Discover the impact of a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous (VUCA) world on current and future leadership requirements.    Learn how thinking agility will help you and your leaders adapt, focus and get more done in a rapidly changing and increasingly noisy environment. Explore four specific steps you can take to build your own and others’ thinking agility. Create your own action plan from the provided checklists to start putting better thinking to work for better performance and results.

Paper in Brief Discover the limits of "feel good" teambuilding activities, especially when critical business results are on the line Explore a thinking-based system to help teams build trust faster, streamline communications, make better decisions and get the benefit of diverse perspectives Learn how to apply the latest research on thinking and team effectiveness to achieve specific business objectives, whether the team is virtual or co-located, intact or cross functional Get practical tips for overcoming three common team challenges

Is your business prepared for the way we’ll work in the future? To stay ahead of the competition you need a proactive, integrated approach to your entire  talent management lifecycle. SuccessFactors offers a full suite of talent solutions to help you: Attract,engage,select, and hire the right talent Get your new hires up to speed in record time Provide continuous performance management Reward and retain your top talent Identify and anticipate talent gaps Provide learning anywhere, any time Get content as a service Harness the power of collaboration

"Performance management" sounds wholly positive. After all, who can argue with better performance? And effective performance management (PM) programs can deliver significant, tangible benefits such as: Increase in time spent on strategic priorities Improvement in employee productivity Jump in project completion rates More decrease in turnover

An Approach - The Reality of Product Management  The illusion of control drives adversarial relationships between customers and the project team. Made up dates/effort in the Project Schedule are treated as truth. Project Managers are judged by their ability to meet these made up dates regardless of what happens during the project. Leaders and customers shy away from defining the measurement of DONE. Lack of clarity about expected measurable outcomes and how this ties to business ROI is often avoided, vague or missing entirely in discussions.

Imagine the difference between looking across the room through a glass of muddy water and a glass of clear water. The muddy water represents how our decision making is impacted by negative emotions. Our minds were designed to keep us safe. Every moment your brain is scanning around you to see what might threaten you. Luckily, most of us are not physically threatened very often, but our brain also picks up threats to our self-esteem. 

We struggle with problems that seem unbeatable. Will we ever be able to improve employee engagement, cut costs, grow profit, and improve quality? These organizational problems are really team problems, and team problems are primarily people problems.  

You’ve heard it a hundred times. Continuous learning is critical to your talent management strategy—and your organization’s bottom line. To that end, you’ve invested in a powerful learning management system (LMS) and social tools, not to mention great content. But something still isn’t working. So what’s wrong? Simply put, your current learning strategy is no longer enough. Read on to find out why.

Do you wake up every Monday raring to go to work, full of new ideas, confident that you’ll be able to implement them, and passionate about what you do?  If so, would you like to stay that way?  And if not, doesn’t that sound pretty great? Best-selling author, keynote speaker and bona-fide expert on employee engagement, Bob Kelleher has researched and reflected on these issues deeply.  In his new book, I-Engage:  Your Personal Engagement Roadmap" Bob offers valuable insights and even potential solutions.  Click below to download the first chapter of this latest revelation.  It begins... Engagement is the key. Back in 2003, global consulting firm Towers Perrin (now Towers Watson) identified and defined an intriguing concept that would go on to revolutionize the way companies thought about their most important asset: their employees. Called "employee engagement," it was originally loosely defined as "the capture of discretionary effort." Discretionary effort, simply put, means going above and beyond at one’s job, or putting in additional effort, because one wants to do so. 

Talking with the C-suite, having a seat at the table, being a trusted advisor…whatever you call it, this form of success only comes from credibility fostered by a reputation of consistently giving good advice. This white paper will help you develop what it takes to propel yourself and your department into the confidence of senior leaders, reliably and consistently.

Industry research shows that effective sales coaching can dramatically improve the performance of a sales team - in some cases driving up revenues by 20% or more.   The reason for such potential improvements is the significant "multiplier effect" sales organizations can achieve through sales coaching: one trained manager can coach multiple sales professionals and improve their overall performance. With such potential benefits it is no wonder that many sales organizations recommend that their frontline sales managers spend 25% - 45% of their time sales coaching. The High Impact Sales Coaching Guide provides expert advice on essential sales coaching skills to help sales managers effectively empower their teams to reach their highest potential.

No matter how fun your game-based solution is supposed to be, you will still need a plan for launching it, promoting it, and measuring it. How will you communicate about the game? Will you require players to play? How will you incentivize play... or do you need to incentivize?

Analytics are at the heart of a modern data-driven business. When it came to content, we used to rely almost entirely on anecdotes and guesswork. That is no longer good enough - content is at the heart of the sales and marketing process and we must know how it is being used and how it is performing.   Marketing Automation tools made that a reality for marketing content. They let marketers analyze and optimize content marketing efforts during the first half of the sales cycle, providing analytics to show how effectively content moves customers through the funnel. But until recently, as soon as a deal was handed off to the sales team, it entered a content black hole.   There has been no way to answer very basic questions about sales content. Do reps have what they need? Do they use it? Do customers pay any attention to it? Does any of this actually generate real revenue? Even in our increasingly data-driven world, sales content has remained back in the days of guess and hope. But an emerging set of Sales Enablement platforms has changed that. They manage sales content throughout your sales engagements and use analytics to give you full visibility into how that content performs. This guide walks through eight reports that answer the key business questions about sales content and shows how to use them to optimize the way your company engages with customers.

Tracking and assessing workforce-diversity programs shouldn’t be hard work, but it should be a top priority. Because businesses benefit when they employ highly engaged workers with different backgrounds, HR leaders and hiring professionals contribute directly to a company’s success when diversity programs meet their goals. The opposite also is true: Workforce-development professionals who do not effectively measure the outcomes of their diversity programs are in danger of having the programs — and perhaps their jobs — deemed expendable. Ongoing competitive pressures are driving business leaders to demand that all investments return bottom- or top-line improvement, including workforce diversity programs.

Executing talent management activities before they’re needed is an earmark of a successful business. With aging workforces and a shortage of critical talent being among the biggest challenges facing today’s businesses, strategic workforce planning - the discipline of forecasting future gaps between demand and supply of critical talent, to ensure that you have the appropriate workforce mix three, five or ten years from now - has become one of HR’s most important responsibilities.

Goal management is among the most powerful methods companies have to execute business strategies. Thousands of studies have examined the impact of goal management on workforce productivity.  The common finding from this research is: Effective use of goals often increases employee productivity levels by 25% or more.  The financial value of goal management is staggering given the relatively low cost associated with implementing goal management methods. Because the value of goals is tied to fundamental psychological principles of employee behavior, the benefits of goal management do not depend on being in a certain industry or market.  If a company employees people then it will benefit from better goal management.

Research shows that effective sales coaching can dramatically improve the performance of sales teams - in some cases driving up revenues by 20% or more. But all too often sales organizations find it challenging to develop a sales coaching program that's embedded in a coaching culture.   Read this 5-page white paper and learn best practices and strategies for developing an effective sales coaching program for your sales organization.   In this white paper you will learn how to: Implement a proven sales coaching model Create a coaching culture Use metrics to maximize the ROI on coaching Turn sales managers into great coaches

According to Accor Services 90% of organizations say employee engagement impacts business success, but 75% of organizations have no engagement plan or strategy. Senior leaders are the visible face of an organization. These leaders are responsible for building and communicating the vision and strategic direction of the company. Employees belief in senior leadership is one of the three critical ingredients of employee engagement. When employees believe in and trust senior leader companies are more likely to have a higher level of organizational engagement. Dale Carnegie Training’s White Paper "Building a Culture of Engagement: The Importance of Senior Leadership" explains how leaders can build a workforce around organizational engagement which gives their company's a competitive advantage.

The employment market is fragmented and diverse. Every sector of business requires instructional designers and developers. Many employers prefer Instructional Designers (IDs) with experience in their business sector. This means that subject/content experts with a talent for teaching often move into instructional design using their field-specific knowledge as the key to open the door to course design and development, but with little or no formal preparation for quality instructional design and development. This paper discusses the practice analysis process, including survey results that generated nine primary skill set domains for IDs.  

In this white paper we examine valuing alternative futures and the use of qualitative probability theory to weigh the consequences of different actions.  We'll show how to use a common platform to engage their clients in the process of identifying assumptions, weighing the risk of those assumptions materializing or not, and valuing choices based on the probability of possible outcomes. Benefits: The benefits are participants will receive a set of tools and decision models that encourage logical thinking, discipline, and consideration of organizational realities that, in turn, will help them:   Save time.   Avoid unnecessary costs.   Increase their confidence.   Be perceived as having business smarts.   

There are dozens of studies and surveys each year reporting on the "state of the training industry." With some modest differences, these reports are consistently reporting very similar data. Among the data points routinely reported are the following: annual per employee spending on training, how many hours of training are available to employees, what training areas organizations are emphasizing, the ratio of training budget to overall expenses or payroll, etc. In other words, you can find a myriad of fascinating metrics all telling about the training industry from the organization’s perspective. What about the employees’ perspective? Aren’t we all supposed to be training employees?

Write like a leader who gets results Highly competitive companies are changing the way they write. You can, too! Learn three ways you, as a leader, risk your credibility when you write:   Failure to understand your readers Evasion or falseness Too many topics in one email Download these first 3 book chapters to boost your leadership brand.

It’s a new day for corporate training and those who manage learning functions. Today, traditional training programs aren’t enough to meet growing demands for better company performance, consistent compliance, changing employee expectations, and cost control. Companies can take learning to the next level with new tools and approaches that increase employee interest and engagement in learning, and are linked to employee performance, goal setting, and succession planning…all making a direct contribution to business growth. Ready to take learning to the next level? This Guide can help you get there. You’ll read about: Five essentials to transform learning Measuring ROI Tips to improve existing programs Case studies -- real-world examples of companies taking learning to the next level  

Large, global organizations typically operate disparate business systems around the world - increasing information technology costs and impacting service consistency for customers. To increase efficiency and performance, many enterprises choose to optimize their operations based on globally standardized ‘core’ systems. Implementing core software applications, such as SAP, PeopleSoft, SalesForce, Maximo, WorkDay, etc., takes a major investment not only in the technology infrastructure but also in preparing the end-users to operate within the system. Business cases are prepared to forecast the potential savings resulting from the installation of the new application. Assumptions are made on how quickly and thoroughly the users of the application will be able to use it efficiently and effectively. These expectations can be jeopardized if the technology roll-out is delayed or slowed because the users are not ready to meet these assumptions. If a company wants to achieve its business case goals, they need to ensure they get maximum end-user adoption with skilled, competent users.