Workplace Leadership

Leadership demands courage. You have to make good decisions while balancing inevitable tensions and knowing when to take risks. And that's where The Courage Way comes in. It's a guide to leadership that shows how to access and draw upon courage in all that you do. It has its roots in the work of Parker J. Palmer, who in 50 years of teaching, speaking, and writing has explored the human spirit - what he has called "the inner landscape" - and its role in life and leadership.

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.

Without trust, people and businesses fail. Trusted Leader provides a framework for building trust so that you and your organizations can perform at your best. “A lack of trust is your biggest expense", says Wall Street Journal best-selling author David Horsager. Without trust, transactions cannot occur. Without trust, influence is destroyed. Without trust, leaders lose their people. Horsager introduces listeners to his eight pillars of trust through the journey of a senior leader who thought success was certain.

Successful Leaders Aren't Bullies empowers good leaders to choose leadership and to understand the benefits of leading with healthy behaviors and to intervene and to stop bullying. It will inspire and mobilize bullied victims to overcome and to thrive by presenting examples of resilient and healthy individuals and organizations.

A decade ago, Millennials came of age, and many workplaces were not prepared to integrate a new generation that thought and worked differently. As a result, some organizations lost out on the best in young talent or were paralyzed by generational infighting.

Robert Jackall's Moral Mazes offers an eye-opening account of how corporate managers think the world works, and how big organizations shape moral consciousness. Based on extensive interviews with managers at every level of two industrial firms and of a large public relations agency, IMoral Mazes takes the reader inside the intricate world of the corporation.

Decades before the business world discovered the power of authentic staff engagement, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters cofounder Bob Stiller was busy creating a company with a mission to build an engaged workforce focused on innovation. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters went public, moved to selling wholesale exclusively, invested in Keurig, and became one of the few coffee companies to ever reach $1 billion in sales. In Better and Better, Stiller explains how he did it.

In today’s age of Zoom calls and hybrid workplaces, how can leaders foster relationships that allow everyone to succeed? A trio of best friends and leadership consultants at SkyeTeam have the surprising answer: workplace success starts by being a friend. Meet the Ally Mindset, a model for proactive, thoughtful work relationships. As you heal adversarial relationships and strengthen weaker ties, you’ll find that when you have best friends at work—colleagues who have your back—you thrive.

This practical guide introduces managers to a powerful new engagement and retention tool: the stay interview. Smart companies have begun conducting these periodic reviews in order to discover why their important talent might leave and to solve any problems before they actually quit.

Based on 15 years of research, To Be Honest explains how four factors (Clear Identity, Accountability, Governance and Cross-Functional Relationships) affect honesty, justice, and purpose within a company. When these factors are absent or ineffective, the organizational conditions compel employees to choose dishonesty and self-interest. But when done well, the organization is 16 times more likely to have people tell the truth, behave fairly and serve a greater good.

Ori Brafman and management consultant Judah Pollack dramatically demonstrate how even the best and most efficient organizations - from Fortune 500 companies to today's US Army - can become more innovative by allowing a little unstructured space and "contained chaos" into their planning and decision-making. Through their consulting work, they realized that while structure and hierarchy are essential both in large corporations and small groups, too much of either can stifle creativity.

Through detailed case studies, interviews with industry leaders and findings from respected academic research, and drawing on her own experience working with extraordinary brands across a broad range of sectors, Denise shows how great companies achieve the brand-culture fusion that creates extraordinary results and growth.

In Ego vs EQ, Jen Shirkani shares strategies for using emotional intelligence (EQ) as a primary prevention tool to avoid career derailment. The executive leadership failure rate is high: two in five CEO’s fail in the first 18 months on the job and two thirds of business’ will disappear just a decade after founding. This book teaches you how to identify the most common reasons for leadership ineffectiveness, including the cascading consequences they create, and learn tools to prevent them.

While people with invisible disabilities can be just as productive as anyone else, embracing invisible disability in the workplace requires a culture of trust, good communication, and an innovative mindset. Jason Reid shares real-life insight into what it is like to work with an invisible disability, as well as how to manage and support yourself and lead others who have the same challenges.

When you finish this audiobook, you will know how to win somebody over to your team and bring them on your journey. Do I trust our way? We trust it enough to be different by design: We are the only company of our type in the world to guarantee 100 percent performance of the people we recommend you hire. And we guarantee that, not for a week or a month, but for 365 days. We know it works. Very few people are going to join your company and stay for 20 years, but they will choose to make you part of their journey, just as you choose them to be a part of your organization’s journey.

The COVID-19 pandemic and an ever-changing array of new ways of working seem to have all of us asking, "Does work really have to suck this bad?" It looks like a small taste of flexibility and freedom has made many of us rethink the nature of the work we do and how we do it. In Work Here Now, Melissa Swift delivers an eye-opening roadmap to better work that generates wins for companies and employees alike. In the book, you'll explore different ways to improve the growth-impeding, borderline inhumane people management practices we've created and endured over time.

We've reviewed the ideas, insights, and best practices from the past year of Harvard Business Review to keep you up-to-date on the most cutting-edge, influential thinking driving business today. With authors from Michael E. Porter to Katrina Lake and company examples from Alibaba to 3M, this volume brings the most current and important management conversations right to your fingertips.

Choice. Power. Speed. Today's leaders continually face these forces. But with too many choices, too much power, and too much speed, leaders often make decisions in a heightened state of emotion (and drama). Hasty decisions are often poor ones, and in this climate there is no place to hide. Privacy is a thing of the past; the days of covering up or ignoring a problem are over. In today's transparent culture, the decision making of leaders is more vulnerable than ever - and it is more critical than ever to get it right.

The Loudest Duck is a book for managers and executives faced with the productivity and leadership challenges of a heterogeneous, multicultural workplace. It's a book for anyone working his or her way up the ladder in this new corporate world order. It's a book for anyone who belongs to a non-dominant group, be it women, people of color, short people, or employees who don't play golf but whose bosses do.

Does it seem that good ideas go nowhere at your company, that meetings are often a waste of time, and that nobody seems to be in charge? In Getting It Done, Roger Fisher and Alan Sharp tackle the inertia that afflicts many groups. The authors advance the idea of lateral leadership as a means of breaking apart the logjams that inhibit collaboration in organizations, and they offer surefire ways to help anyone get better results from coworkers.