Work Culture Leadership

If you have ever been part of a great team, you will know it is exponentially better than being part of a mediocre team. Teams are at the heart of working in complex domains and are essential to the success of agile approaches yet relatively few teams achieve greatness. Agile and leadership coach Geoff Watts has pulled together his many years of experience with all sorts of teams from software to product development, from medical teams to sports teams and has identified five common characteristics of great teams:

We've all been taught that we must suppress or avoid emotions at work, but this inevitably leads to a loss in productivity, diminished creativity, and crushing job dissatisfaction. Research shows 85 percent of us avoid communicating crucial workplace problems upward, and many of us who are employed are actively looking for a different job. What's going on?

Not just another book on communication. Adaptive Listening helps you up-level the under-trained side of communication amidst the realities of a hectic workday. Researched and tested exclusively in the work setting, Adaptive Listening moves you beyond active listening, embracing easy-to-remember techniques that strengthen relationships and get work done more effectively.

Whether it shows up as stress, top-down leadership styles, drama, or uncertainty, fear kills good decision-making, dampens morale, lowers employee engagement, and hurts bottom-line growth. The good news is that there's an antidote: Freedom at Work. In this groundbreaking book, Traci Fenton brings together decades of original research, based on her team's work with hundreds of top companies around the world, such as The WD-40 Company, Mindvalley, DaVita, Menlo Innovations, Zappos, HCL Technologies, and more, revealing the proven pathway to leadership success.

Virtue is more than a word: it's a way for us all to live, a way to flourish as human beings. And when applied to organizational life, virtue serves to enhance engagement, strengthen relationships, and foster success in business. Picking up where the acclaimed Exception to the Rule left off, Better Humans, Better Performance connects the classical Greek virtues—Trust, Compassion, Courage, Justice, Temperance, Wisdom, and Hope—with authoritative science that can help you achieve the highest performance.

Why do some team members not get along? What is the best way to get new teams and ad-hoc teams to maximize their performance in the least amount of time? How can meetings be designed to achieve useful outcomes? Teams are the source of problem-solving and innovation that today’s organizations need to survive and thrive in an increasingly complex and challenging marketplace. Teamwork is hard because there is no magic formula or step-by-step procedure to ensure results.

This illuminating and insightful audiobook analyzes problems with the culture's underlying worldviews and suggests how Christians can offer solutions to current problems as a way to rebuild culture and faith.

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.

Conventional product development focuses on the solution. Empathy is a mindset that focuses on people, helping you to understand their thinking patterns and perspectives. Practical Empathy will show you how to gather and compare these patterns to make better decisions, improve your strategy, and collaborate successfully.

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.

A powerful story about the African philosophy of teamwork and collaboration that has the power to reshape our workplaces, our relationships with our coworkers, and our personal lives, written by the bestselling coauthor of Fish! and the bestselling author of 1001 Ways to Reward Employees.

Culture Hacks is filled with simple, actionable ideas that over time, can transform the way that work gets done. From emails to book clubs and meetings to podcasts, take regular steps to build a fantastic work culture that everyone wants to be a part of.

The idea of leadership failure and derailment has been brushed under the carpet for far too long, and only now are statistics appearing on the sheer numbers who fail. Backstabbers and Bullies provides the latest psychiatric and clinical perspectives on dark-side behavior, including: recognizing and coping with overconfident, narcissistic, and psychopathic leaders; causes of leadership derailment and failure; corrupt corporate cultures; and the criminal personality.

The iconic Sydney to Hobart Race, a 723-mile deepwater challenge - often called the “Everest” of offshore ocean racing - is considered one of the toughest in the world. Unpredictable weather and seas make each race demanding, but in 1998, an unexpected “weather bomb” hit the fleet, creating 80-foot waves and 100-mile-per-hour winds. Many bigger, better-equipped boats tried to maneuver around the storm, but the crew of the AFR Midnight Rambler chose to head directly into its path.

For over a decade, Jaime Taets, chief vision officer and founder of Keystone Group International, has been the go-to consultant for executive teams hoping to untangle their issues and improve their businesses—profits, strategies, and services—along the way. And throughout that time, Jaime has learned that most business problems are actually people problems. To get at the root cause, leaders must go deeper than the business layer with questions that are rooted in culture and people.

Companies spend billions of dollars annually on diversity efforts, with remarkably few results. Too often diversity efforts rest on the assumption that all that's needed is an earnest conversation about "privilege." That's not enough. To truly make progress with diversity, equity and inclusion, we must focus less on documenting the problem and more on just stopping the transmission of it.

Even amid the seeming chaos of the matrix organization - where you are constantly being asked to do things by people who aren't your boss - there is always that special person who seems indispensable, who seems to thrive on complexity, and who is able to stay focused and positive and get the right things done: This is the go-to person. In this game-changing book, Bruce Tulgan reveals the secrets of the go-to person in our new world of work. Tulgan shows how go-to people not only behave differently, but also think differently.

If you find yourself getting fed up and frustrated with a colleague whose incompetence is driving you crazy, a boss who gets angry when you're not a mind reader, or an employee who habitually challenges your authority, chances are you're caught in an emotional trap in the workplace. Quit complaining and do something!

When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition, experience, and big data alone don't work. What does? Running disciplined business experiments. And what if companies roll out new products or introduce new customer experiences without running these experiments? They fly blind. That's what Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke shows in this rigorously researched and eye-opening book.

The Antiracist Business Book: An Equity Centered Approach to Work, Wealth, and Leadership is the business book for the modern world. Trudi Lebrón has spent the last decade working as a DEI and impact coach for businesses, nonprofits, and entrepreneurs. And what she learned over that time was that making a lasting change wasn't about fixing old systems; it was about building a new one. In this seminal work, Trudi lays out a plan for all businesses, leaders, entrepreneurs, and coaches to remix business, so that equity and impact become synonymous with profit and power.