Great Workplace

The founder of Menlo Innovations and author of the business culture cult classic Joy, Inc. offers an inspirational guide to leaders seeking joy in the challenge of leading others. Filled with colorful anecdotes from Sheridan's personal journey and wisdom from many leadership mentors, Chief Joy Officer offers an approachable, down-to-earth philosophy and practice that will help even the most disillusioned of middle managers bring a renewed sense of purpose to their work building others.

Your organization's culture can feel like something that has a life of its own; it's long-standing, inherited, and seemingly impermeable - in fact, a strong culture is often an obstacle to doing new things or going in new directions. But leaders are the stewards of a company's culture and have the power to shape it. The best leaders know that organizational culture is a fundamental and powerful management tool that can drive positive outcomes.

The Talent War explores how US Special Operations Forces assess, select, and develop their world-class talent. You'll learn how to adopt a talent mindset, the single greatest weapon you can possess in the war for talent. When your organization reflects this mindset, you will hire, train, and develop the right people and put them in the best positions to make decisions that allow you to retake the advantage and win the war.

Managing a call center presents numerous challenges for leaders, including meeting stringent KPIs, maintaining employee motivation, and handling high call volumes. Achieving performance metrics such as average handle time, first call resolution, and customer satisfaction requires meticulous planning and constant monitoring. Simultaneously, leaders must keep their teams motivated in a high-pressure environment, often characterized by repetitive tasks and demanding customers.

Your only job as a leader is to make sure that Monday morning doesn't suck. At least, that’s what Eric Harkins thinks. In his first book, Eric talks about his 25-year journey working in corporate America and the many lessons he learned about leadership. He was lucky enough to work for a company that made sure Monday morning didn’t suck, but even luckier to work for several that didn’t. And he learned a lot about what it takes to create a culture high performers want to be a part of.

It’s a safe bet that most of the secretaries on the TV series Mad Men would have attended the Katharine Gibbs School in New York City. The iconic institution was in its heyday in the 1950 and '60s synonymous with supplying secretaries—always properly attired in heels, ladylike hats, and white gloves—to male executives. In Expect Great Things! Vanda Krefft turns the notion of a “Gibbs girl” on its head, showing us that while the school was getting women who could type 90 words per minute into the C-suite, its more subversive mission was to get them out of the secretarial pool.

People Operations explains how leaders at small- and medium-sized businesses can stop spending time on HR administration - "paperwork" - and start focusing on the "peoplework" that truly fuels employee growth and productivity. Authors Jay Fulcher, Kevin Marasco, and Tracy Cote provide listeners with a playbook for creating a massive competitive advantage by eliminating antiquated approaches to HR. The book takes a look at how work has changed and what companies need to do about it, and the new approach they must take to processes, systems, and best practices.

A culture of trust for all companies large and small is invaluable. Trust turns deflection into transparency, suspicion into empowerment, and conflict into creativity. And what many have learned unfortunately is that no enterprise is too large or too successful to withstand a lack of trust within its walls. In The 10 Laws of Trust, JetBlue chairman and Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Joel Peterson explores how a culture of trust gives companies an edge.

It was the Golden Age of Travel, and everyone wanted in. As flying boomed in the 1960s, women from across the United States applied for jobs as stewardesses. They were drawn to the promise of glamorous jet-setting, the chance to see the world, and an alternative to traditional occupations like homemaking, nursing, and teaching.

Scott Page, a leading thinker, writer, and speaker whose ideas and advice are sought after by corporations, nonprofits, universities, and governments around the world, makes a clear and compellingly pragmatic case for diversity and inclusion. He presents overwhelming evidence that teams that include different kinds of thinkers outperform homogenous groups on complex tasks, producing what he calls "diversity bonuses".

Based on real experiences that David Novak had as the Chairman and CEO of Yum! Brands, this parable will empower listeners to recognize the contributions of those around them in order to drive bigger and better results. It's not hard, it's not expensive, and you don't need an MBA or even a position of authority to do it. It's a deceptively simple principle that can have a huge impact on both your life and your business.

Heather E. McGowan and Chris Shipley deliver a guidebook for leaders navigating the uncertainty of a post pandemic world in this sequel to The Adaptation Advantage. Leaders today must acknowledge and respond to the fundamental shifts that lay the foundation for effective leadership: From managing people to enabling success, from viewing peers as competitors to seeing them as collaborators, from applying extrinsic pressure on workers to unlocking intrinsic motivation, and from driving productivity with unquestioned authority to inspiring value creation by leading with empathy.

The inspirational career guide for young and ambitious Black British professionals, Black and Great not only highlights the specific challenges Black people face in the working world but provides listeners with honest and practical advice to thrive and carve out the career of their dreams, whilst embracing their Blackness. Featuring interviews and letters from some of the UK's leading Black voices in their respective fields, Black and Great is essential listening for a Black professionals ready to make their mark in the working world and beyond!

Drive long-term profits and growth by making the company a place your employees love. In Great Company presents a practical approach to ensure that your employees perform at their highest possible levels. It's not about increasing salaries, offering huge bonuses, or investing in the latest employee engagement tools. The real answer is simpler, deeper, and longer-lasting: getting your people to love where they work.

If you have ever been part of a great team, you will know it is exponentially better than being part of a mediocre team. Teams are at the heart of working in complex domains and are essential to the success of agile approaches yet relatively few teams achieve greatness. Agile and leadership coach Geoff Watts has pulled together his many years of experience with all sorts of teams from software to product development, from medical teams to sports teams and has identified five common characteristics of great teams:

In this follow-up guide to The Great Workplace, experts from Great Place to Work Institute, Inc. reveal the most common excuses managers use for why they can't create a great workplace. Authors Jennifer Robin and Michael Burchell poke holes in every single excuse. Whether the reasons involve the organization's leadership, employees, environment, or any other factor, the authors explain that if managers lead people properly, they can create a great workplace. The authors explore how managers can interrupt their own negative thought patterns and instead create lasting change.

Change-Friendly Leadership: How to Transform Good Intentions into Great Performance is a simple affirmation that successful organizational change involves - requires, in fact - the active, willful participation of the people affected by the change. In the change approach prescribed here, the friendly factor is not just a play on words; it is the very foundation for effectively engaging people's heads, hearts, and hopes.

Over six years, long-time Sports Illustrated editor Don Yaeger was invited by some of the greatest companies in the world to speak about the habits of high-performing individuals. From Microsoft and Starbucks to the New England Patriots and San Antonio Spurs, what do some organizations do seemingly better than most of their opponents? Don identified 16 habits that drive high-performing teams. Building on stories, examples, and first-hand accounts, each chapter in Great Teams comes with applicable examples on how to apply these characteristics in any organization.

The Great American Bank Robbery maps out in detail exactly how Washington social engineers and their accomplices reshaped banking regulations and housing policies and gutted time-tested underwriting standards that led to the worst financial calamity since the 1930s, one that has robbed American households of $14 trillion in net worth.

From Plato to Plutarch, Shakespeare to Churchill, Machiavelli to Melville, Jane Austen to Carl Jung, Pericles to Peter Drucker and many more - here are the best leadership ideas of the past 25 centuries. You don't need a big title or a business degree in order to lead with impact. What you need is practical wisdom: the insight, judgment and strength of character that all great leaders have but that most business schools and corporate workshops don't teach.