Leadership & Management Whitepapers

Thank you for your interest in LSA's Leadership & Management Best Practices Research Whitepapers.

10 Simple Steps for Leading Virtual and Global Teams
Upward of 70% of our workforce now works virtually. Learn how to ensure that these teams communicate effectively and efficiently while integrating cultural influences and differing perspectives.

2 High Performance Moves to Take Your Team to the Next Level
It is the Leader’s challenge to create the circumstances that stimulate improved performance and execution. The key question for business leaders is not “why” high performance but rather “how”?

29 Ways to Build and Maintain Trust as a Leader
Effective leaders know how to build and maintain trust to create higher performance and a highly engaged workplace.

3 Big Mistakes to Avoid When Cascading Your Corporate Strategy
It is one thing to draft a compelling strategic plan with your executive team. It is an entirely different and more challenging matter to execute that strategy effectively and consistently through the organization.

3 Giant Myths of Strategic Planning
Strategic planning is only the beginning. Less than 10% of well formulated strategies are effectively executed. Why? Executives fall prey to three myths.

3 Immediate Tips for Dealing with a Bad Boss
Fewer and fewer employees are willing to tell bosses the truth about their behavior and the negative effect they have on motivation and engagement.

3 Influence Tips for New Supervisors When Things Get Tough
One of the greatest challenges for new managers is to keep their cool when things get tough. Successful supervisors have the gift of influencing –and persuading—others in way that can get stuff done.

3 Keys to Successful Change
Before you embark on change, you as a leader need to be convinced that change is absolutely necessary for the future health of your organization. The goal of successful change should be crystal clear to you.

3 Must-Have Ingredients of High Performing Teams for New Managers
Newly promoted managers need to learn about how to guide their team successfully…from how to delegate to how to resolve conflict.

3 Overlooked Ingredients of Successful Change Management
Three aspects of change are often overlooked. If they are incorporated as necessary ingredients in your change recipe, you are far more likely to emerge with a win.

3 Smart Ways Successful Managers Engage Employees
Managing successfully is about consistently turning in the desired results from a dedicated team of engaged, motivated, high performing employees.

3 Super Smart Ways for New Managers to Quickly Climb the Corporate Ladder
You hope to prove yourself as a new manager so you are promoted up the ladder to full leadership. How can you work toward making this dream a reality?

3x Alignment Research Findings. Strategy, Culture, Talent
We launched a research initiative to understand what distinguishes the winners from the losers.  What we found? Highly aligned companies significantly outperform their peers and seven alignment factors matter most.

4 Good Ways Leaders Resolve Cross-Unit Conflicts
Teams need to work together across geographies, across functions, and across product and service groups.  Unfortunately, those in charge do not always approach the problem effectively.

4 Key Things that Distinguish the “Best” Leaders from the “Good Enough”
The best leaders are not just “good enough”…they deliver the immediate and long-term results because, in addition to performing, they care about the process and relationships along the way.

4 Keys to Present Like a Rock Star to Senior Executives
Senior Executives are one of the hardest-hitting crowds you will ever face as a presenter.

4 Post Merger & Acquisition Best Practices
Research shows that the most successful acquisitions are those that promptly integrate and deliver value to the market.  Recently, we assembled a panel of experts to discuss best practices for the first 100 days of integrating merged business and professional services organizations.

4 Ways to Bridge the Workplace Generation Gap as a New Manager
Are you new to management? If you are young, you can anticipate some real challenges as you strive to earn the respect of your older, more experienced team.

5 Critical Basics for Being an Effective Manager
Just as you expect your team to continuously strive and better their performance, apply the same yardstick to your own performance as a manager. How well are you doing?

5 Expert Tips to Better Communicate Your Strategic Plan
To succeed, employees must be won over by the legitimacy, significance and relevance of their company’s purpose and strategic priorities.

5 Key Succession Planning Trends and Lessons from the Field
Succession planning expectations are increasing. Most companies have taken some steps. Are they effective? What can you learn from them?

5 Keys to Winning at Succession Planning
Five guidelines for putting a new succession planning program in place or for how to breath life into your existing succession systems.

5 Science-Backed Lenses of Change Leadership
While successful corporate change often seems impossible, it can be and has been done. Get a proven framework for designing and implementing change efforts that work.

5 Things That You Don’t Learn (BUT SHOULD) in Leadership 101
Great leaders are generally collaborative, adaptable and good communicators who can inspire others.  But there are some leaders who display different attributes and yet still produce outstanding results.

5 Unnecessary Misperceptions that Slip Up Too Many New Managers
If new managers do not learn fast, they can fail.  Make sure you don’t fall into this sad state of affairs by checking out the following misperceptions compiled by new manager training pros.

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 required for them to excel as managers.

6 Critical Questions to Properly Initiate Change
We have found that a series of framing questions help to create a preliminary change leadership roadmap to engage the leadership of the organization or business unit to support a potential change.  The six questions will help you conduct your own exploration and due diligence to determine if you are ready to commit your credibility and influence to initiating change in your organization.

6 New Manager Guidelines for Building a High Performing Team
As a new manager, there is no more important task than building a strong, effective team. It is the team’s attitude, productivity and commitment that will be your measure of success.

6 Traps That Can Sabotage Your Success as a Leader
Be sure that you don’t fall into any one of the following 6 leadership traps or you may find that your weaknesses overwhelm your strengths.

6 Ways to Foster Better Project Team Collaboration
Project teams that work collaboratively are high performing teams that consistently produce high quality results and care about the goals they reach together.

7 Immediate Management Actions to Take to Create Alignment
Your employees may have their oars in the water, but do they know in what direction the boat is headed? And if so, do they understand how their oars can best move the team toward its goal?

7 Tips on How Managers Can Increase Engagement through Communication
What can you do to ensure your communication with employees is helping, not hindering, engagement? See that you follow these guidelines to succeed.

8 Critical Steps to Inspirational Leadership
The truly inspirational leader does seem to breathe life into a project, a team, an organization. Helping another person to connect his or her daily efforts to the strategic goals and vision of the organization is the challenge of the inspirational leader.

8 of the Simplest Keys to Success as a New Leader
Have you just been lucky or are you a natural leader?  One way to decide if leadership is the path for you is to assess your skills against the following list of keys to success as a leader.

8 Powerful Traits of Successful Talent Leaders
What makes a person an outstanding talent leader? Is it the ability to set a vision, develop a strategy, or manage a budget? Or is it something much less visible and more subtle?

8 Reasons Leaders Need 360 Feedback
Done right, the 360-degree feedback process provides valuable insight that individuals typically cannot gain on their own.

A New Way to Think About Change: The Agile Organization
The most important learning from our collective change experience is this: How we think about change management must fundamentally change.

A Purposeful and Aligned Culture – Your Organization’s DNA
A Purposeful Culture engages the business strategy.  It accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performing organizations.

Alignment: The Missing Leadership Ingredient Not to Miss
A great strategy can be rendered utterly useless by an ineffective culture and average talent. The proper alignment of strategy, culture and talent allows organizations to thrive and outperform their competition.

Are 2 in 5 Managers Really Bad Bosses?
The year began with a flurry of articles about bad bosses. The authors intended to test the premise: “employees don’t leave their job or company, they leave their boss.” The findings may surprise you.

Becoming a New Leader: 5 Traps to Avoid
As a new leader, everyone is watching and judging the moves that you make. Even a great team can be rendered utterly unproductive by an ineffective leader.

Changing Corporate Culture: 4 Do’s and 3 Don’ts
Leaders are beginning to better understand the importance of culture.  Changing an entrenched attitudes and beliefs however, is one of the toughest leadership tasks you will face.

Coaching Makes the Difference – 6 Tips to Get Engagement and Performance Started
Is your team firing on all cylinders?  Before spending money and time on surveys, smart leaders make sure the changes will bring about the desired business results.

Do Managers Really Make a Difference?
How do we get managers and senior executives more involved in training and development initiatives?  With tightened budgets and increased pressure to perform, we are getting asked this question more than ever before.

Do You have a High Performance Culture to Drive Your Strategy?
It is your job as a leader to shape and align your culture to move your strategy forward.  Culture accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performing organizations.

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

Does Shared Leadership Make Sense for Your Organization?
“We want the four of you to lead this collectively. It is time for all of you to step up.”  Does shared leadership work?

Effective Communication Skills: What Works
Some people are just easier to get along with. Communication with them is effortless—they just “get it.” And, we also know there are some people who just don’t understand. At all. Ever.

Effective Decision Making – How Do You Decide What Moves to Make
Decision-making may be the most critical job of a leader. The higher the stakes, the more decision-making matters.

Ethical Leadership: What Does it Mean?
How can you ensure that your company doesn’t fall prey to the next big ethics scandal? If you think the answer is simply more legal training and compliance policies, you are at risk.

Exposing 3 Big Corporate Culture Myths about Talent
Do not fall for misinformation about culture promising quick fixes and silver bullets for everything that ails under-performing businesses.

Five Keys to Effective Executive Coaching
Coaching should be done in the right place at the right time with the right style. Look for teachable moments and provide feedback with the right balance of directness and empathy.

How to Build Higher Levels of Trust in Leaders
One area stands out as having the highest correlation to high levels of employee engagement compared to any other – the ability of Leaders to Build Trust.

How to Fast Track Your Leaders with Just-in-Time Action Learning
Are your leaders prepared for the #1 challenge that they will face in the next 12 months? This whitepaper lays out practical, just-in-time leadership development approaches that work. Are you doing what it takes?

How to Manage Different Generations without Going Insane
Best practices for effectively managing multiple generations in the workplace.

How to Manage the 4 Most Important Organizational Levels During Change
For complex organizational change to work, make sure that you engage and manage four levels of the organization that are most critical to creating and sustaining change.

How to Successfully Recognize and Reward Organizational Change
For change to succeed, leaders should identify and acknowledge those who adopt the desired changes, clearly determine how to measure success and openly reward the new behaviors.

Influencer = Catalyst: 3 Steps for a Savvy Leader to Take
What does it take to influence change? Can this leadership skill be learned? Great leaders share three key characteristics.

Information Flow: Why It is Critical to Organizational Alignment
Accurate and timely information is critical. But just how important is it compared to all of the other avenues you can take as a leader to improve performance?

Is Your Strategy Clear Enough to Act? Probably Not
An unclear business strategy makes choices, priorities and trade-offs blurry for employees.  Our research found most leaders think their strategy is twice as clear as the rest of the organization.

Leadership – Why Defining Failure is Critical to Creating Success
The lack of performance clarity creates a significant leadership problem for companies looking to grow. The ambiguity creates an environment that allows underperformers to hide and stay.

Leading Change: Top 4 Risks to Overcome
Can your key leaders successfully implement the important changes required to execute your strategy? Effective change leaders understand the need to anticipate and mitigate four key risks.

Leading Virtual Teams – Top 4 Challenges and 3 Winning Communication Strategies
Virtual teams have some special challenges. If you are leading a virtual team, there are three dimensions of communication you need to know.

Need Bench Strength? A Proven Fast Track to Leadership
70% percent of companies confessed that they are doing nothing to close leadership gaps. Read about the two fundamental causes and what to do about it.

Performance Management: 5 Key Success Factors
If you want better performance from your employees, the following four statements may surprise you: (1) Forget about making your managers’ lives easier. (2) Dump your performance appraisal and “coach” moniker.

Performance Pressure: How Much Should a Leader Push?
Leaders are expected to create the environment that gets the most from their people. If we push too much or too little, we may not meet our goals. How to strike the right balance.

Political Savvy: How to Understand and Use Politics to Strategically Influence Others
Are Politics Helping or Hurting You and Your Company?  Power plays, turf battles, deception, and sabotage block individuals’ career progress and threaten companies’ resources and results.

Prepare Your New Managers or Suffer the Consequences
If you are in the position of selecting and promoting employees to management positions, do it right or you are likely to face 4 management-based problems that you must address.

Principles for Effective Teamwork – the Top 18
Effective teamwork can help drive true business results. Our research has uncovered 18 key principles. Some are obvious and some may surprise you.

Rhapsody in Change: The Subtleties between Leadership and Action
Leadership meets its deepest challenge when it must face up to the need for a deep, major, and rapid shift in the whole fabric of the organization that doesn’t seem to welcome it.

Should You Facilitate Your Own Strategy Retreat? 3 Guidelines to Help You Decide
When conducting a strategy retreat, you have options.Here are three situations that call for an outside facilitator if you want to be successful.

Situational Leadership® II Research – Development Levels
Read relevant academic research that supports the components of goal- or task-specific knowledge and skills, transferable skills, motivation and confidence.

Solving the Mystery of Successful Strategy Execution: What to Do Once Your Strategy Retreat Is Over
Successful execution typically means making hundreds of decisions every day. The challenge is to be clear on how each choice drives the strategy forward.

The 3 Levels of a High Performance Culture
Based upon over 25 years of research and experience, we have identified three critical and interrelated components required to create a workplace culture that matters.

The 4 Most Important Attributes to Look for When Your Sales Reps are Missing Their Targets
Almost 80% of your reps may be under-performing. It is the sales leader’s job to hire, engage and retain high performers and weed out under-performers.

The 4R Model of Transformational Leadership
We believe that leaders can be made.  The 4R Model is a roadmap for how leadership can be consciously developed and practiced through Relationships, Roles, Responsibilities and Results.

The Elite 6% – How Strategic Clarity Distinguishes High Performing Leaders
According to a recent USA Today article, only 6% of last year’s Standard & Poor’s 500 firms accounted for 50% of the profits.  What did those leaders do differently?

The Research-Backed Relationship Between Engagement and Management
Based upon surveying over half a million employees every year, this report shows the relationship between employee engagement and manager effectiveness by company type and industry.

The Six Management Practices that Make the Difference Between Effective and Extraordinary
Superstars in the management arena are rare. But when they emerge, they have an enormous impact not only on their own teams but also on the departments and organizations that their protégés go on to lead.

The Top Coaching Mistakes – Is What You Learned All Wrong?
We’ve identified what we consider to be the top two mistakes that hinder effective coaching – mistakes that if avoided, will greatly simplify the coaching process and minimize the time it takes to effectively develop your people.

The Top Skills for High Performing Leaders
These six leadership competencies continue to rise to the top regardless of industry, client, strategy or culture.

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.

Top 5 Warning Signs that Your Organizational Change Will Not Stick
Change takes longer and demands more resources and work than most leaders would like. People have difficulty with change, and when the organization changes its processes, systems, or structure, people often do not “complete” the change. If you begin to see any of the following warning signs, you are about to suffer the consequences of poorly managed organizational change.

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? Learn what to look out for in your organization.

Top 6 Forces Driving Engagement Plus 6 Strategies that Work
Not all factors are created equal; some have a greater effect than others. Six overall forces consistently drive engagement across most organizations.

Top 6 Management Trust Warning Signs
Trust seems to be suffering these days. Almost two-thirds of Americans feel that they can’t be “too careful” in dealing with people. This pervasive suspicion can have devastating repercussions in the workplace.

What Employees Actually Want – 8 Key Findings on Employee Recognition
Feeling valued was one of three critical areas having the strongest association with overall engagement. Unfortunately, less than one percent of companies surveyed actually performed best in that area.

Why Change Really Fails and How to Beat the Odds
According to research conducted by McKinsey & Company , about 70% of all organizational change initiatives fail. Our own research and experience  navigating organizational change over the last 30 years pinpoint three consistent reasons organizational change initiatives fail.