Resources Library

The ability to create an environment that is built on, cultivates and uses trust to leverage success is one of the most fundamental qualities and requirements of impactful leadership. A culture strongly grounded on trust will provide fertile ground for individuals and teams to take risks and maximize their potential by exploring ideas and moving beyond previous boundaries. Knowing that the leader and the team have every member's best interest in mind will empower all to share information freely, listen, challenge and support each other.

Advocacy

Lencioni, Patrick. 2006. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

• In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni once again offers a leadership fable that is as enthralling and instructive as his first two best-selling books, The Five Temptations of a CEO and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. This time, he turns his keen intellect and storytelling power to the fascinating, complex world of teams. Kathryn Petersen, Decision Tech's CEO, faces the ultimate leadership crisis: Uniting a team in such disarray that it threatens to bring down the entire company. Will she succeed? Will she be fired? Will the company fail? Lencioni's utterly gripping tale serves as a timeless reminder that leadership requires as much courage as it does insight.
• Throughout the story, Lencioni reveals the five dysfunctions which go to the very heart of why teams even the best ones, often struggle. He outlines a powerful model and actionable steps that can be used to overcome these common hurdles and build a cohesive, effective team. Just as with his other books, Lencioni has written a compelling fable with a powerful yet deceptively simple message for all those who strive to be exceptional team leaders.

Emotional Intelligence

Goleman, Daniel, Katzenbach, Jon, and Kim, Chan. 2000. On Managing People. Boston MA: Harvard Business Review Press.

• Managing people is fraught with challenges: What really motivates people? How do you deal with problem employees? How can you build a team that is greater than the sum of its parts? The answers to these questions can be elusive, even to a seasoned manager. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles on managing people to help you deal with these, and many other, management challenges. This collection of best-selling articles includes: featured article "Leadership That Gets Results" by Daniel Goleman, "One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?" "The Set-Up-to-Fail Syndrome," "Saving Your Rookie Managers from Themselves," "What Great Managers Do," "Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy," "Teaching Smart People How to Learn," "How (Un)ethical Are You?" "The Discipline of Teams" and "Managing Your Boss."

Goleman, Daniel. 1998. Working with Emotional Intelligence. New York, NY: Bantam Books.

• Do you have what it takes to succeed in your career? The secret of success is not what they taught you in school. What matters most is not IQ, not a business school degree, not even technical know-how or years of expertise. The single most important factor in job performance and advancement is emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is actually a set of skills that anyone can acquire, and in this practical guide, Daniel Goleman identifies them, explains their importance and shows how they can be fostered.
• Comprehensively researched, crisply written and packed with fascinating case histories of triumphs, disasters and dramatic turnarounds, "Working with Emotional Intelligence" may be the most important business book you'll ever read.
• Drawing on unparalleled access to business leaders around the world and studies in more than 500 organizations, Goleman documents an astonishing fact: in determining star performance in every field, emotional intelligence matters twice as much as IQ or technical expertise.
• Readers also discover how emotional competence can be learned. Goleman analyzes five key sets of skills and vividly shows how they determine who is hired and who is fired in the top corporations in the world. He also provides guidelines for training in the "emotionally intelligent organization," in chapters that no one, from manager to CEO, should miss.

Nadler, Reldan. 2010. Leading with Emotional Intelligence: Hands-On Strategies for Building Confident and Collaborative Star Performers. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

• Written by Dr. Reldan Nadler, one of the top corporate experts in Emotional Intelligence leadership, this hands-on guide uses case scenarios and step-by-step strategies to provide all the answers you need.
• How do I increase my confidence and EI to become a star player?
• How can I become more effective as a leader?
• How do I develop my people to become our next leaders?
• How can I communicate decisions to become more successful? 
• What can I do at my next team meeting to improve morale and performance?
• Filled with more than 100 EI tools and techniques, Dr. Nadler's proven program is a must-have resource for CEOs, executives, managers and team leaders. Organized by key topics, communication, collaboration, confidence, self-control and developing others, this book offers invaluable quick-reference tips, as well as detailed checklists, worksheets and action plans. In addition, you'll find fascinating frontline reports of leadership in action: Warren Buffett's vision and leadership of powerful CEOs, Jeff Immelt's staying power at GE, Pete Carroll's optimism at USC, and Meg Whitman's commitment to service at eBay.
• This is how successful people put their emotional skills to work. This is how you increase confidence, teamwork and performance. This is Leading with Emotional Intelligence.

Humility

Covey, Stephen M. R. and Merrill  Rebecca R. 2006. The Speed of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything. New York, NY: Free Press.

• From Stephen R. Covey's eldest son comes a revolutionary new path towards productivity and satisfaction. Trust, says Stephen M.R. Covey, is the very basis of the new global economy, and he shows how trust—and the speed at which it is established with clients, employees and constituents—is the essential ingredient for any high–performance, successful organization.
• For business leaders and public figures in any arena, The Speed of Trust offers an unprecedented and eminently practical look at exactly how trust functions in our every transaction and relationship—from the most personal to the broadest, most indirect interaction—and how to establish trust immediately so that you and your organization can forego the time–killing, bureaucratic check–and–balance processes so often deployed in lieu of actual trust.

Integrity

Kouzes, James M. and Barry  Z. Posner. 1995. The Leadership Challenge: How to Keep Getting Extraordinary Things Done in Organizations. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

• Leadership is not mysterious. Through research, interviews and the experience of hundreds of managers, Kouzes and Posner show how leadership can be learned and mastered by all of us.

Role Model

Fischer, Peter. 2008. The New Boss: How to Survive the First 100 Days. London, PA: Kogan Page.

• The New Boss is a guide for newly appointed senior managers to make a successful leadership transition. Written by Peter Fischer, an industrial psychologist and psychotherapist, this book provides new bosses with tried and tested models and self-assessment techniques for managing expectations, building key relationships and implementing change during the first three months in charge. This book identifies all the problems a new boss is likely to face, shows how to deal with them and allows the new boss to "hit the ground running."

Transparency

Bennis, Warren, Goleman, Daniel, O'Toole, James, and Marosz, Jonathan. 2008. Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

• In Transparency, the authors—a powerhouse trio in the field of leadership—look at what conspires against "a culture of candor" in organizations to create disastrous results, and suggest ways that leaders can achieve healthy and honest openness. They explore the lightning-rod concept of "transparency"—which has fast become the buzzword not only in business and corporate settings but in government and the social sector as well.
• Together, Bennis, Goleman and O'Toole explore why the containment of truth is the dearest held value of far too many organizations and suggest practical ways that organizations, their leaders, their members and their boards can achieve openness. After years of dedicating themselves to research and theory, at first separately, and now jointly, these three leadership giants reveal the multifaceted importance of candor and show what promotes transparency and what hinders it. They describe how leaders often stymie the flow of information and the structural impediments that keep information from getting where it needs to go. This vital resource is written for any organization—business, government and nonprofit—that must achieve a culture of candor, truth and transparency.

 

Research shows that your employees will judge the effectiveness of your leadership based on whether you have a vision and on how well you are able to communicate it. With a clear strategy toward desired goals that are communicated strategically, effectively, frequently and consistently, employees can prioritize, make decisions and act in ways that lead to realizing a cohesive vision.

Political Savvy

Lombardi, John V. How Universities Work. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

• Witty and insightful, How Universities Work is destined to be an essential handbook for anyone wanting to understand universities in the United States. John V. Lombardi gives readers an insider's view of the academy, describing the structure, logic, dynamics and operational styles of both public and private institutions of higher education.
• Lombardi defines and describes all the bits and pieces that compose a university with remarkable economy―from budgeting systems to tenure, from the library to the athletic field. Although focused on research universities, much of the discussion applies to other types of post-secondary institutions. Ideal for students, this book will form a solid foundation for courses in higher education, but it will also be a welcome addition to faculty and administrators' personal libraries.

Problem Solving

Lawrence, Gordon. 1982. People Types and Tiger Stripes: A Practical Guide to Learning Styles. Gainesville, FL: Center for Applications of Psychological Type.

• People Types & Tiger Stripes is a classic general book on the use and application of the MBTI® instrument as well as the definitive book in the field of education and type. In the third edition, Gordon Lawrence doubled the content, reflecting the work he has done over the past 15 years. People Types & Tiger Stripes also includes two writings by Isabel Briggs Myers.

Strategic Thinking

Kotter, John P.1996. Leading Change. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

• In Leading Change, John Kotter examines the efforts of more than 100 companies to remake themselves into better competitors. He identifies the most common mistakes leaders and managers make in attempting to create change and offers an eight-step process to overcome the obstacles and carry out the firm's agenda: establishing a greater sense of urgency, creating the guiding coalition, developing a vision and strategy, communicating the change vision, empowering others to act, creating short-term wins, consolidating gains and producing even more change, and institutionalizing new approaches in the future. This highly personal book reveals what John Kotter has seen, heard, experienced and concluded in 25 years of working with companies to create lasting transformation.

Kouzes, James M., and Barry Z. Posner. 2003. Academic Administrator's Guide to Exemplary Leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

• Written by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner—two of the foremost experts on the topic of leadership—the Jossey-Bass Academic Administrator's Guide to Exemplary Leadership clearly shows how anyone can develop the key leadership skills needed "to get extraordinary things done" on their campuses. This important resource outlines the principles and practices that are solidly based in more than two decades of quantitative and qualitative research. The Jossey-Bass Academic Administrator's Guide to Exemplary Leadership
• Describes the proven Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership
• Explains the fundamental principles that support the key leadership practices
• Provides actual case examples of real people on college and university campuses who demonstrate each practice
• Offers specific recommendations on what to do to own these practices
• Shows how to continue to develop as a leader
• This one-of-a-kind resource is an invaluable tool that offers a set of leadership practices that are based on the real-world experiences of thousands of people who have answered the call for leadership

Thiederman, Sondra. 2012. The Diversity and Inclusion Handbook. Flower Mound, TX: The Walk the Talk Company.

• Why should diversity and inclusion matter to you and your organization? The answer lies in that one thing we all strive for: success. When team members of all backgrounds are included, valued and respected for their uniqueness and what they have to contribute, they truly are more creative, more committed, more collaborative and more motivated to participate to the fullness of their potential. They move from a collection of untapped individuals to a productive U.S. focused on common goals and collective achievement. Helping you reach that level of success is what this book is all about! This powerful handbook by respected expert Sondra Thiederman will guide you through the three key dimensions of diversity and inclusion each of which contributes to the ultimate goal of individual and organizational success. Whether you are a small task team or a large multi-national organization, a U.S. climate and culture is one that translates differences into direction, uses the talents of everyone and is energized to accomplish common goals with excellent outcomes. So, be prepared to learn from what you are about to read in the Diversity and Inclusion Handbook. And, most important, to turn this information into action — and, ultimately, into success.

Williams, Damon A. Strategic Diversity Leadership: Activating Change and Transformation in Higher Education. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, LLC.

• In today's world—whether viewed through a lens of educational attainment, economic development, global competitiveness, leadership capacity or social justice and equity—diversity is not just the right thing to do, it is the only thing to do!
• Following the era of civil rights in the 1960s and '70s, the 1990s and early 21st century have seen both retrenchment and backlash years, but also a growing recognition, particularly in business and the military, that we have to educate and develop the capacities of our citizens from all levels of society and all demographic and social groups to live fulfilling lives in an inter-connected globe.
• For higher education that means not only increasing the numbers of diverse students, faculty and staff, but simultaneously pursuing excellence in student learning and development, as well as through research and scholarship—in other words pursuing what this book defines as strategic diversity leadership. The aim is to create systems that enable every student, faculty and staff member to thrive and achieve to maximum potential within a diversity framework.
• This book is written from the perspective that diversity work is best approached as an intellectual endeavor with a pragmatic focus on achieving results that takes an evidence-based approach to operationalizing diversity.
• It offers an overarching conceptual framework for pursuing diversity in a national and international context; delineates and describes the competencies, knowledge and skills needed to take effective leadership in matters of diversity; offers new data about related practices in higher education; and presents and evaluates a range of strategies, organizational structures and models drawn from institutions of all types and sizes. It covers such issues as the reorganization of the existing diversity infrastructure, building accountability systems, assessing the diversity process and addressing legal threats to implementation. Its purpose is to help strategic diversity leaders combine big-picture thinking with an on-the-ground understanding of organizational reality and work strategically with key stakeholders and allies.
• This book is intended for presidents, provosts, chief diversity officers or diversity professionals, and anyone who wants to champion diversity and embed its objectives on their campus, whether at the level of senior administration, as members of campus organizations or committees, or as faculty, student affairs professionals or students taking a leadership role in making and studying the process of change.

People can trust you and you can have a great vision but in the end you must execute-and general alignment is all about that. Alignment may require making tough choices and difficult trade-offs; assuring sustainability as well as adopting behaviors and decision-making approaches that support overarching priorities.

Accountability

Tulgan, Bruce. 2007. It's Okay to Be the Boss: The Step-by-Step Guide to Becoming the Manager Your Employees Need. New York, NY: Collins Business.

• Do you feel you don't have enough time to manage your people? Do you avoid interacting with some employees because you hate the dreaded confrontations that often follow? Do you have some great employees you really cannot afford to lose? Do you secretly wish you could be more in control but don't know where to start?
• Managing people is harder and more high-pressure today than ever before. There's no room for downtime, waste or inefficiency. You have to do more with less, and employees have become high maintenance. Not only are they more likely to disagree openly and push back, but they also won't work hard for vague promises of long-term rewards. They look to you—their immediate boss—to help them get what they need and want at work.
• How do you tackle this huge management challenge? If you are like most managers, you take a hands-off approach. You empower employees by leaving them alone unless they really need you. After all, you don't want to micromanage them and you don't have the time to hold every employee's hand. Of course, problems always come up and often snowball into bigger problems. In fact, you probably spend too much of your time solving problems and falling behind on your work, which leaves even less time for managing people and opens the door for even more problems!
• In It's Okay to Be the Boss, Bruce Tulgan puts his finger on the biggest problem in corporate America—an under management epidemic affecting managers at all levels of the organization and in all industries—and offers another way. His clear step-by-step guide to becoming the strong manager employees need challenges bosses everywhere to spell out expectations, tell employees exactly what to do and how to do it, monitor and measure performance constantly, and correct failure quickly and reward success even more quickly. Now that's how you set employees up for success and help them earn what they need. Tulgan opens our eyes to the undisciplined workplace that is overwhelming managers and frustrating workers and invites bosses everywhere to accept the sacred responsibility of managing people. His message: It's okay to be the boss. Be a great one!

Execution

Covey, Stephen R. 1990.  The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  New York, NY: Fireside.

• In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, author Stephen R. Covey presents a holistic, integrated, principle-centered approach for solving personal and professional problems. With penetrating insights and pointed anecdotes, Covey reveals a step-by-step pathway for living with fairness, integrity, service and human dignity—principles that give us the security to adapt to change and the wisdom and power to take advantage of the opportunities that change creates.

Fully engaging your team members in a way that matters to them and allows each to make unique contributions toward a shared purpose is at the heart of cultivating talent. An outstanding leader develops human talent exponentially through a genuine commitment to choosing the right people as well as fostering their growth, diversity and participation. This practice will get you the results you want from your team members as individuals and as true contributors to a collaborative unit.

Collaboration

Katzenbach, Jon R. and Smith, Douglass K. 1993. The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

• Teams are becoming a fast, flexible and efficient way to enhance organizational performance. Yet today's business leaders consistently overlook opportunities to exploit their potential, confusing teams with teamwork or sharing. In this book, two senior McKinsey & Co. partners argue that we cannot meet the challenges ahead, from total quality to customer service to innovation, without teams. The authors talked with hundreds of people in more than 50 different teams in 30 companies to discover what differentiates various levels of team performance, where and how teams work best and how to enhance their effectiveness. Among their findings: formal hierarchy is actually good for teams; successful team leaders fit no ideal profile; commitment to performance goals is more important than commitment to team-building goals; top management teams are often smaller and more difficult to sustain; and team endings can be as important to manage as team beginnings. The wisdom of teams lies in recognizing their unique potential to deliver results and in understanding their many benefits.

Resolve

Stone, Douglas, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen. 2000. Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

• Whether you're dealing with an underperforming employee, disagreeing with your spouse about money or child-rearing, negotiating with a difficult client, or simply saying "no," or "I'm sorry," or "I love you," we attempt or avoid difficult conversations every day. Based on 15 years of research at the Harvard Negotiation Project, Difficult Conversations walks you through a step-by-step proven approach to having your toughest conversations with less stress and more success. You will learn:
• How to start the conversation without defensiveness
• Why what is not said is as important as what is
• Ways of keeping and regaining your balance in the face of attacks and accusations
• How to decipher the underlying structure of every difficult conversation
• Filled with examples from everyday life, Difficult Conversations will help you on the job, at home or out in the world. It is a book you will turn to again and again for advice, practical skills and reassurance.

Talent Selection

Falcone, Paul. 2009. 96 Great Interview Questions to Ask Before You Hire. New York, NY: American Management Association.

• Every harried interviewer knows the result of throwing out vague questions to potential employees: vague answers and potentially disastrous hiring decisions. Presented in a handy question-and-answer format, 96 Great Interview Questions to Ask Before You Hire provides readers with the tools they need to elicit honest and complete information from job candidates, plus helpful hints on interpreting the responses. The book gives interviewers everything they need to:
• Identify high-performance job candidates
• Probe beyond superficial answers
• Spot "red flags" indicating evasions or untruths
• Get references to provide real information
• Negotiate job offers to attract winners
• Included in this revised and updated edition are new material on background checks, specific challenges posed by the up-and-coming millennial generation and ideas for reinventing the employment application to gather more in-depth information than ever before. Packed with insightful questions, this book serves as a ready reference for both managers and human resources professionals alike.

Hoevemeyer, Victoria A. 2006. High-Impact Interview Questions: 701 Behavior Based Questions to Find the Right Person for Every Job. New York, NY:  American Management Association.

• "Tell me about a time...." The words evoke a child's fairy-tale innocence. Yet when used by an interviewer, they can help to determine the suitability of a job candidate by eliciting real-world examples of behaviors and experience that can save you and your organization from making a bad hiring decision.
• High-Impact Interview Questions shows you how to use competency-based behavioral interviewing methods that will uncover truly relevant and useful information. By having applicants describe specific situations from their own experience during previous jobs (rather than asking them hypothetical questions about "what would you do if..."), you'll be able to identify specific strengths and weaknesses that will tell you if you've found the right person for the job. But developing such behavior-based questions can be time-consuming and difficult.
• High-Impact Interview Questions saves you both time and effort. The book contains 701 questions you'll be able to use or adapt for your own needs, matched to 62 in-demand skills such as customer focus, motivation, initiative, adaptability, teamwork and more. It allows you to move immediately to the particular skills you want to measure, and quickly find just the right tough but necessary questions to ask during an interview.
• Asking behavior-based questions is by far the best way to discover crucial details about job candidates. High-Impact Interview Questions gives you the tools and guidance you need to gather this important information before you hire.