Organizational Behavior Leadership

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.

In his new audiobook, The Heart-Led Leader, Spaulding turns his focus to ourselves - to who we are. Authentic leaders, Spaulding says, live and lead from the heart. The values and principles that guide our lives and shape our ability to lead others is far more important than our titles or our ability to crunch numbers or the impressive degrees we display on our walls. To effect true transformational change, heart-led leaders draw on the qualities of humility, vulnerability, transparency, empathy, and love.

In the modern workplace, employees collaborate. Managers are expected to be effective team leaders and employees are expected to be valued teammates. But many teams struggle. Being part of a struggling team can be unpleasant, but it can also hurt your career and waste company resources.

"Work-life balance" isn't making anyone happy. The pandemic helped catalyze a cultural shift of workers redefining themselves beyond what they do for a living. Now, it's time for you to rethink your role as a leader in the nexus of work and life. In Work-Life Bloom: How to Nurture a Team That Flourishes, award-winning author Dan Pontefract contends that a thriving workplace isn't about employee engagement levels, nor is it predicated on your team members bringing their "best selves" to work. Instead, it requires you to support the people you manage so they can be their best in work and life.

In today's global economy, effective leadership requires engaging in diverse interactions, meaning there is no one, predefined way to lead. Instead, leaders today must be culturally agile, and they must live that awareness and adaptability each and every day. There Is No Box is a practical guide for leaders who recognize how critical it is to draw outside the lines of typical guidance in order to rethink leadership development and gain competencies that make them more inclusive, culturally aware, and empowered to facilitate collaboration.

Today, not only is everything digital getting faster, cheaper, and smaller at an exponential rate, we also have the Internet. When these two revolutions - one in technology and the other in communications - joined, an explosive force was unleashed that changed the very nature of innovation. And with any change, we have seen many strategic blunders and extraordinary learning curves along the way.

Lifelong learning has become a multibillion-dollar business, with more than 60 million adults currently engaged in webinars, webcasts, in-house training, continuing education classes, and more. But it is also an industry in flux, as newcomers topple old-guard organizations that can’t keep pace with the need for instant access to materials and flexible delivery methods, as well as demands for community and connection.

Managers will learn how and why to stop bullying; prepare executives to lead the campaign and to resist undermining efforts of subordinates; and create a new, positive role for human resources. Outlining the required steps, The Bullying-Free Workplace includes information on how to create a preventive policy that brings consequences, like never before, when violated.

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:

Building a Strong Team Culture: 10 Essential Management Tips by Liora Quade is a timely and powerful guide for any leader who understands that the foundation of lasting success is not just strategy or productivity—it’s culture. In today's competitive workplace, perks and benefits can no longer compensate for a lack of connection, trust, or psychological safety. Culture is the unseen force that shapes how teams collaborate, innovate, and thrive—or how they fall apart.

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.

It is taken for granted in the knowledge economy that companies must employ the most talented performers to compete and succeed. Many firms try to buy stars by luring them away from competitors. But Boris Groysberg shows what an uncertain and disastrous practice this can be.

Stretching across 500 miles of northern Spain, the Camino de Santiago has been a pilgrimage route for centuries. Setting off as a competitive, shrewd negotiator with little patience for small talk, Victor Prince emerged as a very different person - more balanced, more caring, more present in the moment, but looking to the future. Prince translates this growth experience into seven leadership skills, each linked to values that have guided Camino travelers for centuries.

With nearly four decades of experience with the good, bad, and ugly of the board universe, Brian Hayward hones in on practical ways to develop the thinking and behaviour necessary for anyone taking this seat. Through real-life examples, and stories featuring Paul McCartney, Kalahari bushmen, Robert Maxwell, camels, Buddhist parables, and the Boeing 737 Max, listeners will see how chairing a board requires leadership competency of its own (distinct from being a director).

Every business leader today should be asking themselves these questions. Systems and processes have been skewed too long in favor of some at the expense of others, and things are changing - fast. How to Be an Ally shows how to take personal responsibility for driving change that's good for people - and for business.

Throughout the history of business, employees had to adapt to managers and managers had to adapt to organizations. In the future, this is reversed with managers and organizations adapting to employees. This means that in order to succeed and thrive, organizations must rethink and challenge everything they know about work. The demographics of employees are changing and so are employee expectations, values, attitudes, and styles of working.

Richard Branson, one of the world's most famous and admired business leaders, argues that it's time to turn capitalism upside down - to shift our values from an exclusive focus on profit to also caring for people, communities, and the planet as he writes: "People often associate me with challenges, with trying to break records while sailing the Atlantic or flying in a jet stream in a balloon or going into space with Virgin Galactic. But this audiobook isn't just about fun and adventure and exceeding one's wildest dreams."

Surviving Toxic Leadership with Gratefulness is the result of my struggle to make sense of the experiences HR professionals generously shared with me, as well as my own nearly decade long experience with a toxic leader. In this audiobook, I share gory details along with a systemic research-based perspective on toxic leadership, recognizing that the problem of a toxic workplace is never encapsulated in the leader alone. I argue throughout the audiobook that it is crucial and urgent that we not only learn about toxic leadership but act to end it.

In The Courage Playbook: Five Steps to Overcome Your Fears and Become Your Best Self, Gus Lee, bestselling author and leadership expert, delivers an astonishing reveal that with moral courage, we can overcome our fears. This is a practical guide to gaining your courage to live rightly, treat others without bias, and lead inspirationally.

The Corporate Culture Survival Guide is the essential primer and practical guide every organization needs. Corporate culture pioneer Edgar H. Schein breaks the concept of "culture" down into real terms, delving into the behaviors, values, and shared assumptions that define it, and explains why culture is the central factor in an organization's success - or failure. This new third edition is designed specifically for practitioners needing to apply these practices in real-world settings.