Want evidence-based leadership tools? Learn how to use our new encyclopedia!

by | Mar 9, 2023 | Michigan Model, Strategies and Tips, Lindy Greer

Great leaders have a variety of tools that they can utilize across different situations. To acquire these tools takes awareness and intentional practice in the form of experimentation. To help you access the best evidence-based leadership tools to try out on your leadership journey, Sanger has created the world’s first Leader Behavior Encyclopedia. Using the encyclopedia, you can search through different categories of leader behaviors to find new tools to experiment with. These different behaviors are also spotlighted every Tuesday on Sanger’s social media in our ‘Tip Tuesday’ campaign.

The leader behavior tools in our encyclopedia are chosen exclusively from the top-tier, peer-reviewed scientific publications in management and psychology (including journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, The Leadership Quarterly, and Organization Science). Each tool highlighted has a strong evidence basis behind it to suggest its likely effectiveness for you as you deploy it in your teams and organizations. We regularly update the encyclopedia (50 new tools were added this month!), making it the most exclusive place to access the most cutting-edge tools in leadership science for you to leverage on your leadership journey.

To illustrate how you can use the encyclopedia, let’s look at a few use cases:

Alex works as a doctor in a hospital. She wants to find tools to help her colleagues in her unit better gel with one another. She goes to the encyclopedia and searches on team-building. She gets several toolcards back, including ideas to implement moments of mindfulness in team meetings, establish pre-meeting rituals, maintain better eye contact, and emphasize the value of humility. For the meeting she is running next week, she runs the idea by her team to implement a pre-meeting ritual, where at the start of the meeting, everyone shares a learning moment they had in the past week. The team is enthusiastic and they try this out, iterating on how to do it each time.

Karthik is an incoming MBA student. His Michigan Model of Leadership 360 report suggests that one area of leader tools he might work on while at Ross is ‘yellow’ tools. He goes to the encyclopedia and searches on ‘yellow’ tools. He gets back a variety of toolcards. The first toolcard that comes up highlights the power of listening for leader effectiveness. He commits to this as his first experiment in orientation, making a plan to ensure he listens before he speaks during one of the leadership simulations offered that week. He asks his teammates for feedback afterwards, and they give him suggestions to show others his active listening even more clearly, such as by asking more follow-up questions.

Sanger’s new Leader Behavior Encyclopedia offers the world’s first public searchable system to find tips for evidence-based leadership tools to make your teams and organizations more effective. Keep us posted on how your experiments go!

Leader Behavior Encyclopedia