Workplace Leadership

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).

Tremendous forces for change are radically reshaping the world of work. Disruptive innovations, radical thinking, new business models and resource scarcity are impacting every sector. Although the scale of expected change is not unprecedented, what is unique is the pervasive nature of the change and its accelerating pace which people in organizations have to cope with. Structures, systems, processes and strategies are relatively simple to understand and even fix.

Mark Schwartz, author of leadership classics A Seat at the Table and The Art of Business Value, reveals a new (empowering) model for the often soul-shattering, frustrating, Kafkaesque nightmare we call bureaucracy. Through humor, a healthy dose of history and philosophy, and real-life examples from his days as a government bureaucrat, Schwartz shows IT leaders (and the whole of business) how to master the ways of the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler to create a lean, learning, and enabling bureaucracy.

Every employee at every level wants to feel seen, heard, and respected. If we don’t feel safe, we can’t be our best selves or do our most creative work. This is why leaders must ensure psychological safety for everyone in their team. Whether you’re a manager, CEO, or entrepreneur, The Psychological Safety Playbook is the guide you need to lead your team to the highest levels of performance and innovation.

In A New Kind of Diversity, best-selling author Tim Elmore brings his decades of research and leadership experience to bear on what might be the biggest, most dramatic, and most disruptive shift the American workforce has ever seen: the vast diversity of several generations living—and working—together.

Leadership guru and renowned professional speaker Robin Sharma reveals a remarkable step-by-step system that will restore trust, commitment, and spirit within your organization while transforming the way you think, feel, and live in the process. With masterful insight and brilliant simplicity, Robin Sharma has distilled some of the most powerful wisdom available for both professional and personal leadership into eight immensely practical lessons that leaders, managers, and entrepreneurs can immediately apply to send morale and productivity soaring.

Consciousness is the main source of organizational greatness. "Conscious business", explains Fred Kofman, means finding your essential values through your work. A conscious business seeks to promote the intelligent pursuit of happiness in all its stakeholders. It produces sustainable, exceptional performance through the solidarity of its community and the dignity of each member.

People are the problem. They're always the problem. If a business person goes home frustrated, if they talk with their significant other about it, if they lay awake at night stewing about it, inevitably the problem is some person at work - a colleague, subordinate, or boss. Handling people issues is every leader's major headache. It's what takes up the majority of their time and - more important - the bulk of their head space. Every leader can and must develop this most important of all management skills.

Patagonia, named by Fortune in 2007 as the coolest company on the planet, has earned a reputation as much for its ground-breaking environmental and social practices as for the quality of its clothes. In this exceptionally frank account, Chouinard and Stanley recount how the company and its culture gained the confidence, by step and misstep, to make its work progressively more responsible, and to ultimately share its discoveries with companies as large as Wal-Mart or as small as the corner bakery.

As a savvy and motivated professional, you’re constantly on the lookout for high-impact leadership strategies to take your business to the next level and beyond—without bogging you down in abstract theories or exhaustive case studies. You need foolproof ways to lead your people to achieve outstanding results, even in challenging times. As legendary football coach Vince Lombardi said, it’s time to get “brilliant on the basics.”

We live, say Edgar and Peter Schein, in a culture of “tell". All too often we tell others what we think they need to know or should do. But whether we are leading or following, what matters most is we get to the truth. We have to develop a commitment to sharing vital facts and identifying faulty assumptions - it can mean the difference between success and failure. This is why we need Humble Inquiry more than ever.

Today's workplaces are dynamic, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that tension can develop quickly and ruinously. The Essential Workplace Conflict Handbook is the ideal resource for anyone ready to confront conflict at work rather than run from it. Managed correctly, conflict can be a positive source of innovation and creativity.

Effective leadership comes down to implementing everyday, common-sense practices to help organizations thrive - and yet so many leaders are still missing these fundamental principles from their personal and professional lives. Renowned business experts Ken Blanchard and Randy Conley disclose the simple truths about leadership they have gathered over their long and distinguished careers to help bring common sense into common practice.

In the modern workplace, conflict has become a dirty word. After all, conflict is antithetical to teamwork, employee engagement, and a positive company culture. Or is it? The truth is that our teams and organizations require conflict to get things done. But we avoid conflict and build up conflict debt by deferring and dodging the difficult decisions. Our organizations are paying the price - becoming less productive, less innovative, and less competitive.

This book is designed to help you rise to the challenge and become the game changer your organization needs. Candid insights from dozens of coaches, managers, CEOs, journalists, entrepreneurs, and other elite performers reveal the qualities that make some people stand out, and the underlying theme is mindset. While talent is a great head start, it is merely potential. Undeveloped and erratically-wielded talent holds little value for an organization.

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.

In this insider’s look into the world’s biggest tech company, former CEO and SVP of Google share how they helped engineer a new strategy and philosophy to help them thrive—a perfect book for seasoned business employees and the tech curious. Today, Google is a global icon that regularly...

Through her global consulting projects, keynote speeches, and work with thousands of leaders, Karen has seen first-hand how a pervasive lack of clarity strangles business performance and erodes employee engagement. Ambiguity is the corporate default state, a condition so prevalent that “tolerance for ambiguity” has become a clichéd job requirement. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Reframing Organizations provides time-tested guidance for more effective organizational leadership. Rooted in decades of social science research across multiple disciplines, Bolman and Deal's four-frame model has continued to evolve since its conception more than 25 years ago. This new seventh edition will be updated to include additional coverage of cross-sector collaboration, generational differences, virtual environments, globalization, sustainability, and communication across cultures.

Unfortunately, far too many people don’t like where they work. Some organizations are unhealthy and full of disrespectful behavior. Other workplaces are simply uninspiring. For various reasons, countless people feel trapped, indifferent, or bored at work. The authors of this book believe that people should be able to like where they work. When employees like the places they work, it’s not only good for their mental health and well-being, it’s also good for their organizations - both financially and otherwise.