The Power Of Flexing

A leadership and learning expert shows you how to change your behavior, develop soft skills, and achieve personal and professional growth through a series of small experiments she calls “Flexing.” A personnel shift at your organization puts you into a leadership role you don't feel prepared for. Your boss tells you that you seem aloof and unapproachable in client meetings. You need to win the support of the members of a local community group for a project you feel passionate about. Addressing these diverse issues depends on improving your soft skills—such as time management, team building, communication and listening, creative thinking, and problem-solving. But this isn’t as easy as it may seem. Sue Ashford, the chair of the Management and Organizations group at the Ross School of Business, has the solution. In this timely book, she introduces Flexing—a technique individuals, teams, and entire organizations can use to learn, grow, and develop their skills and knowledge with every new project, work assignment, and problem. Flexing empowers you to embrace any challenge and adapt to any change, yielding practical, valuable takeaways that ensure growth. Flexing helps you move ahead when you’re confronted with a new challenge, or simply want to develop a vital skill. It’s a journey that begins with setting a flex goal—stating explicitly what you want to learn and how you want to grow. Once that flex goal is set, you then begin to run experiments, solicit feedback from peers or colleagues, and monitor and tweak your progress on the way to achieving your goal. Flexing can be tailored to each person, allowing you to reflect on your own experiences and incorporate the lessons you learn in the next project you tackle. It’s a growth mindset that will help you become the best version of yourself. Flexing also works with teams and organizations. Ashford teaches small groups and large how to implement flexing to ensure their members are ready for new challenges. With more people moving to remote working full-time and developing new ways of collaborating in teams, this warm and practical guide will help every professional and any organization on the journey to greater effectiveness.

Renowned executive coaches and global leadership strategists Jane Hyun and Audrey S. Lee offer lessons on the vital skill of “Flexing”—the art of switching leadership styles to more effectively lead people who are different from you, allowing managers to successfully manage the multicultural workers of today and tomorrow. Flex offers a proactive strategy for managers to navigate and leverage diversity effectively in this new global economy, showing managers how to: understand the power gap, the social distance between you and those in the workplace of different cultures, ages, and gender; flex your management style, by stretching how you work and communicate with others, and bridging the gap with more effective communication, feedback tools and building healthy teams; and multiply the effect, by teaching these skills to others and closing the power gap with clients, customers, and partners to create innovative solutions. Creating flex in a company’s management style will impact all aspects of developing the talent you have, attracting future talent and building relationships with customers in this competitive marketplace. Now, Flex: The New Playbook for Managing Across Differences shows you how.

Learn to navigate disruption and embrace change as an opportunity to grow and succeed. Never before has it been so urgent to understand how today's trends are shaping tomorrow’s labor force. As seismic shifts continue to change America's world of work in unprecedented ways, leaders must adapt to the rapidly evolving workplace using creative solutions for recruiting, engaging, and retaining a skilled workforce. Forward-thinking 'disruptors' who respond quickly to the new business environment will attract more talent, win more customers, and gain greater profits than those who make assumptions based on what has worked in the past. FLEX: A Leader's Guide to Staying Nimble and Mastering Transformative Change in the American Workplace is your real-world guide to harnessing the power of change to increase employee satisfaction and secure long-term success in the marketplace. Rick Grimaldi, a labor relations attorney with decades of experience helping businesses respond effectively during pivotal moments, shares his valuable insights on the surprising and fundamental ways the world of work is reinventing itself. Learn to: Avoid common pitfalls in today's cultural revolution Foster the creative education and training needed for tomorrow's workforce Adapt to a world becoming defined by technology and artificial intelligence Lead meaningfully on climate change and global health concerns Set the stage for creative collaboration and communication Disregard outdated assumptions when making decisions Responded quickly with new policies and procedures Communicate with sensitivity and transparency Address uncomfortable organizational culture issues Be prepared for the disruptions that will inevitably come Whether you lead a large corporation or own a small family business or you are the policy maker, FLEX: A Leader's Guide to Staying Nimble and Mastering Transformative Change in the American Workplace is your real-world blueprint for leading a profitable, healthy company into an ever-evolving future.

Your children will face many challenges in the years ahead, so you want to raise them to be resilient-strong, adaptable, and able to recover. It is your mission to empower your son or daughter to cultivate a functional and fulfilling life. This essential handbook will help you achieve that goal. In Resilience Parenting, martial arts instructors Chris and Holly Santillo share the insights they have gained as teachers and parents. They offer positive alternatives to lecturing, bribing, and punishing; focusing instead on three Pillars: Learning, Integrity, and Service. By applying these powerful principles, you can inspire your children to develop the independence they need to succeed as adults, while renewing their connection to family and community. Whether you are raising a teenager or just starting your family, the methods prescribed in this book will help you unlock your greatest potential as a parent.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The author, Jeff Parks, was a card-carrying scientist. He loved his high school classes in biology, chemistry, and physics, then went on to become an eager researcher and problem solver in college and graduate school. But it wasn’t until he got his first job at a small biotech start-up that he realized he’d never fully developed the skills and sensibilities he needed to be a business leader. #2 Many leaders, like Jeff, have the desire to make a positive impact on the world, but circumstances often get in the way. In Jeff’s case, his job as a team leader at a start-up company created an opportunity for him to create something new and valuable. But his company failed to provide him with the resources he needed. #3 The 70-20-10 rule is an empirical finding that states that 70 percent of what managers learn about how to be good managers is learned from experience, 20 percent from other people, and just 10 percent from reading books or attending courses. #4 New responsibilities offer great potential for personal growth. Because you are dealing with a situation that is new to you, you inevitably need to move out of your comfort zone and try new behaviors.