...
April 2007 (Part I): Does Your Interviewing Process Work?
In a previous issue of the Harvard Business Review, Larry Bossidy, the past CEO of AlliedSignal, describes interviewing as "the most flawed process in American business."
Based on over 25 years of experience helping organizations improve competency-based behavioral interviewing training and practices, we couldn't agree more.
More and more of our clients have increased hiring. More and more of our clients utilize an inconsistent and unproven interviewing process that takes too much time and does not produce the desired results.
While we know that hiring the right people significantly decreases costs and increases productivity, fewer and fewer organizations have the skills to interview effectively-they don't have a clear picture of the ideal candidate nor how to ask the questions that will predict performance once hired.
We think the problem is obvious.
Read more about improving your hiring process...
April 2007 (Part II): Tools for Hiring Top Talent
If you are working long hours while trying to add important team members to your group, you should be asking yourself 4 key questions:
Based on over 25 years of experience helping organizations improve competency-based behavioral interviewing training and practices, we couldn't agree more.
Despite the best intentions, 90% of all terminations are due to performance factors that never appeared on a resume. Most companies exert 2-4 times more time and effort to interview and select new employees than is required.
It is possible to hire "A" players faster with less effort.
Read more about improving your hiring process...
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