Leadership Psychology

From polar explorers and politicians to CEOs and sports coaches, we are fascinated with the makeup of leaders. How do they thrive under pressure and inspire others to do the same? How do they establish a culture of long-term success? Performance psychologist Tom Young has worked closely with teams and individuals at the highest level of professional sport. He has seen how leaders in these high-pressure environments communicate, how they maintain focus and respond to challenges.

Business leaders today face unprecedented challenges—and it's not uncommon to feel overwhelmed by the sheer number and complexity of nonstop decision making. To further complicate matters, you may believe that some decisions require rational (brain) decision making, while others call for you to "go with your gut." In The Steadfast Leader, you'll discover that integrating the two—brain and gut—will help you become the calm, steadfast and powerful leader you want to be.

We made some incorrect assumptions about work, and those assumptions are killing us. We allowed a narrative that is solely about earnings to replace what we know to be true about human motivation. Human beings are hardwired to seek purpose, but according to data, most people don't feel a sense of purpose in their work. Work has become a grind, an endless series of tasks that lack meaning.

The classic best seller on performance management is updated to reflect changes in today's working environment. When an employer needs to know how to gain maximum performance from employees, renowned behavioral psychologist Aubrey Daniels is the man to consult. What has made Daniels the man with the answers? His ability to apply scientifically based behavioral stimuli to the workplace while making it fun at the same time. Now Daniels updates his groundbreaking book with the latest and best motivational methods, perfected at such companies as Xerox, 3M, and Kodak.

In a volatile and complex world roiled by a climate crisis, global pandemics, and disruptive technologies like AI, hyper-individualized leadership models no longer make sense. To seize emerging opportunities and achieve sustainable growth, leaders must recognize that a team’s success flows from the intelligence, achievements, and growth of the entire collective. In Safe to Great, Skip Bowman proposes a leadership sea change that puts purpose before profit, and the team before the individual.

NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic-Programming and this is used to model successful people, managers and leaders. And if you model successful people correctly, you’ll get the same results as they have, for example: a higher productivity and income.

Microsoft is well-known for being an intense place to work: employees face constant pressure to innovate and excel and are passionately devoted to their jobs. In this insightful audiobook, Anna Rowley reveals the major problems all managers face and shows how to conquer them.

Memory master Michael Tipper guides you through his tried-and-tested techniques to boost your powers of memorization to astonishing new levels. Make forgetting a thing of the past. By following the wealth of easy techniques presented in Instant Recall, your memory will soon be in tip-top condition, and you will find confidence and success.

Have you ever had a memory that, when brought up again, brings out the worst emotions in you? Perhaps it's an overwhelming sense of fear that you feel, despair, grief, or embarrassment. It takes control of your current self, and although the experience happened yesterday, a year ago, or even a decade ago, the vividness of that memory has a huge impact on how you perceive the world today. What if you could rewrite that memory and associate new feelings with it? Would you choose to be happy with, satisfied with, or even entertained by that memory instead?

Leadership is a set of abilities with which a lucky few are born. They're the natural relationship builders, master negotiators and persuaders, and agile and strategic thinkers. The good news for the rest of us is that those abilities can be developed. In The Leader's Brain: Enhance Your Leadership, Build Stronger Teams, Make Better Decisions, and Inspire Greater Innovation with Neuroscience, Wharton Neuroscience Initiative Director Michael Platt explains how.

From the mechanics of decision-making and the significance of emotional intelligence to the intricacies of group dynamics and the nuances of interpersonal communication, Empowerment from Within offers a holistic view, packed with insights and anchored in academic research.

The best leaders make everyone around them better - and this kind of pervasive positive impact is something we all aspire to. But often, despite our best intentions, we're tripped up by subtle psychological states of which we are not even aware. It does not have to be that way.

People functioning at the highest level are what the authors call 10x leaders. Research on these leaders consistently brought up five major strengths. This book teaches readers to become a 10x leader using these five key areas, the SHARP framework.

According to Paul Sullivan, clutch performance does not stem from an innate ability. It’s a learned skill—the art of operating in high-stress situations as if they were everyday conditions. Even some of the most experienced and talented performers lack this skill—but Sullivan shows that anyone can develop it.

The idea of leadership failure and derailment has been brushed under the carpet for far too long, and only now are statistics appearing on the sheer numbers who fail. Backstabbers and Bullies provides the latest psychiatric and clinical perspectives on dark-side behavior, including: recognizing and coping with overconfident, narcissistic, and psychopathic leaders; causes of leadership derailment and failure; corrupt corporate cultures; and the criminal personality.

Narratives about decision making are often inadvertently tailored primarily to men. Meanwhile, narratives about women in business overlook decision making or offer advice that is unhelpful and can even backfire. How Women Decide fills this gap. It takes on the very real psychological and cultural obstacles women face, asks how these affect decision making, and suggests practical changes for approaching important choices.

In leadership, you need to be able to play to your strengths and look toward overcoming your limitations. The first and most important step is identifying and understanding your leadership style. Without this self-analysis, it’s impossible to know what your strengths and limitations are.

The unprecedented access to other humans that technology provides has ironically freed us from engaging with them. According to social psychologist Adam Waytz, our increasingly human-free lives come with a serious cost that we’ve already begun to pay: the loss of our humanity. Humans have superpowers. More than any other psychological stimulus, our presence can make experiences feel significant, inspire moral behavior, and encourage action. The Power of Human shows us how to rehumanize and harness these unique abilities to improve our lives, beginning with our jobs.

Why do military commanders fail at crucial moments of their careers? Robert Pois and Philip Langer, one a historian, the other an educational psychologist, study seven cases of military command failures, from Frederick the Great at Kunersdorf to Hitler’s invasion of Russia. While the authors recognize the value of psychological theorizing, they do not believe that one method can cover all the individuals, battles, or campaigns under examination. Instead, they judiciously take a number of psycho-historical approaches in hope of shedding light on the behaviors of commanders during war.