chapter 1 The Truth There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult. —Warren Buffett, most Successful Investor of the 20th Century THE STAKES ARE HIGH. You are the coach of a five-man basketball team battling against another team. But this isn’t just any game. It’s the Olympics and it’s all for the glory. You are leading the team who is gunning for Gold in the men’s basketball final. hundreds of thousands of sports fanatics—representing virtually every country in the world—hover above their colorful stadium seats shouting with all their might in the hopes of inspiring your team to victory. You are about to begin the fight of your life … battling for the title of "best in the world." As the ball is tossed in the air at center court, one of your star players grabs it and races down the wooden planks as fast as he can, gunning for the competitor’s net. Just imagine, three of your five starting players are standing at center court waving to their family and friends in the stands. Your final starting player is watching ESPN SportsCenter on a TV in the locker room as he sips lime green Gatorade and roots for the opposing team. Is it real? Absolutely! Leaders, this is your workforce today. Click below to download this book chapter.

Does your onboarding process create positive first impressions that set up new employees for success in their roles, or is it simply a list of items to check off and call it done?  This ebook will take you through seven aspects of the recruiting and onboarding process, teach you how to connect with your employees starting on the first day and discover where to automate the process so you can focus on making a new hire's experience personable and engaging.  Click below to download this eBook.

A New Look at Sales Onboarding Sales organizations onboard new employees differently now than they did just five years ago. This transition to modern learning practices reflects exciting new opportunities for today’s professionals in Sales Enablement and Training as well as Learning and Development to transform onboarding into an organizational capability that drives growth. We’ve helped over a hundred organizations build out successful modern onboarding programs and gained perspective on themes that consistently emerge among top performers. We’ll illustrate these throughout this guide while giving you tactical recommendations for driving better and faster onboarding today Click below to download this White paper.

How investing in human and creative skills drive your business forward In-demand skills are evolving more quickly than we can keep up. Baseline skills—such as communication, problem solving and creativity—already represent one in three skills requested in job descriptions, and by the year 2020, more than one third of core skillsets will be made up of skills not considered crucial to the job today. Use this resource as a starting point to develop innovative, creative and productive teams that push your business forward. Click below to download this White paper.

According to a study by Bersin by Deloitte, organizations with senior leaders who coach can effectively and frequently improve business results by 21% compared to those who never coach. This infographic will cover the seven skills needed to help managers and leaders improve their ability to coach their teams. Click below to download this Infographic.

Company experts are retiring at a record pace. Read this excerpt to learn some tips on how to best capture and share their knowledge.

The training industry is one that sees changes in methodology and technology constantly. Some organizations are quick to pick up on new trends and try them out, while others prefer to wait and see which ones survive the test of time and prove their value. In this BizLibrary ebook, we’ll look at some of the top trends that are continuing to prove important for workplace learning, along with those that have a lot of potential to impact the way we train through 2018 and beyond. Click below to download this eBook.

Map our your unique sales process in minutes. A well-designed sales process allows the replication of best practices, introduces a shared sales language, discipline, and minimizes risks for both buyer and seller. It's a powerful concept. But, where to begin? Download this interactive Excel tool to: 1. Define your ideal customer profile. 2. Identify which prospects to pursue (and which not to). 3. Capture knowledge and best practices from your team. 4. Outline qualifying criteria, milestones and steps that build value. 5. Sequence steps and milestones to ensure pipeline momentum. In short: plug in your information and get some inspiration from this tool - finish with a killer sales process to increase win-rates and deal sizes! Click below to download this tool.

FASCINATING INTERVIEWS BY KELLY LEONARD, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, INSIGHTS & APPLIED IMPROVISATION AT SECOND CITY WORKS There is a growing amount of evidence that shows how our own expertise can become a trap. We become accustomed to our success and patterns and this leaves us, sometimes, unprepared for change. There is also evidence that when you expose yourself to new thinking, new ideas and new perspectives, you are making yourself more change-ready. These interviews will give you some unique and unusual insights across a variety of fields and experiences. A mixture of academics, executives, artists and thought leaders whose combined wisdom will give you some practical information that you can parlay into your own working lives. Enjoy! - KELLY LEONARD, Executive Director, Insights & Applied Improvisation at Second City Works

At a time when financial capital is cheap and readily available, but human capital isn’t, there’s an urgency to increase Employee Lifetime Value. But to do that, we have to understand the employee journey.  In this ebook you will learn:  The fundamental elements of the employee journey The building blocks of employee success How to diagnose disengagement How to detect emotional distancing How to architect intervention opportunities Click below to download this eBook.

If you ask your executives what your organization's most valuable asset is, their response will probably be "Our people, of course!". And yet, when an opportunity to invest in leading talent programs presents itself, that level of enthusiasm seems to suddenly disappear. Womp-womp. Many C-suites still see learning and development as cost burdens, even though improved talent management strategies have been shown to drive growth in revenue time and time again. This eBook will equip you with winning strategies to get the leadership buy-in you need and elevate the role of talent management in your organization. Click below to download the Making the Business Case for Talent Management eBook! It's everything you need to get executive buy-in and ongoing support for your proposed talent initiatives.

This ebook addresses how to approach the dramatic changes involved in moving to a digital workplace, using cloud-based applications and document management. As Millennials flow into the workplace with their technological savvy, we’re going to continue to experience the drive toward more virtual workplaces. This ebook covers issues around virtual leadership, digital communication practices, and how to resolve conflict often emerge in these disconnected settings. Click below to download this eBook.

The first time I immersed myself in a video-based simulation, I felt like something was off, uneasy, or just plain awkward. For those musically inclined, it was like hearing a half cadence or a sequence of incomplete notes. To help instructional designers avoid half-cadence simulations, designers should follow this 12 key guidelines. Click below to download this guide. 

We're experiencing the biggest talent shortage since 2007, and businesses feel more pressure than ever to improve learning programs. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the idea of creating a more evolved learning program. It’s easier still to revert back to tried and true (and often tired) training content. But as someone who contributes to growing and retaining top talent, you can lean into this opportunity to inspire and champion innovation across your organization. In this eBook, we cover three steps to building a modern workforce through learning:   STEP 1: Increase access to essential, high-value skills for work and life  STEP 2: Focus on skills that inspire people and drive business forward STEP 3: Design reporting that captures tangible benefits of your learning programs Download today, it could change the way you think about developing your workforce.  Click below to download this eBook.

Learning and development isn’t a once-in-a-while activity. It’s a business-critical priority for increasing performance, staying competitive and improving employee engagement. To deliver the personalized and continuous learning experience your employees expect, you need to make development planning more effective and enjoyable for your employees. But you also need to ensure learning and development drive individual, team and organizational performance. Use this handy template to identify appropriate learning activities based on your employees' needs and the learning outcomes you want them to achieve. Click below to download this job aid.

DO YOU WANT TO DEVELOP A BEST-IN-CLASS SALES FORCE? Frontline sales management is one of the most challenging jobs in business today. There's constant chaos that distracts managers from the important work of being a sales coach.  In this ebook, we provide simple yet highly-effective methods for getting the most out of your sales talent. At the end, you’ll have what you need to follow a proven-effective path to develop sales coaching excellence, and as a result, develop a best-in-class sales force. Click below to download this ebook.

Why Your ROI Story Is Stronger Than You Think If you’re in charge of training a sales team, you know how hard it is to ensure they properly receive and retain training while in the field. But since organizations often treat sales training as an unavoidable cost of doing business, you may find it even harder to justify investing in technology that would improve your learning program. Sales, sales enablement, and sales training leaders often don’t realize how much investing in sales training technology contributes to a stronger ROI. That’s because most companies haven’t instituted best practices for identifying the business impact of better sales learning. Most limit their tracking to activity metrics like usage and adoption, or they capture anecdotes about how a recent training contributed to closing a specific deal. Quantifying the full return on your sales training investments helps you more effectively champion your initiatives and win more resources. That way, you can improve your team’s performance and create a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement. Here are four sources of ROI you’re already delivering that you should capture to demonstrate how sales training contributes to the bottom line of your organization. Click below to download this eBook.

With the fast faster fastest pace of life today, finding a shortcut can be a big help. And the Internet has opened a world of resources to help us in our personal and professional lives. But: searching…copying…pasting…sending… can cause you major problems—maybe even land you in court!  Content is OWNED by someone. They OWN the copyright to that content—and can control how it is used. This includes the exclusive rights to: copy/reproduce distribute create other works from that content display or perform the content publicly give permission to others to use the content in certain ways (often by granting a license for a fee) pursue those who use that content without permission. Most of us don’t pay attention to the Copyright Law, so we are setting ourselves up for expensive and time-consuming legal nightmares; we could be sued for using someone else’s content and images without their permission. Getting a letter in the mail from an attorney—who’s not our attorney—makes the heart pound! Or Maybe we discover that content we have created has been taken and used by someone else—without our permission. Then we have to pay an attorney to straighten that out. That could lead to Very costly and time-consuming litigation—and the death of a business. Click below to download this eBook.  

If you're ready to see success in your employee training program, you first have to understand what success looks like. Seeing positive results from your program requires dedication to individuals achieving goals, which translates to the organization achieving its goals. What goals are you trying to reach, and how are you measuring whether or not you've reached them? Rather than trying to come up with strong goals out of thin air, we've outlined ten steps that will take you through the process of creating goals and metrics for your employee training program. These steps will help you think through how your program is aligned with the business, and how your employees are positioned to boost business results through various training initiatives.

Business leaders look for predictability. They seek insight from mounds of data to get just a glimpse of the future. They demand their sales and marketing executives put the business on the right path to meeting or exceeding sales and margin goals. Sales executives create detailed business plans to identify new opportunities and retain existing customers.  They train sales reps and channel partners on product benefits and teach them to overcome objections. They develop compensation plans aligned with corporate goals to encourage growth. Marketing leaders identify competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. They define buyer personas and construct profiles to ensure the right messages reach the right prospects. They carefully map out every step of the buyer’s journey to know when and how to influence behaviors. All this to increase the likelihood of success, to gain more certainty and predictability. Shouldn’t your sales incentive program work this hard to engage your participants? Knowing how and when to nudge your participants could mean the difference between blowing past your goals and scrambling to explain a disastrous failure. This eBook maps the sales incentive journey which participants embark upon when engaging with a program. We’ve developed it from insights gained during almost 50 years of observing and influencing participants, and it can help put your program on the road to predictable success. Click below to download this eBook.

What challenges are your organization wrestling with? Revenue growth? Product and service innovation? Profitabilty? Change management? Agility? Complexity? No matter what issues you're dealing with, you have the internal resources to address them. You just might not be taking advantage of them. Click below to download this eBook.

Due to advancements in technology, there's been a shift in the way employees have wanted to receive their training. That has left organizations with the task of developing new learning methods that support the science of learning. Whether your organization already has a program in place or you’re just jumping into the deep end, there are sure to be a lot of questions around strategy, goal alignment, becoming a learner-centric organization, how to tackle low engagement, and more. We’ve identified the top three challenges with training a modern workforce and how you can use on-demand training to overcome those challenges and have a positive impact on your organization. In this ebook, you’ll learn: How microlearning can help combat long training times Tips on gamification and how it can boost engagement Strategies on boosting information retention through learning boosts

Do your employees really know what you're trying to accomplish as a team and an organization? New research links organizational underperformance and failure to meet key objectives with rampant employee confusion about Key Results. 85% of organizations say Key Results are not clearly defined such that employees at all levels can engage. Download "Clarity Is Key" to discover the impact that clear communication has on results--and use this information to guide your team effectively, boost results, engage employees, and reach goals faster than ever.

Microlearning is a treatment for instruction. Microlearning can be used to deliver a wide variety of subject matter, and the primary decision guiding the implementation is the scope of content to be covered. Microlearning is meant to be easily consumable in short periods of time (e.g. less than 10 minutes). The microlearning solution should address one learning objective ONLY.