Season's greetings to you and yours! 

Thank you for your support this past year.  We are so grateful to be working with wonderful clients and partners who actively strive to create a competitive advantage through people. 

Please enjoy access to the top 10 articles downloaded in 2015 by clients like you to help align their culture and talent with their strategy.

Top 10 Whitepaper Downloads

1. 3x Alignment Research Findings. Strategy + Culture + Talent
   We launched a research initiative to understand what distinguishes the winners from the losers. What did we find? Highly aligned companies significantly outperform their peers and 7 unique factors matter most.
   
   
2. 5 Warning Signs that Your Managers Are Falling Behind Strategically Managers matter. Yet, too many high-growth companies mistakenly exclude their managers from the very strategic planning and implementation processes they need to excel as managers. If your managers are not clear about the strategic direction of the company, their ability to lead, set priorities and make trade-offs for themselves and their team is severely hampered.
    
3. Do You Have High Performing Managers? The 4 Management Metrics that Matter Most Despite rumors to the contrary and the recent buzz around holacracies and self-managed work teams at companies like Zappos, management and managers are still a major factor in the running of most organizations.
   
   
4. Performance Pressure: How Much Should a Leader Push? As leaders, we are expected to create the environment that produces the most from the people within our organizations. If we (or our culture) push too much or too little, we may not meet our goals. Read more about how to strike the right balance.
    
5. Top 5 Warning Signs that Your Performance Environment May Be In Trouble If you have direct reports, then you should sit up and take notice. Think about it. What percent of your success is dependent upon the success of others? If you are like most savvy leaders today, you will answer 70%+. Download this provocative whitepaper to learn what to watch out for in your organization.
   
   
6. Create a High Performance Sales Environment It is a sales leader's responsibility to create the circumstances that stimulate improved performance from their sales force. The key question is not "why" high performance but rather "how"? Are you hitting your sales targets? Read about the 6 steps that a sales leader must take to build a high performance sales environment.
    
7. The Truth About Sales Coaching and the Biggest Mistakes For much of the sales world, the notion that sales coaching is an essential ingredient in improving sales organizations is not up for debate. But most sales leaders - if they're honest - will tell you that they barely have time to manage their sales teams much less time to coach. With that reality as the backdrop, here's the question - What if you could cut your coaching time in half and get better results?
   
   
8. 5 Most Common Training Function Strategies and Key Mistakes to Avoid There are many different paths to creating a successful training function. In our experience, however, there are 5 main strategic approaches that differentiate one training function from another. One direction is not necessarily better than another. Rather, the key is to create a core focus that works in your specific environment and addresses your most pressing needs.  
    
9. New Employee Orientation: 7 Speed to Productivity Best Practices Is your speed to productivity for new hires where you want it to be? Most new employees take anywhere from 3 to 24 months to "get up to speed." This wide disparity provides wonderful opportunities for organizations who want to decrease "ramp time" and implement a more effective new hire on-boarding process.
   
10. Leading for Engagement: The Top 10 Most Powerful Ways Leaders Can Boost Employee Engagement Inspiring people to put forth their best effort is, perhaps, a leader's most vexing, and yet most rewarding, challenge. The good news is that employee engagement can be measured and improved. And if leaders take the right actions to improve employee engagement, business performance can improve dramatically.  Here are the ten actions with the greatest impact.

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

3 "Must Have" Steps to Convert Customer Loyalty into Customer Revenue

Most customer service leaders agree that satisfied customers create customer loyalty which, in turn, leads to higher revenue and greater profits. 

Loyal and faithful customers matter. Their devotion typically manifests itself in repeat business, higher margins and positive word of mouth.  In fact, according to:

• Bain and Company, a 5% increase in customer retention can improve profitability by 75%.
• Forrester Research, it is 5 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain current clients. 
• Nielsen, over 75% of consumers are most likely to buy a new product when referred by friends or family.
• The Direct Marketing Association, the average company loses between 10 and 30% of its customers annually.
• Gallup, a fully engaged customer represents an average 23% premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth compared with the average customer. 

We agree that strong customer loyalty can enable companies to significantly out-perform their competition, but only if the necessary strategies are in place to turn customer satisfaction into revenue-generating action. These strategies are the critical link between a customer's feelings and whether or not they act upon those feelings. 

Customers may love you. They may intend to invest in your products and services and talk about them with others...but do they actually translate intentions into real purchases, referrals and testimonials? 

To gain the most from fulfilling your brand promise, you need to do whatever it takes to make it easy for your best customers to buy and recommend you. Our customer loyalty experts tell us that there are three simple steps to converting customer loyalty into customer action...all possible, all under your control, and often necessary to realize actual revenue growth.

The bottom line - when customers believe in your brand promise, they give more.

Read the 3 "Must Have"Steps to Convert Customer Loyalty into Customer Revenue

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

High Performance - How to Lead Against the 4 Big Signs of Complacency

Complacency is the enemy of high performance.   

From a sporting perspective, only 11% of NBA teams since 1971 have been repeat champions.  In the NFL, only 8 teams have won back-to-back Super Bowls in the last 50 years.  From a corporate perspective, almost one-third of the companies listed in Jim Collin's best-selling business book, Good to Great, are either defunct or at less than half of their market cap while another 50% of the companies studied are now at or below the performance of their peers.

Yet, as leaders, we are charged with putting our teams in situations that consistently bring out their best.  Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, may have put it best when he said, "Success breeds complacency. And complacency breeds failure."  

Unfortunately, examples of corporate complacency are not difficult to find.  One of our favorites includes Research in Motion (RIM), the maker of the once ubiquitous and market-leading BlackBerry that first allowed people to send and receive email from a handheld device. It was dubbed the "Crackberry" and became a "must have" for CEO's, world leaders, athletes and Hollywood celebrities.    

Founded in 1985, RIM became one of the world's most successful high-tech companies. Then, thanks to the introduction of Apple's iPhone, RIM's market share dropped from 50% in 2009 to less than 3% today.  While BlackBerry was riding high and making incremental improvements, Apple created an entirely new experience with a cooler, better and more stylish iPhone.  If RIM had not been complacent when they were on top and had spent more time looking where the market was going, the story today might have been quite different.

From a human performance perspective, we believe that leaders must fight complacency by constantly creating a meaningful performance gap between where you are and where you want to be.  If the next level of performance is "just possible," then employees will be stimulated to perform at their peak.

For example, comparing yourself to a more successful person can encourage greater effort on your part to achieve. Conversely, if you are the higher achiever, you may be tempted to relax, get complacent and let others catch up. These are critical and foundational concepts behind creating a High Performance Environment. As a leader, your number one job is to stimulate greater performance from your team, and one of your most important tasks is to identify clear, transparent, and fair standards for job performance. This clarity will help you lead the fight against complacency. 

Be on the lookout for these four key signs of complacency: 

1. Satisfaction with what is rather than what can be.
2. The sense that no more can be done.
3. Lackadaisical acceptance of the traditional ways of behaving.
4. Lack of interest in innovation and continuous improvement.

Once you introduce a new and higher standard, you will need to offer employees the support they need to be successful in their journey toward improved performance.

Top 5 Warning Signs that YourPerformance Environment May Be In Trouble

How to Create a High PerformanceEnvironment

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

5 Steps to Get Your Project Team Pulling in the Same Direction

Is your project team scattered all over the map? Do they know where they are going and how they are going to get there?

The more important, complex and visible your project, the more critical it is to have all the team members working together and pulling in the same direction. 

Most project leaders face at least one of the following challenges during a project: 

• Resource Limitations. Just as the project has a start and a finish, so does the project team. The more unique the project, the greater the difficulty in assembling and keeping a team with the appropriate skill and style mix. 
• Scope Creep. Project scope rarely stays the same over the course of a project. Things change and projects need to change accordingly. Scope is controlled by ensuring there are clear agreements (in a way that aligns with your organizational culture and before any new work begins) on the implications of requirements, specifications, objectives, timelines and costs. 
• Politics. When "politics" interferes with project progress, we usually mean that the organization's authority structures and influencers aren't properly supporting the project. Given that projects often require cooperation and participation across functional boundaries of an organization, this is not surprising.
• Weak Estimating. Because estimating requires forecasting the future, resource requirements, costs, timing and deliverables are often built more on assumptions than facts. Even projects that are similar to previous efforts can be difficult to forecast because most projects contain so many variables. 
• Poor Communication. If people are the engine of accomplishing work, communication is the heart of true productivity. Projects that require cooperative, concerted effort from temporary, cross-functional project teams, require teams to re-create basic communication channels on every project. 

To overcome these common challenges, each project team needs a clear road map to follow. You, as project leader, are in charge of seeing that there is a step-by-step plan to drive you all efficiently and successfully toward the project goals that will deliver the desired business results for your key stakeholders.

Read the 5 Steps Winning LeadersTake to Ensure Each Project Team Member "Gets It"

What Your Project Team Can Learn from Weight Watchers

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 Health Check Is Your Project on Track?

Project management is both an art and a skill.  Effective project leaders are worth their weight in gold. Weak  project managers create unnecessary angst, waste and churn.

A recent project post mortem at one of our growing high tech clients reinforced that the best project managers consistently excel at simultaneously managing results and relationships while meeting or exceeding ever-changing stakeholder expectations. Are your project leaders and project teams:

1. Getting high quality results?
2. Forming and maintaining meaningful relationships?
3. Setting and managing expectations?

Getting High Quality Project Results

The desired results of any project must be clearly understood at all times by the project team, the project sponsor, and all key internal and external stakeholders.  The more complex the project, the better the project team must be at dealing with the inevitable changes in direction, scope, resources and timing.  That means quickly understanding changes, communicating the implications and making wise decisions with those who matter most. 

Here are three warning signs that the desired results may not be as clear, believable or implementable as they need to be to set you and your team up for success:

• The business rationale for the project is vague, tactical, debatable, or was created in a vacuum.
• There is some ambiguity between customers, management, project managers, and the project team regarding what they want to accomplish and why.
• While people generally know what the project is trying to accomplish, it is unclear specifically how the success of the project is ultimately to be measured.
  

Forming and Maintaining Meaningful Relationships

In this time of cross-functional, cross-cultural, and cross-global teams, relationships are the heart of getting project work done.  Because project teams are usually made up of people with different skills, backgrounds, agendas, assumptions, and reporting relationships, project leaders must be adept at influencing others to agree on goals, roles, processes and conflict resolution. Influencing a team requires solid preparation combined with a willingness to use a variety of leadership behaviors based upon the situation. 

Here are three warning signs that your relationships may not be as strong as you need them to be meet or exceed expectations:

• It is unclear who all of the internal and external project stakeholders are and what they care most about.
• Project team members or stakeholders' responsibilities and jobs are unclear, confusing, or shifting without explicit recalibration.
• Formal and authoritative sponsorship of the project is unclear or in name only.

Setting and Managing Expectations 

Stakeholder satisfaction is directly correlated to how well you and your team set and manage expectations along the entire project life-cycle.  This is accomplished by proactively maintaining frequent and consistent communication with key stakeholders about project status, issues and satisfaction to-date.  Project team members need to know how and when to communicate any changes, decisions or issues. 

Here are four warning signs that you need to better manage expectations:

• While communication occurs, there is no formal strategy or plan to ensure that information gets to the right people, at the right time in the right way.
• Internal and external stakeholders are often confused regarding direction, decisions, coordination, status, or information.
• Large or small changes are often implemented without going through a formal review process to determine the value or impact.
• Tasks are not consistently or clearly measured to ensure that the team meets cost, quality and time success criteria.

Assess the Health of Your Project

Learn More About Project Post Mortem Best Practices 

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

Should You Facilitate Your Own Strategy Retreat? 3 Guidelines to Help You to Decide

Strategic Planning...It is that time of year again. Most successful companies and teams conduct strategic planning sessions to ensure that key stakeholders agree upon where to play and what actions to take over the next twelve to thirty-six months. Done right, a successful strategy retreat sets clear priorities and boundaries, galvanizes and inspires the workforce, and creates synergies that allow the organization to perform beyond just the sum of its parts.  Done wrong, an unsuccessful strategic plan builds silos, dilutes performance and potential, and decreases your ability to attract, engage and retain top talent. When conducting a strategy retreat, you have three main options: 1.   Facilitate it yourself 2.   Use an internal facilitator 3.   Hire an outside professional.  Before even addressing the issue of who facilitates your strategy retreat, the first step should be to set clear and measurable business objectives. Without meaningful and realistic goals, it is too easy to waste time and money. Unclear objectives also make it difficult to select the most effective design options in terms of pre-work, design, timing, participation, location and post-retreat communication and cascading.   All too often companies select dates and locations before they have a clear and agreed-upon picture of what success would look like from a strategy, culture and talent perspective. They then call companies like ours to help before they are able to answer the most basic questions of what would constitute a success and how that success would align with current business priorities. This is a mistake.   When it comes to strategy retreats, form (the design) should follow function (the purpose).  After you have agreed upon the desired outcomes for your unique situation, it is time to determine whether an internal or external facilitator would be more effective at getting you from where you are to where you want to go. While many of our clients have very capable and knowledgeable internal facilitators, there are three situations that call for an outside facilitator for your strategy retreat:   The Stakes are High At some point, every leadership team faces an important fork in the road where they must decide between critical and complex strategic bets regarding the future direction of the company. Sometimes this is prompted by external changes in the environment such as new competition, disruptive technologies or shifting markets. Other times the inflection point is triggered by internal factors such as when key influencers leave or when there are questions regarding strategic or cultural beliefs. In general, the higher the stakes, the more an experienced facilitator can help. They know how to guide a senior leadership team toward a common goal with a renewed sense of purpose, alignment and commitment. Look for an executive-level strategic facilitator who has the expertise to deftly navigate and resolve controversial politics, positions and topics while moving the team forward in a way that makes sense.   The Group is "Stuck" Even high performing teams get stuck. Corporate stalemates play out in many different ways--over turf, status, power, relationships, structures, roles, knowledge and personalities to name just a few. Whatever the root cause, the more stuck the group, the more critical it is to have an unbiased and neutral external facilitator with deep experience with group dynamics and processes so they can help move the team forward. Unlike an internal facilitator, good external strategy facilitators have the ability to ask the "tough" and "unspoken" questions without fear of reprisal. They push just enough to uncover and remove the key obstacles that are blocking the team from reaching their potential.   Read About the 3rd Strategy Retreat Situation to Use Outside Resources Learn More About Strategic Clarity Facilitation 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

Research Report on The Relationship Between Employee Engagement & Manager Effectiveness

For decades, organizational effectiveness experts have believed managers have an enormous influence on employee engagement and retention. 

While most of us would intuitively come to these conclusions, this research report offers compelling data and insights based upon surveying over half a million employees across more than 5,000 organizations every year. The report answers three questions: 

• What is the relationship between employee engagement and manager effectiveness?
• Does the impact of manager effectiveness change based upon demographic differences such as company size, employee age and position? 
• Does the impact of manager effectiveness differ by industry? 

As we review the exhaustive research results, we will propose several action steps you will need to consider in light of this data. We believe that manager effectiveness is the "transmission" of an organization, one that, properly led, can result in more engaged employees that will be more productive and stay with you for a longer time.

First, while many manager characteristics and actions matter in terms of engaging and retaining top talent, it can all be broken down into ten overall categories that combine to describe employee engagement:

1. Alignment With Goals - This category describes how well the employee understands and agrees with the organization's strategic direction and the extent to which they understand how to contribute toward that end. An employee may have their oar in the water, but do they know what direction the ship is headed? And if so, do they understand how their oar can move the ship toward its goal?
    
2. Individual Contribution - At its core, employee engagement is the willingness of employees to exert discretionary effort toward their work. This category contains two basic dimensions. First, do employees consistently think about ways to do their jobs better? And second, do employees feel that they will be recognized for doing so? Of course, these two dimensions are linked: if employees don't perceive that extra effort will yield recognition, there is little incentive for them to do so.
    
3. Team Effectiveness - Most employees spend a significant portion of their working lives interacting with a team. So whether a company has five employees or 5,000 employees, it's no wonder team effectiveness has a significant impact on engagement. Can employees count on their coworkers to go the extra mile and produce quality work? Is it clear who is accountable for what? Do employees feel that the team collaborates and utilizes individual strengths? This category speaks to what Jim Collins refers to in Good to Great as getting "...the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus..."
    
4. Retention Risk - This category describes an employee's intent to stay with the organization. It is a measure of whether the employee perceives opportunities for growth and development. The category also contains an advocacy dimension: how likely is an employee to recommend the employer as a great place to work. All of these factors - intent to stay, perceived opportunity for growth, advocacy - tend to be highly correlated with overall employee engagement.
    
5. Trust With Coworkers - Loyalty to one's company is not the only measure of loyalty that matters. Loyalty toward coworkers and camaraderie with colleagues play a significant role in building employee engagement. Have you ever heard someone say, "I love the people..." when asked about their job? While the Team Effectiveness category deals with how well teams do their jobs, this category measures the relationship and closeness within teams.
    
6. Manager Effectiveness - The type and amount of supervision and direction that leaders give their employees has an extremely strong impact on employee engagement. This category measures effectiveness in terms of how well managers perform their jobs and also how much respect employees have for their managers. Employees who believe that their managers and supervisors truly care about their development are more likely to be engaged in their work.
    
7. Trust in Senior Leaders - One of the previously mentioned categories, Alignment with Goals, deals with the degree to which employees buy into the direction of the company. This category measures the degree to which employees believe in the leaders setting those goals. The issue here is the employee's perception of senior leaders themselves. Do employees perceive leadership to be capable and trustworthy? It's possible to believe in the direction of the ship without believing in the ship's captain.
    
8. Feeling Valued - As you might expect, whether an employee feels valued is highly correlated with their engagement. This category encompasses perceptions about the organization's commitment to its people - from investing in employee development to fairly compensating employees to commitment toward making the company a great place to work.
    
9. Job Satisfaction - This category focuses on the intrinsic value an employee finds in their role. Apart from office politics, and strategic direction, does the employee's job expand or contract their contentment? Does the role challenge them, utilize their unique strengths, and fit into their long-term career aspirations? All things equal, happy employees are more likely to be engaged employees.
    
10. Benefits - This category measures the degree to which employees believe the benefits offered by their employer meet their needs and whether they believe the company's benefits package is unique in the marketplace.

Download the Employee Engagement & Manager Effectiveness Research Results

Learn More About Measuring Employee Engagement & Manager Effectiveness

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

How to Beat the Odds 4 Tips (that Your Competition Does NOT Know) for Hiring Your Next High Performance Sales Rep

All sales teams have clear winners (high performers) and clear losers (low performers). 

Finding and hiring those winners can make an immense difference in team performance. According to the McKinsey Quarterly, a top quartile performing salesperson is 14 times more productive than an average performer. Conversely, hiring losers directly hinders sales team success. 

• Financially, underperformers miss revenue targets and increase turnover and recruiting costs. (A recent article in the Wall Street Journal said that turnover costs on average are $150,000 per sales person.)
• Culturally, underperformers can take up to 80% of a sales manager's time while demotivating the rest of the team.
• And from a customer perspective, low performers decrease customer loyalty and negatively impact your brand promise.

To be sure, the odds of finding a top notch sales rep are not very encouraging. MHI Global's recent sales best practices study found that less than 10% of the sales professionals surveyed could be considered "world class." Additionally, a sales benchmark study by Xactly, one of our clients, found that 79% of SAAS sales representatives miss quota and 14% never achieve even 10% of quota. 

But here's the good news. With up to 9-out-of-10 sales professionals not performing at their peak, sales leaders have a wonderful opportunity to significantly increase performance. While assembling, engaging and retaining a world-class sales team is not easy, it is a critical factor for companies that seek to create and maintain high growth.

So how can you beat the odds and assemble a high performing sales team? While different situations require different approaches, the best way to attract, engage and retain a high performing sales team is to start with four underutilized areas to outsmart your competition.

Read About the 4 Underutilized Areas and How To Better Hire Top Talent

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

Free Sales Online Health Check How Does Your Salesforce Stack Up?

Sales teams are not created equally.  Are your sales practices where they need to be to consistently hit your targets for your unique sales strategy and culture? 

This ten-minute complimentary online diagnostic is for sales leaders who are concerned about the current or future performance of their team.  It quickly benchmarks sales best practices based upon twenty years of high performance research to let you know where you stand in the areas of:

• Defining, Planning and Executing Sales Strategies
• Generating Qualified and Targeted Sales Opportunities
• Communicating and Presenting When the Stakes Are High
• Selling to Executives at their Level
• Consultatively Selling Solutions that Add Value
• Negotiating Successfully with Target Buyers

This proven assessment is for sales teams who are struggling to meet increasingly aggressive sales targets, who face increased competition or pricing pressure, and who need to better align with a new go-to-market sales strategy.  While there are many avenues to improve sales performance, only a few matter most for your unique situation.

Assess Your Sales Practices Now

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

Do You Have High Performing Managers? The 4 Management Metrics that Matter Most

Despite rumors to the contrary and the recent buzz around holacracies and self-managed work teams at companies like Zappos, management and managers are still a major factor in the running of most organizations. 

There are over 56 million managers in the United States making up 38% of the workforce and a significant portion of payroll. And in the UK, there are ten times as many managers as there were just 100 years ago. 

Many companies have also flattened their organizational structures to increase productivity and speed up decision making thereby giving managers wider responsibility over more employees than they had in the past. The good news is that managers have a big impact on performance. The bad news is that leadership gaps are growing. Corporate talent research shows that leadership bench strength continues to be the most pressing issue on the minds of business and HR leaders. The bottom line - organizations are having a difficult time finding the leadership capability they need to help them succeed.

Manager Performance is Not Meeting Expectations

Most of our clients recognize the inherent challenges of finding high performing managers. But what concerns us even more is that, according to recent research, senior executives are not happy with the performance of their companies' frontline managers. 

According to McKinsey, nearly 70% of senior executives are only "somewhat" or "not at all satisfied" with the performance of their companies' frontline managers. And a stunning 81% of frontline managers are not satisfied with their own performance. This aligns with our own employee engagement research findings where 'trust in senior leaders,' 'manager effectiveness' and 'alignment with goals' consistently rank in the bottom quartile in underperforming organizations. 

How Important Is Manager Performance In Terms Of Business Performance?

It would be difficult to overestimate the negative impact of poor managers on the business success of your organization. 

Bad Management = Bad Business:

From a customer experience perspective, managers and line supervisors direct as much as two-thirds of the workforce responsible for defining, delivering and improving the customer experience. From an employee perspective, managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. When managers underperform, both the customer experience and employee engagement suffer. 

Good Management = Good Business:
According to a Harvard Business Review study, the most enduringly successful companies (those delivering a 10-fold return to investors over a ten year period) excel at ten specific management practices: strategy, execution, culture, structure, talent, innovation, leadership, mergers and partnerships, problem anticipation and performance coaching. When managers execute their responsibilities well, the organization can thrive.  

So What Should You Do to Increase Manager and Company Performance?
You need a comprehensive plan. The first and most important step is to clearly define what success will look like with three key stakeholders: 

1.   Your Target Audience

2.   Their Bosses

3.   The Executive Team

This phase is complete when all three constituents agree upon the critical few metrics to improve and their relative importance compared to other priorities faced by the organization. For management training, success metrics typically fall into four main buckets.

Read About the Management Success Metrics that Matter Most

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

Free Management Online Health Check How Do Your Managers Stack Up?

Are your management practices hindering organizational performance and growth? 

Consider the following:

• Bad managers exacerbate employee relations problems while effective managers decrease issues, claims and lawsuits. This is not a trivial matter. The number of claims by employees against employers increased by 2000% from 1969 to 1994 and by 70% between 1992 and 2003. Additionally, the average employee lawsuit costs $250,000 and the majority of cases are ruled in the plaintiff's favor when taken to litigation.
   
• Bad managers negatively impact financial health. Companies with higher performing managers realize a 48% increase in profitability.
   
• Bad managers negatively impact employee engagement and retention. Companies with higher performing managers realize a 30% increase in employee engagement scores and a 19% decrease in turnover.
   
• Bad managers negatively impact customer engagement. Companies with higher performing managers realize a 17% average increase in customer engagement scores.

If you are worried about the performance of your managers, this ten-minute complimentary online Management Best Practices Diagnostic is for you. It benchmarks 14 high level management best practices based upon twenty years of high performance research to let you know where you stand.

Assess Your Management Practices

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

Organizational Alignment Research Findings - How Aligned Are You?

Each year, our clients tell us that it gets more challenging to succeed.

Leaders tell us this means bigger goals, increased complexity, and tighter budgets. Employees tell us this means higher expectations, an increased pace of change, and the need to do more with less. 

Yet, some leaders and teams significantly outperform their peers. We wanted to know why. So we launched a research initiative to understand what distinguishes the winners from the losers.

Our presupposition? That Organizational Alignment (the optimum combination of business strategy, corporate culture, and talent) makes the difference. 

We worked with 26 independent variables measured against 15 dependent variables of organizational performance. We surveyed 410 companies from across 8 industry segments that represent the fast growing middle market with 77% of respondents in management or leadership positions. 

What We Found

The data supports our organizational alignment theory to an astounding degree. Here are the key results so you can judge for yourself:

Highly aligned companies grow 58% faster and are 72% more profitable while outperforming unaligned companies...  

• Customer Retention 2.23-to-1
• Customer Satisfaction 3.2-to-1
• Leadership Effectiveness 8.71-to-1
• Employee Engagement 16.8-to-1

7 Factors Matter Most
While all 26 ingredients in the organizational alignment recipe significantly impacted performance and any alignment factor taken alone will not work in isolation, seven factors matter most. 

The take-away? 

When your Strategy is clear enough to act, your Culture is high performing, and your Talent is differentiated, your company is set up to perform at its peak. 

The critical question...Is your company aligned enough to be one of the winners? 


Download Organizational Alignment Research Findings and the 7 Factors that Matter Most

Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps 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