Leadership

An Independent Press Awards Nonfiction Winner.

A compass for leaders lost in the paradoxical space between attention to people and attention to results-with Compassionate Accountability, you don't have to choose!

Sadly, compassion and accountability are too often in tension-leaders feel they have to pick one or the other. But solely prioritizing accountability can create toxic work environments that drive away good talent. On the other end of the spectrum, being too nice can compromise performance and productivity.

Finding harmony between compassion and accountability is the ultimate catalyst for improved results and a thriving workplace.

The solution is recognizing that compassion and accountability are not opposites. In fact, accountability is an element of compassion. Compassionate Accountability is the process of building connection while getting results. This book shows how this foundational mindset, philosophy, and way of living can lead to a thriving organizational culture. It covers such topics as these:

• Why you can't practice compassion without accountability
• How to turn on the three “switches” of the compassion mindset-and the predictable damaging consequences when they're turned off
• The key role Compassionate Accountability plays in a healthy leadership culture
• Six areas to focus on to start building your culture of Compassionate Accountability
• Five common barriers to compassion for leaders-and how to overcome them

Plus, readers will find real case examples of how organizations have adopted Compassionate Accountability, along with quizzes and self-assessments to help them learn and apply the concepts.

Leaders seeking a renewed sense of fulfillment in their roles and increased leadership impact will find inspiration, guidance, and a road map for cultural transformation.

Hone your skills and strengthen your practice with this series of twenty-five fresh and provocative questions for reflection that challenge the conventional wisdom in the coaching profession.

Like any established profession, coaching is full of unexamined assumptions. These need to be regularly questioned and tested to keep the profession vital and valuable. Coaches need to engage in the same kind of scrutiny and self-examination that offers such powerful benefits to their clients.

In Positive Provocation, coaching thought leader Robert Biswas-Diener asks a series of twenty-five provocative and sometimes playful questions that take a fresh look at some of coaching's most cherished beliefs. What if coaches had agendas? Why are ethics so boring? What's so great about interrupting? Can we trust eureka moments? What if we used less empathy?

This is not an attack on the coaching profession-Biswas-Diener writes with a light, conversational, and often humorous touch. These are positive provocations, meant to stimulate your curiosity, engage you with the latest research, and invite you to see your practice with new eyes.

Biswas-Diener covers philosophies of coaching, communicating with clients, common coaching concepts, coaching interventions, and a big final provocation: should coaching be informed by science? This book will give you a richer understanding of the coaching process, make you more articulate about your own beliefs, and allow you to feel more engaged with the craft.

Since the 1980s, Appreciative Inquiry has proven to be one of the most powerful and effective methods for organizational change. Now two top consultants show how leaders can adapt its principles to become more personally and professionally resilient.

Appreciative Inquiry is a venerable and widely used organizational change method that emphasizes identifying what's working and building on those strengths. It is the focus on the best of what is and using that to generate the future that makes it so powerful. In answer to numerous requests from their clients, consultants and scholars McArthur-Blair and Cockell show how to apply the lessons of AI to build resilience in leaders. Every leader has moments of despair, that "dark night of the soul" where there seems to be no clear path forward. The authors' ALIVE process (Appreciate, Love and Inquire in order to Venture and Evolve) helps leaders forgive themselves for their own failures and those of others, focus on their strengths in times of despair, and amplify and grow those strengths so that they are better able to build hope in themselves and throughout their organizations. In times of rapid change like ours, building resilience is a vital leadership skill.

For newcomers and upper management alike, leadership can be overwhelming and overcomplicated. By building core tenets of leadership around two key words for each chapter, Bill Treasurer simplifies the equation.


Congratulations, new leader! You've joined the ranks during an exceptionally complicated time.

Our current workplace climate is fraught with political divisions, economic disparities, and ever-shifting social dynamics. Leaders are managing remote teams across larger geographic distances and facing new roadblocks to onboarding, giving performance feedback, and nurturing healthy relationships.

Leadership Two Words at a Time speaks directly to the plight of the new leader and is divided into three parts: Leading Yourself, Leading People, and Leading Work. Rather than overintellectualize the practice, Bill Treasurer breaks up the concept into essential and understandable learning nuggets-summed up by two-word headers-that provide the practical guidance and support that leaders often don't get. The result is time-tested wisdom that new leaders can grasp immediately and implement easily-and, with a little practice, master completely. Consider it a personal leadership playbook.

This book gives you the basic building blocks to gain both competence and confidence, take on greater responsibility, and learn what it takes to be and stay a leader.

Master persuasion as a leadership practice to spark change that sticks, turn resistance into collaboration, and move teams from compliance to lasting commitment.

Most change efforts fail not because of poor strategy but because leaders struggle to win genuine commitment. Between 60 and 70 percent of major organizational change initiatives fall short or fail outright. The missing ingredient? Constructive persuasion.

Drawing on over two decades of research and coaching thousands of executives worldwide, Dr. Jay Conger shatters outdated myths about persuasion as manipulation or performance. Instead, he reveals persuasion as the essential leadership practice that transforms resistance into collaboration, ideas into action, and plans into sustained progress.

Readers will learn to do the following:

• Map influence networks and identify key decision-makers who can tip organizational support
• Build credibility through humility, transparency, and demonstrated expertise rather than positional authority
• Frame problems that invite collaboration instead of triggering defensiveness
• Craft compelling evidence that combines data with emotional resonance
• Orchestrate the emotional arc that moves teams from uncertainty to confidence and commitment
• Remain open to being influenced themselves—the mark of truly persuasive leaders

Each chapter delivers field-tested frameworks, readiness checklists, and real-world cases from banking, healthcare, technology, and beyond. The result is a transformative playbook that elevates persuasion from soft skill to the decisive force behind leadership success in the 21st century.

This book, the first to treat workplace culture like a garden instead of a construction project, offers a proven framework that transforms toxic environments into thriving ecosystems where all talent flourishes.

Organizations fail when they treat culture like a construction project. They thrive when they treat it like a garden, cultivating conditions for growth rather than engineering behavior through rigid blueprints.

Award-winning consultant Abi Adamson introduces the SERN™ framework (Soil, Exposure, Roots, Nutrients) to guide sustainable cultural transformation. Drawing from her experience working with international clients, including Spotify, Sony Music, and Match Group, Abi shows how to do the following:

• Identify and detoxify the soil poisoning organizational foundations
• Expose who's hoarding the light while others wither in shadows
• Strengthen the root networks where real culture actually lives
• Distribute the nutrients people actually need to thrive (hint: it's not pizza Fridays)

Unlike traditional culture initiatives, focused on compliance and conformity, this framework reveals why expensive transformation efforts keep failing and how to spot “nutrient vampires” draining your best people.

For C-suite leaders, executives, people managers, and anyone who has ever felt invisible at work, this guide offers a sustainable alternative: treating culture as a living ecosystem requiring ongoing cultivation, not a one-time fix.

Because as Abi says, “We bloom together or we wilt alone.”™

Build organizations where employees feel truly safe to learn, contribute, and challenge the status quo.

The proven practical guide to psychological safety is now expanded with updated research and powerful new frameworks and tools.

Psychological safety—the belief that you can speak up without risk of punishment or humiliation—is crucial for high-performing teams and innovative organizations. This revised and expanded edition of Timothy Clark's groundbreaking framework provides leaders with a research-backed roadmap through four distinct stages that enable individuals to feel safe, valued, and empowered.

The four stages build progressively:

• Inclusion Safety (feeling included and accepted),
• Learner Safety (feeling safe to learn and ask questions),
• Contributor Safety (feeling safe to contribute and participate), and
• Challenger Safety (feeling safe to challenge the status quo and speak truth to power).

This new edition adds compelling quantitative evidence from Clark's global database of 1.2 million data points, validating the four-stage model across cultures and demographics. New chapters explore what psychological safety is not, the dangers of “nice” cultures, the relationship between psychological and physical safety, and practical measurement strategies.

Leaders will learn to banish fear, create performance-based accountability, and build environments where people thrive beyond expectations.

This complete guide to effective, transformative diversity training provides an answer to the superficial, check-the-box DEI efforts that are undermining the entire field.

DEI work is getting a bad reputation. But that's because it's not being done right, say veteran diversity consultants James O. Rodgers and Laura Kangas. Too many organizations are treating diversity training as a quick-hit, low-cost, check-the-box activity.

Effective diversity training involves behavioral change based on adult learning theory. It is rigorous, deeply personal, experience based, and, if done well, life changing. Rodgers and Kangas offer a complete guide, from design to implementation to results. They show how to

• determine what specific, tangible outcomes an organization wants before it starts
• link diversity training to overall organizational strategy
• help all participants forge an individual, emotional connection to the training
• identify what skills a facilitator needs-the right facilitator makes all the difference
• create memorable learning experiences, not simply educational programs

The authors' goal is nothing less than to spark a worldwide revolution of informed practitioners, employees, and business leaders who will demand diversity training be given the same time, resources, and attention as any other critical enterprise initiative.

Reading group discussion guide available in book.

This hilarious and profound workplace guide proves the rigorously rational and the supremely sympathetic can meet in the middle and merge their strengths. Readers will discover how blending with their opposite opens the pathway to being their truest selves.


We're all familiar with the introvert/extrovert divide, but there is another dichotomy that is just as significant. From the famed Myers-Briggs personality scale, Feelers put more weight on personal concerns and the people involved, and Thinkers are guided by objective principles and impersonal facts. This simple distinction lays the groundwork for the profoundly different ways that individuals make sense of and engage in both the workplace and the world.

Devora Zack, herself a proud snowflake, says we can directly control only three things: what we say, what we think, and what we do. Zack makes a strong case that the best use of our energy is to focus on our own reactions and perceptions rather than trying to fix or change others. The book includes an assessment that readers can take to learn their placement on the Thinker/Feeler spectrum before exploring different modes of communication and motivation based on personality type. Zack guides her readers to channel their emotions and successfully connect with those on the other side, both inside and outside of the workplace.

“Eileen delivers a new perspective on the burnout crisis with humor, good sense, and unique ideas on how to manage our brains. I owe my daily well-being to her. Keep this book at your side to help you glide through your workday.” -Marcia Reynolds, PsyD, author of The Discomfort Zone


It's official. For the first time, the World Health Organization has classified burnout as a health problem. Renowned motivational speaker Eileen McDargh proposes that to tackle it, we must learn to break out of energy-draining thoughts and behaviors.

Resilience, she argues, is strictly a matter of energy management-by better managing your energy, you can both build resiliency and overcome burnout. Breakthrough happens when our energy is consciously distributed to what matters most in our lives. So after a short survey that will tell you where you fit in a burnout and resiliency profile, McDargh helps pinpoint the causes of your burnout and examine the energy demands that keep you from refueling and recharging. She provides an in-depth energy analysis and gives you the keys to master the four dimensions that can give you a resilience breakthrough: head, heart, hands, and humor.

McDargh guides the reader through the process of identifying energy drains and implementing strategies for handling them, whatever phase of life you are in. Her intention is to help you not only to successfully manage work and life demands but also make even larger strides in understanding how to put together a life by design and not by default.

This career development tool kit is for people who want to take charge of their own professional futures.


This book is for employees who want to take charge of their own professional development. Many organizations have eliminated employee career development programs in favor of DIY efforts-and, even if this is not the case, there is more to be gained than lost in taking responsibility for your own career.

Elaine Biech offers practical guidelines for keeping your career on track and mapping it beyond your current job; overcoming personal roadblocks and finding your passion at work; and initiating talent conversations with your manager. Over 100 skills are outlined, including networking, handling pressure, prioritizing, showing political savvy, being a team player,, and selling your ideas. For each skill, Biech offers actions you can take immediately, ongoing practices, and long-term strategies.
Full of tools, tips, and resources, this book is written for the development of all employees. In addition, a short chapter offers advice to managers who want to bring out the best in their people.

A much-needed revised edition of the only book that presents a multicultural leadership model integrating eight practices from African-American, American Indian, and Latino communities-an alternative to the heavily or exclusively Anglo-American based concepts of leadership presented by most leadership books. The first edition has sold 20,000 copies, was the winner of the International Latino Book Award, Best Business Book, and was on the Rocky Mountain News Bestseller list.

Without a deep understanding of your company's culture, any change effort you undertake will fail. Bestselling author Jon Katzenbach and his coauthors identify the four most critical cultural elements leaders need to focus on.

Every organization has a unique culture, but they all have one thing in common. Whenever they have a big change to make, powerful emotional forces in their culture appear, at first, to resist it. But there are other culture forces under the surface that can be potential sources of catalytic strength. The best leaders succeed by tapping those “critical few” sources. Using an unusual, dialogue-based approach, Jon Katzenbach, author of the seminal The Wisdom of Teams (over 400,000 sold) shows how a sharp focus on just these elements reduces complexity and enables leaders to create profound cultural transformation and positive, lasting impact on performance.

The critical few elements are:

The critical few traits: the shared characteristics that are at the heart of people's emotional connection to what they do.
The critical few behaviors: people's actions that would lead a company to succeed if they were replicated at greater scale.
The critical few informal leaders: individuals whose emotional intuition and institutional trust make them valued guides for transformation, wherever they are on the org chart.

Corporate culture is critical to any organizational change effort. This book offers a proven model for identifying and leveraging the essential elements of any culture.


If you're going to make any significant change in an organization, you have to deal with the organizational culture. Because as Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” But there can be a big difference between the official culture as described in the company handbook and how work really gets done. This book, written by a unique team of two culture-change experts and a business anthropologist, is about solving this “culture puzzle.” The authors describe the four forces that shape every organization's-or, as they put it, every tribe's-culture from hunter-gatherers in the Amazon to corporate executives at Amazon. Interest: what the organization does to fulfill members' needs and earn their loyalty. Habit: which behaviors and ideas constitute “the way we do things around here.” Vision: where the organization came from and where it's going; and Innovation: how the organization adapts and changes. The authors provide detailed advice and analytic tools for understanding and strengthening these four forces in your organization, and for using that understanding to more your organization forward.

Now in a second edition, this classic book shows how to make conversations generative and productive rather than critical and destructive so people, organizations, and communities flourish.



We all know that conversations influence us, but we rarely stop to think about how much impact they have on our well-being and our ability to thrive. This book is the first to show how Appreciative Inquiry-a widely used change method that focuses on identifying what's working and building on it rather than just trying to fix what's not-can help us all communicate more effectively and flourish in all areas of our lives.

By focusing on what we want to happen instead of what we want to avoid and asking questions to deepen understanding and increase possibilities, we expand creativity, improve productivity, and unleash potential at work and home. Jackie Stavros and Cheri Torres use real-life examples to illustrate these two practices and the principles that underlie them.

The second edition includes a new chapter on establishing the right mindset for appreciative conversations and a free discussion guide download. This book demonstrates how the practices and principles of Appreciative Inquiry strengthen relationships and generate possibilities for a future that works for everyone.

In a wonderfully readable and fun way, SEEING SYSTEMS (over 30,000 copies sold) presents a unique and innovative theory of power dynamics that provides the reader with a new way of looking at, understanding, surviving, and prospering in the many systems of which we are part.