Workplace Behavior

This audiobook is a practical guide that shows how leaders can build psychological safety in their organizations, creating an environment where employees feel included, fully engaged, and encouraged to contribute their best efforts and ideas. Perhaps, the leader’s most challenging task is to increase intellectual friction while decreasing social friction.

Human beings have been organizing to accomplish work for as long as we’ve existed. So why is organizational behavior still so elusive and mysterious? In this book, one of the greatest scholars in his field reframes his career’s work around the seven forces that drive all organizations. Mintzberg identifies them as efficiency, proficiency, consolidation, collaboration, culture, division, and conflict.

What’s the secret to business growth and innovation and a purpose-driven career in a world that is becoming vastly more complicated by the day? According to Marc Benioff, the answer is embracing a culture in which your values permeate everything you do. In Trailblazer, Benioff gives listeners a rare behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of one of the world’s most admired companies. He reveals how Salesforce’s core values - trust, customer success, innovation, and equality - and commitment to giving back have become the company’s greatest competitive advantage.

The Song of Significance is a rousing contemplation on work: why it is the way it is, why it’s gotten so bad, what all of us–especially leaders–can do to make it better.

Linda Kohanov, author of the bestselling The Tao of Equus, pioneered a deep understanding of "the way of the horse," including the extraordinary nonverbal communication of skilled riders and the collaborative power of "herding cultures" through the centuries. She has adapted this profound, time-tested approach to modern life and the organizations in which top-down management hierarchies have become obsolete.

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.

The great goddess Devi comes in many forms and many moods. She is the kind and gentle Parvati, the scholarly Saraswati and also the invincible warrior Durga, who rides out on a lion to fight the evil asuras. In this book, listen to three exciting tales about the Devi. Discover how Parvati made Shiva fall in love with her; join the gods as they create the mighty warrior goddess Durga to defeat an asura called Mahisha and find out what happened when Saraswati lost her temper and cursed Lord Brahma!

We live, say Edgar and Peter Schein, in a culture of “tell". All too often we tell others what we think they need to know or should do. But whether we are leading or following, what matters most is we get to the truth. We have to develop a commitment to sharing vital facts and identifying faulty assumptions - it can mean the difference between success and failure. This is why we need Humble Inquiry more than ever.

The updated Thin Book of Trust offers a framework that supports trust building as a workplace competency. It is based on the idea that building trust is a competency, a set of skills that can be learned, improved, and practiced. It will help you continuously improve your ability to build and maintain trust with others. It can also help you create and contribute to a high-trust culture at work.

No matter the industry or the position, business is built on relationships—and at the heart of all good relationships is good etiquette. Understanding good business etiquette, and how to adapt it to your job, is key to building a successful career. For instance, how you adjust your attire as you transition from a large corporation to a small start-up (or vice-versa) will greatly determine your new colleagues’ first impressions of you. Work environments are complex, and it’s important to know how to identify what type of environment you’re in and how to adjust your behavior accordingly.

Power is changing. Private corner offices and management by decree are out, as is unquestioned trust in the government and media. These former pillars of traditional power have been replaced by networks of informed citizens who collectively wield more power over their personal lives, employers, and worlds than ever before. So how do you navigate this new landscape and come out on top? Adam Grant, Wharton organizational psychologist, went to the World Economic Forum in Davos, the epicenter of power, and sat down with thought leaders from around the world, to find out.

Influence Without Authority is the classic guide to getting what you need from people you don't control. Getting things done requires collaboration, and convincing others to contribute requires political skill; this book introduces the Exchange Model, in which you get what you need by offering something of value in return. The key lies in knowing what the other person values - that's their "currency", and it's your immediate tool for coaxing their cooperation. This model has been proven over decades, as organizations around the world have turned toward collaboration.

In Immunity to Change, authors Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey show how our individual beliefs - along with the collective mindsets in our organizations - combine to create a natural but powerful immunity to change. By revealing how this mechanism holds us back, Kegan and Lahey give us the keys to unlock our potential and finally move forward. And by pinpointing and uprooting our own immunities to change, we can bring our organizations forward with us.

A trio of McKinsey & Company veterans draws from a unique combination of psychology, neuroscience, and consciousness practices plus a combined 50-plus years of international board room experience to offer a unique approach to learning and leading with awareness and intentional choice, even amidst the most challenging circumstances.

When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see. In other words, we have what Julia Galef calls a "soldier" mindset. From tribalism and wishful thinking, to rationalizing in our personal lives and everything in between, we are driven to defend the ideas we most want to believe - and shoot down those we don't.

The secret for creating magic in our careers, our organizations, and our lives is simple: outstanding leadership, the kind that inspires employees, delights customers, and achieves extraordinary business results. No one knows more about this kind of leadership than Lee Cockerell, the man who ran Walt Disney World Resort operations for over a decade.

Peter Senge's groundbreaking ideas on building organizations have made him a household name among corporate managers. His theories help businesses to clarify their goals, to defy the odds, to more clearly understand threats, and to recognize new opportunities. He introduces managers to a new source of competitive advantage, and offers a marvelously empowering approach to work.

The Culture Engine shows leaders how to create a high-performing, values-aligned culture through the creation of an organizational constitution. With practical step-by-step guidance, listeners learn how to define their organization's culture, delineate the behaviors that contribute to greater performance and greater engagement, and draft a document that codifies those behaviors into a constitution that guides behavior toward an ideal: a safe, inspiring workplace.

This book offers a concise, accessible guide to the key concepts and applications in Otto Scharmer's classic Theory U. Scharmer argues that our capacity to pay attention coshapes the world. What prevents us from attending to situations more effectively is that we aren't fully aware of that interior condition from which our attention and actions originate. Scharmer calls this lack of awareness our blind spot. He illuminates the blind spot in leadership today and offers hands-on methods to help change makers overcome it through the process, principles, and practices of Theory U.

Leonard Mlodinow, the best-selling author of The Drunkard’s Walk and coauthor of The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking), gives us a startling and eye-opening examination of how the unconscious mind shapes our experience of the world and how, for instance, we often misperceive our relationships with family, friends, and business associates, misunderstand the reasons for our investment decisions, and misremember important events.