Organizational Leadership

"What does a workplace utopia look like to you?" This is the question Dr. Ella F. Washington asks company leaders, and often she hears about an ideal vision of an organization that values diversity and inclusion and wants employees to bring their whole selves to work. But how can you get there? Organizations have largely missed the mark when it comes to creating environments where all employees thrive in an equal and equitable way, because they treat diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as a program that gets done rather than the necessary and difficult journey it is.

Workplace finger-pointing stifles creativity, reduces productivity, and limits psychological safety. Although no one sets out to be judgmental, learning new habits is hard. Two experienced leadership and agilists coaches share a road-tested leadership model that continuously embraces humility and failure as part of the growth process to deliver results. By facilitating blame-free retrospective meetings, leaders chart a productive path forward. They amplify three essential motivators of purpose, autonomy, and co-intelligence within their team, layered on with four resilience factors.

We all know how important our habits are for personal productivity, success and happiness. But the truth is that we rarely work alone: reaching our goals depends on how effectively we work with others, and teams have their own habits that can help - or hinder - success. Here, productivity and teamwork expert Charlie Gilkey shows how to cultivate, implement and maintain the small habits that lead to big results for any team.

Millennials have only just begun their reign as the largest generation in the workplace. But they are not alone. For the next decade at least, these young professionals will be working side by side with more established generations, including the baby boomers, who are working longer than ever, and an entirely new group coming up, generation Z. This means within any organization, any team, any meeting, any marketing opportunity, you may find any combination of generations. The Remix shows you how to adapt and win through proven strategies that serve all generations’ needs.

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.

Does your organization manage complexity by making things more complicated? If so, you are not alone. According to The Boston Consulting Group's fascinating Complexity Index, business complexity has increased sixfold during the past 60 years. And, all the while, organizational complicatedness - that is, the number of structures, processes, committees, decision-making forums, and systems - has increased by a whopping factor of 35.

Based upon research of what successful teams do to overcome severe odds, Do Big Things presents an intuitive, seven-step process that equips teams with how to quickly and consistently operate in a manner necessary for success. Filled with practical tools and engaging stories of teams today, Do Big Things equips leaders with “the how” to quickly identify and activate the behaviors needed to achieve more than you or your team ever thought possible.

Whether you're a manager, owner, or employee, Customer Service Training 101 gets you up to speed fast. The completely revised and updated third edition addresses every aspect of face-to-face, phone, online, social media, and self-service interactions. Using scenarios, guidelines, and practice exercises, this inspiring training manual explains what to say and do, what to avoid, and why interactions go astray.

Do you feel out of your depth when setting objectives for your team? Ah, the annual ritual of objective-setting! Loved by so few, undertaken by so many. Do you get a slight knot in the pit of your stomach, just thinking about it? Most managers dread it because they're not 100 percent sure of what they're supposed to do. Promoted with little training, they're just supposed to know how to design objectives. Know how to develop soft skills. Sure it's easy, right? On top of that, there’s the niggling feeling that the process doesn’t make much of a difference.

An expert in dignity studies, Donna Hicks contributes a specific, practical guide to achieving a culture of dignity. Most people know very little about dignity, and when leaders fail to respect the dignity of others, conflict and distrust ensue. She highlights three components of leading with dignity: what one must know in order to honor dignity and avoid violating it; what one must do to lead with dignity; and how one can create a culture of dignity in any organization.

Relying on extensive research and interviews, and carefully examined personal experience, The Likeability Trap delivers an essential examination of the pressure put on women to be amiable at work, home, and in the public sphere, and explores the price women pay for internalizing those demands. Rather than advising listeners to make themselves likeable, Menendez empowers them to examine how they perceive themselves and others and explores how the concept of likeability is riddled with cultural biases.

As this book shows, human beings are wired to care, and we can become more empathic with practice. Empathy increases dopamine, reduces stress, boosts self-esteem, heightens the immune system, and enriches our relationships. Empathy also improves business key performance indicators. This means that leveraging empathy on purpose can lead to better health, happier and more productive workplaces, and a more meaningful life. That's why empathy is our superpower.

From Bridgewater Associates to Netflix, some of North America's largest companies admit to being heavily influenced by concepts from pro sports. So what do these companies know that others don't? The answer is simple: People innovation can be a competitive advantage. Through in-depth interviews and meticulous research, Where Others Won't dives deeper than ever before into professional sports from around the world to uncover over 50 easily implementable people strategies to help you win.

Every team has a manager.... But not every team is lucky enough to have a true leader. Get ready to break the mold! Did you know that 82 percent of employees would consider quitting their job because of a bad boss? And it isn’t just that you don’t want to be a bad boss…. You don’t want to be a boss at all – you want to be a leader.

Teams Unleashed provides a map and compass for engaged, sustainable, and improved team performance. This practical approach uses the everyday language of teams to highlight what's working, and uncover what's not, and gives teams the tools to incorporate new practices that build team effectiveness. This is an approach proven in the real world of teams since 2005 and used by thousands of teams worldwide.

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.

This book offers a concise, accessible guide to the key concepts and applications in Otto Scharmer's classic Theory U. Scharmer argues that our capacity to pay attention coshapes the world. What prevents us from attending to situations more effectively is that we aren't fully aware of that interior condition from which our attention and actions originate. Scharmer calls this lack of awareness our blind spot. He illuminates the blind spot in leadership today and offers hands-on methods to help change makers overcome it through the process, principles, and practices of Theory U.

Most business leaders understand the power of a dynamic, positive culture - but almost every effort to change culture fails. Why? The approach is often all wrong. Rather than attempt to "transform" a new culture from the ground up, leaders need to instead spearhead a culture renovation. In Culture Renovation, Kevin Oakes provides tangible, tactical insights drawn from a robust data set and informed by CEOs and HR leaders at many of the world's top companies.

The central problem Hammer saw is that despite good intentions, companies don’t perform at the levels they need to because the way they do things is screwed up. This book is a tool kit for how to do things right, providing its listeners with the skills to make deep and fundamental changes in how companies do their work.

You don't have to do a dangerous job to endure a health-destroying, possibly life-threatening workplace. Just ask the manager in a senior finance role whose immense workload required frequent all-nighters, leading to alcohol and drug addiction. Or the dedicated news media producer whose commitment to getting the story resulted in a 60-pound weight gain thanks to having no down time to eat properly or exercise. These individuals are not exceptions. Every industry is filled with them, and the costs, to both employees and their companies, is enormous.