Research and sources

Every number we publish, and where it came from.

Leaders are asked to trust a lot of round numbers with no paper behind them. Here is ours: the claim, the exact wording from the study, the citation, and a link so you can read it yourself.

Our rule: if we cannot find the figure in the primary source, we do not publish it. Where a body of research supports a conclusion but no single clean statistic does, we describe the finding in words instead of inventing a percentage.

Sales grew 66.8% in the three years after an advisory board was set up, versus 22.9% in the three years before.

In the three years after the advisory board was set up, sales growth of 66.8% was reported versus 22.9% in the three years before the advisory board was established.

Study of Canadian small and medium-sized enterprises, comparing companies with advisory boards against a matched control group, plus a before-and-after analysis of the same firms.

Business Development Bank of Canada, Advisory Boards: An Untapped Resource for Businesses, March 2014

86% of leaders who used an advisory board say it had a significant impact on the success of their business.

Most (86%) respondents who have benefited from the advice of their advisory board believe it has had a significant impact on the success of their business.

Same study. Annual sales of businesses with an advisory board were 24% higher on average than comparable companies without one.

Business Development Bank of Canada, Advisory Boards: An Untapped Resource for Businesses, March 2014

Nearly two-thirds of chief executives receive no outside leadership advice, though nearly all want it.

Nearly two-thirds of CEOs do not receive outside leadership advice, but nearly all want it.

More than 200 chief executives, board directors, and senior executives of North American public and private companies were surveyed.

Stanford Graduate School of Business and The Miles Group, 2013 Executive Coaching Survey

Workplace coaching produced a large effect on individual-level results.

The largest effect size in our study (1.24) was observed for individual-level results outcomes.

Meta-analysis of coaching studies in organizational settings. Delta of 1.24, 90% confidence interval 0.88 to 1.47.

Jones, R. J., Woods, S. A., and Guillaume, Y. R. F., The effectiveness of workplace coaching: A meta-analysis of learning and performance outcomes from coaching, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 89(2), 2016

Training transfers into practice when demonstration and practice are paired with ongoing peer coaching.

Knowledge, demonstration, and practice alone rarely change classroom practice. Adding peer coaching to the design is what produces transfer into daily work.

We deliberately do not cite the widely circulated 5% versus 95% transfer statistics attributed to this work. We could not verify those numbers in the primary source, so we state the finding qualitatively instead.

Joyce, B. and Showers, B., Student Achievement Through Staff Development, 3rd edition, 2002

Psychological safety underpins team learning behavior, speaking up, and improvement.

Psychological safety, the shared belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks, is consistently associated with learning behavior, voice, knowledge sharing, creativity, and performance.

Review of roughly three decades of empirical work across industries. Summarized qualitatively because the review reports patterns across studies rather than one headline percentage.

Edmondson, A. C. and Bransby, D. P., Psychological Safety Comes of Age: Observed Themes in an Established Literature, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 2023

Think a number is wrong?

Tell us and we will correct it or take it down. We would rather publish fewer figures than one we cannot defend.

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