Workplace Leadership

We all know it. Demanding accountability in the workplace is the quickest way to get your employees to start fidgeting nervously and looking at the door. Traditional accountability methods leave leaders frustrated with limited, ineffective tools and leave employees feeling criticized, discouraged, and even disengaged. Using a foundation of neuroscience and human dynamics, Inspiring Accountability in the Workplace brings a much-needed modern approach to inspiring employee engagement, productivity, and results.

This is a book about work choices and life choices, and the critical points, or defining moments, at which the two become one. A refreshing antidote to traditional feel-good, inspirational business ethics, it examines the right-versus-right conflicts that every business manager faces and presents an unorthodox yet practical way for you to think about and resolve them.

In the groundbreaking new book Accelerate (XLR8), leadership, change-management expert, and best-selling author John Kotter provides a fascinating answer - and a powerful new framework for competing and winning in a world of constant turbulence and disruption. Accelerate (XLR8) vividly illustrates the five core principles underlying the new network system, the eight accelerators that drive it, and how leaders must create urgency in others through role modeling.

In the new edition of this fascinating book, a book that has appeared on MSNBC, CNBC, Slashdot.org, Lifehacker.com and in the New York Times, best-selling author Scott Berkun pulls the best lessons from the history of innovation, including the recent software and web age, to reveal powerful and surprising truths about how ideas become successful innovations - truths people can easily apply to the challenges of today.

In The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle goes inside some of the world's most successful organizations - including Pixar, the San Antonio Spurs, and the US Navy's SEAL Team Six - and reveals what makes them tick. He demystifies the culture-building process by identifying three key skills that generate cohesion and cooperation and explains how diverse groups learn to function with a single mind.

In the years following her role as the lead author of the international best seller, Limits to Growth - the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet - Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001. Thinking in Systems is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem-solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute's Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world....

As a manager, it’s your role to achieve the highest possible return on the physical, emotional, and mental efforts your people put forth. It’s not just a return on investment ...it’s a return on energy. But how are you supposed to light a fire under each employee when studies find that most of them are working at only a fraction of their potential?

Stretching across 500 miles of northern Spain, the Camino de Santiago has been a pilgrimage route for centuries. Setting off as a competitive, shrewd negotiator with little patience for small talk, Victor Prince emerged as a very different person - more balanced, more caring, more present in the moment, but looking to the future. Prince translates this growth experience into seven leadership skills, each linked to values that have guided Camino travelers for centuries.

Using stories from his time at Netscape, Apple, and Slack, Michael Lopp presents a series of small but compelling practices to help you build leadership skills. You’ll learn how to create teams that are highly productive, highly respected, and highly trusted. The essays in this book examine the practical skills Lopp learned from exceptional leaders - as a manager at Netscape, a senior manager and director at Apple, and an executive at Slack. You’ll learn how to apply these lessons to your own experience.

Every manager makes tough calls - it comes with the job. And the hardest decisions are the "gray areas" - situations where you and your team have worked hard to find an answer, you've done the best analysis you can, and you still don't know what to do. But you have to make a decision. In Managing in the Gray, Joseph Badaracco offers a powerful, practical, and even radical way to resolve these problems.

Detonate explains how organizations built up bad habits, identifies which ones masquerade as "best practices", and suggests alternatives that can contribute to winning in the marketplace. With a focus on optimism and empowerment, it focuses on an approach and mindset which are critical to successfully compete in an era characterized by profound technological advances and uncertainty.

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?

Organizations and employees now spend an average of $18,000 dollars per year per employee for health costs. These are direct costs, but the hidden costs of time out of the office, distraction, disengagement, and turnover far exceed them. The Healthy Workplace Nudge explains the findings of research on 100 large organizations that have tackled the problems of employee health costs and disengagement in four fresh ways and explains how to create a workplace that is good for people, releases them to what they do best and enjoy most, and produces great and profitable work.

Eliminate sexual harassment, unconscious bias, ethical lapses and other HR nightmares! Companies spend millions on legal compliance training and initiatives to eliminate workplace drama and the resulting low morale and lawsuits, but don't always get the results they want. Most organizations understand that simply checking legal compliance boxes around sexual harassment, bias, etc. isn't enough, but are at a loss on how to implement solutions, especially in today's post-#MeToo world.

Whereas the first edition of Beyond Performance introduced the authors' "Five Frames of Performance and Health" approach to change management, the fully revised and updated Beyond Performance 2.0 has been transformed into a truly practical "how to" guide for leaders. Every aspect of how to lead change at scale is covered in a step-by-step manner, always accompanied by practical tools and real-life examples.

We've reviewed the ideas, insights, and best practices from the past year of Harvard Business Review to keep you up-to-date on the most cutting-edge, influential thinking driving business today. With authors from Michael E. Porter to Katrina Lake and company examples from Alibaba to 3M, this volume brings the most current and important management conversations right to your fingertips.

As one of the globe's most trusted leadership mentors, John C. Maxwell debunks the myths that hold people back from leaning into and developing their influence. In this inspiring call-to-action, he shows middle managers how to leverage their unique positions and become 360 degree leaders by exercising influence in all directions - up (to the boss), across (among their peers), and down (to those they lead).

Is your workplace riddled with gossip, power struggles, and confusion? Do you seek clarity in your management and cohesiveness in your team? Do you have a personal obstacle affecting your professional success? If so, there is good news-help is on the way. Stop Workplace Drama offers down-to-earth, practical methods to help business owners, entrepreneurs, and private practice professionals maximize success, increase productivity, and improve teamwork and personal performance.

Imagine walking up to a stranger on the subway and asking them for their seat. What about asking a random person on the street if you could borrow their phone? If the idea makes you squeamish, you're not alone - social psychologists have found that doing these very things makes most of us almost unbearably uncomfortable. But here's the funny thing: even though we hate to ask for help, most people are wired to be helpful. And that's a good thing, because every day in the modern, uber-collaborative workplace, we all need to know when and how to call in the cavalry.

Hiring and firing are hard to get right - and potentially costly to get wrong. Two of the most crucial tasks you face as a manager, they are vital to both the success of the enterprise...and your own career. No need to worry. This handy guide breaks down the simple but powerful strategies you can use to bring better employees onboard - and weed out the weaker ones.