Collaboration — the concept and the practice — is experiencing a renaissance among business leaders these days. Many of our clients are telling us they need to reinvigorate their organizations' ability to work across all kinds of silos, levels, and boundaries. Everybody has to get faster at making smart decisions and much more reliable at implementing change. We call that  "collaborative acumen" — when leaders help people come together, be their best, and get it done.

Failure to achieve consensus can take your company down, as leaders at a number of organizations in recent history can attest. What if you were running one of those companies, and you realized in hindsight that the failure didn’t need to happen? Well, it doesn’t – most of the time.

Decision making during a crisis is the ultimate test for a leader. Especially when the problems are complex, roles become ambiguous, and urgent decisions get made hastily or pile up. The results are confusion and sometimes even paralysis. A leader can feel like the whole world is watching and waiting for decisive action that addresses issues and does it fast.

Over the years, a handy term has come into use in organizational literature and conversation, borrowed from psychotherapy: resistance to change. This phrase reminds me of some of the other psychological terms we use all the time to label troubling behavior in others: “passive aggressive”, “ADHD”, “manic depressive”.

Leaders don't get it right all the time, which sometimes is a big let-down when the person stepping into a high-profile leadership role has widespread support as the best qualified candidate for the job. Take President Obama, for instance. Already he's had a few missteps in bumping up against variables —situations and people —beyond his control. Politics aside, his adjustments and calibrations are similar to those of all new leaders challenged with driving a change agenda.

President Obama is teaching important lessons to new leaders challenged with spearheading critical change efforts. His decisive actions from the time of his November election victory until now offer great pointers for how leaders can step into power and lay a solid foundation for success.

Patty McManus' white paper, "Beyond Feedback: Breaking the Vicious Cycle," explores a particular type of interpersonal workplace conflict that involves a complex dynamic.

The tricky thing about these conflicts is that they can't be "fixed" by giving feedback. In fact, feedback may exacerbate the problem and is often the last thing you should turn to in these situations.

To read it, please download the article here.

Download Patty McManus' ebook, "The Little Book of Big Change."

According to a recent Reuters report, nearly half of British workers polled say their bosses are incompetent, make poor decisions, and lack confidence.

What’s more, of those who say their bosses don't know what they are doing, 83 percent said that management's poor decision making damages morale, half say it hurts productivity, and 19 percent say it hands competitors an advantage.

When it comes to change, leaders get wake-up calls — whether they want them or not. The calls can come from the product quality group or the media, the customer, or a lone voice deep in their organizations. The wake-up call usually sounds like:

"What we're doing isn't good enough any more."

"What we did yesterday puts us at risk today."

"We have a new opportunity, but so does our competition — and whoever gets there first, wins."