Great Workplace

Great business leaders understand that acceptance of greater personal accountability and responsibility leads individuals, teams, and organizations back on the path to success. But with the evolving nature of 21st century business, the practical steps that go into creating a high performance culture of accountability have become more muddled than ever.

It was the Golden Age of Travel, and everyone wanted in. As flying boomed in the 1960s, women from across the United States applied for jobs as stewardesses. They were drawn to the promise of glamorous jet-setting, the chance to see the world, and an alternative to traditional occupations like homemaking, nursing, and teaching.

The Talent War explores how US Special Operations Forces assess, select, and develop their world-class talent. You'll learn how to adopt a talent mindset, the single greatest weapon you can possess in the war for talent. When your organization reflects this mindset, you will hire, train, and develop the right people and put them in the best positions to make decisions that allow you to retake the advantage and win the war.

We've long been told our ability to succeed depends on our IQ, talent, education level, gender, job title, or when and where we were born. Great Work turns that conventional thinking on its head to reveal that innovation can come from anyone, anywhere.

Scott Page, a leading thinker, writer, and speaker whose ideas and advice are sought after by corporations, nonprofits, universities, and governments around the world, makes a clear and compellingly pragmatic case for diversity and inclusion. He presents overwhelming evidence that teams that include different kinds of thinkers outperform homogenous groups on complex tasks, producing what he calls "diversity bonuses".

You could decide to have G.R.E.A.T. processes. When you have those, these kind of problems perhaps don’t go away completely, but they can be dramatically reduced. Everyone can have an easier life, with less stress, wasted effort and better outcomes for employees, the business and its customers. So the big question you probably have is “well, how do we make that happen?”

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:

Far away from Silicon Valley, in familiar, traditional, even unglamorous fields, ordinary people are unleashing extraordinary advances that amaze customers, energize employees, and create huge economic value. Their secret? They understand that the work of inventing the future doesn't belong just to geeks designing mobile apps and virtual-reality headsets or to social-media entrepreneurs hoping to launch the next Facebook. Some of today's most compelling organizations are doing brilliant things.

According to studies, we all work for the same thing--and it's not just money. It's meaning. Through our work, we seek a sense of purpose, contribution, connection, value, and hope. Digging down to the meaning of work taps our resilience in hard times and our passion in good times. That's the simple but profound premise behind this groundbreaking book by renowned management expert Dave Ulrich and psychologist Wendy Ulrich.

Evidence shows culture drives fiscal performance. It's no secret that a toxic work culture can drive away employees and drive down profits. Creating a dynamic work culture that promotes both employee and business growth is key to ensuring an organization's success. However, culture is a moving target and hard to get right. In Great Mondays, brand strategist Josh Levine introduces a proven formula for building and managing a workplace culture that maximizes employee engagement, performance, and retention for long-term business success.

High performance has always required shrewd strategy and superb execution. But Rich Karlgaard - Forbes publisher, entrepreneur, investor, and board director - takes a surprising turn and argues that there is now a third element that's required for competitive advantage - your company's values. Karlgaard examined a variety of enduring companies and found that they have one thing in common; all have leveraged their deepest values alongside strategy and execution, allowing them to fuel growth as well as weather hard times.

This book debunks the myth that leaders need to be creative like designers to apply design thinking. Applying design approaches and practices to organizational leadership is not just about its leaders becoming more creative. It is definitely not about the person at the top coming up with the grand answer. Design thinking starts with the 'pain point' related to the problem you are trying to solve. You get to the heart of the issue. It is a collaborative effort that neatly leads stakeholders and representatives affected by the problem to design novel leadership solutions that work.

Do you always get the assignments you want? Do you know how to ask for help without sounding dumb? How to answer a question you don’t know the answer to? All the while sounding smart, capable, and competent? If the answer is no, you’re not alone. Jodi Glickman founded the communication consulting firm Great on the Job to help rising stars of the business world with the same issues. Now, for the first time, the training program that Jodi uses with her top-tier clients is available in book form. Great on the Job teaches people how to talk to one another at work, every day, in every situation....

A culture of trust for all companies large and small is invaluable. Trust turns deflection into transparency, suspicion into empowerment, and conflict into creativity. And what many have learned unfortunately is that no enterprise is too large or too successful to withstand a lack of trust within its walls. In The 10 Laws of Trust, JetBlue chairman and Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Joel Peterson explores how a culture of trust gives companies an edge.

In The Culture Solution, business consultant and The New York Times best-selling author of The Dream Manager and Off Balance presents the six enduring principles of a dynamic culture, designed in a way that is both intensely practical and inspiring. If you want to grow your business; attract, grow, and retain top talent; learn the key to hiring in the 21st century; teach every person in your organization that they have a role to play in making the culture better today than it was yesterday, this book is for you and every person on your team.

Employees who buy into a company’s purpose and goals are the key to driving sustainable bottom-line improvements. Here’s how to get lots of them.

Drawing on decades of expertise, visionary leader and team expert Michael G. Rogers presents an unparalleled approach to team development that sets this audiobook apart from any other in the leadership genre. With captivating stories, relatable examples, introspective activities, and actionable exercises, this audiobook challenges your team’s mindset and equips them with the tools to elevate their personal performance and that of your entire team.

From Plato to Plutarch, Shakespeare to Churchill, Machiavelli to Melville, Jane Austen to Carl Jung, Pericles to Peter Drucker and many more - here are the best leadership ideas of the past 25 centuries. You don't need a big title or a business degree in order to lead with impact. What you need is practical wisdom: the insight, judgment and strength of character that all great leaders have but that most business schools and corporate workshops don't teach.

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.

Thirty years ago, Roger Fisher and Bill Ury wrote the groundbreaking book Getting to Yes. It established the mutual gains approach to negotiation, or what the popular media likes to call "win-win negotiation". But there are few, if any, negotiating situations in which everyone can get everything they want. In reality, most people want to win at win-win negotiation. And the way to win is to come up with a proposed agreement that is "good" for the other side and "great" for you.