Performance Leadership

There is greatness in all of us. The power to reach our full potential, regardless of our position or profession, is waiting to be unlocked. It just takes a clear path."The biggest obstacle - and opportunity, in performance isn’t knowing what to do; it’s about doing what we know.” says best-selling author and performance expert Alan Fine. “And what keeps us from doing what we know is interference. Identifying and reducing interference is necessary in order to capitalize on the skills, talents, and knowledge that already exist in each of us.”

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....

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.

Clarity is key for any successful leader, so much so that top corporations, such as Micorsoft. Nike, Proctor and Gamble, Kimberly Clark, and many more, have incorporated storytelling into their leadership training programs. These companies know that before you can become a strong leader, you must first master the art of storytelling so you can communicate your vision to your team and inspire them to execute on objectives.

Daily observation of classroom teaching can significantly impact the quality of teaching and learning. Organized into 21 chapters designed to be read over a period of 21 school days, Now We're Talking! presents a results-driven approach that far surpasses traditional walkthrough models of feedback for teachers. School leaders will complete two cycles of teacher evaluations while reading the book and establish the necessary foundation for subsequent visits.

"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.

It has never been harder to find good employees. Government handouts and programs, publicly traded behemoths with an insatiable appetite for front-line staff, and a burgeoning gig-economy has made hiring extremely hard for small business owners. The golden question is how do we attract good talent and then retain them long-term? How do I determine rates of compensation for my highest performers that are always demanding raises? How do I scale my business without having to constantly micro-manage my Team when they are in the field working? The answer is Pay-For-Performance (P4P).

With Results, Not Reports, Peter Follows, CEO of Carpedia International, provides business leaders with a framework for lasting improvements in performance and profitability. Carpedia has a remarkable success rate in large-scale improvement programs, helping clients achieve their improvement goals over 90 percent of the time. In this book, Peter explains how to achieve sustainable improvement through the dynamic management of process, performance, and people, emphasizing that all three components have an interdependent relationship and that the key is to address them concurrently.

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.

A humorous yet practical five-step guide to ridding ourselves - and our companies - of the bureaucratic bottlenecks and red tape that plague every office.

Revised and updated, the second edition of Leadership Coaching draws on the top coaching practitioners’ thinking and writing to present an in-depth understanding of the tools, techniques, and frameworks that can be used to enhance the coach/coachee relationship.

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.

Corporate learning and development programs play an undeniable role in successful business endeavors, but only when they're done right. The significant revisions in the third edition of The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning add fresh, timely elements to a resource that has become known globally as a trusted guide for professionals determined to get the most of their companies' training and development programs.

Researchers now have a clear understanding of the key drivers that make meetings successful. In The Surprising Science of Meetings, Steven G. Rogelberg, researcher and consultant to some of the world's most successful companies, draws from extensive research, analytics and data mining, and survey interviews with over 5,000 employees across a range of industries to share the proven practices and techniques that help managers and employees enhance the quality of their meetings.

The Leadership Contract provides the manual that leaders around the world need. With only seven percent of employees feeling confident in senior leadership, the problem is evident: disappointing, and often disgraceful leaders. Employees deserve better than that; organizations need better than that - and this book provides a robust framework for stepping up and making the decision to lead. If you're not exceptional, step up or step aside - this book helps you toughen up and put your commitment to great leadership in writing for yourself as much as everyone else.

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.

Great companies, large and small, rise or fall because of their talent: The more high performers on your team, the more successful your organization will be. Of course, that’s easier said than done. Research shows that only about 25% of all new hires turn out to be high performers. But companies that have used Brad Smart’s Topgrading system over the past two decades have boosted their hiring success rates dramatically - sometimes even to 90%.

Authors Bill Eckstrom and Sarah Wirth have spent a decade researching the activities, behaviors, and performance of leaders. After studying more than 100,000 coaching interactions in the workplace, primarily of sales teams, they have been able to determine how coaching affects team outcomes and growth. The authors share three critical performance drivers, along with the four high-growth activities that coaches must execute to build a team that is motivated to achieve at the highest levels.

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.

Now, from the AGI-Goldratt Institute and Jeff Cox, the same creative writer who co-authored The Goal, comes Velocity the book that reveals how to achieve outstanding bottom-line results by integrating the world's three most powerful continuous improvement disciplines: Lean, Six Sigma, and Goldratt's Theory of Constraints.