Best Places to Work Management Essentials Training

Best Places to Work Management Essentials Training

“We partnered with LSA Global to help us invest in our people. LSA designed a modular and customized management curriculum that allows us to deliver top quality solutions to our managers and leaders.

We consider LSA to be our learning and development partner and our LSA consultants to be an extension of our team.”
Lisa Bruun | SVP Human Resources | Ellie Mae, Inc.

“We consistently receive outstanding feedback about the quality of LSA’s Management Essentials Training Programs. LSA always aligns their solutions to our unique culture to meet our very specific requirements.

Thank you for regularly going above and beyond!”
Anna Meyer | VP Human Resources | Intuit

Even with the growing interest in holacracies, flatter organizations, and self-managed teams, managers still matter — enormously. In fact, as organizational structures flatten and spans of control widen, managers are often being asked to accomplish more with fewer resources while improving performance, engagement, decision making, and information flow.

That makes getting the Best Places to Work Management Essentials right more important than ever.

The challenge is that many managers are struggling. McKinsey research found that:

Nearly 70% of senior executives are only “somewhat” or “not at all satisfied” with the performance of their front-line managers.
81% of managers reported being dissatisfied with their own performance, while spending more than half of their time on non-managerial activities.

Those findings should concern any organization serious about performance.

Managers do not simply manage work — they shape the everyday employee experience. Poor managers undermine performance, engagement, and retention. Great managers create the conditions for people and teams to perform at their peak.

Our organizational alignment research reinforces the business case. Compared with misaligned and lower-performing managers, higher-performing managers are associated with significant improvements in profitability, productivity, employee engagement, customer engagement, and employee retention.

Our people manager assessment center data and Best Places to Work research based on more than 500,000 annual employee engagement surveys consistently show that managers directly influence four critical organizational outcomes:

Employee performance
Employee engagement
Employee retention
Employee relations

Based on Best Places to Work research across more than 70,000 organizations and over 20 years of working with managers and their teams, our highly experiential Best Places to Work Management Essentials approach focuses managers on the behaviors that matter most..

Best Places to Work Management Essentials: Our Proven 5-Step Methodology

Assess the Management Essentials That Matter Most.
Our proprietary people manager assessment center measures the management practices most highly correlated with manager effectiveness based on millions of employee surveys across more than 70,000 organizations.

Assessment results, stakeholder interviews, business priorities, and organizational context determine what managers most need to improve. That means development is targeted at real performance gaps — not generic management theory.
Practice Management Essentials in Realistic Situations
After extensive interviews with key stakeholders and review of the assessment data, participants engage in highly experiential one-to-three-day workshop where managers learn by doing in small learning cohorts led by an experienced facilitator-coach.

Instead of passively consuming content, participants practice critical management situations, receive targeted feedback, coach one another, and identify specific actions they can apply immediately on the job.

Our Proven 5-Step Methodology – cont.

Core Best Places to Work Management Essentials can include:

- Alignment with Goals
  Creating clear alignment between individual priorities, team goals, and organizational strategy.
- Feeling Valued
  Ensuring employees feel valued for their contributions and believe the organization cares about their success.
- Individual Contribution
  Helping employees continuously improve while effectively recognizing and rewarding performance.
- Manager Effectiveness
  Building the credibility, competence, and coaching capabilities required to help employees perform and grow.
- Retention Risk
  Understanding how managerial behaviors influence an employee’s intent to stay and willingness to advocate for the organization.
- Team Effectiveness
  Creating an environment where coworkers can depend on one another to deliver high-quality work as a high performing team.
- Trust in Managers
  Building employee trust through consistent character and competence.

Convert Learning into a Management Action Plan
Knowing what great managers do is not enough. Managers must translate insights into observable changes on the job.

Each participant develops a rigorous Best Places to Work Management Action Plan with specific goals and accountabilities. Action plans are pressure-tested with peers and the facilitator to ensure they are relevant, practical, and measurable.
Reinforce Management Essentials Through Performance Coaching
Management development should be treated as a process — not an event.

Participants engage in individual and team accountability sessions, targeted content deep dives, and coaching to review progress, overcome obstacles, share lessons learned, and strengthen application. When appropriate, managers can also receive individualized performance coaching for up to twelve months.

The objective is simple: turn management knowledge into sustained management behavior.
Resurvey to Measure Progress and Impact
Six to twelve months after the initial workshop, participants can be reassessed against the Best Places to Work management practices most strongly correlated with manager effectiveness for your unique circumstances.

Follow-up data identifies where behaviors have improved, where gaps remain, and where additional coaching or reinforcement can produce the greatest performance impact.

Target Audience
Best Places to Work Management Essentials is designed for first-level people managers and supervisors who need to improve employee performance, engagement, retention, and working relationships.

It is especially relevant for organizations that understand a fundamental truth: You cannot create one of the Best Places to Work without creating managers people want to work for.

The Bottom Line
The difference between an average workplace and a Best Place to Work is rarely created by perks, slogans, or management theory. It is created every day through the quality of the employee-manager relationship. The most effective Best Places to Work Management Essentials programs identify the management behaviors that matter most, provide realistic opportunities to practice them, create accountability for applying them, reinforce them through coaching, and measure whether they actually improve. If you want better performance, engagement, and retention, start by building better managers.

To learn more about improving the performance of your people managers and creating a Best Place to Work, please contact us.

Related Information

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Terry Wassman
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LSA helped us with leadership development by designing a solution to match our unique needs and culture.

It was a huge success. I would highly recommend LSA to help take leaders and managers to the next level.

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I continue to be impressed by the level of leadership development training and management expertise and quality of advice and facilitation that LSA has to offer.

What a smart and client-centric group of great people who really know how to help assess and develop high performing leaders.

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A key to performance improvement is cultivating the proper type of motivation.

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I definitely recommend LSA Global to anyone for whom presentations are an integral part of their job.

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LSA custom designed a key management development solution for our Client Partner Teams on both coasts that aligned with our business priorities and organizational culture.

I’d recommend LSA to any company looking for a first class training and consulting partner that truly makes a behavior and performance impact.

Laurie Torres
Chief People Officer

We have been able to utilize LSA’s extensive expertise to leverage our investment in employee development.

The result has been the cost effective and highly effective delivery of high quality management training programs.

Thank you!

Steve Feller
Vice President, Human Resources

We have been very pleased with the high quality management development programs that LSA Global has designed and delivered to meet our unique needs.

They have world class facilitators and the knowledge gained by our management team has been put into practice very quickly.

LSA consistently delivers excellent results and receives exceptional feedback. I highly recommend them to anyone looking to improve management capabilities.

Cindee Van Vleck
Director Human Resources

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Their leadership, management, and sales expertise has been invaluable. They think strategically and provide a results driven plan – not just a temporary fix.

They are great to work with, and even more importantly, they “get it!”

David Fiano
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LSA exceeded all my expectations.

We interviewed 7 potential training and consulting partners and selected LSA due to their expertise, flexibility, and breadth and depth of leadership solutions.

We were able to design a highly customized, focused, and relevant management training program that fit our unique needs.

Our leaders and managers galvanized as a team and are better prepared for the rigors of a leading their teams in a very competitive and fast-changing market.

Mitch Mandich
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I am very impressed with the quality of work and talent. LSA did a great job of listening to my needs and providing the exact management training program expertise we needed to get the job done.

Don Pryor
Director, Business Planning & Analysis

We partnered with LSA Global to help us invest in our people in the areas of performance coaching, diversity, and inclusion. They were very flexible in meeting our specific needs.

LSA exceeded my expectations from a speed, quality, and value standpoint. I would recommend LSA to anyone looking for a true business partner.

Anita Luckinbill
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LSA’s approach and ability to bring the right leadership and management expertise and approach to eBay has been a great asset.

They really focus on helping us succeed in any way they can and definitely lifted up our leadership and management development capabilities.

Mike Normant
Learning & Development

LSA understands our business, has deep expertise in content areas, and customizes their approach to deliver great results.

The facilitator was extremely knowledgeable about working virtually across cultures. The passion, practices, and tools made the session interesting, fun, and highly valuable.

I highly recommend LSA Global to any company that has global partners or offices.

Glenn McGillivray
Human Resources Business Partner

FAQs

Unlike generic management courses, this research-backed program is built on insights from over 70,000 organizations, 5 million employee surveys, and decades of performance data. The training is highly experiential, customized to your business realities, and focused on improving the four management metrics that matter most — employee performance, engagement, retention, and employee relations.

This program is designed for first-level managers, supervisors, and emerging people leaders who want to strengthen their ability to lead teams, improve accountability, increase employee engagement, and retain top talent. It is especially valuable for organizations seeking to create a high-performance culture and become an employer of choice.

Core modules typically include manager effectiveness, alignment with goals, employee recognition, retention risk, team effectiveness, trust-building, communication, and performance coaching. Each workshop is tailored to address the organization’s unique culture, business strategy, and management challenges.

The training includes action planning, peer coaching, follow-up coaching sessions, and re-survey assessments to reinforce behavior change and measure progress over time. Participants leave with practical tools, measurable goals, and a customized management action plan designed to create lasting impact back at work.

Organizations with highly effective managers consistently outperform competitors in profitability, productivity, employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and retention. Stronger managers can help increase profitability by 48%, improve productivity by 22%, and reduce turnover by 19%.