Most major change initiatives in business fail to achieve their desired results. This is a shocking fact, when you consider how much is at stake when you undertake change — whether it's a company reorganization, new technology implementation, new products/services, you name it. And even the most successful initiatives are often painful and time-consuming to implement.

One of the biggest challenges to emerge from the 2012 Building Trust in Business research is the current perception of the lack of leadership transparency, predictability and consistency. This challenge stands in direct conflict with building trust.

In this free podcast, Patty McManus shares her insights into this problem and possible methods to address it.

Download the 2012 Building Trust in Business research report, here.

This is the third in a series of blog posts for leaders about overcoming obstacles to collaboration.

This is the second in a series of blog posts for leaders about overcoming obstacles to collaboration.

Here’s something you may not have seen in print: leading collaboration is so demanding that many leaders will not only never collaborate effectively — they’ll never even really understand what it means.  But there’s good news. In this post and in Part III I’ll share a few examples of great collaborative leadership I have observed up close in my consulting work over the years.

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.