Performance Leadership

The World Health Organization estimates that American businesses lose more than $300 billion a year due to stress experienced by employees, and recent research by Harvard Medical School found that more than 95 percent of leaders felt at least somewhat burnt-out. For individuals and organizations who want to thrive in today's high-pressure, 24-7 business environment, working even longer is not the solution. To maximize your performance and well-being over the long-term, you need to work stronger.

Your business success depends on your ability to align and develop the people who work for you. High-performance teams are built intentionally by leaders who understand the three essential components of growth: alignment, development, and transition. TeamWork breaks each of these components down into actionable processes, with steps you can take immediately to start making a difference today. Learn how to create teams that work the way you want them to. Then, discover ways to scale those teams, keeping them aligned with your objectives as your business grows.

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.

Resilience is not an innate character trait. Whether you’re in a leadership role or working as part of a team, you need to implement strategies that build and nurture resilience. You need a resilience plan. Award-winning mental health expert Marie-Hélène Pelletier draws on her clinical practice and extensive knowledge in therapeutics and business practices to explore how resilience is the best defense against burnout and how everyone can build it in themselves—not with a one-size-fits-all plan but with strategies to help you create a custom plan.

There's a bewildering array of management tools out there. And they all promise to help you excel at the toughest parts of your job: defining your organization's strategic direction, managing customers and costs, and boosting workforce performance. But just 30 percent of these tools deliver as intended. Why? As Jeremy Hope and Steve Player reveal in Beyond Performance Management, while many tools are sound in theory, they're misused by most organizations. For example, executives buy and implement a tool without first asking, "What problem are we trying to solve?"

For decades, performance management has been seen as an annual chore by managers and HR alike. But this process is changing, and there are ways to make it more effective for your organization and more useful for employees. If you read (or listen to) nothing else on performance management in your organization, listen to these ten articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you assess performance more accurately, have more effective feedback conversations, and encourage the growth of your employees.

In his work consulting to major corporations for more than 30 years, Gerald Kraines consistently hears that 60-70 percent of business organizations' potential effectiveness goes unrealized. He shares how to engage, align, and develop employees in order to leverage and encourage optimal performance and long-lasting results.

As an aviation pioneer, Carey D. Lohrenz learned what fearless leadership means in some of the most demanding and extreme environments imaginable: the cockpit of an F-14 and the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. Here, her teams had to perform at their peak - or lives were on the line. Faltering leadership was simply unacceptable. Through these experiences, Lohrenz identified a fundamental truth: high-performing teams require fearless leaders.

The essential complement to the pathbreaking Competitive Strategy, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Advantage explores the underpinnings of competitive advantage in the individual firm. Competitive Advantage introduces a whole new way of understanding what a firm does. Porter's groundbreaking concept of the value chain disaggregates a company into activities, or the discrete functions or processes that represent the elemental building blocks of competitive advantage.

It is taken for granted in the knowledge economy that companies must employ the most talented performers to compete and succeed. Many firms try to buy stars by luring them away from competitors. But Boris Groysberg shows what an uncertain and disastrous practice this can be.

In Better, Simpler Strategy, Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee provides executives with a simple tool to cut through technological complexity and market uncertainties. The Value Stick, based on proven economic mechanics, is an extraordinarily powerful tool that helps executives decide where to focus their attention and how to deepen their firm's competitive advantage.

Since technology has made it easy to access, share, and distribute company data, many managers avoid live interaction, instead relying on emails, text messages, web-based seminars to manage their employees. But although technology has changed, people have not. There is still a need for effective face-to-face communication; managers need to have the ability to ask the right questions and use the answers to find solutions.

The US military in general, and its many elite organizations in particular, possesses a culture of high performance. Courage to Execute outlines the six basic principles that operate at the foundation of high performance, which include leadership, organization, communication, knowledge, experience, and discipline, known together as LOCKED. When all are practiced effectively, teamwork emerges. But the most elusive quality that's at the heart of all elite military teams, the element that organizations and businesses desire to perform more efficiently and effectively, is trust.

In Put Happiness to Work, Karpinski draws on his deep experience at the intersection of business and psychology to lay out a step-by-step program that includes specific activities to enhance engagement and generate happiness at work. Utilizing existing work habits and meetings, these dynamic yet simple tools will hardwire effective changes into leaders' and employees' behavior, creating long-term, sustainable engagement.

Few business topics have aroused more skepticism in recent years than the notion of corporate purpose, and for good reason. Too many companies deploy purpose, or a reason for being, as a promotional vehicle to make themselves feel virtuous and to look good to the outside world. Some have only foggy ideas about what purpose is and conflate it with strategy and other concepts like “mission,” “vision,” and “values.” Even well-intentioned leaders don’t understand purpose’s full potential and engage half-heartedly and superficially with it....

"Your story is your life," says Loehr. As human beings, we continually tell ourselves stories: of success or failure; of power or victimhood; stories that endure for an hour, or a day, or an entire lifetime. We have stories about our work, our families and relationships, our health; about what we want and what we're capable of achieving.

Demand is exceeding our capacity. The ethic of "more, bigger, faster" exacts a series of silent but pernicious costs at work, undermining our energy, focus, creativity, and passion. Nearly 75 percent of employees around the world feel disengaged at work every day. The Way We're Working Isn't Working offers a groundbreaking approach to reenergizing our lives so were both more satisfied and more productive, on the job and off.

To perform better in any situation - in your career, hobbies, relationships, or in any facet of your life - it is critical to develop psychological skills, which, just like physical abilities, can be taught, learned, and practiced. Both as individuals and as groups, we can tone these psychological skills and use them to heighten awareness, foster talents and technical abilities, and reach peak performance. Mental preparedness and psychological awareness are the keys to thriving in any environment.

Today’s companies have fewer hierarchical layers. The nature of work is also more virtual, collaborative, and transparent than at any previous time. Information flows move every which way, shifting from top-down to all-in. And the workforce is forever altered, too. Sweeping changes in expectations across backgrounds, experiences, generations, and gender are challenging long-held, inflexible beliefs about the relationship between work and life—and the very meaning of success.

Rédigé par les experts de la HBR, cet ouvrage inspirant met à votre disposition toutes les techniques et les outils nécessaires pour mener votre carrière avec sérénité, en gérant parfaitement vos émotions et en tirant au mieux parti de votre personnalité. Comment s'affirmer dans son travail pour progresser et gagner la confiance de ses collègues ? Comment tisser des relations équilibrées avec son manager ou ses collaborateurs pour éviter incompréhensions, frustrations et conflits ?