Guides and Tools

Exceptional leaders can take organizational culture and performance to a new level of effectiveness—no matter the challenges your teams face—when there’s a focus on fundamental and lasting behavior change. Here are three intentional leadership actions that will amplify your leadership impact.

While HR leaders understand how important L&D programs are to their people’s success, leadership teams aren’t always on the same page. More than 54% of HR professionals surveyed for a 2021 Workplace Learning Trends Report say that leadership often sees L&D as a cost and not as an investment.

Gen Z needs more than technological prowess to succeed in the world of work. And it’s up to your organization’s leaders to shape and guide these new cohorts so they can thrive.

This guide explores four critical behaviors leaders can cultivate to improve their personal effectiveness and their team’s collective impact while navigating a difficult organizational chapter.

In this guide, we’ve compiled crucial insights for first- time leaders who are making the shift from individual contributor to trusted leader. These insights can help you embrace the mindset necessary to step into your new role with confidence and accelerate trust, engagement, and performance for consistent, superior results.

Take our Difficult Conversation Assessment to gain insight into which of three conversation styles you use and learn how to navigate conversations with effectiveness and authenticity. Then share this assessment so others can assess their difficult conversation style.

Burnout, while a perennial risk in a competitive marketplace, doesn’t have to be the norm. Leaders who manage their own energy and build a “big tent” culture—one that reflects the company’s values while also showing thoughtful care for their teams—can still perform at the highest levels. They may not eliminate burnout entirely, but they can reduce its frequency, shorten its duration, and create the kind of environment where people can recover and thrive.

Use this tool to assess and improve communication and collaboration on your team, so that you can better move through tension into progress.

Discover how leaders who expect a lot and care a lot drive higher engagement and results—without burnout. Learn the practices behind sustainable performance.

Communication, in all its dimensions, is a core leadership competency. And leaders are responsible for making their messages intentional and effective, whether they’re articulating a bold vision or sending a quick update to the team. From facilitating team dialogue, to sharing difficult news one-on-one, to crafting a strategic memo, every message is a chance to shape culture. Clear communication aligns teams, reinforces priorities, and turns collaboration into a force multiplier.

Disruption will never be easy to master. The critical insight is that it can be harnessed—anchored in purpose, accelerated by experimentation, and sustained by refinement. Leaders who instill this discipline give their organizations the rare ability to treat uncertainty as fuel. This is the leadership imperative of our age: to turn disruption into the greatest strategic advantage of all.

As companies embrace the advantages of having hybrid workforces where possible, it can be challenging to manage teams. Use these 8 tips to boost engagement, collaboration, and morale.

How you communicate a change to your team is critical to helping them understand and adapt. All change creates disruption, but leaders can minimize the amount of disruption through effective communication.

In a working world shaped by speed and scale, ensuring clarity is part of your job. Writing well means treating it as a core competency, not something to delegate. It means committing to being understood. It means staying curious, sharpening your intent, and taking responsibility for how— and whether—your words land.

Essential human skills like emotional intelligence, proactive problem-solving, building high-trust relationships, and self-leadership don’t come easily to everyone on a given team. Yet they’re critical to achieving an organization’s most important goals. You need one comprehensive program to help everyone gain and improve these essential abilities.

If you’re a leader, it helps to be a good talker. But great communication is actually more about hearing and understanding others than it is about being heard yourself. When you listen well in person or over video meetings, you’ll be able to connect more deeply with your team members, colleagues, and customers. You’ll help advance their thinking — and they’ll advance yours with their ideas and insights.

What got you here won’t get you to where you want to go next. To successfully transition from individual contributor to trusted leader, you’ll need to first navigate these shifts to embrace a leadership mindset, support your team, and facilitate outstanding performance.

We’ve assembled the following power skills from our world-class content and solutions for you to share with individuals inside your organization. As your people incorporate these skills into their daily routines, they will increasingly focus on their highest priorities and organize their work in more productive ways.

Essential human skills like emotional intelligence, proactive problem-solving, building high-trust relationships, and self leadership don’t come easily to everyone on a given team. Yet they’re critical to achieving an organization’s most important goals.

For organizations to accomplish major goals—for example, selling more products, helping more clients, or lowering costs—all team members must collaborate and complete their work at the highest level. Whether an organization is successful in accomplishing its goals or having challenges, there will still be points of friction along the way.

Leaders who seek to chart a path through unprecedented change may find their teams uninspired and detached. Here’s what’s happening and how to refuel the fire.

Achieving the Public Victory® requires us to first successfully master the habits related to Private Victories. True dominion over self, the definition of independence, is necessary to establish meaningful, lasting, and productive relationships both at work and at home.

Attention may be every organization’s scarcest resource. Every meeting competes with every attendee’s day job—and with the phone in every pocket. The first job for all presenters is to break through, and that starts with giving people a reason to listen and focus.

The 7 Habits are based on universal truths and enduring principles. They’re grounded in decades of research and development—and based on the best-selling business book of all time. In fact, it’s been the top leadership training framework for over 35 years. The 7 Habits have changed hundreds of millions of people’s lives—and their organizations.

Turn disruption into innovation and growth with these five leadership behaviors to drive collective action.

This guide provides an overview of project management best practices so that leaders can better understand workflows and guide project outcomes at a high level. This informed perspective will help leaders see where they can guide project teams toward success. When leaders ensure projects are managed well, they can skillfully drive collective action around the activities and initiatives with the most organizational impact.

In this guide, we’ll explore four tactics you can use to navigate the negative mindsets that can creep in during times of stress, helping you develop habits to not only thrive through tough times but also support your team members in overcoming the same challenges.

Leaders can use this interactive tool with their Gen Z employees to tap into what they care about most and determine the skill gaps they need to fill to be successful in their roles. Share this tool with your Gen Z employee, ask them to fill it out, and discuss it in your next 1-on-1 meeting

Organizations looking to close their leadership gap must address a practical obstacle that often goes unacknowledged: Most leadership development efforts are misaligned with how leaders actually spend their time. For instance, in a study reported by Harvard Business Review, 96% of the leaders surveyed said they lacked the time for strategic thinking. Before building new skills, companies must first remove structural barriers that prevent leaders from applying the skills they already have.

A Trust & Inspire leader focuses on building relationships that develop capabilities and empower their team. And one way in which they build these high-trust relationships is by using clear and effective communication practices consistently.

Here are six things you can do to help your team process the changes swirling around them and chart a productive course forward—despite the upheaval in their life and work.

When trust is eroded, things fall apart. Try these six tips to build trust in your organization and avoid breaking it.

Move to a “Trust & Inspire” leadership style and model it to your people with these seven steps.

A few words go a long way. Building a culture of trust starts with a shared vocabulary of simple—yet powerful—phrases that leaders use to say thanks, show empathy, and provide support.

In a world defined by relentless disruption, how well people trust one another, make decisions, collaborate, and execute under pressure determines whether performance stalls or accelerates. We adapt more quickly and innovate more effectively when we place people at the center of our most meaningful endeavors. And for leaders like you, the need to act on these insights is no longer optional. In periods of profound change, leadership decisions determine whether organizations merely endure disruption—or emerge stronger because of it. This is the Human Imperative—the human side of strategy.

In this guide, we’ll explore the three key L&D program components required to create behavior change, the relationship between active learning and behavior change, and how FranklinCovey’s unique approach to individual effectiveness and leadership development drives lasting behavior change for organizations worldwide.

In a workplace where technology handles the routine, your team will thrive because they bring creativity, discernment, and clear communication to every interaction—skills that no algorithm can replace. Let’s take a closer look at how our distinctly human strengths—like inspiration, trust, and creative collaboration—must come into play as technology shifts the way we work, and how leaders can empower their direct reports to further develop the skills of personal and interpersonal effectiveness to close the gaps AI won’t fill.

Forward-thinking companies treat retention as a throughline across the entire employee experience. By building it into recruiting, onboarding, development, and recognition, they reduce turnover and create cultures that attract top talent and support high performance.

“Change is a constant” is a commonplace axiom of the business world. Unfortunately, it is more often said with a sense of resignation than excitement. It doesn’t need to be that way.

The most effective leaders are advocates for their team members. By listening and seeking understanding first, advocates avoid making hasty assumptions about others. Advocates build inclusive processes and look for opportunities to advance others within their organization. And advocates build team connections that support engagement, productivity, and innovation.

As leaders navigate uncertainty, they will increasingly find they are required to do more with less, reinforcing a scarcity paradigm. This dynamic, characterized by tension, can undermine (or even ruin) a company’s culture— creating an “us-versus-them” mentality where teams compete for resources rather than collaborate.

In a professional landscape that’s constantly evolving, learning and development (L&D) leaders need to utilize learning science to adapt to the ongoing and changing needs of individual contributors and executives.

In this guide, we focus on the essentials of effectiveness—concepts such as personal responsibility, vision, and time management. Personal leadership is embodied in an individual’s ability to understand their own strengths and motivations and then apply their energy to their most important goals.

Unconscious biases are, well, unconscious, which makes them hard to identify, much less know their true impact. It’s a complex and sometimes controversial issue. Is it any wonder that there are so many misconceptions around what to do? Before you can take steps to operate more fairly and effectively at work, you need to get your bearings.

This guide explores how leaders can elevate their cultures by focusing on four interlocking dimensions of organizational behavior:
• Trust
• Accountability • Agility
• Feedback

Artificial intelligence is transforming how organizations operate, but many leaders are unprepared for its real impact. The Human + AI Partnership: How to Empower Your People to Create a Future-Ready Workforce explores how leaders can bridge the gap between technological optimism and organizational readiness. Based on FranklinCovey research, it uncovers common leadership traps—like overconfidence, inaction, or focusing too narrowly on efficiency—and replaces them with actionable practices for leading with empathy, clarity, and accountability.

If your company is part of a merger or acquisition, it usually means your hard work is paying off. However, the euphoria of striking a deal can quickly fade when you realize the hard work is only just beginning. Will your company flail, survive, or thrive post-M&A?

Build stronger relationships and achieve better outcomes with the Think Win-Win Guide. This tool helps you adopt a mindset of mutual benefit, fostering collaboration and trust in both professional and personal interactions. Learn how to shift from a competitive mindset to one that seeks solutions where everyone wins—leading to lasting success and meaningful partnerships.

Effective leadership is the decisive factor in whether an organization’s investment in transformation elevates its workforce and delivers growth—or becomes just another corporate reset whose ambitions outstrip its impacts. What distinguishes leaders who produce exceptional results is the clarity with which they communicate their expectations and the care with which they apply them.

Trust & Inspire is a different operating system. It starts from the idea that a leader’s job is not to extract effort from people, but to create the conditions where they can do their best work. Command & Control expects leaders to tighten their grip as pressure rises. Trust & Inspire invites them to recommit to clarity and trust, shared ownership and purpose.

It isn’t enough to be different. You must be strikingly different in ways that actually matter. After six years of intensely focused research involving nearly 3,000 sales professionals from 135 countries, we’ve discovered three ways top sales performers stand out from the herd.

Too many leaders set vague goals like “improve customer retention,” leaving their teams unsure of how well they’re doing or even exactly what they’re working toward. This simple formula, from FranklinCovey’s 4 Disciplines of Execution®, provides a powerful way to identify “where you are today, where you want to go, and the deadline for reaching that goal.”

In today’s virtual work environment, we’ve learned a few things. Productivity isn’t necessarily hurt — and may be improved — in remote environments. A PwC survey found a 47 percent productivity increase in 2020, despite the large rise in working from home. And 94 percent of employers surveyed by Mercer reported productivity was unaffected or improved during the pandemic.

With a few techniques and honest communication, we’ve found that gatekeepers will admit nearly anyone.

In a perfect world, your team magically shows up to work fully committed to the organization’s Wildly Important Goals® (WIGs®)—ready and willing to win as a team. But since that’s not typical behavior in the real world, try these eight team commitment-boosting strategies.

The best organizations know where their pockets of greatness reside, and they are better than the rest at scaling greatness across the organization, institutionalizing their own best practices, getting everyone’s behavior to change, and making their performance curve “righter and tighter.”

When you execute a strategy that requires a lasting change in the behavior of other people, you are facing one of the greatest leadership challenges you will ever meet. With The 4 Disciplines of Execution®, you are not experimenting with an interesting theory; you are implementing a set of proven practices that meet that challenge successfully every time.

What are all of the steps your client will take to make a good decision, regardless of the provider they choose?

Sales leaders—and their teams—know the strain all too well: Deals that once seemed solid can stall without warning. Decision-makers grow harder to reach as their priorities change. Budgets become frozen mid-cycle. A sales playbook can feel outdated by the time it’s put into motion.

Sales professionals are facing unprecedented challenges. On their radar screens: Rapid shifts in technology, pervasive economic uncertainty, evolving workplace dynamics, and a fundamental decline in trust at almost every level of society. These sources of uncertainty are undoubtedly reshaping the sales landscape. But here’s how sales leaders and teams can respond effectively to come out on top.

Seasoned sales leaders know that the purpose of a prospecting call is not to make an appointment, but to enable a yes or no decision. Should we be talking…or not?

In 25 years of coaching and refining The 4 Disciplines of Execution®, we’ve learned plenty about how to achieve a breakthrough result that requires collective behavior change at scale.

In this guide, we’ll explore four trusted execution disciplines that can help mobilize everyone in your organization to work together to deliver exceptional results on your top initiatives.

Make every prospecting call count with this structured planning tool. The Prospecting Call Plan helps you prepare, stay focused, and maximize your impact on every call. Use it to clarify your objectives, anticipate objections, and craft a compelling message that engages potential clients. With this resource, you’ll approach prospecting calls with confidence and purpose—leading to more productive conversations and stronger connections.

Focus on the right opportunities and maximize your sales impact with the Sales Prioritization Tool. This strategic resource helps you evaluate and rank prospects based on key criteria, ensuring you invest your time where it matters most. By prioritizing effectively, you’ll close more deals, build stronger relationships, and drive better results.

The 80/20 Activity Analyzer is your tool for defining the activities that will have the most impact on achieving your Wildly Important Goal®. A Wildly Important Goal (WIG®) is something that must be done, or nothing else you achieve really matters. It starts with narrowing your focus on what must be done.