Work Behavior

There’s a message getting a lot of airtime these days. It says to be successful, you have to step into the spotlight, climb the ladder, become the boss, or chase whatever version of success that’s been dangled in front of you.

BRAGG Inc.'s CEO, Norman Stern, is sucking the life out of the company. Everyone sees it. Everyone but Norm.

Kindness isn’t merely about getting along with people and being nice. It’s a game changer in business, the door opener to opportunity, and the key to authenticity and confidence. It’s a superpower that can be honed through an intentional lifestyle of kindness and is especially important in these divisive times.

Rookie Smarts addresses the questions every experienced professional faces: Will my knowledge and skills become obsolete and irrelevant? Will a young, inexperienced newcomer upend my company or me? How can I keep up? The answer is to stay fresh, keep learning, and know when to think like a rookie.

We are in a period of change. We need to think and act differently. The new world of work is significantly more digitized and decentralized than before—a transformation accelerated by the COVID-19 crisis. We need to orient ourselves differently to be successful, shifting from transactional to human-centric management, mindsets, and methods to deal with the faster pace of business developments, continuing uncertainties, more complex issues, and an increase in multidimensional projects.

Increasingly, new employees and junior members of any profession are encouraged - sometimes stridently - to "find a mentor!" Four decades of research reveals that the effects of mentorship can be profound and enduring; strong mentoring relationships have the capacity to transform individuals and entire organizations.

Friendship expert Shasta Nelson unpacks the distinct ways we can make work relationships the healthiest they can be, both for the sake of the employee and the mission of the company. She inspires listeners to see why friendship is crucial to our health and our careers, and teaches us exactly how to develop the supportive and meaningful connections we need.

New York Times best-selling author and leadership expert Ken Blanchard’s popular TrustWorks! training program is now available in audiobook form! Trust Works!: Four Keys to Building Lasting Relationships is an insightful guide designed to help people navigate one of the most complex issues that affects all areas of our lives: trust. In Trust Works!, Ken Blanchard, Cynthia Olmstead, and Martha Lawrence demonstrate how to get along better with those around us.

Based on five years of proprietary research, How Remarkable Women Lead speaks to you as no other book has, with its hopeful outlook and unique ideas about success. It's the new "right stuff" of leadership, raising provocative issues such as whether feminine leadership traits (for women and men) are better suited for our fast-changing, hyper-competitive, and increasingly complex world. In this book, McKinsey & Company consultants Joanna Barsh and Susie Cranston establish the links between joy, happiness, and distinctive performance with the groundbreaking model of Centered Leadership.

Unleash your leadership by identifying and overcoming the limitations you place on yourself in the workplace. Women are called by God to flourish in areas of leadership. And for the first time in modern history, women are making their way into strategic positions of influence and leadership within the ministry, public, corporate, charity and voluntary sectors.

Drawing on their years of experience working at remote companies DuckDuckGo and Automattic, plus dozens of interviews with leading experts, Ali Greene and Tamara Sanderson have written the ultimate playbook for managing remote teams.

What really sets the best managers above the rest? It's their power to build a cadre of employees who have great inner work lives—consistently positive emotions; strong motivation; and favorable perceptions of the organization, their work, and their colleagues. The worst managers undermine inner work life, often unwittingly.

An entertaining and accessible listen with profound implications for the future, Teeming takes us on a journey through nature’s most ancient and successful R&D labs, and gives practical prescriptions for redesigning organizations to flourish far into the future. Evolutionary biologist and anthropologist Dr. Woolley-Barker weaves poetic vision and deep scientific expertise to illustrate how flat, agile, and adaptive societies like ants, termites, and underground fungal networks self-organize for resilience and value.

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?

For most of us, the better we perform the more attention we receive. Yet for many “Invisibles”—skilled professionals whose role is critical to whatever enterprise they’re a part of—it’s the opposite: The better they do their jobs the more they disappear. In fact, often it’s only when something goes wrong that they are noticed at all. Millions of these Invisibles are hidden in every industry. You may be one yourself. And despite our culture’s increasing celebration of fame in our era of superstar CEOs and assorted varieties of “genius”—they’re fine with remaining anonymous.

A decade ago, Millennials came of age, and many workplaces were not prepared to integrate a new generation that thought and worked differently. As a result, some organizations lost out on the best in young talent or were paralyzed by generational infighting.

If you’re finding it hard to express yourself, whether in work environments or at home and if you feel like your voice is not loud enough, you need to transform yourself into a more assertive person. Even if you feel like you’re confident enough to express yourself clearly, assertiveness is a communication skill and as such can be trained and upgraded. If you’ve ever felt like you’re not getting enough respect, you should use this book to test your behavioral patterns and find a solution.

If you listen to the news, robots are coming for your job. Full-time employment will soon be a thing of the past as organizations opt more to hire employees on a contract basis. With technological advances across email, video, project management, and instant messaging platforms, being tied to a desk working full time for one company is becoming obsolete. So, where does that leave you? The Human Cloud may be the most important book you hear to prepare for how work is done in the future.

Perfunctory efforts to show investment in a business relationship don't cut it anymore. Business professionals working across national and cultural boundaries need to form authentic relationships that drive rapport, camaraderie, and optimal team performance—and Forging Bonds in a Global Workforce provides the most thorough and practical approach to date on this issue. Renowned academics in the field of intercultural relationship-building Andy Molinsky and Melissa Hahn deliver an easy-to-understand approach to help you supercharge your global relationship-building skills.

When we do better work, we live better lives. Share before you’re ready. Get more agreements. Have difficult conversations. These are a few of the practical but profound ideas Lessonly CEO Max Yoder shares in Do Better Work. No matter your rank or role, if you want to see more understanding, accountability, and progress on your team, these stories and examples are for you.