Courageous Cultures

From executives complaining that their teams don’t contribute ideas to employees giving up because their input isn’t valued--company culture is the culprit. Courageous Cultures provides a road map to build a high-performance, high-engagement culture around sharing ideas, solving problems, and rewarding contributions from all levels. Many leaders are convinced they have an open environment that encourages employees to speak up and are shocked when they learn that employees are holding back. Employees have ideas and want to be heard. Leadership wants to hear them. Too often, however, employees and leaders both feel that no one cares about making things better. The disconnect typically only widens over time, with both sides becoming more firmly entrenched in their viewpoints. Becoming a courageous culture means building teams of microinnovators, problem solvers, and customer advocates working together. In our world of rapid change, a courageous culture is your competitive advantage. It ensures that your company is “sticky” for both customers and employees. In Courageous Cultures, you’ll learn practical tools that help you: Learn the difference between microinnovators, problem solvers, and customer advocates and how they work together. See how the latest research conducted by the authors confirms why organizations struggle when it comes to creating strong cultures where employees are encouraged to contribute their best thinking. Learn proven models and tools that leaders can apply throughout all levels of the organization, to reengage and motivate employees. Understand best practices from companies around the world and learn how to apply these strategies and techniques in your own organization. This book provides you with the practical tools to uncover, leverage, and scale the best ideas from every level of your organization.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Brené Brown has taught us what it means to dare greatly, rise strong, and brave the wilderness. Now, based on new research conducted with leaders, change makers, and culture shifters, she’s showing us how to put those ideas into practice so we can step up and lead. Don’t miss the five-part HBO Max docuseries Brené Brown: Atlas of the Heart! NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BLOOMBERG Leadership is not about titles, status, and wielding power. A leader is anyone who takes responsibility for recognizing the potential in people and ideas, and has the courage to develop that potential. When we dare to lead, we don’t pretend to have the right answers; we stay curious and ask the right questions. We don’t see power as finite and hoard it; we know that power becomes infinite when we share it with others. We don’t avoid difficult conversations and situations; we lean into vulnerability when it’s necessary to do good work. But daring leadership in a culture defined by scarcity, fear, and uncertainty requires skill-building around traits that are deeply and uniquely human. The irony is that we’re choosing not to invest in developing the hearts and minds of leaders at the exact same time as we’re scrambling to figure out what we have to offer that machines and AI can’t do better and faster. What can we do better? Empathy, connection, and courage, to start. Four-time #1 New York Times bestselling author Brené Brown has spent the past two decades studying the emotions and experiences that give meaning to our lives, and the past seven years working with transformative leaders and teams spanning the globe. She found that leaders in organizations ranging from small entrepreneurial startups and family-owned businesses to nonprofits, civic organizations, and Fortune 50 companies all ask the same question: How do you cultivate braver, more daring leaders, and how do you embed the value of courage in your culture? In this new book, Brown uses research, stories, and examples to answer these questions in the no-BS style that millions of readers have come to expect and love. Brown writes, “One of the most important findings of my career is that daring leadership is a collection of four skill sets that are 100 percent teachable, observable, and measurable. It’s learning and unlearning that requires brave work, tough conversations, and showing up with your whole heart. Easy? No. Because choosing courage over comfort is not always our default. Worth it? Always. We want to be brave with our lives and our work. It’s why we’re here.” Whether you’ve read Daring Greatly and Rising Strong or you’re new to Brené Brown’s work, this book is for anyone who wants to step up and into brave leadership.

Courageous Leadership: The Missing Link to Creating a Lean Culture of Excellence is one of the firsts of its kind to wade through the confusion among leaders on selecting the type of change approach that will get the best results in their organization. It educates the senior executive leaders and organizational excellence practitioners on the different characteristics of change and answers why the approach to incremental and transitional change cannot deliver the results expected from a transformational change. The author shares his experiences from leading several small and large scale organization transformations in multiple industries across different countries on how to establish a robust foundation for an excellence journey and integrate strategy into daily operations. This book elaborates on the types of courage and what it means to be a courageous leader while leading change in difficult situations, and what leaders do differently for putting the organization on a path to excellence and culture transformation. This book shares an innovative design, a methodology and an approach that combines best practices and principles from Malcolm Baldrige, Shingo, Lean, Six Sigma, Balanced Scorecard, accreditation, change management, patient and family-centered care, the Competing Values Framework, the LEADS framework, and the project management body of knowledge. The implementation of this model at a hospital in Canada propelled the organization further ahead on their transformational journey compared to other organizations that started much earlier. Sensei in Japanese means Teacher and Gyaan in Sanskrit means Knowledge. Brief sections on ‘Sensei Gyaan’ have been interspersed throughout the book to provide valuable tips to the readers based on author’s experiential learnings over the past two decades. This book serves as a practical guide for senior executive leaders and organizational excellence practitioners, who wish to embark or are in various stages of their organizational excellence and culture transformation journey. Readers will be guided through 26 elements necessary for establishing a robust foundation and an additional set of 22 Management System elements required to create and sustain a culture of quality across the organization. For leaders in healthcare, the book provides a framework, guiding principles, and associated practices that support the implementation of the 4 core concepts of patient and family centered care namely, dignity and respect, information sharing, participation and collaboration. Included in the book are several examples with creative visuals, ready-to-use templates and standard works, models, guiding principles, and strategies based on best practices to assist leaders in their organization excellence journey.

This book is an advocate for the change-making capacity of culture. It is also a source of inspiration for renegotiating our understanding of the world and affirming culture as a critical space to practice courage and perseverance amid complex societal reconfigurations. It focuses on courageous citizens: those whose daring, sharing and inventing contribute to our collective future, and for whom culture and democracy are the starting points for vision and action.0The contributors explore intellectual and practical interventions that open up a terrain of debate in the enduring struggle for just societies across Europe, zooming in on three key themes that have proven to be of particular relevance during the past decade, and that also keep resonating when looking at the very possibility of another future. They do so by acknowledging the underlying cycle of (re-)thinking, doing and changing that is inherent to remodelling the way we view the world, and concurrently, the potential of culture to generate positive social change.0The three key themes addressed in the book are: 1) Identity and Diversity, 2) Culture, Communities and Democracies; and 3) Solidarity and Fragmentation.

Help students and educators cope with fear in the classroom with this up-to-date new resource In The Courageous Classroom: Creating a Culture of Safety for Students to Learn and Thrive, community psychiatrist Dr. Janet Taylor and nationally acclaimed educator, Jed Dearybury deliver a concise and insightful take on the culture of fear in schools around the country. You'll learn about the various ways fear is present in students and educators, practical tools and strategies for educators to cope with fear and anxiety in the classroom, the reality of racism, homophobia and microaggressions and their impact on learning, and how to create a landscape of calm in your classroom. This important book will show you: The difference between fear and anxiety and how to respond to both How to create social-emotional learning environments where students feel mentally and physically safe Why, despite schools being safer than ever, students and educators fear for their personal safety How to manage educator stress, fear, and anxiety in a time of increasing coverage of school shootings Perfect for K-12 public school educators, Courageous Classrooms will also earn a place in the libraries of educators in training and parents with school-age children who wish to better help children cope with fear.

In this companion to his best-selling book, Singleton presents first-person vignettes and a detailed case study showing educators how to usher in courageous conversations to ignite systemic transformation.

To succeed in today’s hypercompetitive economy, managers must master creating a productive work environment for employees while still making numbers. Tense, overextended workplaces force managers to choose between results and relationships. Executives set aggressive goals, so managers drive their teams to deliver, resulting in burnout. Or, employees seek connection and support, so managers focus on relationships and fail to make the numbers. However, managers need to achieve both. In Winning Well, managers will learn how to: Stamp out the corrosive win-at-all-costs mentality Focus on the game, not just the score Reinforce behaviors that produce results Sustain energy and momentum Be the leader people want to work for To prevent burnout and disengagement, while still achieving the necessary success for the company, managers must learn how to get their employees productive while creating an environment that makes them want to produce even more. Winning Well offers a quick, practical action plan for making the workplace productive, rewarding, and even fun.

Two seasoned parents share the personal story of how they made conscious, faithful choices to raise six successful and courageous children. Michelle and Jim Capra have given all parents a precious, practical gift by sharing their own honest journey to create six children of character. Their struggles to develop habits of excellence, accountability, and moral standards in a loving, godly way are lessons for us all. I only wish I had read this book when I was raising my own children! Barbara A. Glanz Hall of Fame Speaker and Author of "Priceless Gifts - Using What God's Given You to Bless Others" As parents to six children, what really resonates with me about James and Michelle Capra's book, 'Raising Courageous Children in a Cowardly Culture', is their candidness. I truly appreciate that he withstands the tide of political correctness and states what parents today really need to hear. This is the go-to resource for raising upright children. David Heavener, Evangelist, Revelation Media Ministry