Social Work Leadership

A New York Times best-selling author reveals how to find the right words for every situation. Whether you are making a budget request, interviewing for a job, ending a relationship, or talking to children about divorce, the crux of success in those and other crucial situations is planned, effective communication.

In this compelling book, strategy guru Roger L. Martin and Skoll Foundation President and CEO Sally R. Osberg describe how social entrepreneurs target systems that exist in a stable but unjust equilibrium and transform them into entirely new, superior, and sustainable equilibria. All of these leaders - call them disrupters, visionaries, or changemakers - develop, build, and scale their solutions in ways that bring about the truly revolutionary change that makes the world a fairer and better place.

It can be easy to become task-oriented, focusing on the goals ahead of us and checking off our to-do lists rather than focusing on the people in our lives. Entrepreneur and business coach Brian Dixon set out to discover the secret to living a life that matters and finding work you love. In Start with Your People, Brian shares principles, tips, and personal stories to help you maximize the most important resource to succeed in both life and calling: relationships. Join Brian on a journey to discover the people-first mindset that changes everything.

Award-winning executive and journalist Shari Dunn combines deep research with enlightening interviews and anecdotes from across the broad spectrum of her career to uncover the history of Competency Checking, how it manifests in the workplace, and what can be done to change it. Competency checking, Dunn argues, continues to be practiced consciously and unconsciously and is the key reason why Black people and other people of color are underrepresented in so many industries and why there continues to be a revolving door of Black talent even after the hiring surges of 2020.

Today's ways of working are not working - even for professionals in "good" jobs. Responding to global competition and pressure from financial markets, companies are asking employees to do more with less, even as new technologies normalize 24/7 job expectations. In Overload, Erin Kelly and Phyllis Moen document how this new intensification of work creates chronic stress, leading to burnout, attrition, and underperformance. "Flexible" work policies and corporate lip service about "work-life balance" don't come close to fixing the problem.

Ego, arrogance and narcissism commonly describe ineffective leadership. Nobody likes a show off, but it also doesn’t work to shrink into the shadows. Ben Fauske had significant confidence issues early in his career and he was miserable. After years of struggle, he discovered a pattern that some of the greatest recording artists have used to overcome confidence issues and find success. He called it Authentic Confidence, and the process dramatically improved his career.

Building a fully engaged, energized workforce is the key to business success. The Power of Thanks reveals how leading companies like Intuit, JetBlue Airways, IHG, Symantec, ConAgra Foods, and The Hershey Company empower employees through social recognition, in which the practice of mutual appreciation and trust directs and rewards higher performance. Eric Mosley and Derek Irvine, executives at the world-renowned employee recognition firm Globoforce, explain why social recognition is so powerful and how you can apply it in your company.

Everyone has had a bad boss. You might have one right now. You might even be one. Bad bosses are a fact of the workplace, whether they’re short-tempered, unclear about expectations, or too disorganized to manage so much as a stapler. But how do you not only survive a difficult boss, but help your career thrive despite them? Written with Erikson's signature humor and warmth, Surrounded by Bad Bosses (and Lazy Employees) will help you deal with the most hopeless managers and employees you can imagine—and keep you entertained along the way.

Mastering the Cube skillfully lays out proven organization design principles. Comparing today's complex organizations to a Rubik's Cube, the authors explain how focusing improvement efforts on just one or two facets of the organization is akin to concentrating on just one side of the cube. Doing so is bound to affect - and more likely jumble - the other areas needed to generate a healthy and sustainable organization. They advocate stepping back and taking a systems-wide, comprehensive view of change and bringing all elements into alignment with strategy.

Fierce Conversations is the master guidebook to transforming the conversations that are central to your success, offering a new way of relating to people - at work, at home, and in every area of your life.

This illuminating and insightful audiobook analyzes problems with the culture's underlying worldviews and suggests how Christians can offer solutions to current problems as a way to rebuild culture and faith.

As the "stunningly successful nonprofit organization, Teach For America" ( New York Times) celebrates its 20th anniversary, its founder Wendy Kopp issues a passionate and inspiring summation of what she and TFA corps members have learned: that educational inequity—the achievement gap—is a solvable problem, and that the key to solving it—in a single classroom, a school, or system-wide—is leadership.

Governor Charlie Baker, one of the most popular governors in the United States, with a reputation for getting things done, wants to put the service back into public service. Results is the much-needed implementation guide for anyone in public service, as well as for leaders and managers in large organizations hamstrung by bureaucracy and politics. With a broad range of examples, Baker, a Republican, and Kadish, a Democrat, show how to move from identifying problems to achieving results in a way that bridges divides instead of exacerbating them.

Does the mere thought of speaking in front of an audience give you goosebumps, butterflies, and heart palpitations? If you want to overcome all of these, then you need this book in your life. For a lot of people, public speaking is a terrifying thing. Preparing to speak is the easy part. You either familiarize yourself with the topic, create cue cards to help you remember the things you need to talk about, or in some cases, memorize your speech. But when it's time to step up onto the stage and face the crowd, that's when the real challenge begins.

Have you noticed that on some days, everything seems to go so smoothly? Those times when everybody shares the same deadline and all of a sudden everything gets done. What’s going on here? What’s different in these scenarios? At the core of each situation is a replicable occurrence, a behavior pattern, or a trend you can understand and utilize. In fact, with just a little bit of heightened awareness and increased focus on your situation, you can pinpoint these exact patterns and recreate them at will.

History often appears to consist of big gestures and dramatic shifts. But for every peace treaty signed, someone set the stage and provided the pen. As social secretary to the Clintons for eight years, and more recently as chief of protocol under President Obama, Capricia Penavic Marshall has not just borne witness to history, she facilitated it. For Marshall, diplomacy runs on the invisible gesture: the micro-moves that affect the macro-shifts. Facilitation is power, and more often than not, it is the key to effective diplomacy.

You're always negotiating. Whether making a business deal, talking to friends or booking a holiday, negotiation is going on. And most of us are terrible at it. Experts tell us to negotiate as if we live in a rational world. But people can be angry, fearful and irrational. To achieve your goals you have to be able to deal with the unpredictable. In Getting More, negotiation expert Stuart Diamond reveals the real secrets behind getting more in any negotiation - whatever more means to you. Getting More is accessible, jargon-free, innovative...and it works.

We are living in a strange world—Salmon calls it “the New Not Normal.” The Phoenix Economy explores the ramifications of the pandemic years, many of which are surprisingly positive. In doing so, Salmon makes sense of one of the most disorienting and devastating events of our lifetimes. He examines the critical aspects of our lives that have been transformed in three parts: Time and Space, Mind and Body, and Business and Pleasure.

Rising Tide Car Wash in Parkland, Florida, isn’t average in any way. When Tom D’Eri and his father John bought the location in 2013, it was struggling. Now it’s one of the highest-volume washes in Florida. Its employee retention rate is five times that of its competitors. It has spun off into two additional locations that have been immediately successful, and the business is absurdly profitable.

It’s hard to avoid innovation these days. Nearly every product gets marketed as being disruptive, whether it’s genuinely a new invention or just a new toothbrush. But in this manifesto on the state of American work, historians of technology Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russell argue that our way of thinking about and pursuing innovation has made us poorer, less safe, and — ironically — less innovative. Drawing on years of original research and reporting, The Innovation Delusion shows how the ideology of change for its own sake has proved a disaster.