Leadership Problems

Are you a good boss - or a great one? Get more of the management ideas you want, from the authors you trust, with HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing People (Vol. 2). We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you master the innumerable challenges of being a manager.

In Bet on You, Angie Morgan and Courtney Lynch reveal hard-earned, real-world insights that will help you realize your potential by enacting risk in ways most meaningful to you. The author’s risk-taking guidance has been embraced by the world’s best businesses: Google, Boston Scientific, FedEx, and Oracle. Their insights are the secret sauce behind any transformative journey to a success-filled life.

Contrary to popular belief, the business world is not that complicated. While every industry and every profession requires specific expertise, the truth is that the "business of business" is relatively simple. In Business Without the Bullsh*t, listeners will learn surprising but tried-and-true secrets about being an extraordinary boss, about coping with annoying coworkers, and navigating the thorny problems that recur in every workplace.

Think of your to-do list at work. Chances are the most important tasks require you to work with others - and the success of those endeavors depends on the effectiveness of your collaboration. According to management expert Leigh Thompson, collaboration that is conscious, planned, and focused on generating new ideas builds excitement and produces what she calls a "creative conspiracy". Teams that conspire to organize themselves, motivate one another, and combine their talents to meet creative challenges are the hallmark of the most successful organizations.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, is renowned for his work as a scientist, writer, and teacher bringing mindfulness into everyday life. He has dedicated his career to the fields of mind/body medicine, integrative medicine, and self-healing. Here, in this groundbreaking audiobook, Jon Kabat-Zinn and Daniel Goleman explore ways in which mindfulness can be applied by a variety of institutions and businesses to make better leaders and improve the quality of the workplace.

For decades, alarms have sounded about declining engagement. Yet companies continue to struggle with toxic cultures, and the low productivity and unhappiness that go with them. Why is "culture" so difficult to improve? What makes so many good employees check out? Neuroscientist Paul Zak shows that innate brain functions hold the answers. It all boils down to trust. When someone shows you trust, a feel-good jolt of oxytocin surges through your brain and triggers you to reciprocate.

Every manager makes tough calls - it comes with the job. And the hardest decisions are the "gray areas" - situations where you and your team have worked hard to find an answer, you've done the best analysis you can, and you still don't know what to do. But you have to make a decision. In Managing in the Gray, Joseph Badaracco offers a powerful, practical, and even radical way to resolve these problems.

Decisions equal success - nothing happens until one is made. Businesses make millions of decisions every day. But once in a great while a leader makes a truly game-changing decision that shifts not only the strategy of a single company but how everyone does business. These big decisions are counterintuitive - they go against the conventional wisdom. In hindsight, taking a different direction may seem easy, but these bet-the-company moves involve drama, doubt, and high tension.

Have you ever dreaded Sunday night, got a pit in your stomach on the way to work, or had your heartbeat speed up at the sound of your boss’s voice? If so, you may have had anxiety at work. In this empathetic and wise guide, executive coaches and gurus of gratitude Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton explore the causes of workplace stress and anxiety and the management practices that have proven successful in reducing tension and cultivating calm.

Your team will change whether you like it or not. People will come and go. Your company might double in size or even be acquired. In this practical book, author Heidi Helfand shares techniques for reteaming effectively. Engineering leaders will learn how to catalyze team change to reduce the risk of attrition, learning and career stagnation, and the development of knowledge silos.

In this revolutionary guide, Stanford University professor and international best-selling author of inGenius adapts her popular course material to teach everyone how to make imaginative ideas into realities.

CEO, executive wellness coach, and thought leader Naz Beheshti distills the most valuable lessons she learned from her first boss and mentor, Steve Jobs, into a holistic method to live your best life. Presenting the highly effective framework that Beheshti has used with clients for over a decade, this book empowers you to fulfill your highest business, personal, and social potential.

By combining practical case studies with cutting-edge research, Never Go With Your Gut will help you make the best decisions and prevent these business disasters. The leading expert on avoiding business disasters, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, draws on over 20 years of extensive consulting, coaching, and speaking experience to show how pioneering leaders and organizations - many of them his clients - avoid business disasters.

The authors draw on over 50 years of experience in helping companies automate, improve, and connect decisions. Using analytic techniques first pioneered by Fair Isaac Corporation, the authors clearly show how today's forward-thinking executives and managers are using analytic insights to ensure their decisions keep up with information complexity and the pace of change - especially changes in consumer behavior and attitudes, in regulations, and in competitive actions and reactions.

Cost reduction...productivity improvement...customer retention...these are the promises of the Six Sigma quality management system. The Six Sigma Way reveals how GE, Motorola, and numerous other companies are successfully using Six Sigma to fine-tune products and processes, improve performance, and increase profits. Now you can hear the road map for implementing Six Sigma in your manufacturing or service organization.

The world is changing fast. Political risk - the probability that a political action could significantly impact a company's business - is affecting more businesses in more ways than ever before. A generation ago, political risk mostly involved a handful of industries dealing with governments in a few frontier markets. Today, political risk stems from a widening array of actors, including Twitter users, local officials, activists, terrorists, hackers, and more. In today's globalized world, there are no "safe" bets.

In You're the Leader. Now What?, Dr. Richard Winters, a Mayo Clinic emergency physician, executive coach, and director of leadership development for the Mayo Clinic Care Network, uses proven frameworks, practical tactics, and real-life experience to help you become a more effective leader as you face your thorniest organizational challenges.

In Wise Decisions: A Science-Based Approach to Making Better Choices, a team of accomplished industry experts delivers an evidence- and research-based blueprint for making the best decisions you can with the information you have. You'll learn to make the targeted, repeated investment of energy required to turn your decision-making process into one informed by reason, emotion, intuition, and science.

COVID. Climate change. Refugee resettlement. Global supply chains. We're facing a new generation of complex problems, stretching across the public and private sectors. Historically we've looked to government for big solutions, but the reality is, the government we have now is a poor match for the problems we face. We need a fresh new approach. As William D. Eggers and Donald F. Kettl show in this indispensable book, we need a government of bridgebuilders—public managers and leaders who collaborate with partners, both inside and outside government, to get the job done.

In The Leader's Checklist, 10th Anniversary Edition: 16 Mission-Critical Principles, world-renowned leadership expert and Wharton professor Michael Useem shows you how to lead through any challenge.