Organizational Behavior Leadership

In 2001, when Jacqueline Novogratz founded Acumen, a global community of socially and environmentally responsible partners dedicated to changing the way the world tackles poverty, few had heard of impact investing - Acumen’s practice of “doing well by doing good”. Nineteen years later, there’s been a seismic shift in how corporate boards and other stakeholders evaluate businesses: Impact investment is not only morally defensible, but now also economically advantageous, even necessary.

This final essay for an organizational behavior 300-level class explains the basic concepts involved with organizational behavior. Organizational behavior is extremely important to understand, because the behavior of a business's employees, customers, or suppliers can make or break the business. There are various main concepts that are important to identify when understanding an organization's behavior.

Your only job as a leader is to make sure that Monday morning doesn't suck. At least, that’s what Eric Harkins thinks. In his first book, Eric talks about his 25-year journey working in corporate America and the many lessons he learned about leadership. He was lucky enough to work for a company that made sure Monday morning didn’t suck, but even luckier to work for several that didn’t. And he learned a lot about what it takes to create a culture high performers want to be a part of.

What if people could feel confident communicating what they are really thinking without fearing a negative response from their colleagues or boss? Consulting with a diversity of organizations for the past decade, the authors have seen time and again that leaders are failing to draw out ideas and perspectives from their introverts and, at the same time, shutting up their extroverts. Inhibitors in organizations make candid communication unsafe, rendering many things left unsaid.

A groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting book, The Speed of Trust challenges our age-old assumption that trust is merely a soft, social virtue and instead demonstrates that trust is a hard-edged, economic driver -- a learnable and measurable skill that makes organizations more profitable, people more promotable, and relationships more energizing.

Thermostat Cultures is a must-listen for anyone leading a group of any kind or for someone who desires to be a compelling participant on a high-performing team. Every human being on the planet is a part of a team of some kind. A team at work. A team at home. Why do some teams with similar talent levels succeed and others simply maintain? Why are some families more connected while others are pulling in opposite directions? Why do some companies expand with excitement and others limp along? Culture.

Like all relationships, the ones we have at work are subject to stresses—maybe even fractures that can really take a toll on the workplace. Productivity is lost. Time is wasted. Tension mounts. Cooperation is reduced. And the workplace becomes toxic. What’s the solution? In Making Things Right at Work, Dr. Gary Chapman is joined by business consultants Dr. Jennifer Thomas and Dr. Paul White to offer the strategies you need to restore harmony at work. Don’t let broken relationships taint your work environment. Take the needed steps to make things right today.

Today, stakeholder consideration focuses as much on an organisation's culture as it does on the bottom line - employees want to work for a company that has clear values and an engaging environment; customers and clients want to know they’re supporting a worthwhile brand; and investors increasingly look to back socially responsible companies with good organisational health. Yet internally, culture is too often still regarded as an add-on, a one-off moment of focus, or a distraction from the real day to day business.

Are you a manager who struggles to get accountability within your organization? Have you either bulldozed your way through an encounter or talked yourself out of it with excuses like “I’ve already tried that” or “it’s too risky”? If you’ve ever done a poor job of holding others accountable, this audiobook can help you feel more comfortable gaining ownership from employees. Own Up! addresses the big myths, everyday hesitations, and all the other stories we tell ourselves about what it means and how much time and effort it takes to create a culture of responsibility.

Inclusion has been overly politicized and narrowly defined to issues of gender and race today. As a result, we need a new approach to inclusive leadership that goes beyond DEI, leveraging its potential for business innovation and sustainable growth. In Lead Bigger, Anne Chow “has written a bona fide leadership masterpiece” (Stephen M.R. Covey, New York Times bestselling author) by reframing inclusion as an essential leadership skill of expanding our perspectives for greater performance in our work, workforce, and workplace.

A must-listen for service professionals of every level, this essential book takes the proven Lean principles of the best-selling Toyota Way series and applies them directly to the industries where quality of service is crucial for success. Jeff Liker and Karyn Ross show you how to develop Lean practices throughout your organization using the famous 4P model. Whether you are an executive, manager, consultant, or frontline worker who deals with customers every day, you'll learn how take advantage of all Lean has to offer.

How does a suburban pizza joint end up profiled on national magazine covers and network TV news? (Hint: The secret is not in the sauce.) When Nick Sarillo decided to open a family-friendly pizza restaurant in the suburbs of Chicago, people thought he was nuts. Having worked as a carpenter for much of his adult life, he lacked any formal experience in restaurants or in managing a small business. Everyone told him no one else would ever care about his place the way he did.

Results and relationships—managers and leaders no longer have to prioritize one over the other to build a culture of exceptional accountability. You don’t have to choose between being the hard-charging task master and being the easy-going people pleaser. By expanding your awareness to create deliberate intentions, take informed actions, and be responsible for your impact, you can achieve better business outcomes and experience greater satisfaction in doing so.

Our individualistic society has created an environment of fear, division, and domination, which has crushed our ability to relate meaningfully to each other and diminished our capacity to innovate and collaborate. Jean Oelwang, president and founding CEO of Virgin Unite, has been on a decade-long exploration to find out how to nurture relationships with depth and purpose. Deep connections shape who we are and have a profound ripple effect on everything we do, supporting us to achieve more, withstand anything, and amplify impact.

You subscribe to the basic idea that business can do more than make money, but you're not sure how to act on that conviction or how to share it with the rest of your organization. The Conscious Capitalism Field Guide - the authoritative follow-up to the best-selling book Conscious Capitalism, by John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, and leadership expert Raj Sisodia - gives you the tools for sharing and implementing the principles of higher purpose and conscious business throughout your organization.

New York Times best-selling author and leadership expert Ken Blanchard’s popular TrustWorks! training program is now available in audiobook form! Trust Works!: Four Keys to Building Lasting Relationships is an insightful guide designed to help people navigate one of the most complex issues that affects all areas of our lives: trust. In Trust Works!, Ken Blanchard, Cynthia Olmstead, and Martha Lawrence demonstrate how to get along better with those around us.

Research data show that most people do not come close to making full use of their assets at work—in fact, only seventeen percent of the workforce believe they use all of their strengths on the job. Go Put Your Strengths to Work aims to change that through a six-step, six-week experience that will reveal the hidden dimensions of your strengths. Buckingham shows you how to seize control of your assets and rewrite your job description under the nose of your boss.

Based on research from over 1,200 companies, including WalMart, Google, and JPMorgan Chase, this book follows real-world cases from companies where employees evolved from silent contributors to masterminds steering corporate strategies. These cases are the vanguard of a vibrant era in which workers will be the architects of their destinies, shaping not just their own careers but the entire trajectories of their organizations.

Francesca Gino has been studying rebels in life and in the workplace for more than 15 years. She has discovered that rebels - those who practice "positive deviance" at work - are harder to manage, but they are good for the bottom line: their passion, drive, curiosity, and creativity raise the entire organization to a new level. And she has found that at home, rebels are more engaged partners, parents, and friends. Packed with strategies for embracing rebellion at work and in life, Rebel Talent encourages all of us to rebel against what’s comfortable, so that we can thrive.

While your compliance efforts may have served you well compared to industry standards, your best efforts that yield only "acceptable" results are not nearly good enough. You are missing an essential yet elusive component. Good leaders who lead good organizations adhere to both OSHA and industry standards. But that is just the foundation. They also own their moral responsibility to ensure safe outcomes and likewise require all team members to be worthy partners in keeping themselves and the people they work beside safe.