Organizational Behavior Leadership

Organizations and employees now spend an average of $18,000 dollars per year per employee for health costs. These are direct costs, but the hidden costs of time out of the office, distraction, disengagement, and turnover far exceed them. The Healthy Workplace Nudge explains the findings of research on 100 large organizations that have tackled the problems of employee health costs and disengagement in four fresh ways and explains how to create a workplace that is good for people, releases them to what they do best and enjoy most, and produces great and profitable work.

As organizations of all kinds move increasingly toward shared and rotating leadership, they are calling on the circle model to form sustainable teams and adopt circle-driven group processes such as World Caf, Open Space, and Art of Hosting. Meetings in the round have become the preferred tool for moving individual commitment into group action. This book lays out the structure of circle conversation, based on the original work of the co-authors who have studied and standardized the essential elements that constitute circle practice.

It’s undeniable that we’re entering a new era of remote work. While many leaders seek to run business as usual, why settle for the usual when remote teams allow us to work even better? The research shows that employees are more productive and engaged when they have the freedom to work from anywhere.

It is rare today for employees to stay with one organization for the long tenures that were the norm before the Great Recession. In fact, "job hopping" is the new norm, especially for Millennials. In The Boomerang Principle, companies learn how to leverage this fact rather than fear it. By engendering a lifetime of loyalty from former employees, leaders can see them "return" in the form of customers, partners, clients, advocates, contractors, and even returning employees.

Make continuous learning part of your company's DNA - and growth, profits, and sustainability will follow. Keeping up with the pace of change may seem impossible, but it's not. The secret is to make continuous learning a top value for every person on the team so when change happens, everyone is prepared.

Many White leaders want to create change but don't know how to do so appropriately and effectively. How do you know where the blind spots are that can create obstacles for people of color? Your intentions may be sincere and heartfelt, but intentions aren't enough. In It's Time to Talk About Race at Work, Kelly McDonald delivers a much-needed road map for businesspeople.

In his career as an executive at IBM, Cisco, and now as CEO of Anaplan, Frank A. Calderoni discovered that character is just as vital for companies as it is for individuals. In Upstanding: How Company Character Catalyzes Loyalty, Agility, and Hypergrowth, the author explores the powerful link between corporate strategy, company culture, and individual character and how activating this link is essential to realizing strong company character - and an essential ingredient for organizations to achieve hypergrowth, agility, and loyalty.

Increasingly, organizations count on project teams to develop products and deliver services to their customers. Consequently, effective teamwork and team leadership are integral components of an organization's success. Authors Stephen E. Kohn and Vincent D. O'Connell define the essence of superior performance by project teams at work and identify nine attributes of team membership and team leadership that set the stage for accomplishment of group objectives. Kohn and O'Connell bring these proven strategies to life with real-world examples drawn from decades of experience.

Accelerating Performance is not just another "warm and fuzzy" change management book - it's a practical, comprehensive, data-driven action plan for picking up the pace and achieving more. Cowritten by one of the authors of Beyond Performance, this audiobook draws on a combination of empirical research and decades of experience advising global companies to show you how to reduce time to value by building and changing momentum more quickly than your competitors.

Gerard Tellis, a noted expert on innovation, advertising, and global markets, makes the compelling case that the culture of a firm is the crucial driver of an organization's innovativeness. In this groundbreaking book he describes the three traits and three practices necessary to create a culture of relentless innovation. Organizations must be willing to cannibalize successful products, embrace risk, and focus on the future. Organizations build these traits by providing incentives for enterprise, empowering product champions, and encouraging internal markets.

Most companies talk about excellence, but what does excellence really mean? What specific attitudes and practices lead to excellence? Drawing on years of study and decades of experience, authors Harry Paul, John Britt, and Ed Jent have zeroed in on five core qualities of excellence. In this entertaining and enlightening book, they tell how to give and be your best in each of these five critical dimensions and foster excellence in your organization and in your life.

Decades before the business world discovered the power of authentic staff engagement, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters cofounder Bob Stiller was busy creating a company with a mission to build an engaged workforce focused on innovation. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters went public, moved to selling wholesale exclusively, invested in Keurig, and became one of the few coffee companies to ever reach $1 billion in sales. In Better and Better, Stiller explains how he did it.

Access to Asia presents a deeply insightful framework for today's global business leaders and managers, whether traveling from Toronto to Taipei, Baltimore to Bangalore, or San Francisco to Shanghai. Drawing from her extensive experience and global connections, author Sharon Schweitzer suggests that irrespective of their industry, everyone is essentially in the relationship business. Within Asia, building trust and inspiring respect are vital steps in developing business relationships that transcend basic contractual obligations.

This book is crucial for every manager or HR representative who shouldn’t just prepare to one day be faced with a report of a traumatic experience at work, but plan on it. This five-step method will help managers make survivors feel supported and understood. The Empathetic Workplace guides supervisors of any level through an understanding of how stories of trauma impact the brain of both the survivor and the listener, as well as the tools to handle the interaction appropriately, to help the listener, the organization, and most importantly, the survivor.

The Lean Leader: A Personal Journey of Transformation uses a compelling novel format to tackle the nuts and bolts of leading a Lean transformation. Listeners follow along as the characters face real crises and what seem to be unreasonable deadlines. As the story progresses, listeners will see how the main character, Don, and his colleagues transform from being "command and control" autocrats - those who make decisions and bark orders - to more Socratic coaches and mentors.

Your employees and teams may be quite capable of handling their specific areas of focus, but unless you get them to work together, your products, services, and profits will suffer. While progress has been made, maximizing collaboration is still a challenge for many companies. They need a new approach. Over the last quarter century, California's Silicon Valley has become synonymous with building complex, successful businesses. Companies and leaders there have succeeded because they did more than apply existing business models - they created a new model.

Most leaders know that a winning, engaged culture is the key to attracting top talent - and customers. Yet, it remains elusive how exactly to create this ideal workplace - one where everyone from the front lines to the board room knows the company’s values and feels comfortable and empowered to act on them. Based on Ann Rhoades’ years of experience with JetBlue, Southwest, and other companies known for their trailblazing corporate cultures, Built on Values reveals exactly how leaders can create winning environments that allow their employees and their companies to thrive.

Most companies around the globe clearly believe that people should have the opportunity to achieve as much as their initiative and native talent can justify, but too many managers still lack the wherewithal to effectively groom junior employees who have the potential to climb the corporate ladder. The support of a mentor is an integral part of any effort to maximize someone's full potential.

Almost one in four American working adults has a job that pays less than a living wage. Conventional wisdom says that’s how the world has to work. Bad jobs with low wages, minimal benefits, little training, and chaotic schedules are the only way companies can keep costs down and prices low. If companies were to offer better jobs, customers would have to pay more or companies would have to make less. But in The Good Jobs Strategy, Zeynep Ton, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, makes the compelling case that even in low-cost settings, leaving employees behind - with bad jobs - is a choice, not a necessity.

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.