Social Work Leadership

Having difficult conversations at work is a necessary discomfort. Instead of avoiding these conversations with your boss, colleagues, or direct reports, you need a strategy that won't leave you feeling like you were being talked at or ignored. The key to solving this problem starts and ends with changing the conversation. Recognizing that it takes two people to engage in meaningful conversation, Can We Talk? outlines what each contributor needs to do to achieve the best possible result.

Negotiating with a Bully will teach you how to skillfully deal with bullies in different forms and environments. You'll explore the mindset of a bully and understand the motivations and behavior so you can gain an advantage over him or her.

Building a fully engaged, energized workforce is the key to business success. The Power of Thanks reveals how leading companies like Intuit, JetBlue Airways, IHG, Symantec, ConAgra Foods, and The Hershey Company empower employees through social recognition, in which the practice of mutual appreciation and trust directs and rewards higher performance. Eric Mosley and Derek Irvine, executives at the world-renowned employee recognition firm Globoforce, explain why social recognition is so powerful and how you can apply it in your company.

To help you in becoming a more charismatic person, this guide goes through many actionable examples and strategies. As you press yourself to grow, you will find that there are so many experiences you have already had that will help formulate your ability to be successful. It’s time to take the plunge and grow!

History often appears to consist of big gestures and dramatic shifts. But for every peace treaty signed, someone set the stage and provided the pen. As social secretary to the Clintons for eight years, and more recently as chief of protocol under President Obama, Capricia Penavic Marshall has not just borne witness to history, she facilitated it. For Marshall, diplomacy runs on the invisible gesture: the micro-moves that affect the macro-shifts. Facilitation is power, and more often than not, it is the key to effective diplomacy.

A new audiobook based on a groundbreaking cross-generational study reveals both greater freedom and new constraints for men and women in their work and family lives. Stew Friedman, founding director of The Wharton School's Work/Life Integration Project, studied two generations of Wharton college students as they graduated: Gen Xers in 1992 and Millennials in 2012.

Women define career success in a wide variety of ways. But whatever a woman's personal definition, if she is in a traditionally male-dominated career - virtually all high status, highly compensated fields - her career is at risk because of pervasive gender stereotypes. This highly practical book makes clear that women don't need to change who they are to succeed in their chosen careers, and they certainly don't need to act more like men.

In this fascinating and empowering book, King outlines the invisible barriers that hold women back at all stages of their careers, and provides readers with a clear set of takeaways to thrive despite the sexist workplace, as they fight for change from within. Gender equality is not about women, and it is not about men - it is about making workplaces work for everyone. Together, we can fix work, not women.

Mastering the Cube skillfully lays out proven organization design principles. Comparing today's complex organizations to a Rubik's Cube, the authors explain how focusing improvement efforts on just one or two facets of the organization is akin to concentrating on just one side of the cube. Doing so is bound to affect - and more likely jumble - the other areas needed to generate a healthy and sustainable organization. They advocate stepping back and taking a systems-wide, comprehensive view of change and bringing all elements into alignment with strategy.

Fierce Conversations is the master guidebook to transforming the conversations that are central to your success, offering a new way of relating to people - at work, at home, and in every area of your life.

The Ape in the Corner Office connects with the day-to-day of the workplace because it helps explain what people are really concerned about: How come he got the wing chair with the gold trim? How can I survive as that big ape's subordinate without becoming a spineless yes-man? Why does being a lone wolf mean being a loser? And, yes, why is it that jerks seem to prosper, at least in the short run?

Ego, arrogance and narcissism commonly describe ineffective leadership. Nobody likes a show off, but it also doesn’t work to shrink into the shadows. Ben Fauske had significant confidence issues early in his career and he was miserable. After years of struggle, he discovered a pattern that some of the greatest recording artists have used to overcome confidence issues and find success. He called it Authentic Confidence, and the process dramatically improved his career.

Social skills are needed in everyday life. Without them, people cannot relate with each other. Some say that they are tools that ensures communication is possible and appropriate for engaging other people. It also helps one easily get along with others. Over the years, people have been taught these socials skills. They are not inbuilt when someone is born. They are acquired later. They are acquired through the social institutions that one finds themselves in. These social institutions include the family, school, or even one's religion.

In Engagement, best-selling authors Lee G. Bolman and Joan V. Gallos offer a compelling workplace parable to illustrate the strategies and skills needed to make unworkable relationships positive and productive. The audiobook introduces the four-step SURE model, which offers rules of engagement for staying alert, grounded, and productive when faced with the prickly, taxing, or toxic folks who block progress.

Does the mere thought of speaking in front of an audience give you goosebumps, butterflies, and heart palpitations? If you want to overcome all of these, then you need this book in your life. For a lot of people, public speaking is a terrifying thing. Preparing to speak is the easy part. You either familiarize yourself with the topic, create cue cards to help you remember the things you need to talk about, or in some cases, memorize your speech. But when it's time to step up onto the stage and face the crowd, that's when the real challenge begins.

It can be easy to become task-oriented, focusing on the goals ahead of us and checking off our to-do lists rather than focusing on the people in our lives. Entrepreneur and business coach Brian Dixon set out to discover the secret to living a life that matters and finding work you love. In Start with Your People, Brian shares principles, tips, and personal stories to help you maximize the most important resource to succeed in both life and calling: relationships. Join Brian on a journey to discover the people-first mindset that changes everything.

We are living in a strange world—Salmon calls it “the New Not Normal.” The Phoenix Economy explores the ramifications of the pandemic years, many of which are surprisingly positive. In doing so, Salmon makes sense of one of the most disorienting and devastating events of our lifetimes. He examines the critical aspects of our lives that have been transformed in three parts: Time and Space, Mind and Body, and Business and Pleasure.

This provocative book makes a compelling case for reducing the number of workdays in a week to four. International business expert Robert Grosse draws on scholarly research to construct an appealing argument for why the four-day workweek benefits both the organization and the employee. Research has demonstrated that longer work hours harm the individual and don't amount to a more effective organization. The book goes beyond merely arguing that a reduced workweek is a good idea. It delves into why, explores the means for achieving it, and scrutinizes the barriers to getting there.

It’s hard to avoid innovation these days. Nearly every product gets marketed as being disruptive, whether it’s genuinely a new invention or just a new toothbrush. But in this manifesto on the state of American work, historians of technology Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russell argue that our way of thinking about and pursuing innovation has made us poorer, less safe, and — ironically — less innovative. Drawing on years of original research and reporting, The Innovation Delusion shows how the ideology of change for its own sake has proved a disaster.