Book a Demo

Actionable Blog

From leadership styles to corporate culture, the rise of startups and the ubiquity of social media, the last 20 years have radically shifted the professional landscape. Those who embrace the new uncertainties thrive, while those who ignore them fall further behind.

We’re exploring all elements of the new world of work and sharing them here.

How to Make New Year’s Resolutions That Stick

How to Make New Year’s Resolutions That Stick

New year’s resolutions. Depending on which study you read, most of them fail. So why do we keep doing them? I want to give you some tips on increasing the likelihood that you will realize lasting change.

The 4-Phases of Growing a Consulting Firm

The 4-Phases of Growing a Consulting Firm

Over 14 years I’ve had the pleasure of literally thousands of conversations* with consultants, facilitators, trainers and coaches, at every stage of their journey and every...

How to Measure the Impact of Your Programs

How to Measure the Impact of Your Programs

When it comes to L&D budgets, the biggest question from business leaders is, “How are we going to measure impact?” It’s such an easy question for stakeholders to ask...

Moving from Learning to Business Impact

Moving from Learning to Business Impact

The goal of the learning that happens in your leadership sessions is the creation of a change within the organization that hired you.  The goal of this change is the...

How to Maximize Post-Session Engagement

How to Maximize Post-Session Engagement

Joel Bennett is the king of participant engagement. Sure, he’s a great facilitator.  Joel’s funny, knowledgeable, and passionate about his work. But Joel’s magic is...

How to Scale Beyond Your Time

How to Scale Beyond Your Time

Let’s talk about scaling beyond your time: the holy grail of consulting and training firms. First, we need to address some of the invisible pitfalls where many of us get...

You’re Not Charging Enough

You’re Not Charging Enough

You’re not charging enough for your consulting services. At Actionable, we can say this to you with an exceptionally high degree of confidence. How can we know this? We’ve...

Remember Everest When Planning Your Programs

Remember Everest When Planning Your Programs

Here’s a fascinating—if somewhat macabre—statistic about Mount Everest: of all the people who have died while summiting Everest, 82 percent have died on the way back down...

Career Conversations in Complex Times

Career Conversations in Complex Times

A couple of years ago I was introduced to the distinction between complex and complicated—one of the most useful and liberating distinctions I have ever learned. In a...

Are You Creating Customers for Life?

Are You Creating Customers for Life?

Think about the last 12 hours: how many times did you experience the push to buy a product or service? From television commercials, radio ads, newspaper and magazine ads,...

Do You Truly Value Your Employees?

Do You Truly Value Your Employees?

If employees believe they are no more than a number to the organization, then they treat the organization primarily as a means to an income.

The Habit of Curiosity

The Habit of Curiosity

Curiosity is both an attribute of high-performing teams and a personal habit. We are born with it—and we need to cultivate it.

The 7 Traits of Great Bosses

The 7 Traits of Great Bosses

Great bosses who are honest and transparent give their team permission to do the same, which fosters an environment of candor and camaraderie.

The Best ‘Back from Vacation’ Ever

The Best ‘Back from Vacation’ Ever

For too many people, the stress of trying to get away, and then catch up when they return, makes the process of taking a vacation counter-productive.

Do you have a mission? Or just a job?

Do you have a mission? Or just a job?

There are people who just have a job, and there are others whose work is part of a bigger personal mission. Sadly, there are far more people with just jobs.

Diagnosing a Low Trust Culture

Diagnosing a Low Trust Culture

Your clients trust you to help them fix problems, engage their teams, and get better results. But do they trust their teams? Do their teams trust them?

Crossing the Cultural Rubicon

Crossing the Cultural Rubicon

Courage and faith are required of the leader, because once you commit to crossing the cultural Rubicon, there is no turning back. But you won’t want to.

Taming the Distraction Habit

Taming the Distraction Habit

If we allow the stimuli we’re exposed to every day whisk us into a state of distraction—we may be putting our health, productivity, and humanity at risk.

Serving Up Learner-Led Learning

Serving Up Learner-Led Learning

Learning professionals must not only evolve their delivery methods to encourage learner-led learning, but their competencies in concept and design as well.

The Inner Game Of Learning

The Inner Game Of Learning

The inner game, in this context, is how we can control our mindset and our strategy when we approach learning something new.

Vertical Development for Leaders

Vertical Development for Leaders

We can grow our capacity to see ourselves clearly, to appreciate multiple perspectives, and to become authors of our own lives through vertical development.

Infographic: Mastering Behavior Change

Infographic: Mastering Behavior Change

By arming yourself with research about how our brains function, you can work to mitigate threat responses, and pave the way for successful behavior change.

Growth Lessons from a Gardener

Growth Lessons from a Gardener

If you want something to grow, focus on giving it the things it needs to stay alive and healthy. Be attentive. Be patient. The growth will come.

The Costs of CYA Behavior

The Costs of CYA Behavior

CYA behavior is a clear indication there is a lack of trust on our teams, and manifests in sending too many emails, and attending too many meetings.

The Return on Investing in Yourself

The Return on Investing in Yourself

My suggestion is this: think about where you are investing your time and your money, and put in place the practices to make it worth your while.

The Science of Behavior Change

The Science of Behavior Change

For organizations to achieve meaningful change in a sustainable way, they need to create the conditions for behavior change at an individual level.

Behavior Change That Sticks

Behavior Change That Sticks

Clarity is what we want for our organizations, and is the critical first step in behavior change. Resistance to change is often the result of unclear goals.

Our Best Reads for Thriving in Change

Our Best Reads for Thriving in Change

The world of work is changing rapidly. These changes can be viewed as a challenge, or an opportunity—but one thing is certain: change is the new constant.

The Intimacies of Remote Working

The Intimacies of Remote Working

Actionable is a completely remote working environment—many of us have never met in person. And yet we know each other on a deeply personal level.

Turn Your Halo Effect Into A Superpower

Turn Your Halo Effect Into A Superpower

In order to find the time it takes to work on your business—your growth, strategy, and goals—you need to reflect on your halo effect, and supercharge it.

Getting Lucky At Work and Beyond

Getting Lucky At Work and Beyond

“Luck” happens because the person has used a systematic approach to ensure progress toward their dreams and goals. It’s not as simple as just getting lucky.

Building a Curiosity Culture

Building a Curiosity Culture

We want to nurture a curiosity culture because it makes us more present to the journey, more creative, better at communicating alignment with each other, and more agile.

The Art of Receiving Feedback

The Art of Receiving Feedback

In addition to modeling being recipients of feedback, another way to reduce the threat is to recognize that when we give feedback we are engaging in a conversation.

How to Create a Learning Culture

How to Create a Learning Culture

To keep employees engaged, and to develop the agility they need to keep up, organizations need to embrace a learning culture.

Managing the Bubble: How to Cultivate Presence

Managing the Bubble: How to Cultivate Presence

We all have one: that cartoon-like bubble above our heads, filled with thoughts, beliefs, judgments, assumptions, fears, biases, and experiences, that colors our ability to be present and engaged.

Infographic: The Hard Truth About Soft Skills

Infographic: The Hard Truth About Soft Skills

It’s time to reevaluate our perception of “soft skills”—communication, collaboration, emotional intelligence, etc., and consider them core skills essential to competitive teams.

Make Every Day a Good Day — At Work and Beyond

Make Every Day a Good Day — At Work and Beyond

Research shows that resilience is directly linked with happiness. And, it’s important to note that we’re talking about actually experiencing positive emotions, rather than avoiding negative emotions.

Is Your Brand Limiting Business Growth?

Is Your Brand Limiting Business Growth?

It’s important to take some time to analyze key elements of your brand, and reflect on where changes might be needed as you build your business growth plans.

How to Be More Present With your Team

How to Be More Present With your Team

You must develop a presence with your team first—truly being present on a day-to-day basis to understand them and their needs, and work with them to deliver high levels of performance.

Stop Underestimating your Clients

Stop Underestimating your Clients

Your clients are smart people. They know you, trust you and value what you bring to them and their organization. They look to you as the expert in their development and growth.

What Do Your Clients Need?

What Do Your Clients Need?

The best way to create initiatives that address a true need and provide demonstrable ROI is to tie your service to a specific problem or pain point and associated metric.

How to Stop Hiding Behind Busyness

How to Stop Hiding Behind Busyness

Many teams never escape the “I’m busy” phase. What’s worse is they wear their busyness as a badge of honor. They seem to say, “I’m busy because my job is important.”

Stop Treating Training as a One-Time Event

Stop Treating Training as a One-Time Event

Too often training is seen as an event. It is treated as a one-off. A gap is identified and then a training event is provided with the content that addresses that gap. Unfortunately, that’s not how learning works.

Forget Content, Context is King

Forget Content, Context is King

Expanding your offerings to include strategies and tactics to maximize peer-to-peer and hands-on learning will allow you to clearly demonstrate the ROI of your work to your clients.

3 Podcasts For Effective Team Leadership in 2017

3 Podcasts For Effective Team Leadership in 2017

As your team gears up for a productive new year, take the time to think about the best way to support them. Here are three of our favorite recent episodes of The 21st Century Workplace for helping team leaders improve engagement and culture.

How We’re Making Health A Priority In 2017

How We’re Making Health A Priority In 2017

We recently started an #actionablehealth channel on Slack, as a place to talk about our health and fitness goals. As a result, many members of the team have made commitments to incorporate more regular exercise throughout the day.

Coaching the Coaches

Coaching the Coaches

At Actionable, I am an Integration Coach, which basically means I spend my days coaching the coaches. While the context has shifted, from coaching my own clients to coaching the coaches, the same principles apply.

Annual Planning — Actionable Style

Annual Planning — Actionable Style

Based on Actionable founder Chris Taylor’s long-standing process for mapping out the year ahead, this worksheet will help you reflect, visualize, and plan to meet your upcoming goals and milestones.

The Power of a Pause

The Power of a Pause

Listening intently and with full presence enables a leader to fully understand, to make sense of what is around them, and move forward with wisdom.

The Limits of “Unlimited” Vacation

The Limits of “Unlimited” Vacation

As with many great company policies, “unlimited” vacation in a ROWE does have its downsides. It’s not as simple as just booking a trip and hitting the road.

I’m a Mean Coach

I’m a Mean Coach

For leaders, honesty, hard questions, and having to look in the mirror and face the truth about shortcomings can feel uncomfortably personal, or even a bit hostile.

Small Data Creates Opportunities for Insight

Small Data Creates Opportunities for Insight

I’m not suggesting that you ignore the big data altogether. Instead, it’s worthwhile to examine both the big data and the small data to figure out what the right data is to solve the issue.

Take Time for Thinking

Take Time for Thinking

Innovative, agile thinking is a critical element that managers want from their teams, and for good reason. When teams are aligned and thinking at a high-level, magic can happen.

3 Books to Help You Embrace Failure

3 Books to Help You Embrace Failure

You, and everyone you work with, are human. Failure (in some capacity), is unavoidable. Will you embrace it? Learn from it? Or will you try to pretend it never happened?

How Asking for Help Transformed my Work

How Asking for Help Transformed my Work

I made a daily commitment to ask for help from the people around me, both in my personal and professional life. It sounds simple, but the insights I gathered through the process were a revelation.

Communication Issue? Look to Your Culture

Communication Issue? Look to Your Culture

Effective communication strategies are crucial, but I’d also urge you to think deeply about what effective communication looks like for your team. Every group will have different ideas and goals.

Collaborate to Go Far in 2017

Collaborate to Go Far in 2017

In this fast-paced world, collaboration, or more specifically, establishing successful commercial relationships, is a becoming a necessity. We need to be agile, well-informed, and not simply stuck in the bubble of our day-to-day activities.

Being Careful to Distinguish Fact from Opinion

Being Careful to Distinguish Fact from Opinion

When we make statements, they are primarily either assertions or assessments. Assertions can be proven to be true or false. Assessments are not absolutely true or false, but are a contextual or relative statement—or an opinion.

Better Together: The Actionable Way

Better Together: The Actionable Way

What makes us a cohesive, collaborative team is our respect for each others’ unique lifestyles, expertise, time zones, and leadership. We work with each other, never against or in spite of each other.

Engaged Employees are Self-Managers

Engaged Employees are Self-Managers

Allowing employees to manage themselves—to establish effective work flows and processes, and to manage their own time—is a crucial component of creating and maintaining employee engagement.

Hope is Not a Strategy

Hope is Not a Strategy

I am calling you out, coaches and consultants. Time to treat your business as you expect your clients to treat theirs—with intentional thought, and with focus and clarity about what will drive the results you want to deliver.

Getting Comfortable with Failure

Getting Comfortable with Failure

Not all great ideas end up generating revenue. What sounds brilliant in a brainstorming session may be a total flop in the real world. If we were afraid of failure, we would get paralyzed.

First, Define Your Culture

First, Define Your Culture

Within the teams you have established, it’s a practical business investment to take the time to ensure the members of your team have a clear sense of their role and the culture of the company.

Craft Stories to Sell More Effectively

Craft Stories to Sell More Effectively

Our brains are wired to process the world around us through stories. By harnessing the power of a great story, you can improve your sales pitches, persuade your customers, and engage your employees.

What to Read to Become More Adaptable

What to Read to Become More Adaptable

These three summaries will give you the framework you need to create a learning, creative culture in your organization, and build an engaged team that is capable of navigating new challenges.

Protect the Culture

Protect the Culture

If you’re hiring for culture, look for impassioned people. People who will (respectfully) disagree on certain points because they know truly who they are and what matters to them.

Stop Just Reading, Start Really Learning

Stop Just Reading, Start Really Learning

Information overload is here to stay, and you’ll never be able to entirely escape it. The key is to figure out how to manage the flow, and how to apply what you’re reading into tangible benefits for you and your team.

3 Books to Help you Grow your Business

3 Books to Help you Grow your Business

We have curated a list of three summaries from ActionableBooks to help you grow your business and increase revenue—without increasing the number of hours you work in a day.

Stoicism, Self-Control, and the 21st Century Workplace

Stoicism, Self-Control, and the 21st Century Workplace

Stoics apply stringent control of their perceptions of the world around them to be able to manage emotions and see things as they truly are. Applying these principals to a 21st century workplace can help to minimize emotional triggers.

Messy Scary Change

Messy Scary Change

The learning and development landscape is changing. And as Actionable works to address these changes, we’re changing too. And that means learning, growing, stretching, changing.

Are you Making Money by Accident?

Are you Making Money by Accident?

While most entrepreneurs are core to their business or practice, the need to designate focused time to planning, thinking, and reviewing the business is even more critical.

Why Every Workplace Should Give Trust Freely

Why Every Workplace Should Give Trust Freely

When I joined the Actionable Team, I quickly came to learn that autonomy is imperative in a Results Only Work Environment (ROWE), and closely tied with the core values of Actionable.

Leadership for Complex Times

Leadership for Complex Times

When we talk about complex, there is more than one solution or maybe none at all. How are we going to grow? Stay innovative? Maintain an engaged workforce? These questions require complex solutions.

Self Management Tips for Q4

Self Management Tips for Q4

To help you establish some new self management strategies during this busy season, we’ve curated three popular blog posts by Actionable founder Chris Taylor.

How Long is Your Year?

How Long is Your Year?

When you’re going through bursts of growth, it’s important to set the heading (vision), and then schedule “annual planning” sessions for a more frequent schedule.

What Do You Value?

What Do You Value?

Most business leaders identify their people as the #1 asset in their company. Actually, it is the employees—their strengths, skills, ideas, and energy, that clearly set an organization apart from its competitors.

A Sabbatical Dream Come True

A Sabbatical Dream Come True

I feel incredibly fortunate to work at an organization like Actionable where something like a sabbatical is not only offered, but embraced. Without the support of Chris and my colleagues, this wouldn’t be possible.

Pivot! Pivot! PIVOT!

Pivot! Pivot! PIVOT!

When considering a new opportunity, think about how you can pivot (yes, just like you learned in gym class) to get the best results.

Pivot Webinar Replay

Pivot Webinar Replay

We were delighted to host Jenny Blake for an Actionable webinar to discuss her book Pivot. Alyssa Burkus sat down with Jenny for a live chat with members of the Actionable community.

Building a Sustainable Business

Building a Sustainable Business

In conversation with independent consultants, the topic that gets a lot of airtime is how to build a sustainable consulting business?

The Truth About Working From Home

The Truth About Working From Home

The expectations of working from home are the same as any other job. If you don’t get the work done, you’ll be replaced by someone who can. There are deadlines to be met, meetings to attend.