Warren Buffett made some news recently with an essay in Fortune magazine about women in leadership, writing that America is using only half its talent, and that women are key to our realizing country's future achievement. It caught my eye because of the work Interaction Associates is doing around women leaders – more on that in a minute.

First, from Buffett's essay, this excerpt is particularly telling:

Interaction Associates is in the final stages of our annual workplace trust research, Building Trust in Business 2013. We will release this year's findings in early summer and we expect to show some interesting new trends at the intersection of trust, leadership, and collaboration.

How can leaders overcome the barriers to innovation and drive more good ideas to powerful implementation? That question and others are the focus of this exclusive on-demand webcast for executives, leaders and managers called "Collaboration: The Spark Plug for Innovation." It's led by Interaction Associates Senior Consultant Justin Jones, who has deep experience in applying collaborative practices in large, global organizations.

In a recent webinar that Patty McManus and I led — "Three Strategies to Succeed at Change (and what to do if it goes sideways)" — many change leaders in the audience expressed concern about sponsorship. The short headline: "Lack of sponsorship can wreck a change effort."

It’s been an exhilarating couple of weeks at Interaction Associates, with several important validations of our work and the issues that we track in the world.

The Conference Board is out with its summary report on the top ten business challenges for 2013, identified in its annual global survey of CEOs, presidents, and chairmen.  As someone occupying the CEO position, the most intriguing news this year is item number ten on the list: trust in business.

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.

Resilience is the capacity to bounce back from the failures and setbacks that every leader faces. Making lemons into lemonade is an art that every leader will want to cultivate.

In this audio interview, Executive Networks hosted Interaction Associates' Chief Consulting Officer Kevin Cuthbert, discussing resilience at work. The interview was part of Executive Networks' NetConnect series. Find out more about Executive Networks here.

First, we measured "employee satisfaction." Then, business became obsessed with tracking "employee engagement." Now there's a new measurement in town: "employee involvement."

Employee involvement has been shown to drive success in companies and organizations around the world. Learn what this means for you in this article (pdf)  by Andrew Atkins, published in Rotman Magazine. Read it here.