Workplace Management

How many people does the ideal team contain? How do groups bond, earn trust and forge shared identities? How can leaders build environments adaptable enough to respond to shocks and still enable people to thrive together? How can you feel close to people if your only point of contact is a phone or a computer? In The Social Brain leading experts from the worlds of evolutionary psychology and business management come together to offer a primer on great team working. They explain what size groups work and how to shape them according to the nature of the task at hand.

In the hospitality space, Three and Jackie Carpenter know full well the importance of leading teams who are loyal, engaged, and happy. Working in an industry where customer expectations are at an extreme, Three and Jackie have applied a mindset of treating employees like customers. They've developed a five-step roadmap to creating positive employee experiences and company cultures where connection is the crux of the team's success.

Entrepreneur, bestselling author, and business coach Jadah Sellner knows what it’s like to be burned out, in debt, and just barely holding on to a new business. In the process of launching and building multiple companies, she realized today’s aggressive 24/7 hustle culture wasn’t working for her—or for her clients. In She Builds, Sellner shares a new entrepreneurial model for women, centered on sustainable leadership—a practical framework they can use to create a business on their own terms, prioritize their well-being, and break free from the toxic culture that leads to burnout.

In Applied Empathy, Michael Ventura, CEO and founder of Sub Rosa, a design firm that finds creative solutions for iconic brands and institutions such as GE, Nike, Citibank, Nikon, and Warby Parker and also West Point and the White House, offers entrepreneurs and executives a radical new business book and way forward. Applied Empathy presents real strategies, based on Sub Rosa’s design work as well as the popular class Ventura and his team have taught at Princeton University, on how to make lasting connections and evolve your business internally (your employees, culture, and product/services) as well as externally (your brand, consumers, and value).

We all know that IQ, education, knowledge, and technical skills are essential for professionals, but they alone are insufficient for effective leadership. Who you are as a person - your personality and character - drives leadership performance and determines who thrives and who fails. In Personality at Work, psychologist Ron Warren lays out the key personality traits that drive high performance - and the common traits that derail it.

Organizations are facing an engagement crisis. Not surprisingly, these stakeholders have developed deflector shields to protect themselves. Only a privileged few organizations are allowed to penetrate the shield, and even less will meaningfully engage. To penetrate the shield, and engage the audience, organizations need an edge. Gamification has emerged as a way to gain that edge and organizations are beginning to see it as a key tool in their digital engagement strategy.

Develop and expand your innate leadership abilities through daily exercises and challenges designed to help you grow into the leader you want to be and prepare you for the job you were made to have. A recent Harvard Business Review article outlining a study of over 17,000 leaders found that although, on average, people begin to supervise others at age 30, most do not start to receive formal leadership training until their forties.

Do you know what it takes to be a good listener? Would you like to improve your communication skills? Would you like to be able to understand the people around you better? If so, this book will show how to train your brain to be better at active listening. With the step-by-step guides and expert strategies found inside, you'll acquire the skills that will allow you to build healthy and meaningful personal relationships and achieve great career success!

UCLA psychologist and organizational consultant Dr. Robert Maurer provides a simple and proven effective technique for making major changes with minimal disruption. Applying the operational concept of kaizen - small, continual improvements - to common management challenges, managers can drive major improvements with a series of well-planned techniques for boosting quality, innovation, sales, and morale.

Today's leaders know that speed and agility are the keys to any company's success, and yet many are frustrated that their organizations can't move fast enough to stay competitive. The typical chain of command is too slow; internal resources are too limited; people are already executing beyond normal expectations. As the pace accelerates, how do you inspire people's energy and creativity? How do you collaborate with customers, vendors, and partners to keep your organization on the cutting edge?

Hewlett Packard is an American icon, the largest information technology company in the world. The bedrock of Silicon Valley, it employs more than 300,000 people, its market capitalization is in excess of $100 billion, and its products are in almost every home in the country where there is a printer or computer. But the story of Hewlett-Packard reflects power struggles that shape corporate America and is an alarming morality tale for our times.

In The High-Velocity Edge, the reissued edition of five-time Shingo Prize winner Steven J. Spear's critically acclaimed book Chasing the Rabbit, Spear describes what sets market-dominating companies apart and provides a detailed framework you can leverage to surge to the lead in your own industry. Spear examines the internal operations of dominant organizations across a wide spectrum of industries, from technology to design and from manufacturing to health care.

Resolving Conflicts at Work is a guide for preventing and resolving conflicts, miscommunications, and misunderstandings at work, including dozens of techniques for revealing how the inevitable disputes and divisions in the workplace are actually opportunities for greater creativity, productivity, enhanced morale, and personal growth. In the third edition of this text, all chapters are completely infused with additional content, updated examples, and new case studies.

There are a host of neuroscientific explanations for why laughter makes us feel so great. Laughter triggers "feel good" chemicals in the brain which activate opiate receptors throughout your body and mind. Creating a workplace culture in which laughter is not only allowed but expected is an important step in building the trust, openness, authenticity, storytelling, and teamwork (TOAST) that are essential to any healthy collaborative environment.

A man finds himself on the top step of a stepladder; a woman removes the guard to her machine; a worker is not wearing her safety glasses in the plant. Why do these folks do these things? One tendency is to blame workers for safety errors and label their personal failings as the cause. Labeling does not solve the problems. These tendencies build dysfunctional management practices that create fear associated with your safety programs. I want to teach you a better way to analyze behaviors to understand why your employees were put in a position to take the risk in the first place.

The fact is, over 90 percent of all new start-ups fail. Every entrepreneur must face this harsh reality and learn to master it if they hope to survive and wind up on top. In Surviving a Startup, Hoffman brings listeners on a wild ride, sharing with them the tumultuous journey of launching a venture-funded start-up and revealing what it takes to make it.

Leading with heart, authenticity, and purpose, Thomas Vozzo provides a clear path to a new bottom line—including 55 rules to break—bringing The Homeboy Way to life as the perfect antidote to the massive tidal currents of social injustice and inequities. By every traditional measurement of success, Vozzo was a clear winner. Then, through a series of fateful events, Vozzo landed as CEO of Homeboy Industries, the most successful gang intervention, rehabilitation, and reentry program in the country, founded by Jesuit priest Greg Boyle.

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.

Imagine what Atari might have achieved if Steve Jobs had stayed there to develop the first massmarket personal computer. Or what Steve Case might have done for PepsiCo if he hadn't left for a gaming start-up that eventually became AOL. What if Salomon Brothers had kept Michael Bloomberg, or Bear Stearns had exploited the inventive ideas of Stephen Ross? Scores of top-tier entrepreneurs worked for established corporations before they struck out on their own and became self-made billionaires.

This book will inspire you to: overhaul performance management practices to jump-start motivation and engagement; use agile processes to transform how you hire, develop, and manage people; establish diversity programs that increase innovation and competitiveness as well as inclusion; use people analytics to bring unprecedented insight to hiring and talent management; prepare your company for the double waves of artificial intelligence and an older workforce; and close the gap between HR and strategy.