Workplace Leadership

It's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day demands of your current job and lose sight of the big picture, but with a typical career spanning fifty years or more, you do so at your own peril. It's up to you to chart your own course to professional success. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the 10 most important ones to help you develop yourself, make the right career moves, navigate inevitable detours and disruptions, and turn your professional dreams into reality.

If you cut off a spider's leg, it's crippled; if you cut off its head, it dies. But if you cut off a starfish's leg it grows a new one, and the old leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. The Starfish and the Spider argues that organizations fall into two categories: "spiders", which have a rigid hierarchy, and "starfish", which rely on the power of peer relationships.

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.

In the new edition of this fascinating book, a book that has appeared on MSNBC, CNBC, Slashdot.org, Lifehacker.com and in the New York Times, best-selling author Scott Berkun pulls the best lessons from the history of innovation, including the recent software and web age, to reveal powerful and surprising truths about how ideas become successful innovations - truths people can easily apply to the challenges of today.

Experience the power of Metronomics with The M Game, the streamlined definitive guide to Metronomics crafted by celebrated entrepreneur and CEO+Leadership team coach Shannon Susko. This essential monograph demystifies complex business concepts and offers a clear path to sustainable growth and innovation in today's competitive global marketplace. With engaging case studies and real-world examples, also available on themgamebook.com, Shannon demonstrates how Metronomics fosters balance, rhythm, and growth within organizations, propelling them to new strategic heights of success.

We've all read about the experts: the artists, the scientists, the engineers - that special group of people known as Imagineers for The Walt Disney Company. But who are they? How did they join the team? What is it like to spend a day in their shoes?

Part of being an executive is leading companies to success. As such, when an executive is experiencing extreme and prolonged stress, anxiety, isolation, and depression - what I’m calling “executive loneliness” - they often do nothing to address it for fear of appearing unsuccessful. Not addressing it exacerbates the negative and difficult feelings to the point where it becomes more and more difficult for them to function. It takes a toll on their whole life.

Not just another book on communication. Adaptive Listening helps you up-level the under-trained side of communication amidst the realities of a hectic workday. Researched and tested exclusively in the work setting, Adaptive Listening moves you beyond active listening, embracing easy-to-remember techniques that strengthen relationships and get work done more effectively.

Discover eight radical lessons from 100 of the world’s most inspiring organisations. Today’s workplaces are broken. Badly broken. The good news? There is a better way. And it's not just theory. It's already practiced in pioneering organisations around the globe. Drawing on Minnaar and De Morree’s visits to 100+ of the world’s most progressive organisations, this audiobook gives direct evidence that you can make work enjoyable and rewarding, while boosting performance and success.

Listen to this book at your own risk. It contains ideas that may lead to a profound self-awakening. An introspective journey for those in the trenches of today's modern organizations, Deep Change is a survival manual for finding our own internal leadership power. By helping us learn new ways of thinking and behaving, it shows how we can transform ourselves from victims to powerful agents of change. And for anyone who yearns to be an internally driven leader, to motivate the people around them, and return to a satisfying work life, Deep Change holds the key.

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:

Full of empowering wisdom from one of Silicon Valley's first female African American CEOs, this inspiring leadership book offers a blueprint for how to achieve your personal and professional goals. Shellye Archambeau recounts how she overcame the challenges she faced as a young black woman, wife...

One of your most important responsibilities as a manager is to motivate your employees to do their absolute best. Managers who create positive, rewarding, high-energy environments reduce absenteeism and turnover while dramatically increasing productivity and quality. In Motivation, success expert Brian Tracy draws on his decades of experience bringing out the best in others to provide 21 of the fastest, most powerful methods ever discovered for increasing the effectiveness of any individual or group.

While your compliance efforts may have served you well compared to industry standards, your best efforts that yield only "acceptable" results are not nearly good enough. You are missing an essential yet elusive component. Good leaders who lead good organizations adhere to both OSHA and industry standards. But that is just the foundation. They also own their moral responsibility to ensure safe outcomes and likewise require all team members to be worthy partners in keeping themselves and the people they work beside safe.

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.

Before you can lead change, you must first learn to communicate effectively.Sync or Swim will help you: break through apathy and cynicism to inspire teamwork; empower and energize frustrated colleagues; and create an engaging work environment.

“A game-changer for workplace dynamics” —Eve Rodsky, New York Times bestselling author of Fair Play The author of The Memo helps you discover what you need to navigate every workplace communication challenge with confidence. This program is read by the author. We are living in a world of...

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.

Even amid the seeming chaos of the matrix organization - where you are constantly being asked to do things by people who aren't your boss - there is always that special person who seems indispensable, who seems to thrive on complexity, and who is able to stay focused and positive and get the right things done: This is the go-to person. In this game-changing book, Bruce Tulgan reveals the secrets of the go-to person in our new world of work. Tulgan shows how go-to people not only behave differently, but also think differently.

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).