David Baldwin

Center for Creative Leadership (CCL)

Curt Grayson

Influence is an essential component of leadership. Your position in an organization and the power it gives you aren’t always enough to motivate people to do what you ask. Developing your influence skills can help you gain commitment from people at all levels: direct reports, peers, and bosses. This book includes an assessment tool to help you determine the influence tactics you currently use. Some tactics depend on logic, others appeal to emotions, and others are cooperative appeals. You may discover tactics you rarely use, and you can develop those tactics to become more effective. You will learn what to do before, during, and after an influence session. Every influence attempt can become a learning experience, and you can continue to enhance this crucial leadership capability.

Gaining Commitment, Getting Results

Influence

Maxine A. Dalton

Almost all managers regard job experiences and the lessons they provide essential for their development as leaders. But not all of those managers are successful at learning those lessons. That difficulty is often related to a manager ’s relying too much on one preferred learning tactic—a tactic that might not be suited for gleaning the lessons of a particular job experience. By increasing the number of learning tactics and becoming a more versatile learner, managers can better position themselves to take advantage of the lessons that job experiences offer and contribute to their leadership development.

Becoming a More Versatile Learner

Social Identity comprises the parts of a person's identity that come from belonging to particular groups, including age, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, and socioeconomic status. Your social identity informs how you lead. The social identities of those around you affect how they view you as a leader and how they views, and thus work with, others. This guidebook includes questions and activities to help you develop your awareness of social identity. Armed with that knowledge, you can decrease the likelihood of misunderstanding, increase your ability to be open to different perspectives, and enhance your skill at accurately interpreting situation that call on your ability to lead.

Knowing Yourself, Knowing Others

Social Identity

Douglas Riddle

Leadership in the top management ranks is often an isolated business. Many managers recognize that to focus their personal development plans they need the uninterrupted time and attention of a skilled, objective facilitator. This guidebook is for managers who are considering leadership coaching as a tool in their personal leadership development. It describes what leadership coaching is and cna help you decide whether it is appropriate for your situation. You'll also learn how to locate and select a qualified coach with the professional and personal credentials and characteristics that match your development needs so that you can achieve the goals you've set.

When It's Right and When You're Ready

Leadership Coaching

Stanley S. Gryskiewicz

Sylvester Taylor

Creative solutions can be challenged and defended in the pursuit of profitability. But first, creativity must be demystified. A process that targets innovation provides leaders with just such a problem-solving approach. The goal is to produce high-quality ideas that are appropriate to the task—which means groups and organizations can implement them with less risk. Work with the targeted innovation process consists of activities in five areas: stating the problem in a way that encourages creative problem solving, learning and understanding different problem-solving styles, learning and understanding creative pathways and their relationship to problem solving, generating ideas, and evaluating those ideas. Targeted innovation reconciles creativity with management. Managers can use it to solve problems that meet their organization’s call for innovative answers to current challenges.

Innovation That Gets Results

Making Creativity Practical

Barbara Popejoy

Brenda J. McManigle

Conflict is inevitable when people work together, and it’s one of the most difficult challenges facing managers. But it’s a challenge that successful leaders learn to address. Managers who develop an understanding of difference without judgment and are willing to see more than one perspective or solution are in a good position to manage conflict with their direct reports. Conflict between managers and direct reports highlights a power relationship and affects the work itself—the tasks for which managers and direct reports share responsibility. Managers who look to see both sides of conflict can resolve it, but it means assessing the differences between themselves and their direct reports and finding out how those differences affect the conflict. After assessing those differences, managers can devise a plan to use before, during, and after a conflict resolution session. They will be better prepared to understand emotions that can trigger conflict, to clarify performance expectations so their direct reports know what’s expected of them, and to provide ongoing feedback for the support and development of their direct reports.

Managing Conflict with Direct Reports

Talula Cartwright

A great many peer conflicts arise from incompatible goals or from different views on how a task should be accomplished. With honest dialogue these kinds of conflicts can usually be resolved. But other peer conflicts are more troublesome because they involve personal values, office politics and power, and emotional reactions. To resolve these more difficult peer conflicts, managers should examine three key issues that can cause such clashes and also influence their outcome. One, they should assess their emotional “hot buttons” that trigger ineffective behaviors and make conflict difficult to manage. Two, they should examine their personal values and how those might conflict with what their peers find important. Finally, they should assess their power in the organization—which can be related to position, influence, expertise, or some other factor—and learn how to use it to manage conflicts. Navigating these issues won’t rid an organization of conflict among peers. But by paying attention to them managers can build effective relationships that will survive these inevitable conflicts and bolster their ability to achieve organizational goals.

Managing Conflict with Peers

The success of your daily interactions with others, whether during formal meetings or encounters at the water cooler, can make or break your success in the workplace. Having interpersonal skills will allow you to motivate, inspire, and successfully lead others, as well as further your own career development. This guidebook will show you how, through self-awareness and strategic implementation of behaviors, you can utilize interpersonal savvy to make the most out of negative situations, develop and lead others, and create a positive working environment despite daily challenges and hardships.

Building and Maintaining Solid Working Relationships

Interpersonal Savvy

Leaders often have to make decisions without complete information, and those decisions are expected to be not only right but also timely. Using reflective techniques can help you learn to depend on your intuition for help in making good decisions quickly. Reflective practices may seem time-consuming at the beginning, but the time you put in on the front end is well worth the investment. It will pay you back both in time and in the quality of the decisions you make.

A Guide to Reflective Practice

Developing Your Intuition

Bill Sternbergh

Sloan R. Weitzel

هذا الكتاب دليل تغيير طريقة تفكيرك حول وضع الأهداف. إنه دليل تحديد الأهداف المهمة والمفيدة في خمسة مجالات مفتاحية من حياتك: (المهنة، والذات، والأسرة، والمجتمع، والبعد الروحي). والأهداف التي تبتكرها بمساعدة هذا الدليل أهداف ذكية- أي محددة، وقابلة للقياس والتحقيق، وواقعية، وموقوتة. إن وضع أهداف كهذه يعود عليك بفائدة تحقيق تقدم حقيقي على درب النجاح في مجالات حياتك كافة.

Setting Your Development Goals: Start with Your Values

المدير الممارس: ضع أهداف تطورك: Setting Your Development Goals: Start with Your Values

Meena Surie Wilson

Today's large business organizations in India have a voracious need for effective managers and talented leaders; but demand far exceeds supply. This timely and practical book offers thoroughly-researched pointers on how Indian managers can become high-performing business leaders. The leadership development curriculum proposed in these pages is based on extracting lessons from on-the-job experience. Given that the workplace is the medium through which the essentials of leadership are learned, executives and managers at all levels need to know which experiences matter, what are the foremost lessons learned, and how learning occurs. Developing Tomorrow's Leaders Today offers a complete template for effective leadership, including: The seven experiences vital for developing leadership ability The 11 lessons in leadership essential for managerial effectiveness Over 50 stories and 100 wise quotations from today's senior executives that portray how leadership acumen sharpens over time Reflective exercises, self-assessments, and guidelines for self-improvement The underlying research was conducted in cooperation with the Tata Management Training Center in Pune, India, and captures the experiences and leadership lessons learned by over 100 senior Indian business leaders. As such, it offers readers both a compass and a map for traversing the terrain of leadership development. In these pages, early and mid-career managers will find a roadmap for steering their careers towards the higher echelons of executive leadership. Senior executives, at the top of their game, will find a systematic and proactive approach to cultivating the leadership talent that their organizations will require in the future. Global executives operating in India will find out how leadership and management are practiced in India.

Insights from Corporate India

Developing Tomorrow's Leaders Today

Michael E. Kossler

Kim Kanaga

Despite all of the attention and accolades that organizations place on teams, they are not always the most efficient way to meet a business challenge. It’s expensive and time consuming to launch a team, and it’s a full-time job to lead a team toward achieving organizational objectives. This guidebook was written to help managers determine if a team is the right tool for meeting a business goal, and explains potential obstacles and challenges to forming a team that can operate at its full potential.

Do You Really Need a Team?

Michael H. Hoppe

Active listening is a person’s willingness and ability to hear and understand. At its core, active listening is a state of mind that involves paying full and careful attention to the other person, avoiding premature judgment, reflecting understanding, clarifying information, summarizing, and sharing. By learning and committing to the skills and behaviors of active listening, leaders can become more effective listeners and, over time, improve their ability to lead.

Center for Creative Leadership (CCL)

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