Workplace Problems

Being a dog walker isn't as glamorous as you might imagine. Unless, of course, you're walking a tech billionaire's German shepherd mix. And when your grumpy, gorgeous billionaire boss asks you to spend the evenings at his place to babysit his teenage niece, who are you to refuse? You think, what could possibly go wrong? I'll tell you what can go wrong: Your business implodes, your heart shatters, and you find out you're carrying his baby.

Bullies aren't limited to the playground. These days, they roam our offices and can be found everywhere from break rooms to boardrooms. They don't steal your lunch money, but they can make your work life a living hell - and even ruin your career. Whether the bully is a boss or a coworker...whether you're the target of manipulation, intimidation, verbal abuse, or deliberate humiliation, Beating the Workplace Bully will show you how to fight back.

A renowned leadership consultant offers an “a powerful and timely resource for leaders at every level” (Marshal Goldsmith, author of What Got You Here Won’t Get You There), drawing on decades of her in-the-field research and consulting As an executive coach, Dr. Katie Best has helped...

The hallmark of any exceptional career is the ability to devise innovative solutions for work challenges. Creative thinking skills are vital for your professional advancement.

Difficult people are the worst part of a manager's job. Whether it comes from direct reports or people above, outbursts, irrational demands, griping, and other disruptions need to be dealt with - and it's your responsibility to do it. Leading the Unleadable turns this dreaded chore into a straight forward process that gently, yet effectively, improves behaviors.

The original edition of Discipline Without Punishment introduced a positive approach for getting problem employees to meet - and often even exceed - job requirements. The book still delivers on that promise, and in this revised edition, Dick Grote provides new insights, along with sample dialogues, memos, and worksheets.

Using stories from his time at Netscape, Apple, and Slack, Michael Lopp presents a series of small but compelling practices to help you build leadership skills. You’ll learn how to create teams that are highly productive, highly respected, and highly trusted. The essays in this book examine the practical skills Lopp learned from exceptional leaders - as a manager at Netscape, a senior manager and director at Apple, and an executive at Slack. You’ll learn how to apply these lessons to your own experience.

In The High-Velocity Edge, the reissued edition of five-time Shingo Prize winner Steven J. Spear's critically acclaimed book Chasing the Rabbit, Spear describes what sets market-dominating companies apart and provides a detailed framework you can leverage to surge to the lead in your own industry. Spear examines the internal operations of dominant organizations across a wide spectrum of industries, from technology to design and from manufacturing to health care.

For decades, alarms have sounded about declining engagement. Yet companies continue to struggle with toxic cultures, and the low productivity and unhappiness that go with them. Why is "culture" so difficult to improve? What makes so many good employees check out? Neuroscientist Paul Zak shows that innate brain functions hold the answers. It all boils down to trust. When someone shows you trust, a feel-good jolt of oxytocin surges through your brain and triggers you to reciprocate.

Dream, Believe, Dare, Do. Though four simple words, this carefully crafted credo lies at the heart of Walt Disney's enviable empire and has led The Walt Disney Company to prosperity for decades. As foremost experts on Disney, authors Bill Capodagli and Lynn Jackson return with an updated and expanded third edition of The Disney Way to show how organizations can incorporate this four-pillared credo to support any business, drive any team, and guide any leader to create immeasurable success.

Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a "good" leader in all other respects would also be an effective leader of innovation. The truth is, leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the "collective genius" of the people in the organization.

The traditional attitude toward creativity in the American business world is to "think outside the box": to brainstorm without restraint in hopes of coming up with a breakthrough idea, often in moments of crisis. Sometimes it works, but it’s a problem-specific solution that does nothing to engender creative thinking more generally. Inside the Box demonstrates Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), a method that systemizes creativity as part of the corporate culture. SIT requires thinking "inside the box", working in one’s familiar world to create new ideas independent of specific problems.

This practical guide shows how to facilitate collaboration among diverse individuals and organizations to navigate complexity and create change in our interconnected world. David Ehrlichman draws on his experience as a network builder; interviews with dozens of network leaders; and insights from the fields of network science, community building, and systems thinking to provide a clear process for creating and developing impact networks.

Your workday is filled with them - people who frustrate, impede, maneuver, undermine, plot, connive, and whine. This indispensable guide details specific techniques for handling all of them, with easy-to-follow scenarios for every situation. Updated and revised to reflect modern issues including technology, generation gaps, and language barriers, this guide describes 10 kinds of culprits and offers helpful strategies and phrases for diffusing workplace tensions and effectively resolving conflicts.

Jonathan Smart, business agility practitioner, thought leader, and coach, reveals the patterns and antipatterns that will help organizations from every industry deliver better value sooner, safer, and happier through high levels of engagement, inclusion, and empowerment. Through his decades of experience in the technology world, Smart provides business leaders with a blueprint for creating a world-class organization of the future.

This practical guide introduces managers to a powerful new engagement and retention tool: the stay interview. Smart companies have begun conducting these periodic reviews in order to discover why their important talent might leave and to solve any problems before they actually quit.

In this insightful and comprehensive guide, Addy Osmani shares more than a decade of experience working on the Chrome team at Google, uncovering secrets to engineering effectiveness, efficiency, and team success. Engineers and engineering leaders looking to scale their effectiveness and drive transformative results within their teams and organizations will learn the essential principles, tips, and frameworks for building highly effective engineering teams.

Taming the Abrasive Manager: How to End Unnecessary Roughness in the Workplace is an ideal resource for managers, human resource professionals, executive coaches, and anyone who works for or with an abrasive leader. Researcher and executive coach Dr. Laura Crawshaw― known as the Boss Whisperer® for her work in this field―shares her discoveries on how to tame the deep fears that drive abrasive managers to attack their coworkers. In her straight-shooting style, Crawshaw offers invaluable insights gained from her encounters with abrasive bosses in corporate jungles who aggressively defend...

Mark Schwartz, author of leadership classics A Seat at the Table and The Art of Business Value, reveals a new (empowering) model for the often soul-shattering, frustrating, Kafkaesque nightmare we call bureaucracy. Through humor, a healthy dose of history and philosophy, and real-life examples from his days as a government bureaucrat, Schwartz shows IT leaders (and the whole of business) how to master the ways of the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler to create a lean, learning, and enabling bureaucracy.

Ethical intelligence may not get as much attention as other forms of "smarts", but as Bruce Weinstein reveals, it is the most practical, valuable, and even courageous form, determining success on the job, fulfillment in relationships, and sense of self-worth. After reviewing the basic ethical principles agreed upon by cultures and religious traditions around the world and throughout time, Weinstein tells listeners how to develop their ethics IQ by applying these principles in daily life.