Workplace Behavior

People are the problem. They're always the problem. If a business person goes home frustrated, if they talk with their significant other about it, if they lay awake at night stewing about it, inevitably the problem is some person at work - a colleague, subordinate, or boss. Handling people issues is every leader's major headache. It's what takes up the majority of their time and - more important - the bulk of their head space. Every leader can and must develop this most important of all management skills.

Once, the job of leaders was to identify problems and fix them, while leaving nonproblems alone. Today, the notion that the new way is always better than the old way—and that if you aren’t disrupting everything, you are losing—has come to constitute a new orthodoxy of business thinking. Whether it’s a merger or re-org or a new office layout, change has become the ultimate easy button for leaders, who pursue it with abandon, unleashing a torrent of disruption on employees. The result is life in the blender: a perpetual state of upheaval, uncertainty, and unease.

Ranging from general conflict to psychological violence, workplace bullying has become an epidemic at many offices. The Workplace Bullying Institute reports that workplace bullying affects approximately 80 million workers. And with the Great Resignation upon us, we're seeing that a toxic culture or manager is one of the top reasons employees leave a company. In Walk Away to Win, Megan Carle draws on her own experience as a target of workplace bullying—paired with the latest research in the field—to reveal how unhealthy workplace cultures enable this insidious behavior.

New edition, expanded and updated. With the release of Theory U almost 10 years ago, Otto Scharmer set in motion a revolution in thought. Scharmer explained that what we pay attention to and how we pay attention is key to what we create. What prevents us from attending to situations more effectively is that we aren't fully aware of and in touch with the inner place from which attention and intention originate.

In Snakes in Suits, Hare, an expert on the scientific study of psychopathy, and Babiak, an industrial and organizational psychologist and a leading authority on the corporate psychopath, examine the role of psychopaths in modern corporations and provide the tools employers can use to avoid and deal with them. Together, they have developed the B-Scan 360, a research tool designed specifically for business professionals.

Get more of the management ideas you want, from the authors you trust. With insights from leading experts, this book will inspire you to identify areas for personal growth; assess your strengths, work preferences, values, and contributions; build your skill set and stay relevant; develop learning agility; map out a plan for where you'd like your career to go - both short and long term; find fulfillment in your work; and prepare for your next opportunity.

Today's headlines are full of employee unrest over racial injustice, communities infuriated by corporate environmental impacts, staff anxiety over surveillance, and discoveries of child labor in supply chains. Simply maximizing shareholder value while not breaking the law is no longer an option, but we've never been so confused about what it means to do the right thing. NYU ethics professor Alison Taylor argues that amid stakeholder demands and transparency pressures, we can no longer treat ethics as a legal and reputational defense mechanism.

Merchants of Doubt has been praised—and attacked—around the world, for reasons easy to understand. This book tells, with “brutal clarity” (Huffington Post), the disquieting story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades.

The 1980s was the most outrageous and turbulent era in the financial market since the crash of ’29, not only on Wall Street but around the world. Michael Lewis, as a trainee at Salomon Brothers in New York and as an investment banker and later financial journalist, was uniquely positioned to chronicle the ambition and folly that fueled the decade. In these trenchant, often hilarious true tales we meet the colorful movers and shakers who commanded the headlines and rewrote the rules.

Perfect for a recent college graduate as well as those looking to climb the ladder in their respective jobs or industries, Business Etiquette Made Easy is an essential guide for any working professional.

Positive mentoring relationships can change the way we lead and help us succeed. In One Minute Mentoring, legendary management guru Ken Blanchard and Claire Diaz-Ortiz, a former Twitter executive and early employee, combine their knowledge to provide a systematic approach to intergenerational mentoring, giving listeners great insight into the power and influence of mentoring and encouraging them to pursue their own mentoring relationships.

Change within organizations is disruptive, making people feel less in control of their work and lives. With every passing day, organizational change becomes more complex. It’s no surprise that efforts for change encounter resistance. Jan Kaderly knows that managing change is managing resistance. In Change Killers, Kaderly takes you on a deep exploration of resistance. Dive into decades of research on the very human reasons why we resist change and discover how you can manage resistance while building the support needed to evolve and grow.

As a response to the increasing violence in our culture, the widening ideological divides, and the growing gap in economic well-being, there is greater awareness that a deeper sense of community is desperately needed. But even as we acknowledge the need to build community, the dominant on-the-ground practices about how to engage people, civically and organizationally, remain essentially unchanged. We still believe community is built with better messaging, more persuasion, and social events for people to get to know each other better. All of which is naïve.

The way most white-collar crime works is by manipulating institutional psychology. That means creating something that looks as much as possible like a normal set of transactions. The drama comes later, when it all unwinds. Financial crime seems horribly complicated, but there are only so many ways you can con someone out of what’s theirs.

The Fieldbook is an intensely pragmatic guide. It shows how to create an organization of learners where memories are brought to life, where collaboration is the lifeblood of every endeavor, and where the tough questions are fearlessly asked. The stories here show that companies, businesses, schools, agencies, and even communities can undo their “learning issues” and achieve superior performance. If ever a work gave meaning to the phrase hands-on, this is it.

Are you feeling less engaged, less committed and more skeptical at work? Do you find yourself isolated? Or are you caught in the middle of co-workers’ interpersonal conflicts? If so, you may be experiencing the confidence-busting, commitment-breaking, energy-draining patterns consistent with broken trust. We’ve all been there, but few of us know how to rebuild that trust. Dennis and Michelle Reina have spent their careers researching and measuring workplace trust.

The success of Starbucks is one of the most remarkable business stories in decades. Since 1987, the coffee merchant has grown from a single retail store on Seattle's waterfront to a company with more than 1,000 stores nationwide and a new one opening somewhere every business day. According to Fortune magazine, Starbucks "has changed everything...from our tastes to our language to the face of Main Street."

For two decades, this Wall Street Journal best seller - over 800,000 sold - has offered 26 simple strategies, from A to Z, that managers can use to address their employees’ real concerns and keep them engaged. The authors have gone over every word of the previous edition, revising, updating, and streamlining. This new edition will ensure that Love ’Em or Lose ’Em will continue to help managers all over the world create a supportive workplace culture so they can fight burnout and keep the people they can least afford to lose.

The founder of Menlo Innovations and author of the business culture cult classic Joy, Inc. offers an inspirational guide to leaders seeking joy in the challenge of leading others. Filled with colorful anecdotes from Sheridan's personal journey and wisdom from many leadership mentors, Chief Joy Officer offers an approachable, down-to-earth philosophy and practice that will help even the most disillusioned of middle managers bring a renewed sense of purpose to their work building others.

Imagine a world where personal and professional growth are combined, where improving your relationships and owning your strengths at work translate directly into the rest of your life. Creating a company culture like that is not a dream. Through personal stories and real-life conversations, Jonathan Raymond takes you into the room with managers and employees where real culture change happens and shows you a new kind of employee mentoring where each person gets the real-time feedback, support, and clear boundaries we all need.