Breaking The Proactive Paradox

How do you get your team members to exercise appropriate independent judgment? How do you get employees to be more accountable for their actions? Leaders need team members to be empowered and proactive post COVID-19. What are the roadblocks? How are they overcome? Most books on employee empowerment bypass two critical relationships: the employment compact and the jobholder and their job. These two relationships hold the key to unlocking employee empowerment. This breakthrough book is for leaders who want to maximize performance through empowerment. It offers a new approach and practical strategies to energize employees to exercise their initiative when needed and be accountable for their actions. A proactive employee is engaged in their job and can confidently make decisions without overly relying on their manager.

Warp speed change is now a constant. What do organizations need to do to maximize the potential of their employees in the new reality? The tired cliché that employees are our greatest asset is false. It’s unlocking the potential of employees that’s the greatest asset. THE FUTURE OF HUMAN RESOURCES confronts the conventional employment practices of selecting, inducting, developing, rewarding, and exiting employees. This book is a comprehensive blueprint for HR professionals to make the necessary changes to accommodate a new mentality. Thirteen traditional practices are challenged, and fresh, practical pathways offered. Dr. Tim Baker, according to leadership guru, Marshall Goldsmith, is “one of today’s most influential HR experts.” He offers new insights about what’s still considered conventional wisdom, such as employee induction, the job description, and succession planning. THE FUTURE OF HUMAN RESOURCES provides you with a roadmap to navigate the post-Covid world of work.

Listen, observe, test—these three words lie at the heart of a powerful method for businesses’ transformation. Behind this method is a deceptively simple idea: managers and management scholars must first take the pulse of a real business, get its case history, diagnose its problems, and only then solve them. Invented by the scholars who launched Harvard Business School, this medical model will still cure companies today. Damningly, during the last thirty years business schools embraced the presumptions of economists, game theorists, and other calculators of abstraction. The solving of real-world, real-time problems has atrophied and stagnated. In this book, renowned scholar and emeritus professor Jay W. Lorsch marshals evidence, history, and insights from his more than fifty-year career at Harvard Business School to make the case for a return to the medical model–the practices of listening, observing, and testing in which the fields of human relations and organizational behavior are rooted. By telling the history of the development of his field, Lorsch demonstrates how the medical model emerged in the years before World War II and for decades helped managers, management scholars, and consultants diagnose and solve the problems besetting companies large and small. Explaining the case studies that define the practice, he discusses how the model has been refined and reapplied by later generations and how it can continue to address issues such as diversity, leadership, competition, and optimal corporate board structures.

Turbulence in recent years has become unprecedentedly wicked. Uncertainty has become a dense fog becoming for business leader’s public enemy number one. This book uses scenario and other methods like systems thinking to see over the horizon and to time travel to the future. Written by an extremely experienced consultant who has in parallel been a strategy academic at leading business schools for over thirty years, this is a practical toolkit grounded in theory. The author provides exercises to try out and includes fascinating case studies to take the reader beyond “what happened and why?” to “how the process was managed and tips for applying it for yourself.” This is a must-read for business leaders finding uncertainties giving them sleepless nights. For MBA students it will give them a different dimension for their thinking course work and projects - and a real edge over those trapped within a single view of the future. This is not just a journey but a new way of thinking.

This book will enable leaders to manage change in a more proactive, tailored and engaged manner to increase the likelihood of achieving the expected outcomes of the change initiatives. Leaders today must be able to embed resiliency into their organizations and to re-position change as a natural process. Being an effective change agent has become a critical leadership competency for 21st Century leaders. With these factors in mind, we are proposing a new approach to change in this book (the C6 Change Leadership Framework), as a means to mitigate “Change Fatigue” and to enhance a leader’s ability to positively affect change in their organizations. This book will enable leaders to manage change in a more proactive, tailored and engaged manner to increase the likelihood of achieving the expected outcomes of the change initiatives.

What if you could adapt rapidly to change, design your destiny, plot your own North, systematically design the roads you wish to travel and go the distance–improving your health, your work, and your life? Change means that you will have to create habits, and as both individuals and organizations have found, this is an extremely challenging venture. You may feel that procedures and methods, allied with inspiration, willpower, and motivation will be enough, but the up and down nature of the latter qualities can lead to repeated failed attempts. For individuals, leaders, managers, or anyone who wishes to build or change habits and behaviors and acquire new competencies, the answer lies in Warp Speed Habits, a revolutionary brain-based strategic-tactical approach to creating habits and changing behaviors. Intersecting neuroscience and psychology, this guide leverages business management lessons at an individual level, promotes the development of a “habit mindset” and reshapes environmental contexts. In this quest, as you learn to design, build, and implement sustainable habits, you will travel to worlds and dimensions in different realms. Ready? Begin your first voyage, but make no mistake, as you execute missions in your travels to different worlds, do not illude yourself by biographies of overnight success—these are myths that blur the mindset of energy and resilience you will require. But with the Warp Speed Habits practical and pragmatical roadmap, you will overcome brain traps and obstacles along the way, and ultimately contribute to thriving behaviors that deliver results!

“It’s my hope you’ll enjoy Improv to Improve Your Leadership Team as much as I did. I am grateful to creative thinkers like Candy who challenge us to learn and grow in ways we may never have considered.” –Quint Studer, Healthcare Solutions Group, Author, The Calling: Why Healthcare Is So Special “Dr. Campbell has done something truly remarkable. By combining the fun and creativity of improv with documented, empirical research, she has written a user’s manual for building a cohesive, energized, and effective team. Leaders, take note: when you follow Campbell’s blueprint, your team will feel more valued, more respected, and more engaged.”–Bill Stainton, CSP, CPAE, 29-time Emmy Winner, Hall of Fame Innovation Speaker You’re a leader with a problem. There’s a fungus-like growth in your organizational culture you can no longer ignore. It starts slowly with a few people feeling maligned and/or excluded, spreads resentment, leads to disengagement, and finally...resignations. What a nightmare! But WAIT! You have stumbled onto the exact solution you need! With this book, you can QUICKLY discover how to use the principles of applied improvisational exercises from the arts to help teams effectively connect and communicate, creatively problem-solve, increase workplace safety and employee retention, and guarantee client and stakeholder satisfaction. It’s all contained here.

Applied Leadership: Developing Stages for Creating Exceptional Leaders, is a comprehensive, self-development practical leadership book. Designed to be a complete self-training guide for individuals in all stages of leadership, from entry level to advance stages. For years, organizations and individuals have struggled with ineffective leadership training. It neither served to strengthen the current leaders in the organization, nor created future leaders for that organization, until NOW. Because great leadership is an evolutionary process, this publication will offer the reader a journey to become an exceptional leader. Individuals will be able to develop the practical skills necessary to be excellent leaders for any organization. No longer will organizations outsource costly training sessions that last for weeks or months for their staff, rather, this book will provide those necessary steps, skills, and knowledge needed at their own pace.