Professional Growth In Staff Development

This training resource is a professional development career ladder for nursing professional development specialists and educators at any experience level. Whether you are new to the profession or a seasoned veteran, this book provides all the steps you need to progress professionally or chart the professional development of your staff.

This book makes the case that career development practice is a mental health intervention, and provides skills and strategies to support career development practitioners in their work. It explores how practitioners do more than help people navigate career paths, they change people's lives in ways that improve mental health and overall well-being.

This new edition offers unique, state-of-the-art perspectives on library staff development and training.

EDITORS This introduction to the International Handbook of Educational Lead ership and Administration describes some of the motivation for devel oping the book and several assumptions on which is based much of the work represented in its 31 chapters. A synopsis of the contents of those chapters is also provided. SOME KEY ASSUMPTIONS It is sometimes suggested that the search for an adequate understanding of leadership is doomed to fail. After all, there is little evidence of agreement about the concept in spite of prodigious efforts dating back hundreds if not thousands of years. Such a view is captured, for exam ple, in Bennis' observation that: Of all the hazy and confounding areas in social psychology, leadership theory undoubtedly contends for top nomination. Probably more has been written and less is known about lead ership than any other topic in the behavioural sciences. (1959, page 259) We do not find this state of affairs discouraging (nor entirely accurate) and, of course, it did not prevent Bennis from proceeding either. One reason for our desire to continue in the face of such discouraging words is that a great deal of leadership research aspires to develop a general theory, a theory which applies to all or most domains of organized human activity. This aspiration inevitably produces decontextualized and, therefore, abstract categories of practice. Howard Gardner's (1995) depiction of leadership as story telling is a case in point.

If you want to do more with mentoring, you’ve found the right book. The notion that only the most experienced members of an organization can guide a few promising go-getters no longer applies in today’s business world. In Modern Mentoring, Randy Emelo advocates for a vastly different mentoring practice. Drawing from a rich career, he explains why organizations should consider all employees potential mentors, making everyone both advisors and learners. Modern Mentoring offers a blueprint for success with a model that benefits more than the select few and steers clear of forcing connections between people. Emelo demonstrates that a culture in which people choose what they want to learn and whom they learn from, while increasing overall organizational intelligence, is completely within reach. In this book you will learn: what it takes to grow a modern mentoring culture which tools to use as you facilitate organization-wide mentoring how organizations like Monsanto and Humana benefit from modern mentoring.

The most effective leader behaves more like a coach Authors Bill Eckstrom and Sarah Wirth have spent a decade researching the activities, behaviors, and performance of leaders. After studying more than 100,000 coaching interactions in the workplace, primarily of sales teams, they have been able to determine how coaching affects team outcomes and growth. The authors share three critical performance drivers, along with the four high-growth activities that coaches must execute to build a team that is motivated to achieve at the highest levels. Through both hard data and rich stories, Eckstrom and Wirth demonstrate how leaders can measure and improve their coaching to lead their teams to better results. The Coaching Effect will help leaders at all levels understand the necessity of challenging people out of their comfort zone to create a high-growth organization. Leaders will learn how they can develop trust relationships, drive accountability and leverage growth experiences to propel their team members to the highest levels of success.

Leadership Development explores how leaders gain and use self-knowledge for continuous improvement and career development and describes how leaders help themselves and the people with whom they work, understand themselves, and become more self-determined, continuous learners, and make the most of resources, such as feedback and coaching. This book explains why leaders need support for self-insight and professional growth in today's business environment. It explores dimensions of effective leadership in light of business, technological, and economic trends. Focusing on the importance of leaders developing accurate self-understanding, the book defines self-insight, outlines the meaning of internal strength and resilience for self-regulation, and considers how leaders attain a meaningful and realistic sense of self-identity. This volume illustrates ways organizations support these psychological processes. Leadership development is viewed as a comprehensive, continuous process that includes evaluating organizational needs and individual competencies, setting goals for career development and performance improvement, offering needed training and growth experiences, providing feedback, and tracking change in behavior and performance over time. It describes how leaders react to feedback and how 360-degree feedback survey methods and executive coaching help leaders attain and apply self-insight to enhance their performance. In addition, this book considers challenges and opportunities for leadership development, including how leaders overcome career barriers and become continuous learners.