Work Leadership

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.

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:

Why are women so often overlooked and underpaid? What are the real reasons men get raises more often than women? How can women ask for - and actually get - the money, the job, the recognition they deserve? Prompted by her own experience as cohost of Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski asked a wide range of successful women to share the critical lessons they learned while moving up in their fields. Power players such as Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Harvard's Victoria Budson, comedian Susie Essman, and many more shared their surprising personal stories.

Business is about making money, but it's also about making decisions. There are relatively small decisions, like when to call a meeting or which emails to answer quickly. Then there are the big decisions that can make or break a business - which product to launch, whom to hire, how to spend. Hard work, analytics, past successes, intelligence, and a great business plan aren't enough anymore. Many of us are scrambling to discover the path to success but have found instead that we've lost our way.

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.

Integrating proven mindfulness practices and world-class leadership theory, The Mindful Leader is the essential guide for self-aware leadership. The book provides a practically grounded template for leaders to develop unprecedented levels of self-awareness, wellbeing, and effectiveness. Mindfulness provides practical tools for self-awareness, mental wellbeing, stress reduction, and more. When practiced through a leadership lens, it becomes much more than just another leadership guide.

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.

According to studies, we all work for the same thing--and it's not just money. It's meaning. Through our work, we seek a sense of purpose, contribution, connection, value, and hope. Digging down to the meaning of work taps our resilience in hard times and our passion in good times. That's the simple but profound premise behind this groundbreaking book by renowned management expert Dave Ulrich and psychologist Wendy Ulrich.

The world's leading safety experts share practical day-to-day solutions that combine the latest tools and technologies in healthcare today with the best safety practices from high-risk yet high-reliability industries, such as aviation, nuclear power, and the United States military. Using these field-tested methods, you can develop new leadership initiatives, educate workers on the universal skills that can save lives, organize and train safety action teams, implement reliability management systems, and create long-term, transformational change.

At the heart of John C. Maxwell's brilliant and inspiring program is a simple premise: To do well in life, we must first think well. But can we actually learn new mental habits? Thinking for a Change answers that with a resounding "yes" - and shows that your thinking can indeed change your life.

You have the opportunity to lead: to show up with confidence, connected to others, and committed to a purpose in a way that inspires others to follow. Maybe it's in your workplace, or in your relationships, or simply in your own life. But great leadership - leadership that aligns teams, inspires action, and achieves results - is hard. And what makes it hard isn't theoretical, it's practical. It's not about knowing what to say or do. It's about whether you're willing to experience the discomfort, risk, and uncertainty of saying or doing it.

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.

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.

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.

Do you wish you had more qualified, committed, and mission-oriented leaders in your church to share the ministry workload? Do you have a passion for cultivating the God-given leadership gifts in others? Most pastors say that the need to identify and develop leaders is critical to the health and growth of their church, yet most churches do not have an intentional plan for doing this.

In this inspiring guide to discovering a vocation that feeds your heart and soul, Askinosie describes his quest to discover more meaningful work - a search that led him to volunteering in the palliative care wing of a hospital, to a Trappist monastery where he became inspired by the monks' focus on "being" rather than "doing", and eventually traipsing through jungles across the globe in search of excellent cocoa bean farmers to make award-winning chocolate. Askinosie shares his hard-won insights into doing work that reflects one's values and purpose in life.

Scott Adams' The Joy of Work is a manifesto for coping within the walls of your cubicle. You'll learn to look at the bright side of every work situation the Dilbert way: "I cried because I did not have an office with a door, until I met a man who had no cubicle."

If Apple is Silicon Valley's answer to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, then author Adam Lashinsky provides listeners with a golden ticket to step inside. This primer on leadership and innovation, offers exclusive new information about how Apple innovates. It should appeal to anyone hoping to bring some of that Apple magic to their own company, career, or creative endeavor.

Burnout. Compassion fatigue. Self-care. Work/life balance. In the midst of all these buzzwords, there are real human beings – nurses, doctors, first responders, social workers, teachers, therapists – all trying to navigate the perils and promise of the helping professions. Working as a helper asks a lot of us personally, but we rarely get the training we need to handle the complex challenges we face – let alone unlock the deep personal growth potential available in our work.

Resolving Conflicts at Work is a guide for preventing and resolving conflicts, miscommunications, and misunderstandings at work, including dozens of techniques for revealing how the inevitable disputes and divisions in the workplace are actually opportunities for greater creativity, productivity, enhanced morale, and personal growth. In the third edition of this text, all chapters are completely infused with additional content, updated examples, and new case studies.