Confidence Classic: How To Lead At ANY Level, With Dr. Richard Winters The Director Of Leadership Development For The Mayo Clinic

There are two kinds of problems organizations face today:

1. Those with known solutions that only require the application of existing knowledge and workflows to solve.
2. Those with unknown solutions that require innovation, experimentation, and adaptation to survive.

In The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, leadership experts Ronald A. Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky teach you how to deal with the second kind of problem. You’ll learn how to diagnose these challenges, create effective interventions, and push your organization—and yourself—further than you ever thought possible.

What’s the secret to being a great leader? Whether you’re in a warzone or on the front lines of a corporate battle, Extreme Ownership argues that the best leaders take full responsibility for everything in their world: not only their actions, decisions, and failures, but also those of everyone on their team. By practicing Extreme Ownership, great leaders achieve victory by prioritizing the team above all else and focusing on constant improvement—and in this guide, we’ll show how you can, too.

Authors Jocko Willink and Leif Babin are former US Navy SEAL officers who served in one of the most dangerous areas of Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. They honed the principles of Extreme Ownership on the battlefield, then applied the same tenets to the corporate world as business consultants. In this guide, we’ll add broader context from other leadership books such as Built to Last and Team of Teams to better illustrate how to apply Willink and Babin’s leadership principles to your life.

While many business books tell you how to manage other people, this 1966 classic by management expert Peter F. Drucker explains how to manage yourself to be effective. Effectiveness is key to individual and organizational success. Without it, other attributes, such as talent, intelligence, knowledge, and hard work, are useless.

Drucker says anyone can learn five practices for effectiveness: managing your time, focusing on just a few key tasks, making a unique contribution, maximizing your strengths, and making sound decisions. He explains how to implement these practices, which have remained relevant for over 50 years, even as technology and organizations have evolved. This guide examines how Drucker’s ideas on effectiveness hold up today and how others have built on them.

In Fierce Conversations, Susan Scott argues that to achieve happiness and success in life, you must constantly have courageous conversations—honest and sometimes uncomfortable discussions about your thoughts, feelings, desires, and issues. These aspects are constantly changing, and if left unaddressed, Scott warns that you may grow out of touch with reality and become misaligned with your goals. Further, failing to have courageous conversations risks perpetuating issues and damaging relationships. Scott provides a model for courageous conversations that will effectively solve critical issues, enable learning, and improve relationships so you can achieve happiness and success in all aspects of your life.

This guide re-organizes Scott’s discussion into a step-by-step outline for having courageous conversations. First, we’ll explain how to uncover the most critical thoughts, feelings, issues, and desires that must be addressed. Next, we’ll discuss how to structure a courageous conversation. Finally, we’ll provide a few techniques to ensure effective dialogue. Our commentary will supplement Scott’s advice with recommendations from other communication guides such as Crucial Accountability and Difficult Conversations.

Become a great boss through the straightforward, deeply human lessons of Radical Candor. These techniques maintain high employee satisfaction and drive stellar results that you’d never be able to accomplish otherwise. With the two guiding principles of radical candor—caring personally and challenging directly—you’ll build stronger relationships within your team and create a culture of sincere and helpful guidance, inspiring your team members to bring their best and most motivated selves to their work and their collaborations, every day.

Leadership expert John C. Maxwell argues that today’s leaders must abandon traditional management practices and make leadershifts—changes in how they think, communicate, and act as leaders. In Leadershift, Maxwell shares lessons from a lifetime of leading organizations and coaching developing leaders, sharing common leadership mistakes, and providing guidance for becoming a transformative leader who can inspire great things from others. By making Maxwell’s leadershifts, you can maximize your leadership abilities and amplify the success of your team or organization.

In this guide, we’ll explore the leadership changes Maxwell suggests to run an effective organization. We’ll discuss how to improve your leadership mindset, manage a team effectively, earn the respect of others, and inspire new generations of leaders. We’ll supplement Maxwell’s advice with insights from other leadership experts and share additional practical tips for making Maxwell’s leadershifts in your work.

We’re often advised that if we choose work we’re passionate about, it won’t really feel like work. But this mindset can lead to overwork and burnout—with serious consequences, especially for people in “purpose-driven” professions.

While we’ve suffered from exhaustion throughout history, today's version is different. Often seen as workplace burnout, it’s exacerbated by digital overload and the blurring of lines between work and home life. Experts say individual remedies to combat the problem are ineffective against modern burnout, which requires systemic changes in workplace culture and structure.

In Nine Lies About Work, Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall argue that many of our workplace norms and practices are flawed. As a result, a majority of workers aren’t engaged at work and productivity growth is lagging. Thus, these typical practices prevent people and organizations from flourishing. To build thriving organizations, they assert that today’s leader should be a freethinking leader, one who questions established systems and beliefs and who values individuality over conformity.

In this guide, we explore why people don’t need feedback, why organizations shouldn’t invest in people who have “potential,” and why we should forget about work-life balance. We’ll also compare the authors’ ideas with those of other leadership experts, discuss research that supports or counters their arguments, and include tips to help you replace the lies with truths.

In The Great Game of Business, businessman Jack Stack and writer Bo Burlingham propose that the best and most efficient way to create a successful business is by encouraging employees to take ownership—by encouraging them to see the company as theirs rather than just somewhere they work. If employees see the company as theirs, its success becomes their success as well—and people will work harder to ensure their own success than that of others.

In this guide, we’ll explore the principles of fostering employee ownership that let Stack take a failing division of International Harvester and turn it into a corporation comprising over 60 businesses. We’ll examine the benefits and difficulties of implementing these principles and the authors’ advice on how to do so. In our commentary, we’ll compare the authors’ ideas to those of other business experts such as John Doerr and Tony Hsieh and examine how their suggestions intersect with psychological principles.

Want to motivate your employees and teammates to do a better job? Does your team seem unhappy, unmotivated, and distrustful of your organization?

In Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work, Paul Marciano argues that engagement stems from respect. Employees don’t want to be treated like cogs in a chain. Instead, they want to feel empowered, have autonomy, receive supportive feedback, and be treated considerately. Learn what components of work people really want, and simple actions to take today to engage your team.

According to Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace report, the average global employee engagement score is 23%—meaning less than a quarter of employees worldwide are enthusiastic about their work. Employee engagement is crucial because it translates to productivity, synergy, and creativity, which in turn lead to an organization’s success. In contrast, disengagement costs $8.8 trillion in lost productivity worldwide.