Work Leadership

Conducting performance reviews can be stressful. But these conversations are critical to your employees' development, allowing you to formally communicate with them about their accomplishments relative to their goals. Performance Reviews guides you through the basics.

Two Robert Updegraff classics in work and business come together for the first time to show a new generation of visionaries and entrepreneurs how to truly work smarter and not harder! The Subconscious Mind in Business: A Six Hour Day for Executives explains how business executives and owners can lower hours worked while boosting productivity by employing both minds: conscious and subconscious. Obvious Adams: The Story of a Successful Businessman is the enduring classic about a young man whose ability to spot the obvious raises his position high up in the ranks in the advertising world.

It's the 21st century, yet most companies maintain a 20th-century corporate culture. Despite instant communication and collaboration through wireless computers and smartphones, employers needlessly rent or own office space. Bryan Miles has a reality check for you: the future of business is virtual, and it's going to take more than technology upgrades for you to upgrade your workplace environment.

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.

Workers want good jobs, and many leaders want to provide them. But they don't think they can offer higher pay and more motivating work without hurting the bottom line. Most business leaders want to win with customers, but their companies are hobbled by a host of service and operational problems largely driven by high employee turnover—turnover that's partly driven by low pay. It is indeed a vicious cycle, and Zeynep Ton is here to show you the way out: why good jobs combined with strong operations lead to higher productivity and increased competitiveness for the business.

The case studies in Lead on Mission show how business owners, leaders, and boards take steps to advance a higher purpose beyond their tenure. In doing so, they increase a company's likelihood of sustaining a high-performing culture with an eternal ROI. While there is no single way to do this, the book offers practical approaches, insights, and case studies from Faith Forward leaders, investors, business owners, and industry experts.

The Loudest Duck is a book for managers and executives faced with the productivity and leadership challenges of a heterogeneous, multicultural workplace. It's a book for anyone working his or her way up the ladder in this new corporate world order. It's a book for anyone who belongs to a non-dominant group, be it women, people of color, short people, or employees who don't play golf but whose bosses do.

The curtain is about to rise, say Pine and Gilmore, on the Experience Economy, a new economic era in which every business is a stage, and companies must design memorable events for which they charge admission. With The Experience Economy, Pine and Gilmore explore how successful companies, using goods as props and services as the stage, create experiences that engage customers in an inherently personal way.

Today’s companies have fewer hierarchical layers. The nature of work is also more virtual, collaborative, and transparent than at any previous time. Information flows move every which way, shifting from top-down to all-in. And the workforce is forever altered, too. Sweeping changes in expectations across backgrounds, experiences, generations, and gender are challenging long-held, inflexible beliefs about the relationship between work and life—and the very meaning of success.

Around the world, product teams are waking up to the same uncomfortable truth: doing things “the right way” doesn’t matter if your team loses its funding or your company goes out of business. Simply put, product teams can no longer afford to be disconnected from the business impact of their work. And well-trodden “best practices” from Silicon Valley behemoths can only provide so much guidance for teams working across vastly different business and funding models.

Are you frustrated or disenchanted by the results of your Agile approach? Does Agile sound like a good idea, but you're not sure how to explain it beyond roles, practices, and meetings? Is your team going through the motions, but it's still business as usual? The missing piece is the Agile mindset - the thinking that makes Agile processes work.

Remote and hybrid workplaces are here to stay, and they pose formidable obstacles that complicate managing projects and launching new products. Against this backdrop arrives Project Management in the Hybrid Workplace. In his inimitable style, Simon adeptly fuses critical research and concepts from a slew of diverse and seemingly unrelated fields, including Agile software development, human resources, supply-chain management, organizational behavior, cognitive psychology, and labor economics. Brimming with case studies, insights, and practical advice, the book is a tour de force.

Imagine a company where people love coming to work and are highly productive on a daily basis. Imagine a company whose top executives, in a quest to create the most "fun" workplace ever, obliterate labor-management divisions and push decision-making responsibility down to the plant floor. Could such a company compete in today's bottom-line corporate world? Could it even turn a profit?

Creativity, new ideas, innovation - in any age they are keys to success. Yet, as Stanford Professor Robert Sutton explains, the standard rules of business behaviour and management are precisely the opposite of what it takes to build an innovative company. We are told to hire people who will fit in; to train them extensively; and to work to instil a corporate culture in every employee. In fact, in order to foster creativity, we should hire misfits, goad them to fight and pay them to defy convention and undermine the prevailing culture.

The most successful leaders are storytellers. By mastering business storytelling, they achieve extraordinary business results. As a modern-day leader, you know you should develop this skill, but you don't have the time to do this in an ad-hoc way. What you need is a practical, reliable method to follow, one that will allow your business to reap the benefits of storytelling as soon as possible. In Putting Stories to Work, Shawn Callahan gives you a clear process for mastering business storytelling. He demolishes the thinking that storytelling has no place at work.

Should we even expect to be fulfilled and happy at work? Yes, we should, says Annie McKee, coauthor of the best-selling Primal Leadership. In her new transformative book, she makes the most compelling case yet that happiness - and the full engagement that comes with it - is more important than ever in today's workplace, and she sheds new light on the powerful relationship of happiness to individual, team, and organizational success.

Revamp your workplace culture with these 100 accessible strategies for creating a supportive, flexible, productive, and happy work environment, perfect for managers, human resource representatives, and other workplace leaders. It’s time to update your workplace culture! One of the most...

Work shouldn't be a burden that takes place outside of your “real life". It should, and can, be a source of happiness and authentic meaning. In The Full Body Yes, LinkedIn’s Head of Mindfulness and Compassion Programs Scott Shute shows how the evolution within companies lies in the evolution of ourselves. Through a four-step action plan, he demonstrates how the journey to a working life of happiness and authentic meaning is fueled by compassion.

In our present state of disconnect and loss, Connected Capitalism offers us a deeper and more satisfying approach to both work and life – one that is rooted in relationships, trust, forgiveness, and empathy. What should our post-COVID work world look like? In Connected Capitalism, David...

Empathy is credited as a factor in improved relationships and even better product development. But while it's easy to say "just put yourself in someone else's shoes", the reality is that understanding the motivations and emotions of others often proves elusive. This collection of articles from HBR includes "What Is Empathy?" by Daniel Goleman; "Why Compassion Is a Better Managerial Tactic Than Toughness" by Emma Seppala; and much more.