As you read this, 25-40% of your workforce does not trust their manager. This mistrust leads directly to a lack of engagement, decreased productivity, and increased attrition.
If you think that these tough economic times will keep your top talent engaged and employed, think again. Now is the time that you're "A" managers are worth their weight in gold. They know it. Your competition knows it. Are you doing anything to keep the good ones aboard?
In this turbulent economy, you need your managers to be able to do "more with less." To meet this challenge, managers must have the proper management skills, practices, systems, and structures to help them (and you) succeed. Done right, management development should tangibly reduce employee relations issues, drive productivity and engagement, increase revenue, enhance product quality, and improve retention.
Research shows that organizations that make training available in tough economic times fare better and realize higher profits than do organizations that offer little or no training. According to a study commissioned by the ASTD, organizations that invest in training realize 218% higher gross income per employee. Moreover, companies that make training a priority are estimated to grow at a rate three times faster than those without training.
Smart companies view a downturn in the economy as the perfect time to invest and build their management bench-strength. By 2010, we anticipate a mass exodus of baby boomers reaching retirement age and exiting the workforce-leaving companies with a key talent shortage. That's why proactive organizations continue to spend on developing their managers.
To reap the benefits however, management development must be done right. We define "right" as following a proven 6-step process to ensure that you create tangible business results for you, your managers, and your organization.
- Identifying the desired results using a strategic link analysis, success metrics, and a business case blueprint.
- Assessing the current situation by aligning leadership and employees, obtaining buy-in, pinpointing skill gaps, and setting baseline.
- Designing the exact solution utilizing interviews, pilot workshops, customized case studies, predisposition letters, feedback systems, and individual development profiles.
- Delivering targeted action learning and performance coaching modules supported by a simple Learning Management and Implementation System to handle internal marketing, registration, reporting, and follow-through.
- Implementing coaching and following through with targeted job aids, customized mastery sessions, implementation focus groups, and individual skill implementation plans.
- Measuring impact and results of skill adoption on key business metrics including revenue, margin, productivity, engagement, and retention.
About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned
Admittedly, my head was in the sand.
About 10 years ago, my boss (the CEO) asked me if we should consider outsourcing some of our training function. The question caught me off guard. Was this a reflection on me and my team? Did other executives think that we couldn't handle it? After some research and sound advice, I learned that my initial reaction was pretty naïve.
I was running HR and Organizational Strategies for a soon-to-be 2,500 person global consulting firm. Along with the 100 other tasks on our plates, we were in the process of building world class sales, leadership, and performance management programs for our top talent.
Asking for outside help was far from our minds. We wanted to prove to some new members of the executive team that we "had what it takes." We felt that, if we used outside experts, we would not be as valued as if we were to design, deliver, and manage the training all by ourselves.
Fortunately for me (and for the company), some wiser and more experienced people pointed us in the right direction. We realized that a few key questions make all the difference.
Read up on these training outsourcing questions..
About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned
Project sponsors and project leaders are often afraid to discuss project concerns until it is too late. With up to 50% of projects failing to meet expectations, the chances are high that at least one of your most critical projects will not succeed.
At a time when every investment dollar must be spent wisely, have you done all it takes to ensure that your project is not the 5,000 pound gorilla in the room?
If you cannot answer yes to all of the following questions, chances are you should take a look under the covers to help get your project managers and supervisors back on track.
- Is your project on time and on budget while delivering the quality results that you expect?
- Are agreed-upon project success metrics and project risks being regularly monitored and communicated with all key stakeholders?
- Does the project have the right resources, talent and sponsorship to succeed?
- Is the change management process working effectively?
- Would you consider the project team a high performing team?
- Is the project schedule realistic and inclusive of areas out of the project's control?
If you can confidently answer yes to the above questions, you are most likely in a good position. If you are unsure, our project assessment and diagnostic is for you.
As one of our clients recently said, "spending a little time and a little money can save you a lot of time, a lot of pain, and a lot of money."
Improve project skills and learn to diagnose project risk and success.
About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned
While it may work for this giraffe, it usually takes a lot more than a "carrot and stick" approach to effectively influence project teams. Especially remote and virtual teams.
Once a project team becomes proficient at the fundamental science of project management (e.g. project risk, politics, definition, planning, kickoff and execution, assessment and compliance), it is usually the "people stuff" that gets in the way.
Positively influencing team members who may or may not fall under your leadership often determines the success of a project and cross-functional employee retention initiatives.
The first step in remote and virtual team influence is to establish a climate for influence. Read the white paper "Influencing Your Team" to learn effective ways to improve project skills and the first things a team needs to accomplish.
About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned
What would happen if the Olympics used training's most prevalent approach to scoring?
In addition to creating some interesting arguments, Nadia's perfect 10 would probably turn into something similar to:
- "I think she did pretty well. Very entertaining."
- "I'd recommend watching her again."
- "While I liked it, I wish her routine was my more applicable to my specific job."
While it sounds crazy in this context, thousands of organizations continue to allow training to be the least measured and most ineffective process in business. Based on over 600 measurement projects for Fortune 1000 companies around the world, we know that Training Measurement can now be done both efficiently and effectively. Done right, training measurement will:
- Quantify business impact
- Drive focus and accountability
- Provide specific feedback for coaching
- Support employee retention initiatives
Learn more about training measurement done right...
About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned
"People really like it. We have waiting lists! Our workshops are very popular. We're really happy."
Unfortunately, "popularity" is one of the most common answers we get to justify training expenditures and approaches from Training and HR Departments.
But popularity as a learning business metric is about as effective as tracking hours trained, dollars spent, people trained, courses offered, subjects covered, modalities used, and the look and feel of the workbooks.
Done right, training is about...
Learn more about training done right...
About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned
Most assessments are not only statistically invalid, but they are often implemented in a way that inhibits trust, decreases relevance, and wastes time.
We believe that the purpose of a training assessment should be to answer the questions: "What is holding us back?" and "Where should we focus?"
We also believe that training assessment should be customized to each unique environment, drive toward outcomes rather than simply seek opinions, and guide strategies by comparing skills to actual performance.
And from a purely practical point of view, we believe as well that assessments should be short, relevant, cost effective, and timely.
In addition to traditional interviews and focus groups, LSA Global offers three proven online training assessment options. With over 600 assessment and training measurement projects over the last 15+ years, we think you'll be pleasantly surprised with the speed, cost, flexibility, and value of these options.
Learn more about 3 Best Practice Training Assessment Options...
About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned
Wouldn't you rather spend a little bit of money before you spend a lot of money? While it seems like common sense to diagnose before prescribing, we continue to be surprised that billions are spent on corporate training each year without any assurance that the money is being spent on the right areas.
Unfortunately, there are hundreds of poorly designed assessments being peddled in the marketplace that are too long, too theoretical, and invalid. A proper assessment however, can be used to efficiently and effectively initiate change, align stakeholders, pinpoint skill gaps, customize workshops, predispose training participants, guide coaching, set baseline metrics, target investments, and obtain buy-in.
In order to see if you should be using a skills assessment BEFORE investing in training, please complete our training assessment health check.
5-10 minutes could save you a lot of time, a lot of money, and possibly your reputation.
Learn more about 3 Best Practice Training Assessment Options...
About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned
More than 50% of projects fail to meet original expectations or success criteria. Up to 75% of project leaders do not know if their projects are on track.
This uncertainty can spell trouble in terms of project time, budget, quality, and employee retention.
However, project uncertainty can also provide an opportunity to get back on track.
If you would you like to formally compare your project to research-based best practices - to turn around troubled projects, kick projects off on the right foot, or take your Project Management Practices to the next level - then the LSA Project Management Best Practices Diagnostic Tool is for you.
Project Best Practices Diagnostic / Assessment
About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned
When projects require more than one person to complete, they also require teamwork. You can have the best boat, but regardless of the weather, it is the "people stuff" that typically causes problems on projects.
While it is true that, for successful end results, you need to excel at the science of project management, it is also true that poor project teamwork will destroy the most carefully crafted plans, business cases, and project risk management strategies.
One best practice for creating high performance project teamwork is to build a Problem Solving Culture on each an every project team. This "Problem Solving Machine" has a specific approach and clear characteristics that have proven invaluable to project teams over the years.
Read More about building a High Performing Project Team...
About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned
Less than 25% of corporate training initiatives are directly tied to a company's key business initiatives.
Economic uncertainty often rightfully spells trouble for corporate learning agendas and other expenditures that are not closely linked to a company's strategic priorities. Difficult times can also be a difficult time to get leaders to attend learning programs because they are too busy working on "other priorities."
However, these times can also be a call to Learning and Development leaders to align their activities with prevailing priorities and mission critical programs intended to have a quantifiable impact on the bottom line of the company. If none exist, consider taking your game to the next level by championing a learning initiative that will do just that.
For Learning and Development leaders looking to have a real impact on the business, their challenge is turning Learning and Development initiatives into direct value creation processes - one that prepares leaders to better manage the business and execute the strategy while creating immediate value to the business. State of the art leadership development is quickly being viewed as learning that takes place within the context of work initiatives tied to strategic business imperatives.
Action Learning provides an ideal platform for achieving both powerful leadership learning and meaningful business results. It is a process where developing leaders work on a project to produce real business results while learning new leadership and business skills. In essence, it creates a structured practice field to learn through doing. The level of complexity and infrastructure can range from simple assignments with a small group of leaders to company wide, mission critical business transformations.
Learn more about our Bottom Line Learning: Leaders in Action Program...
About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned
Would you be surprised to find that most Action Learning Programs do not change behavior or deliver true business results?
While Action Learning can be a powerful learning platform, poor action learning design can greatly minimize the desired impact. As a guiding design principle, we have found that the larger the dose of "business reality" - the better.
To us " business realty" means a minimum $6 million to the bottom line though revenue increases and/or cost reductions.
With that in mind, here are 7 Action Learning design best practices that should be addressed.
About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned
Can you believe that less than 50% of companies focus on the key skills required to grow their business - the skills that help drive revenue, increase productivity, and meet strategic targets? Regardless of the macro economic conditions, we find that figure, and the associated waste of billions of training dollars, appalling.
Despite the increased pressure on tangible business results, organizations continue to fall short in the areas of strategic skill identification, skill gap analysis, business alignment, and the Transfer of Training(TM). Companies continue to take ineffective short cuts and purchase or cancel training that never should have been considered in the first place.
Business results and skill alignment can and should be accomplished without costly or time consuming "Dilbert-like" consulting services and approaches. Yet, as has been proven over and over again, training on its own does not provide business results or improved performance.
If you would like to target your training investments wisely, then our proven Training Assessment Services are for you. We can help you align leadership and employees, pinpoint critical skill gaps, and create individual coaching plans that put your company on the positive side of the statistics.
Learn more about our proven Training Assessment Services
About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned
When we talk to Human Resources and training, they tell us that learning initiatives fail due to a lack of marketing. But, business executives and employees tell us that this assumption is wrong.
Marketing for training is all about getting the right skills to the right people in the right way at the right time and at the right price. It is about creating awareness and making it easy to "buy" training that makes sense to the individual, their boss, and the organizational design.
We do not advocate against using proven marketing techniques to communicate professional development options. Quite the contrary. Standard marketing approaches, such as sponsorship by senior leaders, visibility on your intranet, easy registration and tracking, targeted marketing emails, clear value propositions, success stories, incentives, and promotions, are the tickets to play the game.
If you 're struggling with low attendance at your training programs and think that marketing is the cause, you are probably missing the boat. The boat that we are talking about carries executives as its passengers. The boat that we are talking about has business alignment and business results as its rudder and helm. We have yet to find a training program aligned with individual and business performance goals that does not have a waiting list - with or without marketing.
About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned
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...
About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned
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 and managers must be better and faster at formulating, choosing, and implementing more innovative strategies. To do this, they must take a different approach.
Read More about How to Fast Track Leaders...
About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned
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...
About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned
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
About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned
Despite excellent intentions, we estimate that over 50% of training providers and internal company practitioners misuse and misapply training assessment tools and techniques.
Properly designed and applied training assessments should clearly answer two key questions:
- What is holding us back?
- Where should we focus?
Training assessments should also be customized to each unique environment, be outcome-based (not opinion-based), and compare skills to actual performance to guide strategies.
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 Training Measurement Whitepaper
About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned
Despite excellent intentions, many employees, managers, and executives become victims of "behind- the-scenes" political forces operating in their organizations.
These include power and political 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.
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, results and key employee retention initiatives.
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.
