The Association Executive's Guide to Improving Organizational Performance and The Not-for-Profit Executive's Guide to Improving Organizational Performance (©2016, Advanced Solutions International), both authored by Robert Alves and Don Robertson, provides hands-on tools to make sure your business strategy drives your technology investments. The books include case studies, self-assessment tools, and author insights to help associations avoid common but devastating mistakes and ensure their business/fundraising strategies align with their technology investments to help them achieve continuous performance improvement.
All leaders face defining moments, crises that reveal their true character. In From Crisis to Calling: Finding Your Moral Center in the Toughest Decisions (©2016, Berrett Koehler), authors Sasha Chanoff and his father, David Chanoff, expand on Sasha’s moment of having to make an impossible choice that goes well beyond the ones we make as to whether we should order the chicken or the beef. While charged with evacuating a specific group of refugees in the violence-torn Congo, Sasha and his colleague discovered a group of widows and orphans who were not on the rescue list but would surely die if left behind. However, attempting to take them would jeopardize the entire mission and result in no one being evacuated. Using this experience and others, Sasha devised some principles for confronting critical decisions. The book also tells the stories of eight other leaders—from business, government, the military, and nonprofits—who stayed true to their moral values in the face of enormous pressure. They illustrate the power and fulfillment that come from investing in your work with compassion, empathy, and an awareness of others.
Harvard professor Amy Edmondson and journalist Susan Salter Reynolds explore how to bring into being systems that transform human experience and make the world more livable and sustainable in Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation (©2016, Berrett Koehler). This demands “big teaming:” intense collaboration across professions and industries that may have completely different mindsets and even be antagonistic to each other. To do this successfully requires practicing new forms of leadership that combine an expansive vision with incremental action—not an easy balance. To reveal how pioneers build the future, Edmondson and Reynolds tell the story of Living PlanIT, an award-winning smart city start-up with a breathtakingly ambitious goal: building a showcase high-tech city from scratch to pilot its software. This meant a joint effort spanning a truly disparate group of software entrepreneurs, real estate developers, city government officials, architects, construction companies, and technology corporations. We get to know Living PlanIT’s leaders and follow them and their partners through cycles of hope, exhaustion, disillusionment, pragmatism, and renewal. There are powerful lessons here for anyone, in any industry, seeking to transform the world.
The Effective Manager (©2016, John Wiley), by Mark Horstman, is a hands-on practical guide to great management at every level. The book identifies what effective management actually looks like, and then digs into the four critical behaviors that make a manager great and explains how leaders can adjust their own behavior to be the leader every team needs. Based on data from 90,000 managers collected over the past 20 years, the author provides the best ways to achieve the four critical managerial behaviors:
- Build Relationships. Why talking all the time doesn't work to build trust. Why most managers focus on the wrong topics when chatting with directs. How to build trust through frequency and high-quality communications. How and why to introduce, brief, start, and continue the most important tool—one on ones.
- Communicate About Performance. Managers say they want more feedback and guidance from their boss but then they make the same mistake with their own team members. They don't know what to say, or when to say it, or why directs push back on corrective guidance.
- Ask for More. Great managers are never satisfied. They inspire and praise, and also identify areas for improvement. They work with their team to improve each member's productivity by collaborating on goals and a plan to get there. The book’s coaching model allows managers to improve skills in 10 minutes a week.
- Push Work Down. The very best managers challenge their teams to do more by sharing their own work, exposing directs to higher level challenges, and freeing up their own time to get more done that only they can do. Learn how to delegate a responsibility.