Excerpts & Articles

Browse through highlights from CCL Press Publications and read selected CCL research reports online.

Articles

• Managerial Effectiveness in a Global Context - CCL research report (Adobe Acrobat pdf, 286 KB)

Downloads

• Executive Reader - Download the complete set of publication summaries from the CCL Press
• View and download forms, surveys and other excerpts from Evaluating the Impact of Leadership Development: A Professional Guide.

Excerpts

from Becoming a More Versatile Learner

• "Introduction" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 22 KB)
  Because learning from job experiences is essential for your development as a manager, you should understand three principles of managerial learning.
• "Finding the Baseline" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 34 KB)
  Most managers employ only one or two of these sets of learning tactics. Let's find out which ones you employ. This will help you understand the ones you need to add in order to increase your versatility as a learner.

from Building Resiliency: How to Thrive in Times of Change

• "What Is Resiliency?" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 16 KB)
  Resiliency provides the ability to recover quickly from change, hardship, or misfortune. It's associated with elasticity, buoyancy, and adaptation. Resilient people demonstrate flexibility, durability, an attitude of optimism, and openness to learning.
• "Why Is Resiliency Important?" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 17 KB)
  How does a manager flourish, even survive, in a current of constant and complex change? By building skills in resiliency, by broadening perspectives and competencies so that organizational, personal, and career changes can be absorbed and contribute to your leadership development.

from Choosing an Executive Coach

• "Does Executive Coaching Meet Your Needs?" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 30 KB)
  Before you start looking for a coach, it's important to determine whether coaching is the best solution for you. To decide whether you want a coach or some other kind of counselor, consultant, or confidant, consider these statements.

from Communicating Across Cultures

• "When Being Yourself Isn't Enough" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 19 KB)
  Your natural, customary ways of communicating can have an unexpected and unwanted impact on people whose cultural backgrounds are different from yours. And you are just as likely to misunderstand and misinterpret their words and behavior.

from Developing Cultural Adaptability: How to Work across Differences

• "Why Is Cultural Adaptability Important?" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 26 KB)
  Managers often interact daily with peers, bosses, direct reports, and others from different cultures, and they often handle those interactions poorly, causing avoidable misunderstandings, frustrations, and stress.

from Developing Your Intuition: A Guide to Reflective Practice

• "Intuition and Reflection" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 22 KB)
  In the world of work, leaders often find themselves in the position of having to make decisions without complete information. They're expected to make decisions that are not only right but also timely. Strategic and tactical choices can't always wait, so effective leaders learn to depend on their intuition as well as the evidence of the moment to reach decisions quickly with minimal information.

from Do You Really Need a Team?

• "Teams—Fast Track or Trendy Trap?" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 16 KB)
  When assigned to the right task, comprised of the right people, and supported in the right environment, teams can achieve breakthrough performance. This guidebook will help you determine if a team is the right way to accomplish the job your organization has assigned to you.
• "How Teams Work" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 38 KB)
  Teams are often temporary groups, yet they can help an organization build its long-term competitive strength by discovering new products and services, by developing new ways of serving customers and clients, and by creating new systems that enhance an organization's efficiency.

from Feedback That Works: How to Build and Deliver Your Message

• "Ten Common Mistakes in Giving Feedback" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 35 KB)
  During many CCL programs, we ask managers and executives: "How many of you give good, consistent feedback to the people you work with?" Usually only one or two people raise their hands. Why so few? The reasons are varied and valid, but they all stem from common mistakes that people make when giving feedback.

from Giving Feedback to Subordinates

• "Why Give Feedback to Subordinates?" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 22 KB)
  Most of your employees want to do a good job. Many are unaware of the impact of their behavior on their job performance, for good or bad. Feedback from you, their manager, can help them identify what they are doing well and build on those skills, correct problems, and develop new abilities that improve not just their personal lives but also the organization in which they and you work.
• "Subordinate Feedback Checklist" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 21 KB)
  Consult this checklist regularly to remind you of the main elements involved when you give feedback to subordinates.

from How to Form a Team: Five Keys to High Performance

• "What Is a Team?" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 28 KB)
  Many kinds of workgroups exhibit cooperative attitudes and practices and might be described as teams. But in this guidebook team refers to a specific kind of group whose members are collectively accountable for achieving the team's goals. Typically, a team has five characteristics.
• "Forming an Effective Team" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 28 KB)
  By carefully laying the groundwork you will greatly increase the likelihood that the team you launch will deliver on its potential. You can be sure to cover all of the facets of team formation by reviewing five critical components.

from How to Launch a Team: Start Right for Success

• "The Right Start Is Critical to Success" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 19 KB)
  One of the first steps to take toward increasing team effectiveness is to pay attention to how the team is formed. You can head off most of the problems that beset teams during the formation stage.
• "Ten Steps to Successful Team Meetings" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 25 KB)
  If you were to conduct an informal poll of team members, you would probably find that a substantial number of them believe that meetings are ineffective, dull, repetitive, too long, too frequent, on the wrong subjects, dominated by a few people, or simply a waste of time.

from Influence: Gaining Commitment, Getting Results

• "How Do You Influence?" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 42 KB)
  Understanding your own influencing style is critical to your success. The first step in that understanding is an assessment of the influence tactics you currently use. You can make that assessment by using the worksheet on the following pages.

from Keeping Your Career on Track: Twenty Success Strategies

• "The Bad News: Derailment Happens" and "The Good News: Success Happens Too" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 22 KB)
  Just as there are clear indicators of derailment, there are also key characteristics associated with successful executives.

from Leading Dispersed Teams

• "Act Global, Think Local" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 39 KB)
  Although quite different in makeup and operation, dispersed teams and local teams share some important characteristics.

from Learning from Life: Turning Life's Lessons into Leadership Experience

• "The Pull of Work and Life" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 19 KB)
  Although nonwork roles and responsibilities can limit and interfere with performance at work, there is another side to this story that is much richer in possibilities and rewards. Interests, roles, and responsibilities outside of work can also serve as creative and supportive sources for learning how to be a more effective manager.

from Maintaining Team Performance

• "Monitoring and Maintenance for Successful Team Outcomes" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 26 KB)
  Teams may fail to live up to their potential, fail to deliver expected outcomes, or fail to produce their results in a timely manner. Many of these failures can be prevented if team leaders assess their team's effectiveness at regular intervals—if they monitor their team's performance.
• "Dimensions of Team Effectiveness-Knowing the Success Factors" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 20 KB)
  There are, in effect, six key dimensions, or aspects, that are consistent across all teams. These dimensions can help team leaders determine and measure how effective their teams are.

from Making Creativity Practical: Innovation That Gets Results

• "What Is Practical Creativity?" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 20 KB)
  Simply put, it's an approach to generating ideas especially suited to organizational problem solving—a kind of targeted innovation.
• "Why Is Practical Creativity Important?" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 26 KB)
  Organizations hold their managers responsible for results. They also look to their managers for innovative ideas. In that kind of climate, success, even survival, requires renewal—and renewal demands creative thinking.

from Managing Conflict with Direct Reports

• "Conflict with Direct Reports Is a Special Case" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 24 KB)
  Conflict between you and a direct report is a special case that highlights two particular areas. One, it brings into play the working relationship between you and your direct report and affects how that relationship is built, maintained, and managed to achieve results. Two, it affects the work itself—the management of tasks and the strategies for achieving goals for which you and your direct report share responsibility. In either case it's important for you to see both sides of the conflict.

from Managing Conflict with Peers

• "A Process for Managing Conflict" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 36 KB)
  Because contemporary organizations rely so heavily on peer relationships to achieve results (command and control hierarchies giving way to collaborative, horizontal networks), using a conflict management process that relies on partnership can be a successful strategy for reaching resolution.
• "Six Paths to Managing Conflict with Peers" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 28 KB)
  Effectively managing conflict with your peers will lead to effective working relationships that serve you, your peers, and the organization.

from Managing Conflict with Your Boss

• "Why Managing Conflict Is Important" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 30 KB)
  Conflict with your boss doesn't have to lead to derailment if you make the effort to effectively manage the situation. When you appropriately manage conflict, positive consequences can result.
• "Seven Steps toward Managing Conflict" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 30 KB)
  CCL has found a seven-step process valuable in helping managers and executives become more strategic about managing conflict. This process is similar to other problem-solving models, but it emphasizes the importance of self-exploration and discovery as part of the process.

from Ongoing Feedback: How to Get It, How to Use It

• "Feedback Checklist" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 27 KB)
  Here is a checklist that you can use to remind you of the important steps whenever you seek feedback from others.

from Preparing for Development: Making the Most of Formal Leadership Programs

• "Why Prepare for a Leadership Development Program?" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 17 KB)
  Leadership development programs represent a large financial investment and personal commitment. They can have a major impact on careers and on personal lives. It's surprising then that many managers show up for such programs with little or no idea of what to expect and what they hope to gain.

from Reaching Your Development Goals

• "How to Reach Your Goals" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 26 KB)
  We know from research and practice that those who commit to pursuing goals immediately following a feedback experience are much more likely to capitalize on their strengths and set a productive path for growth. There are three strategies that need to be fully utilized in any intentional effort to learn, grow, and change.

from Setting Your Development Goals: Start with Your Values

• "Key Point Summary" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 21 KB)
  When setting a goal, it's crucial that you motivate both your mind (what you think you should do) and your heart (what you value). If you bring both into the picture you're more likely to arrive at goals that are meaningful to you and that you can achieve. To bring your heart back into the goal-setting process, examine how your goals align with your values—the underlying life principles you believe are important.

from Three Keys to Development: Defining and Meeting Your Leadership Challenges

• "Why Seek Assessment, Challenge, and Support?" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 19 KB)
  These three elements need to be imbedded in development experiences. To drive your development, you must assess your situation and your skills, seek challenges that are developmentally appropriate, and create support for helping you meet those challenges.
• "Developmental Situations" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 24 KB)
  Challenge means you are stretched beyond your current capabilities. Depending on how much of a stretch it is, you may feel comfortable facing a challenge, or you may feel overwhelmed. One thing however is clear: you need challenge to develop new skills and understanding.

from Using Your Executive Coach

• "What Is Executive Coaching?" (Adobe Acrobat PDF 17 KB)
  Executive coaching is a formal engagement in which a qualified coach works with an organizational leader in a series of dynamic, confidential sessions designed to establish and achieve clear goals that will result in improved managerial performance.