Today, leaders confront a kaleidoscope of business challenges: globalization, emerging markets, increased environmental restrictions and liabilities, instability in nations and entire regions, changing demographics, many retirees with fewer experienced people to fill their shoes, and technology fueling everything to a frenetic pace. Through it all runs a common thread: people and their leadership. Nothing happens until people act, so behavior matters. And leadership has new importance through these intense periods of change and new strategies.

The behavioral framework shown in Unlock Behavior, Unleash Profits (2nd Edition) gives you important insights in reframing these challenges— and understanding what leaders can do to meet them.

Some of the biggest challenges our clients face today include:

• Achieving sustained/predictable top-line growth

  Regardless of the strategy, top-line growth ultimately comes down to behavior, execution, and leaders successfully unleashing employees’ discretionary performance on true drivers of top-line growth.

• Improving customer loyalty across your organization

  As a leader in a customer-facing business, you must understand the drivers that matter most to your others, and ensure no variation in what drives consequences for purchasing…and be deliberate in how you strike a balance between transactional efficiency and the human touch.

• Boosting innovation across your organization

  Employees must first believe that the organization and its leadership value innovation more than status quo. More important, when suggestions are offered, that behavior needs to be encouraged, listened to, and acted upon.

• Effectively and rapidly integrating cultures and organizations following mergers/acquisitions

  Mergers and acquisitions are on the rise, with all of the concomitant cultural and performance challenges. The need to influence behavior and merging corporate cultures is critical.

• Excelling at executing your strategies

  Success in today’s world will come from leaders who can deftly and reliably execute their strategies quickly, well, and with measurable results. Managers and leaders must decide where to focus their efforts, where the human touch will make a difference.

• Boosting employee engagement/retention

  Organizations that have engaged employees (like sports teams that have engaged players) perform better than those who do not. Leadership actions often have a faster, greater impact than changes to policy/procedure or structural redesigns.

• Smoothing leadership transitions

  Many leaders will change their roles in the years to come, and statistics indicate that many will fail. But leadership transition failures can be avoided if success is engineered. Managing through leadership transitions from one job to another, or one company to another, requires careful understanding and application of Behavioral Science, to benefit both yourself and the organization.

• Ensuring that strategic talent management truly results in well-developed leaders

  Companies worldwide are struggling to "manage talent", to find and keep strong leaders. But how companies actually find, develop, and manage talent has become stagnant. However, these challenges also represent opportunities to fundamentally change and measurably improve how talent is managed...and it must be brought to the strategic planning table, which is where it belongs.