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

Organizational Alignment: The Missing Performance Ingredient

It is all about performance. 

Leaders are being asked to do more with less, faster - and they cannot afford to miss the mark. 

If you are not getting the most out of what you have, think organizational alignment. If you believe that you are headed in the right direction, but current performance is not where you want it to be, think organizational alignment. 

Getting aligned means configuring the critical elements of your company to optimize short- and long-term performance. Based upon our  proprietary alignment research, we know that misaligned strategy, culture and talent cause poor short-term performance and unsustainable long-term organizational health in terms of revenue, profits, customer satisfaction and retention, employee engagement, leadership effectiveness and business performance.

So, as a leader, how do you get aligned?  It all starts (but does not end) with strategic clarity.   

First, good leaders start by creating a strategy that outlines clear and compelling choices about where to play and what actions to take. Done right, a successful strategic plan sets a company up to perform beyond just the sum of its parts.  

When it comes to performance however, strategy is only the beginning, not the end. For a strategy to make a true difference, it must be properly executed. To be properly executed it must be understood, believable and implementable enough by all key stakeholders. That is not an easy or simple task. 

• IBM found that less than 10% of well formulated strategies are effectively executed.
• 49% of executives recently surveyed by Booz & Company said their companies had no strategic priorities.
• Employees we surveyed perceived that the organizational strategy was 50% less clear to them than it was to leadership. 

What we hear over and over again from leaders is that their finely crafted strategic plan is not being implemented at the quality or speed that they expect. When leaders dig deeper, they find that the strategy is not clear enough, not agreed to, not perceived to be equal to the challenge, or not supported by adequate resources to truly succeed. What moves should a leader make to bring their strategy to life? 


Initially, we recommend that you, your leadership team, and their direct reports look for these five strategic clarity warning signs. 

1. People consistently ask for more clarifying information before they act
2. Key constituents do not agree on major priorities, resources, funding, or timing
3. People do not believe it is equal to the challenge of your business objectives
4. The plan is not being executed consistently throughout the organization
5. People do not seem to have the right mindset to effectively execute the plan 

If you are experiencing any of these five warning signs, it is time for you and your leadership team to take the steps necessary to get all key stakeholders on board and pointed in the same direction before pushing ahead. 

Read Organizational Alignment Whitepaper to Learn What Comes After Strategic Clarity

Research Strategic Clarity Solutions

Measure Your Current Level of Strategic Clarity


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

Six Tips to Build a Customer-Centric Corporate Culture

Customer centricity is a culture of putting the customer at the center of everything you do.

And it matters. According to the Harvard Business School, increasing customer retention rates by just 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.

Just about every company depends upon satisfied and loyal customers for their success. Most claim in their mission statement and company values to be customer-centric. Yet few companies truly put the customer first and foremost on a day-to-day basis. Comcast, the lowest ranking customer service company in 2014 according to Temkin Ratings, proudly states that they "strive to earn the respect and trust of our customers" in their corporate values. Yet customers rated them at 22% compared to the leader, USAA, at 81%.

See if you can find what is wrong with the illustration above. Sure, there are attendants waiting for the bell to ring. But why should a customer need such an attention-getting device? Customer-centric companies excel at proactively anticipating client needs with the ability and genuine desire to help. Customer centricity is not an empty slogan - it is a way of doing business.

One of the attributes of truly customer-centric companies is having the infrastructure where listening is part of the culture of the whole company, not just in the customer service or marketing departments.

To see that your company truly operates with the customer at the center of your business, you need to build a culture that treats the customer as king. The entire organization from top to bottom needs to understand that this is simply "the way" you do business.

Read About the 6 Tips To Build a Customer-Centric Culture

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

4 Steps to Truly Delight Your Customers

What can one truly delighted customer do for your company?

When you can transform a simply satisfied customer to a genuine promoter, you have a customer who will buy more, return again and spread the good word to their friends. If you could replicate this interaction across the organization, every customer could become an important advocate for your company!

According to Bain & Company, companies that excel in the customer experience grow revenues up to 8% faster based upon stronger loyalty and higher recommendations. As a result, delighted customers have a lifetime value of 6 to 14 times greater than dissatisfied customers:

1. Articulate a customer-centric vision Company leaders need to create a clear, compelling and implementable vision of how your company truly differentiates itself from the competition in the eyes of your customers.
   
   Is your aim to offer speedy delivery, to anticipate the needs of your customers every time, or, perhaps, to solve customer issues in one easy call?
   
   To delight their customers, Zappos depends upon free overnight delivery service as a "thank you" for each order. L.L. Bean offers an actual live, friendly, knowledgeable person on the line on every call...no phone tree needed.
   
   Your customer service strategy needs to be simply stated and understood by everyone from the board room to the employees on the front line.

Read the Other Three Steps to Truly Delight Your Customers

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

The Top 10 Mistakes That Will Absolutely Destroy Your Next Project

Most high growth companies today complete much of their core work through projects and project teams.

Yet, recent studies by McKinsey, IBM and KPMG found that:

• 17% of projects went so poorly that they can threatened the company's survival
• 45% run over budget
• 7% miss final project milestones
• 56% deliver less value than originally predicted
• 70% of organizations have suffered at least one failed project in the last year
• The best organizations at projects are 10 times more successful than the worst
• The biggest perceived barriers to project success were changing mindsets and attitudes, corporate culture, lack of executive support, and the underestimation of project complexity

Successful high growth organizations know how to define, plan and execute successful projects. They learn from early slip-ups and know how to avoid similar mistakes going forward.

Savvy project sponsors know when to pull the plug or change course in a way that delivers what is most important to the business. Smart project leaders know when and how to halt the forward momentum of a project encountering problems until they have what they need to confidently deliver what has been promised to their key stakeholders. Experienced project team members know when a project is going sideways and how to articulate their concerns in a way that matters to those who can do something about it.

Regardless of your project role, here is a list of the top 10 ways you might slip below your project goals and how to ensure a safer, more secure path to desired project results.

Read More About the Top 10 Project Management Mistakes to Avoid

Benchmark Your Project Performance

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

7 Winning Ways Effective Project Leaders Advocate for Project Success

As a project leader, it is not uncommon to be handed a project where the resources available are not adequate enough to achieve the desired results. In fact, project leaders of failed projects almost always agree with this statement from a recent high tech program manager:

"In hindsight, we did not have enough of the right technical expertise or knowledge to do what the project evolved to be or an effective process to judge if we could do or not do something. We asked for them, but did not get them in time. We were told to just work harder."

With every project comes competition for top resources to get the job done. When company leadership tells you there's not enough staff or budget to give you what you believe is required to get the job done, how do you get what you need?

The short answer is by being a strong advocate for your project and your project team.

To successfully lead a project team, an advocate must do much more than just plead the project's cause with a strong voice and subtle (or not) arm-twisting. They must gain respect among influential peers and executive leadership by demonstrating a thorough understanding of the project's business value and purpose compared to other strategic priorities.

They must also be able to clearly articulate the importance of getting the "right resources" to achieve the desired outcome. Successful project advocates employ a disciplined methodology to gain clear, concise, complete answers with their key internal and external stakeholders to the following questions:

1. Desired Outcomes for the Project - What do key stakeholders (customers, users, managers, partners, team members) want? How do the desired outcomes fit into the company's strategic priorities?


2. Project End Result and Success Criteria - What is success? How will we know? Why is it worth doing?


3. Critical Success Factors - What are the critical few things that must happen (or not happen) for the project to have the greatest likelihood of success?


4. Project Scope - What are the project's key requirements? Critical resources? What are the trade-offs regarding cost, quality, scope and time?


5. Project Schedule - Who does what, when and with whom?


6. Key Stakeholders - Who are the critical internal and external individuals essential to the project's success? What's needed from them? What do they need? How often?


7. Project Risks - What can go wrong? What must we do to confine and control project risk? What are the critical business implications? Strong advocates use their in-depth understanding of the business, the performance environment, and the project itself to influence others to support the project's needs in the manner required for success.

Are you effectively advocating for what you need?

As project leader, be prepared to support the project in whatever way is required... from taking a direct role, to providing staff, budget, equipment, facilities, advice, air cover and time. The ability to effectively influence others to do something they did not know they wanted to do, or don't want to do, is how you can gain a competitive advantage in the never-ending battle for resources.

Benchmark Your Project Performance

Research Project Post Mortem Solutions

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

The 4 Most Important Attributes to Look for When Your Sales Reps Miss Their Targets

Only 21% met quota.

According to research by Xactly, a leading provider of cloud-based incentive solutions:

• As many as 79 percent of quota-carrying Software as a Service (SaaS) sales representatives missed their goals.
• 14% of sales reps in the study do not even achieve 10% of quota.
• Across the entire data set, the average quota attainment, regardless of tenure, was only 58%.

Pretty scary that only 21% met quota. What does this mean for you and your sales team?

First of all, if you want to create a high performance sales team, stop making excuses for you and your team. The most common excuse we hear from the VP of Sales is that the quotas are unfair. These sales leaders claim the quotas are driven by the CEO or CFO to meet unrealistic external expectations that are not based in the reality of the competitive landscape, the current value proposition or the available sales resources. While this may be the case, it is the sales leader's job to create the circumstances for their teams to thrive. 79% of reps missing quota does not calibrate to a high performance sales environment. That means sales leaders need to create the right sales strategy, culture and team to succeed.

The second most common excuse is that the sales team is littered with too many underperformers. If your team is anything like those in the survey, almost 80% of your reps may be underperforming. It is your job as the sales leader to hire people who will perform. It is also your job as the sales leader to identify the root cause of any performance problems and to help underperformers succeed or move on as quickly as possible - ideally within 90 days.

We believe that there are four attributes that sales leaders must incorporate into their hiring profiles and performance management processes to create a high performance sales team.

Read More About the 4 Key Attributes

Benchmark Your Sales Performance

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