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Required Reading for Successful Leaders Our president, Richard Lepsinger, has co-authored three books and numerous articles that provide insight into the OnPoint approach. Whether you plan to work with us or not, you’ll find the information in these books and articles tremendously helpful in creating an execution-focused company. |
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IDEAS ONPOINT Are you, or is your organization, facing a significant challenge—developing leaders at all levels, managing change, executing plans and strategic initiatives effectively, engaging and retaining talent? Would you like to know how top-performing companies deal with these issues and what factors differentiate the best companies from those that are less successful? Find out by joining our free email mailing list and request one of our reports related to your area of interest. |
Flexible Leadership: Creating Value by Balancing Multiple If you are a manager or a training and development professional, you need concrete suggestions for guiding your organization through rapidly changing conditions and difficult challenges. Flexible Leadership integrates findings from different disciplines with more than a half-century of research and explains how leaders can effectively enhance the bottom-line performance of their organizations. Packed with illustrative examples of effective and ineffective leadership, the book includes information on:
For a copy of this book please go to: Amazon.com The Art and Science of 360° Feedback You can use 360° feedback to achieve your most critical goals and enhance employee performance. This exceptional book shows you what makes for a successful 360° feedback program and how it can benefit your company. You’ll learn the step-by-step process to implement a successful 360° feedback program. You’ll gain the skills to:
The Art and Science of 360° Feedback is the first and only single-volume guide to all the hows and whys of 360° feedback. It offers case studies and examples of major companies that have successfully implemented this program into their organizations. You’ll learn the process for enlisting the support of and commitment to 360° feedback from others in your organization—a key ingredient for success that is often overlooked. The book includes guidelines for making the process smooth and painless for everyone involved as you bring about real, measurable change in the behavior of your employees. For a copy of this book please go to: Amazon.com The Art and Science of Competency Models: Pinpointing Critical Success Factors in Organizations Many of us ask, “What does it take to do a job well?” and stop there. But there’s more to it than that. Leaders must explore questions like: What skills and knowledge are necessary for effectiveness in a certain job? Does the employee have the appropriate skills and knowledge, or is some kind of training necessary? Are these job expectations aligned with the culture and strategy of the organization as a whole? These questions are essential to performance improvement efforts. And competency modeling is designed to help you find answers to questions such as these. As this book explains, competency models are a means of ensuring that your investment in your employees will yield the expected results. You’ll use this cutting-edge guide to:
Ultimately, The Art and Science of Competency Models is a practical guide to hiring, developing, and training the people who will lead your organization to future success. For a copy of this book please go to: Amazon.com Leadership In Organizations, Sixth Edition With its focus on effective leadership in organizations, this book is especially relevant for people who are currently managers or who expect to become a manager in the near future. The content of the book reflects a dual concern for theory and practice. Practitioners will find guidelines for becoming more effective as leaders. Most chapters have one or two short cases designed to help the reader gain a better understanding of the theories, concepts, and guidelines presented in the chapter. An instructor's manual is available with detailed analyses of the cases and suggestions on how to use them. For a copy of this book please go to Amazon.com. Leading Change: Adapting and Innovating in an Uncertain World One of the main areas in which leaders are able to influence organizational performance is adaptation—an increasingly crucial ability in today’s turbulent business environment. Adaptation involves changes made to cope with external threats and to exploit opportunities created by new technology, changing markets, and the shifting needs and expectations of customers. Today’s organizations require a culture with firmly embedded values and beliefs that support innovation and change. In addition to their influence on an organization, leaders can use specific behaviors and take specific action to facilitate innovation and adaptation. For a copy of this article, click here. Getting it Done: Four Ways to Translate Strategy Into Results. A recent survey indicates that today’s business leaders believe their organizations are not only inadequate at implementing strategy, but also unlikely to get better at meeting this critical challenge. The process of translating strategy into successful business results and maintaining efficient, reliable operations is commonly called execution. Finding ways to improve execution is a critical task for today’s leaders. Our research indicates that four leadership behaviors are especially useful for enhancing execution. For a copy of this article, click here. Why Integrating the Leading and Managing Role Is Essential for Organizational Effectiveness. Organizational Dynamics, Volume 34, Number 4, pp.361-375, 2005 For more than two decades there have been debates about the differences between leading and managing. The assumption that each role requires a different type of person has implications for selection and development. The idea that leading and managing are both important is not new, but past theories do not provide a clear explanation of how the two roles are interrelated and how they jointly affect organizational performance. In this article, we use our Flexible Leadership Model to explain why it is necessary to integrate leading and managing in a way that is appropriate for the situation. For a copy of this article, click here. "Effects of Multisource Feedback and a Feedback Facilitator on the Influence Behavior of Managers Toward Subordinates." A groundbreaking research study has shown that OnPoint Consulting’s Influence Skills feedback instrument, when administered properly, increases managers’ use of effective influence tactics and results in a positive change in their leadership behavior. The study also found that leaders perceive the feedback to be more useful and easier to apply when it is delivered by a facilitator, rather than through a feedback report alone. For a copy of this report, click here. "Closing the Strategy Execution Gap: Ten Factors Required for EffectiveExecution." White Paper. Fall 2006 In business, execution is everything. If an organization can’t execute, nothing else matters: not the most solid, well thought-out strategy, not the most innovative business model, not even technology that could transform an industry. Although much attention has been focused on the need for organizations to improve their ability to execute, few experts have offered specific guidelines for solving the problem. To help close this gap and to provide leaders with more specific information on what it takes to execute strategy effectively, we set out to answer three questions:
The resulting report of findings outlines the five factors that are baseline prerequisites for effective execution and the five differentiating factors that separate the top-performing companies from those that are less successful at execution. For a copy of this white paper, click here. "The Secrets of Successful Change: How Top-Performing Companies Prepare for and Manage Change." White Paper. Winter 2007 How do the best companies deal with continuous change or prepare to take on a specific initiative? What does it take to be an effective leader of change? How can you ensure things get off to a good start and that momentum and commitment is maintained throughout the transition? This report describes the conditions that must be in place and the practices leaders should use to ensure that the people in their organizations are ready for change and can manage it effectively. For a copy of this white paper, click here. "Performance Management: Moving From Scorecard to Strategic Tool." White Paper, Spring 2007 Many professionals see performance management as a dreaded chore that yields little obvious payoff. All this dissatisfaction drives many organizations to tinker endlessly with the details of their performance management systems: revising the rating scales, moving from paper-based to software-enabled, adding or revising competencies, and so forth. But since these changes don’t necessarily translate into success, what is the answer? If you’re dissatisfied with your performance management system, what else can you do but change to a new one? While OnPoint’s survey doesn’t yield any one-size-fits-all solution—probably because such solutions don’t exist—it does suggest some helpful insights. For a copy of this white paper, click here. "Improving the Consistency and Accuracy of Performance Evaluation." White Paper. Spring 2007 One of the most common changes to performance management systems involves refining the rating scale used to evaluate performance. Despite the attention that is often placed on ratings and performance evaluation, only 54% of respondents in our study believe that their current rating systems facilitate the delivery of feedback during performance review meetings. And only 45% believe that their current approaches enable managers to accurately differentiate levels of performance. While there is no single “best” approach, our research indicates that a performance evaluation process is most likely to be applied consistently and perceived as fair and accurate when several key elements are in place. For a copy of this white paper, click here. "Understanding the Specific Challenges that Virtual Teams Face Is Critical to Enhancing Their Performance." Article, 2008 Virtual teams are increasingly used in organizations due to factors such as globalization, decreased travel, geographically dispersed talent, and significant technological advancements. By employing virtual teams, companies can achieve significant levels of productivity and cost efficiency. However, many virtual teams are not successful and suffer from performance issues. Thus, it is extremely important to understand the practices that significantly improve virtual teamwork. This paper presents the key findings and recommendations from a global research study that was conducted in 2004. For a copy of this article, click here. "Trust and Leadership in Virtual Teamwork: A Media Naturalness Perspective." Article, 2004 Due to the prevalence of virtual teamwork in organizational settings and the link between virtual communication and productivity and team member satisfaction, it is important to understand what factors directly impact the success of virtual team communication. Although research on virtual teamwork has increased substantially in recent years, there has been little theoretical development to guide this research. Therefore, the current article proposes a new theoretical framework for research on virtual team communication and illustrates the implications of this theory on two key research areas in virtual teamwork: trust and leadership. This framework should be informative for HR practitioners and managers who work with virtual teams, as it might guide decisions on training, frequency of face-to-face meetings, and team member selection. For a copy of this article, click here. |
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