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Built for leaders at every level
Hospitality is often viewed as something to extend to customers or guests. But restaurateur Will Guidara doesn’t want you to stop there. By extending hospitality to your employees as well, you make them feel seen and heard, enabling them to bring their best selves to work. His approach to building such a culture centers on embracing shared values, purposeful communication, and prioritizing everyone’s well-being.
Every management decision is built on assumptions or models about what works in business. What if our models are wrong? In this class, strategy consultant and author Roger Martin challenges dominant management models and proposes alternatives.
Unnecessary or poorly run meetings can steal important time from your teams and create disengagement amongst employees. Because meetings are often at the core of an organization’s culture, Priya Parker says you need to make sure they’re infused with purpose — from the moment they’re put on the schedule to the moment they wrap up. She urges you to be mindful not just of their content and frequency, but also of their participants and locations.
It’s a natural part of the human experience: We all want to feel seen and appreciated by others. And yet, most of us don’t — this is what businessman and philanthropist David Novak calls the “Global Recognition Deficit.” He’s made it his life’s mission to address this gap and help others do the same by spreading recognition, smiles, and contagious positivity.
Research conducted by the founder of Change Enthusiasm Global, Cassandra Worthy, suggests that over half of all Americans admit to feeling difficult emotions, such as anxiety, when facing a change in the workplace. And while those feelings are valid, they don’t have to be permanent. To become more comfortable with your relationship with change, Worthy offers a framework for harnessing your emotions and making more productive choices that reframe change as opportunity.
Spreadsheets won’t save you in a crisis. What you need is trust, resilience, and accountability. And according to CEO and former Navy SEAL Brent Gleeson, that all comes down to culture.
Aristotle once called man a political animal by nature. In the 21st-century, this means negotiating a complex network of relationships while managing the increasingly difficult challenges of a fast-changing environment. Your career success, argues Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill, will be determined by how well you manage the social and political dynamics associated with organizational life.
There’s a crisis in the workplace. According to a 2016 Gallup Poll, 70% of people are, as the classic pop song puts it, “workin’ for the weekend.” They’re bored and disengaged at work. The solution, says professor Dan Cable, is to activate their biological “seeking system,” the neurocircuitry in our brains that lights up when we push the boundaries of our knowledge and see the meaning in our work.
Unnecessary meetings, micromanagement, overly complex procedures — these are a few common examples of the phenomenon Bob Sutton calls workplace “friction.” And while friction can feel inevitable, regularly slowing us down and causing frustration, he argues that it doesn’t have to be that way. By eliminating pointless barriers, we can streamline work, sharpen decision-making, and fuel creativity.
What is “strategic thinking”? In a nutshell, Michael Watkins’ research suggests that “it means looking beyond the present situation and thinking critically and creatively about the many potential futures.” Sounds great in theory. But how do you actually do it? Watkins has an answer for that, too. He breaks his overarching, forward-looking mindset into six specific disciplines you can practice to build your strategic thinking intentionally and holistically.
Managers often get a bad rap, dismissed as bureaucratic cogs while leaders are celebrated as bold visionaries. Yet both roles are essential to making an organization function effectively. So why does this unbalanced narrative persist? Suzy Welch argues it comes from an overemphasis on separating leadership and management, rather than recognizing how they intersect. The most effective team leaders, she notes, break through this false divide — knowing when to inspire broadly and when to dig into the details. The blend is so crucial, Welch even coined a term for it: “lanaging.”
In the high-stakes world of espionage, operatives rely on a blend of strategy and psychology to navigate complex situations and achieve their objectives — principles that have the potential to transform your approach to business and leadership. Join former CIA officer Andrew Bustamante to explore how to leverage intelligence, motivate others, safeguard secrets, and cultivate high-performing teams. You might even awaken your inner secret agent along the way!