Lead, Don't Manage


Book Description

There's a disconnect in many organizations today. Management is often viewed as being synonymous with leadership, and while every manager would want to be seen as a leader, not everyone in management acts like they understand what leadership entails. But in Lead, Don't Manage, Mark Williams dives into the keys to cultivating successful and effective leadership at every level of an organization.From individual contributors to the C-Suite, Williams understands and explains the value of true leadership and how to establish it among a workforce. There are no mind tricks here, no newly revealed secrets. Grounded and accessible, Lead, Don't Manage provides a straightforward application of proven techniques that will help employees of all levels grasp the impact they can have on their organization and stretch to reach their potential.When you learn to lead from the top down, you'll build organizational success from the bottom up.




Manage to Lead


Book Description

Whether one wants to change personal habits, implement a new system, improve a business process, get team members to work together, increase a community's appreciation for diversity, or even to topple a monarchy, taking seven actions driven by seven disarmingly simple truths will individually and collectively help achieve the goal. Manage to Lead: Seven Truths to Help You Change the World is a workbook that top educators, consultants, and executives use to help their students, clients, and staffs become effective leaders of strategic change. Manage to Lead serves as the core content for a class in Organization Analysis, Strategy and Development (OAS). The workbook introduces a straightforward framework to describe and assess any organization. It also provides a structured approach to plan and implement next steps for an organization as it strives for long-term growth and performance. Those interested in curriculum content for high-end leadership development should consider placing Manage to Lead at the center of their program. Those who purchase the workbook are invited to contact the author to request related teaching artifacts including course syllabus, readings list, PDF of class slides, and minute-by-minute timing of 38-classroom hours.




How to Lead When You Don't Know Where You're Going


Book Description

How do you lead an organization stuck between an ending and a new beginning—when the old way of doing things no longer works but a way forward is not yet clear? Beaumont calls such in-between times liminal seasons—threshold times when the continuity of tradition disintegrates and uncertainty about the future fuels doubt and chaos. In a liminal season it simply is not helpful to pretend we understand what needs to happen next. But leaders can still lead. How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going is a practical book of hope for tired and weary leaders who risk defining this era of ministry in terms of failure or loss. It helps leaders stand firm in a disoriented state, learning from their mistakes and leading despite the confusion. Packed with rich stories and real-world examples, Beaumont guides the reader through practices that connect the soul of the leader with the soul of the institution.




Leading Geeks


Book Description

Winner of the 2003 Financial Times Germany/getAbstract Business & Finance Book Award Leading Geeks challenges the conventional wisdom that leadership methods are universal and gives executives and managers the understanding they need to manage and lead the technologists on whom they have become so dependent. This much-needed book? written in nontechnical language by Paul Glen, a highly acclaimed management consultant? gives clear directions on how to effectively lead these brilliant yet notoriously resistant-to-being-managed knowledge workers. Glen not only provides proven management strategies but also background on why traditional approaches often don't work with geeks. Leading Geeks describes the beliefs and behavior of geeks, their group dynamics, and the unique nature of technical work. It also offers a unique twelve-part model that explains how knowledge workers deliver value to an organization.




Move


Book Description

Move past the obstacles and implement your new strategy Move is your guide to mobilizing your whole organization to take your business forward. Whatever your needed transformation may be: a new initiative, a new market, a new product, your fresh strategy is up against a powerful foe: an organization's tendency to stay very busy and completely engaged what it's already doing. This book shows you how to cut through resistance and get your team engaged and proactively doing the new thing! Author Patty Azzarello draws on over twenty-five years of international business management experience to identify the chronic challenges that keep organizations from decisively executing strategy, and to give you a practical game plan for breaking through. Leaders tend to assume that stalls in execution are inevitable, unchanging parts of the workplace—but things can change. At the heart of every execution problem is the fact that there simply are not enough people doing what the business needs. This guide shows you how to get your entire organization on board—remove the fear, excuses, and hurdles—and uphold the new pursuit against distractions and dissent. No transformation can succeed without suitable engagement from the whole organization, but building engagement can be difficult, uncomfortable, and tentative. This book shows you how to get it done. Get your organization to embrace and personally commit to the new work Remove obstacles and passive aggressive attacks that block progress Defend new strategic initiatives against short term pressures to revert to "business as usual" Sustain momentum and the desire to move forward Make sure no one is ever asking, 'Are we still doing this?' Inertia isn't just a law of the universe, it's a law in the workplace that can be a major obstacle to making things happen. The great thing about inertia is that it cuts two ways: a body at rest remains at rest, but a body in motion remains in motion. People love to finish things. Move shows you how to make successful execution the new norm—starting today.




Lead From The Heart


Book Description

Leadership and engagement expert Mark C. Crowley shows how trading in the old business playbook for heart-led leadership strategies will create purpose-driven, dedicated employees and higher levels of performance. Revised and updated to address the needs of those managing Gen Z and millennial employees in addition to the latest global research on employee engagement. In this thoroughly revised and updated edition of his now classic book, visionary Mark C. Crowley provides the roadmap workplace leaders the world over are seeking: How to most successfully and sustainably inspire and manage other human beings in the post-pandemic era. · Nearly 50 million workers quit their jobs in the U.S. alone in 2021—a record number likely to be exceeded in 2022. · While we might imagine that an opportunity to earn greater pay is the key driver of this “Great Resignation,” research shows two-thirds of the reasons people leave jobs boil down to issues related to their engagement and overall well-being. · More specifically, people quit when they feel they aren’t valued, respected, appreciated, coached—or cared about personally—by their manager and organization. · Thanks in large part to the COVID pandemic and a global reset of what matters most to people in their lives, human beings have profoundly evolved in what they need and want in exchange for their work. · Consequently, a radical change in employee expectations demands that organizations and managers rapidly pivot by embracing leadership practices that match the moment. · The remedy to the Great Resignation is to adopt more humane ways of managing people knowing they inherently lead to infinitely greater engagement not to mention optimal employee performance. · In this new and updated version of his seminal and visionary book, Mark C. Crowley draws upon emerging medical and other scientific discoveries which prove it's the heart, not the mind, that drives human motivation and achievement. · While we’ve long been led to believe that human beings are essentially rational beings, new research shows that feelings and emotions far more often motivate human behavior and what people care about most and commit themselves to in their lives. · In light of this breakthrough understanding, it’s become incumbent upon workplace managers to pay great attention to their employees' emotional experience at work—far greater attention than any of us ever believed necessary. · Ironically, most of us were told the heart has no place in workplace management. In fact, most of us were taught that the heart acts like Kryptonite in leadership: it inherently undermines a manager's effectiveness - and lowers performance. · What makes this book so remarkable is that it brilliantly contradicts all those traditional beliefs and proves why people naturally and instinctively respond to managers who care about them personally and support their deep human needs. · To be absolutely clear, there's nothing soft or weak about the Lead From The Heart philosophy. Instead, it represents the future of workplace management and a roadmap to driving uncommon engagement, productivity and profitability when organizations around the world are wanting it most. · Rich with inspiring stories and illuminating research, this book proves that when you lead people with a greater balance of mind and heart, people naturally follow. And they also excel.




Leading from the Middle


Book Description

The definitive playbook for driving impact as a middle manager Leading from the Middle: A Playbook for Managers to Influence Up, Down, and Across the Organization delivers an insightful and practical guide for the backbone of an organization: those who have a boss and are a boss and must lead from the messy middle. Accomplished author and former P&G executive Scott Mautz walks readers through the unique challenges facing these managers, and the mindset and skillset necessary for managing up and down and influencing what happens across the organization. You’ll learn the winning mindset of the best middle managers, how to develop the most important skills necessary for managing from the middle, how to create your personal Middle Action Plan (MAP), and effectively influence: Up the chain of command, to your boss and those above them Down, to your direct reports and teams who report to you Laterally, to peers and teams you have no formal authority over Anyone in an organization who reports to someone and has someone reporting to them must lead from the middle. They are the most important group in an organization and have a unique opportunity to drive impact. Leading from the Middle explains how.




Managing


Book Description

A half century ago Peter Drucker put management on the map. Leadership has since pushed it off. Henry Mintzberg aims to restore management to its proper place: front and center. “We should be seeing managers as leaders.” Mintzberg writes, “and leadership as management practiced well.” This landmark book draws on Mintzberg's observations of twenty-nine managers, in business, government, health care, and the social sector, working in settings ranging from a refugee camp to a symphony orchestra. What he saw—the pressures, the action, the nuances, the blending—compelled him to describe managing as a practice, not a science or a profession, learned primarily through experience and rooted in context. But context cannot be seen in the usual way. Factors such as national culture and level in hierarchy, even personal style, turn out to have less influence than we have traditionally thought. Mintzberg looks at how to deal with some of the inescapable conundrums of managing, such as, How can you get in deep when there is so much pressure to get things done? How can you manage it when you can't reliably measure it? This book is vintage Mintzberg: iconoclastic, irreverent, carefully researched, myth-breaking. Managing may be the most revealing book yet written about what managers do, how they do it, and how they can do it better.




Leadership on the Line, With a New Preface


Book Description

The dangerous work of leading change--somebody has to do it. Will you put yourself on the line? To lead is to live dangerously. It's romantic and exciting to think of leadership as all inspiration, decisive action, and rich rewards, but leading requires taking risks that can jeopardize your career and your personal life. It requires putting yourself on the line, disrupting the status quo, and surfacing hidden conflict. And when people resist and push back, there's a strong temptation to play it safe. Those who choose to lead plunge in, take the risks, and sometimes get burned. But it doesn't have to be that way say renowned leadership experts Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky. In Leadership on the Line, they show how it's possible to make a difference without getting "taken out" or pushed aside. They present everyday tools that give equal weight to the dangerous work of leading change and the critical importance of personal survival. Through vivid stories from all walks of life, the authors present straightforward strategies for navigating the perilous straits of leadership. Whether you're a parent or a politician, a CEO or a community activist, this practical book shows how you can exercise leadership and survive and thrive to enjoy the fruits of your labor.




It's the Manager


Book Description

Who will lead your workforce during rapid change? Gallup research reveals: It’s the manager. While the world’s workplace has been going through historic change, the practice of management has been stuck in time for decades. The new workforce — especially younger generations — wants their work to have deep mission and purpose. They don’t want old-style command-and-control bosses. They want coaches who inspire them, communicate with them frequently and develop their strengths. Who is the most important person in your organization to lead your teams through these changes? Decades of global Gallup research reveal: It’s your managers. They are the ones who make or break your organization’s success. Packed with 52 discoveries from Gallup’s largest study of the future of work, It’s the Manager shows leaders and managers how to adapt their organizations to rapid change — from new workplace demands to the challenges of managing remote employees, the rise of artificial intelligence, gig workers, and attracting and keeping today’s best employees. Great managers maximize the potential of every team member and drive your organization’s growth. And they give every one of your employees what they want most: a great job and a great life. This is the future of work. It’s the Manager includes a unique code to take the CliftonStrengths assessment, which reveals your top five strengths, as well as supplemental content available on Gallup’s online workplace platform.