Performance Leadership

If you or someone you love has ever been caught in the vise-like grip of anxiety, you understand how painful and debilitating it can be. The frustration of the physical, mental, and emotional interference caused by anxiety is devastating. For many people, anxiety becomes the dragon they cannot slay. It doesn't have to be that way any longer. It’s time to break the chokehold anxiety has on your performance goals and your life.

For decades, alarms have sounded about declining engagement. Yet companies continue to struggle with toxic cultures, and the low productivity and unhappiness that go with them. Why is "culture" so difficult to improve? What makes so many good employees check out? Neuroscientist Paul Zak shows that innate brain functions hold the answers. It all boils down to trust. When someone shows you trust, a feel-good jolt of oxytocin surges through your brain and triggers you to reciprocate.

In this timely and essential guide, McKinsey alumni Gaurav Bhatnagar and Mark Minukas present a proven approach to workplace anxiety that reduces stress, boosts well-being, and overcomes blocks that get in the way of success. It begins with changing our relationship with fear and then developing strategies that improve outlook and performance, leading to greater profits, sustainable growth, and personal rewards. It’s only possible with a culture of unfear.

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.

Most people associate performance management with the annual review, which is universally dreaded by employees, management, and HR professionals alike. It's a cookie-cutter, fear-based, top-down approach that emphasizes negatives over positives and stifles healthy career conversations. It's never been shown to motivate anyone to do anything but try to avoid it, but nobody feels like they have any alternative. Tamra Chandler has one - and it works.

Change-Friendly Leadership: How to Transform Good Intentions into Great Performance is a simple affirmation that successful organizational change involves - requires, in fact - the active, willful participation of the people affected by the change. In the change approach prescribed here, the friendly factor is not just a play on words; it is the very foundation for effectively engaging people's heads, hearts, and hopes.

The Culture Blueprint is a systematic guide to building a company culture. This audiobook is about fostering committed, enthusiastic employees. Distilling his years of experience teaching culture-building to companies like Google, P&G, and Amazon.

What if the leadership practices we’ve worked so hard to master are now getting in the way? In fact, what if they are actually holding us down and preventing us from leading for growth and innovation? Forget “what if” - it’s happening. In Leadership Unchained, Sara Canaday offers a unique perspective that helps modern leaders break free from the chains of conventional wisdom and blaze new trails toward even greater success.

Why were the American POWs imprisoned at the Hanoi Hilton so resilient in captivity and so successful in their subsequent careers? This book presents six principles practiced within the POW organizational culture that can be used to develop high-performance teams everywhere. The authors offer examples from both the POWs’ time in captivity and their later professional lives that identify, in real-life situations, the characteristics necessary for sustainable, high-performance teamwork.

"For many years I struggled to lead in a difficult environment. My colleagues seemed to thrive on conflict. I sure didn't. I tried to be a servant, but I couldn't compete with their charisma and intensity." Whether you lead in a church or the marketplace, you probably relate to Tom Harper's desire to serve with strength. This book is the result of his three-year search through the Bible for wisdom on how to establish authority, overcome resistance, develop boldness, and manage conflict.

An essential resource for current CEOs, leaders, and future leaders who realize a new cultural order is transforming what effective leadership is about, The Culturepreneur will help you and your organization reach new levels of performance - driving human, organizational, societal, and economic successes that exceed even your own expectations.

There is so much buzz around big data. We all need to know what it is and how it works. But what will set you apart from the rest is actually knowing how to use big data to get solid, real-world business results - and putting that in place to improve performance. Big Data shows you how to implement the same practices that leading firms have used to access new dimensions of profitability. You'll learn from clear explanations and countless examples how successful organisations large and small use the SMART model to get ahead.

In looking for help and understanding on how to build an organization and to select and manage your people, a good place to start would be to look for an organization that did that exceptionally well. Cintas is a great American success story, and Bob Kohlhepp was an important part of that success for 50 years. He began his career as controller but quickly moved up to ultimately become CEO and then chairman. He was a key part of building Cintas from $1.6 million in sales in 1967 to more than $7 billion today.

As a leader, you face tough choices every day. The stakes are high, and a lack of clarity - with yourself, your team, and organizational focus - can be devastating. Debra Van Cleve’s The Clarity Effect: Simple Leadership Principles to Create a Culture of Purpose, Passion, and Performance provides business strategies and hands-on exercises, so you can elevate your leadership style, achieve high-performance teams, and create long-term organizational success.

In the fourth book in Miller’s High Performance series, CEO Blake Brown sets out to discover how to create the kind of workplace where everyone feels excited to come to work, passionate about what he or she brings to the company, and energized at the end of the day. It’s a journey that takes him literally all over the world - from Italy to Greece to Green Bay and more. What he discovers from the pages of history is as relevant as the evening news.

With passion, humor, and a rare insight into what motivates all of us to do our best, Culbert offers all of us a chance to be better managers, better employees and, indeed, better people. Culbert has long said his goal is to make the world of work fit for human consumption. Get Rid of the Performance Review!shows us how to do just that.

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.

Leaders have an unprecedented opportunity to overcome the great disconnect between employers and employees by inviting individuals to become part of something bigger than themselves—to belong. Belonging Rules gives leaders the tools, knowledge, and confidence to harness belonging to address the workplace’s most critical challenges.

Extensively revised, the second edition of The Manager's Guide to HR covers all the key areas and brings listeners up to speed on current developments in employment law, including: how social media is changing the recruitment landscape; shifting labor standards regarding compensation and benefits; the National Labor Relations Board's stance on work-related employee speech on social media; and much more. Featuring step-by-step guidance on everything from COBRA compliance to privacy issues, this trusted resource is now - once again - the most up to date.

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.