Workplace Culture

Many new ways of changing organizations have become popular, replacing the old top-down change methods with methods that engage everyone in the organization. This is an extensively revised, updated, and expanded edition of one of the original and leading guides to the core principles that underlie all of these new change methods and make them successful. Over 25,000 of the original sold.

You are more than a mouse in someone else's maze. In this business fable, Harvard Business School professor and bestselling author Deepak Malhotra encourages readers to control your own destiny rather than chase blindly after it.

Leaders all have stories-the events, perspectives, and behaviors that constitute who they are-but few are aware of what that story is or what is says about them. Leadership development expert Tim Tobin show how, by thinking of themselves as literally writing a story -with a plot, theme, characters, and an arc-leaders can take control of their story and become more effective, insightful, and inspiring.

Mega-selling author Ken Blanchard teams up again with his “Whale Done” coauthors to apply to parenting young children the simple principles that have proven so effective in many settings, from training killer whales to improving personal effectiveness to raising business performance.

You are more than a mouse in someone else's maze. In this business fable, Harvard Business School professor and bestselling author Deepak Malhotra encourages readers to control your own destiny rather than chase blindly after it.

Performance reviews don't work--they demotivate and drag performance. Chandler presents the answer with the Performance Management Reboot process, an employee-driven solution that powers people up.

Most people associate performance management with the annual performance review, which is universally dreaded by employees and HR alike. No evidence exists that such reviews do anything to improve performance, and yet they endure. Tamra Chandler wants to replace them with something that actually works.

This means more than just a little tweaking. As Chandler explains in vivid detail, the present process is completely broken and outdated. It's a cookie-cutter, fear-based, top-down approach that emphasizes negatives over positives, pits people and departments against each other, and has never motivated anyone to do anything but try to avoid it.

Her alternative, the Performance Management Reboot, is designed for the way people actually work today, and is grounded in the latest scientific findings about motivation. It's a customized, transparent, employee-driven process that values collaboration over competition, and rewards people for acquiring new skills and increasing their contribution instead of hitting some arbitrary benchmarks.

Chandler's illustrated guide cracks the code to building high performance and engaged employees, while optimizing performance management for today's increasingly connected, volatile, and multi-generational business world.

Leading futurist Bob Johansen shows how a new way of thinking, enhanced by new technologies, will help leaders break free of limiting labels and see new gradients of possibility in a chaotic world.

The future will get even more perplexing over the next decade, and we are not ready. The problem is that we're restricted by rigid structures that do not serve our larger goals-we think they inform us, but in fact, they tend to limit us. Simplistic stories of what's going on will be alluring but dangerous. Just in time, new technology and media tools will make it much easier to think beyond the categories, buckets, slots, and boxes that people use today to prepare for threats and imagine new opportunities.

Full-spectrum thinking is the ability to seek clarity and understanding across gradients of possibility. Utilizing successful examples of spectrum-thinking, such as gender fluidity and the autism spectrum, noted futurist Bob Johansen reveals how a spectrum unifies us rather than divides us by seeing each individual as inhabiting various points on the same landscape. By recognizing technology as an integral part of creating this spectrum, Johansen demonstrates that we can apply full-spectrum thinking to achieve breakthroughs in business, leadership, innovation, politics, community relations, and many other domains.

Most managers focus on near-term results, struggling to find the time and motivation to develop direct reports in any significant way. Yet fast-paced business environments demand managers who can grow their employees' skills. Axelrod and Coyle's work offers managers guidance on how to develop their staff in significant ways, while getting results, every day.

The final guide in the acclaimed Five Inclusive Disciplines trilogy introduces an actionable 5-step framework for building truly equitable, high-performing teams and unlocking their collective power to deliver groundbreaking results.

In today's fast-paced, interconnected world, breakthroughs don't come from individuals-they come from teams. And not just any teams, but diverse and inclusive ones. With decades of experience and cutting-edge research, Andrés Tapia and Michel Buffet provide a revolutionary model that empowers teams to harness the full potential of diverse perspectives.

At the heart of the book are The 5 Disciplines, which guide teams to tap into their collective power:
• Connecting – to build affiliation
• Caring – to nurture psychological safety
• Synchronizing – to harness collective intelligence
• Cultural Dexterity – to integrate diverse perspectives
• Powersharing – to ensure equitable contributions

The result? Unparalleled creativity, engagement, and performance. Through insightful guidance, practical tools, and a proven framework, The 5 Disciplines of Inclusive Teams shows how teams can unlock their collective power to achieve breakthrough results, transforming not only their organizations but also the future.

In today's highly networked and competitive global economy, mounting social and environmental problems are forcing corporations to focus on more than just their stockholders' interest in meeting bottom line profitability. More and more companies are recognizing the value of identifying and building relationships with all of their organization's stakeholders-employees, customers, suppliers, and even communities. In fact, recent research has shown that companies that treat their employees well, create jobs in the local economy, develop innovative products and services, take care of the environment, and contribute to the community, are often more profitable.
In The Stakeholder Strategy, sociologist Ann Svendsen presents an effective and practical step-by-step guide that companies can use to forge a network of powerful and profitable collaborative stakeholder relationships.
While some forward-thinking corporations have tried limited collaborative approaches-focusing on one stakeholder group at a time-few have taken a comprehensive and strategic approach to building relationships with all of their stakeholders, notes Svendsen. And, while considerable commitment to the idea of stakeholder collaboration exists, there is a lack of knowledge and understanding about how to develop these relationships. The Stakeholder Strategy is the first book to show business leaders and managers how to establish and maintain positive, mutually beneficial stakeholder relationships. Based on a synthesis of ideas from community relations, corporate philanthropy, stakeholder management, organizational change, sustainability, and the corporate social responsibility literature, it offers an integrated framework, as well as the practical tools for developing new kinds of collaborative relationships.
Svendsen uses easy-to-grasp concepts from everyday life, such as the process we go through in finding a mate or developing a long-term friendship, to illustrate these relationship-building strategies. She lays out the steps a company should take to create a collaboration-friendly organization: establishing a social mission, values, and ethical guidelines; assessing corporate readiness for collaboration; and making changes in communication, information and reward systems to support internal and external collaboration. Featuring case study examples from companies in North America and Europe who are working to build collaborative relationships with their stakeholders, The Stakeholder Strategy is the first book to provide a detailed explanation of how to conduct stakeholder audits and social audits so that companines can evaluate their relationship-building success and keep on track.

In this entertaining parable, bestselling authors Harry Paul, John Britt, and Ed Jent tell how to give and be your best in five critical work dimensions-passion, flexibility, communication, competency, and ownership-and foster excellence in your organization.

World-record endurance athlete and professional leadership coach Jason Caldwell draws on his amazing experiences to show how anyone can build and lead teams that accomplish incredible things.

As an adventurer who undertakes incredible challenges, such as rowing across the Atlantic or crossing the Namib Desert on foot, Jason Caldwell noticed how much of a pivotal role mistakes made in his record-breaking pursuits. The path to an ambitious goal is never a straight line. When mistakes inevitably happen, they can open up new options and choices. This book relays the crucial questions to ask when faced with any setback:

1. Is the failure something I have control over?
2. Is my goal still possible?
3. Do I want to keep going?
4. Is there another way to my goal?
5. Am I better, tougher, or smarter for this?

Caldwell draws on his amazing experiences to illustrate how these questions have helped him in literally death-defying situations. This is the first book to build a powerful business and personal success method out of the riveting and transformative failures of a true adventurer.

We are collectively creating results nobody wants, and most change efforts address the symptoms rather than the source.

Presencing offers a different approach—one that bridges inner development with outer systems change through 7 concrete practices built for this moment.

From Otto Scharmer, MIT senior lecturer and creator of Theory U, and Katrin Kaufer, MIT researcher, cofounder of the Presencing Institute, and author of Just Money (MIT Press), this field guide draws on more than twenty years of global work with the Theory U framework, now used by thousands of organizations across climate, finance, education, and social innovation.

Inside this book:

• The Wheel of Deep Change — a framework mapping 7 societal sectors and specific leverage points where transformation takes hold
• Social Fields theory — a deeper layer of systems thinking that accounts for the quality of consciousness from which collective action emerges
• Seven step-by-step practices covering generative listening, dialogue, co-sensing, presencing, co-imagining, co-creating, and ecosystem governance
• Real-world stories of “islands of coherence”—communities already demonstrating regenerative ways of working together across the globe
• Reflection questions and dialogue prompts for individual readers, leadership teams, and classroom or workshop settings

Readers new to Theory U will find a self-contained entry point, and those already familiar will find significant new depth and updated methods.

Lying can cause irreparable financial, psychological, and emotional damage in an organization, yet liars also know that we're terrible at recognizing their deceit. Goman's book is a simple primer to help anyone spot lies before they do harm.

Lies aren't good in general, but in the workplace they're especially poisonous. They can destroy employee engagement and productivity, undermine teamwork, increase stress, ruin people's livelihoods, and even bring down entire companies.

It's critical to catch workplace lies before they snowball into something catastrophic, but most of us have no clue about how to spot a liar. And the workplace setting adds another layer of complexity. At what point do you report a liar? If you decide to take action, what exactly should you do? And what if the liar is your boss?

In this entertaining and needed book, leading workplace body language expert Carol Kinsey Goman combines her own experiences with the latest research to provide a comprehensive guide to spotting, exposing, and minimizing workplace lies. Goman looks at the high cost of workplace deception for individuals and organizations, why people tell lies at work, and the kinds of lies they tell. She offers fifty ways that body language and vocal cues can help you spot a liar and explains how our own vanities, desires, self-deceptions, and rationalizations allow us to be duped.

Once you spot a lie, she provides tactical advice on how to respond, whether the liar is above, below, or on the same level as you. And Goman explains how to make sure your own body language doesn't inadvertently make you seem untrustworthy and what leaders at all levels can do to reduce lies and encourage candor.

Some workplace lies are a polite and positive part of professional life (“I'd be delighted to come to that meeting”). But Goman focuses on truly destructive lies and shows how you can prevent them from wreaking havoc on individuals and organizations.

Help is on the way for the legions of managers who woke up and found out they're in charge. Based on her background as a manager, trainer, and leadership consultant and coach, Devora Zack offers a book of lifesaving tips that is as humorous as it is wise.

Everyone needs to involve other people in order to accomplish their tasks and achieve their goals. It doesn't matter if you're a CEO leading a major restructuring or a PTA volunteer raising money for after-school programs, you can't do it all yourself-you and the work will suffer if you try. But the hit-and-miss way most people go about involving others often takes too much time and seems like more trouble than it's worth.

You Don't Have to Do It Alone takes a systematic approach to involvement. It lays out a simple, straightforward plan of action for finding the right people and keeping them energized, enthusiastic, and committed until the work is completed. The book is organized around a series of five questions corresponding to steps in the involvement process-in fact, these questions are the titles of the first five chapters. Each chapter begins with a short anecdote that introduces one of the questions and offers helpful tools and techniques for resolving it, as well as providing examples from corporations, government, and the nonprofit sector that make the book interesting, fun, memorable-and, above all, useful.

You Don't Have to Do It Alone is the Swiss Army Knife of involvement-a set of tools that can be used in any setting to get you the help you need. You will learn to involve others in a way that will actually make your work easier, resulting in less stress, better ideas, and more successful outcomes. This book's lessons apply whether you are working at a multinational corporation, an inner-city hospital, or at the community bake sale.