Workplace Management

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.

The Gen Z Effect provides a mind-bending view of why we will need to embrace Gen Z as the last, best hope for taking on the world's biggest challenges and opportunities, and how you can prepare yourself and your business for the greatest era of disruption, prosperity, and progress the world has ever experienced.

Leading Inclusion is not a how to book; it’s a how to be book—one that educates, challenges, and empowers you and your C-suite and board colleagues to lead a diverse workforce effectively. You’ll learn the historical facts that created the racial inequities and systemic injustices that show up in the workplace, even today. Leading Inclusion shows the importance of taking the pulse of all your employees, so you can identify meaningful actions to build an inclusive, respect-first organizational culture.

Imagine a company where everyone loves to work, where employees feel not just "satisfied" but truly cared for, respected, and energized. Think of the impact this would have on recruitment, retention, customer satisfaction, innovation, and overall performance. Aron Ain, the award-winning CEO of Kronos, a global provider of workforce management and human capital management cloud solutions, believes that anything is possible when people are inspired.

Because they're doing the day-to-day work, front-line employees see many problems and opportunities their managers don't. But most organizations fail to realize this potentially extraordinary source of revenue-enhancing ideas. The authors of Ideas Are Free use real-world examples from their work with hundreds of organizations to show how to exploit the virtually free, perpetually renewable resource of employee ideas.

In The Business Playbook, serial entrepreneur Chris Ronzio walks you through his proven framework for building a playbook: the profile of your business, the people who work in it, the policies that guide it, and the processes that operate it. He shows you how to codify your culture and create a living document that allows you to let go of day-to-day responsibilities and empower your team to run the business without you. If you want to build a company that doesn’t rely on you putting in more hours, this book will show you the way.

In Mastering Civility, Christine Porath shows how people can enhance their influence and effectiveness with civility. Combining scientific research with fascinating evidence from popular culture and fields such as neuroscience, medicine, and psychology, this audiobook provides managers and employers with a much-needed wake-up call, while also reminding them of what they can do right now to improve the quality of their workplaces.

Institutions remain essential to human flourishing. They are the means by which communities thrive, individual vocations are fulfilled, and society is changed for the good. As a result, we all need to learn how to work effectively within institutions. That is just what Gordon Smith provides. He unpacks the core of institutional intelligence - the wisdom of working effectively within an organization. At the same time, he explains how team leaders, directors, executives, board members, key stakeholders, and employees can avoid what is often their greatest source of stress on the job,

Nearly a quarter century ago Carter Cast seemed to have it all together: he had a first-class education, an all-American athletic career, and was a very bright and energetic rising star on the fast track at a Fortune 100 company, PepsiCo. But blissfully unaware of how negative perceptions were shaped, he was stunned when called into his boss's office, and told he was "unpromotable" because he was "obstinate", "resistant", and "insubordinate".

Today, not only is everything digital getting faster, cheaper, and smaller at an exponential rate, we also have the Internet. When these two revolutions - one in technology and the other in communications - joined, an explosive force was unleashed that changed the very nature of innovation. And with any change, we have seen many strategic blunders and extraordinary learning curves along the way.

In Diversity and Inclusion Matters: Tactics and Tools to Inspire Equity and Game-Changing Performance, award-winning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) expert Jason R. Thompson delivers a practical and engaging handbook for implementing a DE&I program in your organization. The CAPE technique, developed by the author, gives you a clear blueprint and the tools you'll need to make your diversity program a success. In this book, you'll learn how to achieve early and significant wins to create the necessary long-term organizational change needed for successful DE&I programs.

The original edition of Discipline Without Punishment introduced a positive approach for getting problem employees to meet - and often even exceed - job requirements. The book still delivers on that promise, and in this revised edition, Dick Grote provides new insights, along with sample dialogues, memos, and worksheets.

The digital age will raise the question of how we humans will stay relevant in the workplace. To stay relevant, we have to be able to excel cognitively, behaviorally, and emotionally in ways that technology can’t. Professor Ed Hess believes that requires us to become hyper-learners: continuously learning, unlearning, and relearning at the speed of change.

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.

Organizations accomplish results when they powerfully engage employees and capture their discretionary time. This is more important than ever during this period where employees are facing unprecedented time poverty. Technology has blurred the lines between employees' work and personal lives, and they are faced with the challenges of successfully navigating and integrating work and personal demands.

The iconic Sydney to Hobart Race, a 723-mile deepwater challenge - often called the “Everest” of offshore ocean racing - is considered one of the toughest in the world. Unpredictable weather and seas make each race demanding, but in 1998, an unexpected “weather bomb” hit the fleet, creating 80-foot waves and 100-mile-per-hour winds. Many bigger, better-equipped boats tried to maneuver around the storm, but the crew of the AFR Midnight Rambler chose to head directly into its path.

Employees can be cynics and skeptics. Both have much in common. They’ve been disappointed, deceived, and at times, devastated. Most workplaces are loaded with the working wounded - men and women who have been let down by their leaders, managers, coworkers, or even the culture of their workplace. They live for Fridays. Could that be yours? Is your workplace one where employees can’t wait to clock out? Would you like to discover how you can create a workplace where the best and most talented people line up to get in? You can!

In the modern workplace, conflict has become a dirty word. After all, conflict is antithetical to teamwork, employee engagement, and a positive company culture. Or is it? The truth is that our teams and organizations require conflict to get things done. But we avoid conflict and build up conflict debt by deferring and dodging the difficult decisions. Our organizations are paying the price - becoming less productive, less innovative, and less competitive.

Far away from Silicon Valley, in familiar, traditional, even unglamorous fields, ordinary people are unleashing extraordinary advances that amaze customers, energize employees, and create huge economic value. Their secret? They understand that the work of inventing the future doesn't belong just to geeks designing mobile apps and virtual-reality headsets or to social-media entrepreneurs hoping to launch the next Facebook. Some of today's most compelling organizations are doing brilliant things.

In this revised and updated edition, Block explores what has and has not changed in organizations and in the world in the 20 years since the first edition was published. He argues that the concept of stewardship is more relevant and necessary than ever, and shows how the idea of stewardship can and must be expanded out from organizations into our communities, societies, and nations.