Workplace Culture

"What is impressive is not only how Winters builds a case for the urgency and need for bold, inclusive conversations but that she also gives specific strategies and competencies to turn her theory into practice.”
-Dr. Sheila Robinson, publisher and CEO, Diversity Woman Media

Effective dialogue across different dimensions of diversity, such as race, gender, age, religion, or sexual orientation, fosters a sense of belonging and inclusion, which in turn leads to greater productivity, performance, and innovation. Whether in the workplace, faith communities, or educational settings, our differences can tear us apart rather than bring us together if we do not know how to communicate. Recognizing our collective responsibility to earnestly address our differences and increase understanding and empathy will not only enhance organizational goals but will also lead to a healthier, kinder, and more compassionate world.

Award-winning diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant Mary-Frances Winters has been leading workshops on what she calls Bold, Inclusive Conversations for years. In this book she offers specific dialogue strategies to foster greater understanding on the following topics:
• Recognizing the importance of creating equity and sharing power
• Dealing with the "fragility" of dominant groups--their discomfort in engaging with historically subordinated groups
• Addressing the exhaustion historically marginalized groups feel from constantly explaining their different lived experience
• Exploring how to build trust and create psychologically safe spaces for dialogue
This guide is comprehensive for anyone who wants to break down the barriers that separate us and facilitate discussions on potentially polarizing topics.

Collaborative strategies work when they're designed by teams-where each person is heard, valued, and held accountable. This book is a practical guide for project team leaders and individual contributors who want their teams to play by a better set of rules.

Where do teams go wrong? Having the right people with the right skills doesn't mean they'll know how to work together as a team. David and Mary Sherwin maintain it's all in the design. Through a blend of straightforward activities, conversational stories, and dialogues that help model different forms of team interaction, this book will help teams:
• Create workday rituals that aid them in making better decisions and following through on their work responsibilities

• Identify patterns of behavior that are getting in the way of team performance, and design and test potential ways to them 

• Reinforce habits that help team members bring the human element into their interactions and foster open communication
Readers of this book will be more prepared to set up and survive challenging projects alongside their coworkers with a shared sense of ownership, and an eye towards retaining the integrity of their teams in the long term. Using a process that has worked at some of the world's cutting edge companies, the authors detail the steps to take control of team design and plan for success. The key is to give every team member a voice in designing the team's rules, and in keeping it aligned with the design over the life of the team.

Edited by legendary business author Ken Blanchard and featuring contributions by authors like Simon Sinek, Brené Brown, Stephen M. R. Covey, and Marshall Goldsmith, this collection offers expert advice on how to implement an increasingly popular and highly effective approach to leadership.

Servant leadership is the secret behind the success of some of the world's leading organizations. Succinctly put, serving leaders lead by serving their people, not by exalting themselves.
Through the stories and reflections of leading businesspeople, bestselling authors, and spiritual leaders, this collection offers tools for implementing this proven but radical leadership model. The book is organized into three sections:
-What is Servant Leadership? describes different aspects of servant leadership
-Models of Servant Leadership focuses on people who have been identified as classic servant leaders
-Putting Servant Leadership to Work features firsthand accounts of how servant leadership has been implemented in various organizations and the difference it has made in both results and human satisfaction.

The must-have book for everyone who wants to be heard. More than just a book on business speech, it looks at the range of common communication mistakes--from repeating oneself to speaking too quickly--that can result in a poor impression

Ditch the negative mental habits that derail conversations and destroy projects, and discover a framework for forging authentic, enduring, and productive connections.

All too often, we find our conversations stuck in cyclical patterns of unproductive behavior. We listen half-heartedly, react emotionally, and respond habitually, or what Chuck Wisner calls “sleep talking.”

Conscious Conversations explores the way we can reframe our thoughts, emotions, reactions, and interactions so we form a connection from the very first conversation and keep our discourse positive and productive throughout any endeavor. Wisner identifies four universal types of conversations and offers specific advice on maximizing the effectiveness of each:

• Storytelling-Acknowledging and investigating the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and others
• Collaborating-Exploring the way our stories interact with other people's stories
• Creating-Cocreating possibilities and discovering unforeseen solutions to sticky problems
• Committing-Coordinating our actions with others to get things done

These conversations unfold sequentially: our awareness of our stories transforms our ability to listen and collaborate, which opens our thoughts to creative possibilities, guiding us toward mindful agreements. This framework makes it possible to identify, understand, and deactivate disruptive emotional triggers; listen with empathy to people with opposing perspectives; and forge relationships built on trust.

A practical and irreverent guide to taking the sting out of feedback and reclaiming it as a motivating, empowering experience for everyone involved.


Feedback! Ugh. Say the word to a colleague, your spouse, or a friend, and watch the person's blood pressure rise and defenses go up. For most of us, it's a word loaded with experiences that may include bias, politics, pain, regret, and anger. However, if we take a step back and think about its true intent, we realize that feedback needn't be a bad thing. We humans want to improve, grow, and advance, and we need insights that can help us move in the right direction. If we close ourselves off from understanding how others experience us, then we close ourselves off to a life of learning and growth. The authors address how feedback got such a bad rap and how we can fix it. They provide three key Fs (focused, fair, and frequent) for positive feedback. They also include a slew of practical exercises and strategies to change how we view and experience feedback.

This is the first book to address the specific needs and challenges faced by high-level consultants, who work on very complex projects and must win the confidence of the most senior leaders in organizations.


Advanced consulting requires both expertise and personal qualifications that are distinct from those needed in everyday consulting. Advanced consultants work with high-level executive teams on complex issues such as strategy, organizational design, merger integration, digital disruption, culture change, and system-wide transformation. While neophyte consultants are often given a playbook to follow, advanced consultants need to invent methods that take full advantage of the opportunities that their work with clients presents.

There is an art to advanced consulting as well as a science; who you are is as important as what you do. Bill Pasmore draws on his four decades of experience as a consultant and teacher of consultants to show readers how to see possibilities that are not evident, conduct analyses that support the value of more comprehensive work, build relationships that engender deeper trust, adapt to changing circumstances, and empower members of their team to take independent actions while maintaining overall control of an engagement. Illustrated with vivid real-world examples and including a self-assessment to measure your progress, this book equips you to advance to more senior positions in your firm or to build a successful independent practice.

Books like StrengthsFinder 2.0 have helped leaders discover their strengths-but tend to stop there. Thuy and Milo Sindell argue that focusing only on our best abilities neglects a vital development opportunity. Inside every leader are “middle skills,” hidden strengths that can be turned into full strengths with attention and focus.

Discover Your Strengths and the StrengthsFinder titles-has resulted in a very one-dimensional model for leadership growth, say Thuy and Milo Sindell. Their research and work have shown that, like everyone, you have hidden, undeveloped strengths that, if identified and worked on, can expand your repertoire of skills, make you a better-balanced leader, and significantly improve performance.

Everyone has what the Sindells call Default Skills, or obvious strengths; Deficient Skills, or weaknesses; and Hidden Strengths, or skills in the middle. Focusing only on Default Skills can lead to resting on your laurels. But trying to develop Deficient Skills isn't worth it. It takes too much time and effort to bring these skills up to speed-the ROI just isn't there. It's in the neglected middle skills that the most potent development opportunities lie. They're close enough to being strengths that working on them can offer a powerful payoff-they are Hidden Strengths.

Using assessments, exercises, and case studies, the Sindells help you identify your most promising middle skills-your Hidden Strengths-and create a plan to turn them into full strengths. In today's work environment, not growing and stretching yourself translates into lack of innovation, stagnation, and obsolescence. Relying upon strengths is like relying upon training wheels-at a certain point you need to take them off improve and grow.

In a world of increasing polarization, Digital, Diverse & Divided shows us how to use cultural intelligence to bridge our divides and authentically connect with those around us.


Our divides are destroying us: red versus blue, Black versus White, globalists versus nationalists, agnostics versus Christians. Drawing on seminal research on social identity and cultural intelligence, this book explains our impulse to divide people into “us” versus “them” and reveals how we can tackle tribalism, confront racism, and develop a common vision for the future.

In Digital, Diverse & Divided, David Livermore outlines the four competencies of Cultural Intelligence (CQ):

• Motivation (CQ Drive)
• Cognition (CQ Knowledge)
• Metacognition (CQ Strategy)
• Behavior (CQ Action)

He shows how we can apply this foundation to a wide range of intercultural situations. This book includes personal anecdotes, stories from around the world, and references to the work of prominent authors, psychologists, thinkers, and economists.

Livermore examines different factors-place, race, gender, religious beliefs, and politics-that shape how we see the world and offers a way for us to reclaim our shared humanity.

The ever-increasing complexity we face requires a new way to think and work. To effectively lead an organization, bestselling author Mark Miller says, you have to play chess, not checkers. He shows how this mentality enables you to marshal all your available resources, including every employee, to strategically address challenges and opportunities.

In his latest business fable, top leadership author Mark Miller tells the story of newly appointed CEO Blake Brown, who takes over a company distressed by poor performance and low morale. Nothing Blake learned from his previous job seems to help him deal with the bigger, more complex problems he now faces. The game has changed. As his new mentor points out, Blake is playing a simple game of checkers when he should be playing chess.

Miller uses this metaphor to show how leaders can encourage deep, strategic thinking throughout an organization and utilize the unique abilities of each employee (bishops move differently than knights). He explains how to apply the “chess not checkers” mentality in four critical areas: leadership development, employee engagement, organizational alignment, and execution. This is an appealing, accessible guide to helping all leaders think ahead, plan their moves, and avoid getting checkmated by circumstances or competitors.

Learn how to take the right risks for lasting success. Begin Boldly provides a framework for making the kind of bold moves that will get your career off to its best start!

Many women enter the workforce feeling like they can never make a mistake, and as a result, they don't take risks in the crucial early stages of their careers. Women, and BIPOC women especially, are disproportionally penalized for mistakes, so any risk begins to feel like a bad risk. A 2019 KPMG study found that fewer than 43 percent of women surveyed were willing to take “big” risks, including volunteering to do a major presentation or asking for a pay raise.

Christie Hunter Arscott equips readers with the ability to differentiate between reckless and intelligent risks using an actionable model built around three mindsets: a curious mindset, a courageous mindset, and an agile mindset. With a step-by-step method for taking risks, making refinements, and assessing rewards, Arscott's approach gives women a flexible and repeatable framework to guide them through this critical career skill.

Liftoff empowers women to take chances on themselves so that risk-taking becomes an enlightening and empowering antidote for self-doubt.

This book will include a discussion guide.

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.