Workplace Culture

Light bulb moments in coaching are the creative insights that change minds and lives.

A new, highly actionable guide for disrupting the narratives holding clients back from resolving problems and making the changes they want in themselves, Breakthrough Coaching provides methods, resources, and exercises to help you activate immedi­ate and sustainable shifts in perspective and behavior, moving you forward on your path of coaching mastery.

Stop being haunted by doubt and discomfort. Discover how to quickly create safety and connection so your clients accept when you challenge their thinking. Then know what to say that evokes the creative flashes of insight that change their minds and lives forever.

Read Breakthrough Coaching to unlock access to:
•5 Modules of learning and discovery
•19 Resource Tools and 5 Practice Exercises
•Coaching case studies and examples
•And so much more

No longer will you worry “can I really say that?” or “should I have said more?” Instead, you'll be able to reveal deep desires and dreams, shine a light on blind spots and mental blocks, and open your client's minds to new perspectives that change their stories ripe with new possibilities-in less than an hour of your time together.

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.

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.

A comprehensive new model for creating inclusive organizations, illuminating the vital role that inclusion plays in developing solutions to the critical social, environmental, and leadership challenges we face.

Most organizational DE&I efforts are focused on changing individual behaviors. But unless you change the organizational structures-the practices, processes, and systems that surround and support individual behaviors-your change efforts will not take root. Structural inclusion makes behavioral inclusion stick.

Andrés Tapia and Fayruz Kirtzman have found that five disciplines encompass the structures, mindsets, behaviors, and accountabilities required for creating inclusive organizations that will have transformational impact not only on their culture and people but also on society and the planet:

1: Manage the Risk: know how to deal with the legal, reputational, and cultural risks of either doing the wrong thing, or not doing the right thing.
2: Explode the Awareness: make sure leaders and employees are deeply informed about, and publicly committed to, the value of DE&I.
3: Maximize the Talent Systems: ensure that leaders and managers display inclusive behaviors when they manage and optimize talent.
4: Master the Logistics: integrate DE&I into operations in ways that lead to improved efficiencies.
5: See the Marketplace: expand to new consumer market segments, enhance cross culturally competent customer service, and form effective partnerships with overlooked communities.

The authors provide assessment tools and case studies of organizations that have implemented each discipline, highlighting what worked and what tripped them up. And they take a wider view, showing how inclusive organizations practicing the five disciplines can address what they call society's four vital tasks: diversify leadership, eradicate polarization, achieve justice, and save the planet. This is a complete guide to how to make your organization a systematic, process-oriented engineer of change for the full range of your stakeholders.

Stop complicating everything! Create simple messages that are more powerful, more memorable, and win people over.

Simply Put is a modern exploration of the simplicity principle for anybody who needs to sell stuff or persuade others. This book is a splash of cold water, designed to wake up entrepreneurs, C-suite executives, and marketing pros who have something they need to tell the world but just can't quite connect the dots. With this book, we're all better marketers.

So why does simple win? And how do we get simple? The award-winning marketing entrepreneur behind New York Times best-selling authors and notable campaigns such as I Love NY provides answers and tools to simplify messages in this practical guide.

From “Yes We Can” to “Just Do It”, regardless of if they're trying to get your dollars, your votes, or just your thoughts, effective messages share one thing – they're simple. Being able to tell your story clearly and effectively is the winning skill for the next generation of entrepreneurs and leaders.

Creating justice-centered organizations is the next frontier in DEI. This book shows how to go beyond compliance to address harm, share power, and create equity.

Traditional DEI work has not succeeded at dismantling systems that perpetuate harm and exclude BIPOC groups. Proponents of DEI have put too much focus on HR solutions, such as increasing representation, and not enough emphasis on changing the deeper organizational systems that perpetuate inequities-in other words, on justice. DEIJ work diverges from traditional metrics-driven DEI work and requires a new approach to effectively dismantle power structures.

This thought-provoking, solutions-oriented book offers strategic advice on how to adopt a justice mindset, anticipate and address resistance, shift power dynamics, and create a psychologically safe organizational culture. Individual chapters provide pragmatic how-to guides to implementing justice-centered practices in recruitment and hiring, data collection and analysis, learning and development, marketing and advertising, procurement, philanthropy, and more.

DEIJ pioneer Mary-Frances Winters and her coauthors address some of the most significant aspects of adding a justice focus to diversity work, showing how to create a workplace culture where equity is not a checklist of performative actions but a lived reality.

An expanded edition of the first practical, nonjudgmental handbook for dealing with microaggressions, featuring examples, sample scripts, action plans, a new discussion and activity guide, and up-to-date suggestions for creating a culture of belonging in the workplace.

Overt discrimination is relatively easy to spot. But the less obvious but more common actions that make people feel left out or stigmatized in our workplaces, commonly called microaggressions, can be hard to identify and even harder to deal with.

The author use a clearer, more accurate term: subtle acts of exclusion (SAE). After all, people generally aren't trying to be aggressive-usually they're trying to say something nice, learn more about a person, or be funny. Bring accused of aggression shuts the conversation down, when you want to open it up.

This book features examples, tools, sample scripts, and action plans to help readers prevent subtle acts of aggression from happening, or deal with them when they do. Updated throughout, this second edition features:

• A greatly expanded chapter on “intentional acts of inclusion”-actions for creating a sense of belonging.
• A discussion and activity guide ideal for book clubs and training sessions
• A new concluding chapter, Hope for Humanity

Whether in the form of stereotypes, assumptions, backhanded compliments, or objectification, SAEs are damaging to our coworkers, friends, and acquaintances. This book is your friendly, accessible, non-judgemental guide to creating a welcoming workplace.

In developing the skills necessary to engage in Bold, Inclusive Conversations around polarizing topics, we can acknowledge that these subjects are complex, that there are no simple answers, and that it takes time and practice to learn how to do it well.

Politics, religion, race-we can't talk about topics like these at work, right? But in fact, these conversations are happening all the time, either in real life or virtually. And if they aren't handled effectively, they can become more polarizing and divisive, impacting productivity, engagement, retention, teamwork, and even employees' sense of safety in the workplace.

In this second edition of We Can't Talk about That at Work!, best-selling author Mary-Frances Winters and new coauthor Mareisha N. Reese of The Winters Group, Inc., provide fresh examples, updated research, and compelling insights. Featuring a new chapter on how two organizations have actualized the model for Bold, Inclusive Conversations as well as a discussion guide and updated glossary, this modern classic offers step-by-step guidance for conducting structured conversations around polarizing topics. Leaders and organizations can address sensitive subjects head on in a way that brings people together instead of driving them apart.

Don't risk the dire consequences of your work processes becoming obsolete-discover a powerful model for constant, ongoing, enterprise-wide process evolution and optimization.

If you have a great product, but don't have the operations in place to efficiently and effectively support it-production, manufacturing, sales, finance, human resources, etc.-you won't succeed. Product innovation is seen as flashier and so gets far more attention, but you can create an enduring competitive advantage by revolutionizing business operations.

The problem is most attempts to improve business operations are reactive, sporadic, and siloed. Tony Saldanha and Filippo Passerini's Dynamic Process Transformation model provides a living model for constant, ongoing process evolution and optimization.

The authors focus on maximizing three drivers of change. First, “open market rules”-each business process must be run as a separate business, instead of via monolithic mandates coming down from on high. Second, there must be “unified accountability”- outcomes must be clear and consistent across the company, instead of being siloed within departments. And third, there needs to be a “dynamic operating engine,” a methodology to convert the constantly changing business process goals into tactical day-to-day employee actions.

With numerous examples from leading companies, this book shows how to proactively keep business processes across the company from becoming obsolete and take advantage of a neglected key to success.

The iconic Henry Mintzberg provides a crystal-clear map to the forms and forces that shape all human organizations, synthesizing his fifty years of research.

We live in a world of organizations, from our birth in hospitals until our burial by funeral homes. In between, we are educated, employed, entertained, and exasperated by organizations. We had better understand how these strange beasts really work. But where can we go to find out?

Welcome to Understanding Organizations . . . Finally! For half a century, Mintzberg has been observing organizations, advising them, engaging them, and escaping them. Here he offers a masterful update and revision of his 1983 classic, Structure in Fives.

Believing there is one best way to structure organizations is the worst way to do so. A better place to start is by recognizing different species of organizations. Mintzberg identifies seven-personal enterprises, programmed machines, professional assemblies, project pioneers, and others. He explores these forms and the seven forces that drive them toward hybrids and across their life cycles.

You will find no better guide to the care and feeding of these extraordinarily varied and vital creatures than this book.

Avoid inadvertently offending or alienating anyone by following six straightforward communication guidelines developed by a no-nonsense linguistic anthropologist and business consultant.

In today's fast-moving and combative culture, language can feel like a minefield. Terms around gender, disability, race, sexuality and more are constantly evolving. Words that used to be acceptable can now get you “cancelled.” People are afraid of making embarrassing mistakes. Or sounding outdated or out of touch. Or not being as respectful as they intended.

But it's not as complicated as it might seem. Linguistic anthropologist Suzanne Wertheim offers six easy-to-understand principles to guide any communication-written or spoken-with anyone:

• Reflect reality
• Show respect
• Draw people in
• Incorporate other perspectives
• Prevent erasure
• Recognize pain points

This guide clarifies the challenges-and the solutions-to using "they/them," and demonstrates why "you guys" isn't as inclusive as many people think. If you follow the principles, you'll know not to ask a female coworker with a wedding ring about her husband-because she might be married to a woman. And you'll avoid writing things like "America was discovered in 1492," because that's just when Europeans found it.

Filled with real-world examples, high-impact word substitutions, and exercises that boost new skills, this book builds a foundational toolkit so people can evaluate what is and isn't inclusive language on their own.

Discover a more agile, democratic, and effective model of leadership, from legendary business scholar Edgar Schein and Silicon Valley executive Peter Schein.

Legendary organizational scholar Edgar Schein and former Silicon Valley executive Peter Schein say leadership today requires that people transcend their hierarchical roles and relate to each other as human beings-what they call humble leadership. In such relationships new ideas can flow freely, mistakes can come to light immediately, and course corrections can be made in real time rather than “by committee” or by order of the lone heroic CEO.

This second edition includes three new chapters. Chapter 1 zeros-in on the Schein's actionable definition of leadership-relative to management and administration-focused on leading people toward “new and better.” Chapter 2 introduces the concept of “situational humility”-leaders now need to shift between several types of relationships to deal with the accelerating complexity of a supply-constrained, “quiet-quitting,” and “two-days-in-the-office” world. And Chapter 5 explains how to create a culture of humble leadership.

Illustrated with examples from healthcare, government, the military, tech, and more, this is a compact, accessible guide to a leadership paradigm far better suited to a world that demands fast, nimble response to change, and a workplace hungry for mutual respect and trust.

Find out how bold actions by visionary leaders can inspire powerful stories that drive culture change.

Data indicates that most strategic efforts to change a company's culture fail. So how do companies succeed in this endeavor?

A top strategy professor and two highly successful CEOs found that, in companies that had successfully changed their culture, leaders had taken dramatic actions that embodied the new cultural values. These actions inspired stories that became company legends, repeated in every department and handed on to new employees.

Through compiling and analyzing 150 stories from business leaders who have achieved change, they identified 6 attributes that every successful culture change story has in common:

1. The actions are authentic
2. They revolve around the CEO
3. They signal a clean break with the past, and a clear path to the future
4. They appeal to employee heads and hearts
5. They're often theatrical or dramatic
6. They're told, and re-told, throughout the organization

With extensive and inspiring examples of stories containing these attributes, the authors illustrate how readers can harness the power of stories within their company in order to change or create a winning culture to align with any strategy.

Drawing on the accumulated expertise of one of the world's top leadership development organizations, this is a comprehensive and accessible guide to effective leadership practice, written in fifty-two short, to-the-point chapters.

A disciplined leader is someone who identifies and focuses in on what author John Manning calls “the vital few”-that 20 percent of activities that will deliver 80 percent of the results. Manning should know. He is the President of Management Action Programs, Inc., a general management consulting firm that's helped tens of thousands of leaders accelerate their leadership and management performance. In this book he draws on MAP's fifty years of expertise to present a comprehensive guide to effective leadership practice in short, quick-read chapters-the format best suited to busy executives.

The Disciplined Leader offers fifty-two succinct lessons to help you hone in on your own vital few in three critical areas: mastering yourself, sharpening your leadership capabilities, and strengthening critical relationships with employees and customers. Each lesson comes with recommended tactics and practical “Now Get Going!” tips for implementing it, so there are literally hundreds of pieces of must-know, time-tested advice here. In each of the three critical areas, Manning emphasizes the vital role of professional and personal discipline, the essential ingredient in making each lesson work. This is a hands-on, nuts-and-bolts guide to leadership practice that's built to inspire action, drive change, and achieve results.

Author of the bestselling DEI Deconstructed returns with a companion workbook filled with practical and actionable techniques for changemakers at all stages of their DEI journey.

The next step in your DEI journey starts here. Building on the knowledge base of DEI Deconstructed, Lily Zheng offers a workbook with 40 original exercises, worksheets, and other tools to help guide you and your organization toward more substantive and lasting DEI outcomes. Whether you're a new or veteran DEI practitioner looking to improve your practice, a leader looking to grow your leadership skills, or an advocate looking to play more powerful roles in movements, this book will give you the practical tools to do just that.

From self-work to organizational change, this workbook will upskill you with the core competencies required for impactful DEI work, such as – diagnosing inequity, working with constituents, building movements, creating psychological safety, stewarding inclusive cultures, resolving conflict and harm, and achieving systems change. Most importantly, it will give you valuable experience putting these skills into action. Each activity can stand on its own and is designed to stimulate valuable reflection and practice. Included are recommendations for targeted exercise roadmaps to supplement your learning journey. Taken all together, these exercises are a complete masterclass in any practitioner's DEI education.

Leadership legend and bestselling author Ken Blanchard returns with trust expert and thought leader Randy Conley to present a structured playbook based on the bestselling Simple Truths of Leadership.

The companion playbook to Simple Truths of Leadership expands on the book's 52 essential principles of servant leadership and trust building. This structured playbook provides weekly prompts and exercises to help you track your progress toward your leadership goals. It focuses on one Simple Truth per week and includes:

• A summary of each Simple Truth
• A game plan for using each truth in your workplace, including thought-provoking questions and exercises to challenge your thinking and cause you to consider new ideas about leadership
• A Call to Action to “Try It This Week”

With so much of today's workforce feeling disengaged from the work they do, it's critical for leaders to move away from self-serving methods and embrace servant leadership to put their followers' needs before their own. And by journaling alongside servant leadership principles, you will be able to turn the common sense behind these simple truths into common practice for you and your organization.

Improve communication, engagement, and culture with active listening.

When employees, colleagues, and customers are not being heard, organizational culture, employee happiness, and overall organizational success will suffer. How well do you listen?

Active listening is the doorway to increased belonging, loyalty, profitability, innovation, and so much more. It is the difference between thinking we understand what people want and knowing what they want. Want to build stronger relationships, avoid misunderstandings, and anticipate problems before they surface at work?

All you have to do is listen.

The Art of Active Listening introduces a 5-step framework that shows you how to listen successfully and act upon what you are hearing. Readers will discover how to:

1. Recognize the unsaid
2. Seek to understand
3. Decode
4. Act
5. Close the loop

Backed by her personal review of over 30,000 employee and customer surveys and facilitation of 100's of focus groups, Younger discovered one universal truth: We all want to be heard. We want our voices to matter. We want the work we do to matter.

When we get this right - when we listen to our employees and customers and care about them not just for what they can do but for who they ARE - they can and will move mountains.

Using the tools provided in this book, you can implement active listening, regardless of whether you're in-person or virtual, that benefits all team members and customers, strengthens overall engagement, improves organizational culture and creates a space for everyone to have a voice.

When those at work feel heard, they will do whatever it takes to achieve outcomes that serve your relationship and your organization.

Experience the power of inclusion, community, and taking action! An updated, expanded edition.

By 2045 Latinos will make up 1 in 4 Americans. They are projected to be 78% of the new entries into the labor force in the next ten years. By sheer numbers alone, Latinos will shape the 21st Century. What does it take to lead such a varied and vibrant people who hail from twenty-six countries and are a blend of different races? And what can leaders of all cultures and ethnicities learn from how Latinos lead?

Juana Bordas takes us on a journey to the very heart and soul of Latino leadership. She offers 10 principles that richly illustrate the inclusive, people-centered, socially responsible, and life-affirming ways Latinos have led their community. This model is uniquely suited to this century's multicultural, global age.

This new and expanded edition includes a chapter on intergenerational leadership that recognizes vast generational shifts are occurring: ten thousand Baby Boomers retire every day and Millennials and Zs are the largest generations in history. Six out of 10 Latinos are millennials. This new chapter can guide us in preparing the next generations to take the helm of leadership.

This unprecedented and wide-ranging book shows that Latino leadership is indeed powerful and distinctive and has lessons that can inform leaders of every background.