Performance Management Leadership

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

Developing successful relationships is critical to our success in both our personal and professional lives. The Power of Understanding People shows you how to establish and develop extremely effective relationships by providing you with techniques to better identify and understand the intrinsic needs of others. As a result, you will achieve better team dynamics, increased sales and client satisfaction, higher levels of employee engagement and performance, and even more satisfying marriages and friendships.

Once, the job of leaders was to identify problems and fix them, while leaving nonproblems alone. Today, the notion that the new way is always better than the old way—and that if you aren’t disrupting everything, you are losing—has come to constitute a new orthodoxy of business thinking. Whether it’s a merger or re-org or a new office layout, change has become the ultimate easy button for leaders, who pursue it with abandon, unleashing a torrent of disruption on employees. The result is life in the blender: a perpetual state of upheaval, uncertainty, and unease.

We all have so much going on. We all worry about things - money, deadlines. With all this buzzing around in our heads it's often a nightmare trying to concentrate on one thing. What if someone could show you how to empty your mind of all the noise? Jamie Smart, state-of-mind specialist, can do just that - with Clarity he will show you how to get real clarity of thought. You'll learn how to clear your mind and become less stressed and more productive - and as a result, more confident in your abilities.

"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.

Battered by waves of downsizing since the 1980s, talented men and women no longer seek job security from one company. This is the true hallmark of the new economy—not fleeting dot-coms and IPOs, but a fast-moving, free-agent workforce with the flexibility to jolt productivity. Managers, meanwhile, must grab hold of this shifting group of talent and squeeze more work out of them than ever before, particularly in a tight economy. The trouble is, their traditional source of power over employees—the corporate ladder—is dead and gone.

From polar explorers and politicians to CEOs and sports coaches, we are fascinated with the makeup of leaders. How do they thrive under pressure and inspire others to do the same? How do they establish a culture of long-term success? Performance psychologist Tom Young has worked closely with teams and individuals at the highest level of professional sport. He has seen how leaders in these high-pressure environments communicate, how they maintain focus and respond to challenges.

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.

Better executive health drives business performance and a stronger society. For the experienced manager as well as manager in training, business school professor, and executive coach; Steven P. MacGregor helps you leverage this truth in your life and your business. MacGregor shares breakthrough insights and techniques he's honed through seven years of pioneering the world-renowned Sustaining Executive Performance (SEP) program and working with thousands of top executives worldwide.

Leadership is the most overanalyzed, thoroughly dissected, and utterly confused topic in business. In Leaders Open Doors, author Bill Treasurer helps lighten the leadership load by distilling that leaders are simply creators of opportunity for others. Using personal stories and anecdotes, Treasurer presents the idea of open-door leadership - that is, the responsibility that leaders have for noticing, identifying, and creating opportunities for the benefit of people, organizations, and society.

Chronic complainers, no accountability finger-pointers, or learning-resistant laggards—these culture-killers costs sales organizations more in productivity than being weak in the so-called hard skills of selling. Learn how emotional intelligence and the development of these critical soft skills improve sales leadership effectiveness and outperforms doubling down on more sales technology tools and fads. The missing link is in hiring for and developing emotional intelligence skills in sellers and sales leaders.

Through her global consulting projects, keynote speeches, and work with thousands of leaders, Karen has seen first-hand how a pervasive lack of clarity strangles business performance and erodes employee engagement. Ambiguity is the corporate default state, a condition so prevalent that “tolerance for ambiguity” has become a clichéd job requirement. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Finally, a paradigm on leadership, transforming colleges, teaching, teams, business, sports and organizations based on research from the very best leaders and their qualities of momentum and focus as demonstrated from the research rather than whims, opinions, or influencers. Talent alone does not win championships but the research in this work shows thoughts, words, actions, habits and unified momentum does. Key leaders in the research include Jesus of Nazareth and John Wooden of UCLA.

No one is immune to these rocky economic times. Innovative businesspeople all over the country are adapting their organizational structures to survive, profit, and compete in today's unreliable market. The practical and relevant advice in Transformational Leadership: A Blueprint for Real Organizational Change by Randy Dobbs can be applied to major corporations and small businesses alike, as well as to nonprofits, universities, hospitals, and other institutions.

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.

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.

Mindfulness Without the Bells and Beads strips away the bells, beads, and hyperbole associated with mindfulness and explains how you can take your performance and leadership to the next level in just eight weeks, without adopting any spiritual or New Age beliefs.

There's a revolution taking place that most businesses are still unaware of. The understanding of how our brains work has radically shifted, exploding long-held myths about our everyday cognitive performance and fundamentally changing the way we engage and succeed in the workplace. Combining their expertise in both neuropsychology and management consulting, neuropsychologist Friederike Fabritius and leadership expert Dr. Hans W. Hagemann present simple yet powerful strategies.

Joe Ferreira specializes in spectacular turnarounds. However, none of Joe’s hard-won personal or professional successes prepared him for becoming the CEO of an organization the same week it was threatened with imminent dissolution by the United States government. Faced with a toxic legacy culture and the worst performance metrics in his industry, Joe drew upon his most momentous personal and professional life experiences. A management memoir, the story of Uncomfortable Inclusion will intrigue, infuriate, and inspire leaders who are eager to turn their organizations into world leaders.

Today's leaders know that speed and agility are the keys to any company's success, and yet many are frustrated that their organizations can't move fast enough to stay competitive. The typical chain of command is too slow; internal resources are too limited; people are already executing beyond normal expectations. As the pace accelerates, how do you inspire people's energy and creativity? How do you collaborate with customers, vendors, and partners to keep your organization on the cutting edge?