Confidence Classic: How Exceptional Leaders Map Decisions, Counter Burnout, and Lead Through Crisis with Dr. Richard Winters, Director of Leadership Development, Mayo Clinic

When your organization is facing changing conditions or never-before-seen challenges, the only way to survive is to adapt. But for leaders to successfully guide their organization through the process, they need to themselves adopt a new mindset. In The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky offer practical strategies to help leaders navigate these kinds of complex challenges—challenges that require innovation, experimentation, and a departure from techniques you’ve grown accustomed to.

In this guide, we’ll look at how Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky define adaptive challenges as well as their advice for diagnosing them in the context of your organization’s needs. We’ll also discuss some of their strategies for guiding your organization through these kinds of challenges. Along the way, we’ll compare their ideas to those from other experts on leadership, business strategy, and psychology, including Simon Sinek, Daniel Kahneman, and Angela Duckworth.

What’s the secret to being a great leader? Whether you’re in a warzone or on the front lines of a corporate battle, Extreme Ownership argues that the best leaders take full responsibility for everything in their world: not only their actions, decisions, and failures, but also those of everyone on their team. By practicing Extreme Ownership, great leaders achieve victory by prioritizing the team above all else and focusing on constant improvement—and in this guide, we’ll show how you can, too.

Authors Jocko Willink and Leif Babin are former US Navy SEAL officers who served in one of the most dangerous areas of Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. They honed the principles of Extreme Ownership on the battlefield, then applied the same tenets to the corporate world as business consultants. In this guide, we’ll add broader context from other leadership books such as Built to Last and Team of Teams to better illustrate how to apply Willink and Babin’s leadership principles to your life.

While many business books tell you how to manage other people, this 1966 classic by management expert Peter F. Drucker explains how to manage yourself to be effective. Effectiveness is key to individual and organizational success. Without it, other attributes, such as talent, intelligence, knowledge, and hard work, are useless.

Drucker says anyone can learn five practices for effectiveness: managing your time, focusing on just a few key tasks, making a unique contribution, maximizing your strengths, and making sound decisions. He explains how to implement these practices, which have remained relevant for over 50 years, even as technology and organizations have evolved. This guide examines how Drucker’s ideas on effectiveness hold up today and how others have built on them.

What’s the secret to being a great leader? Whether you’re in a warzone or on the front lines of a corporate battle, Extreme Ownership argues that the best leaders take full responsibility for everything in their world: not only their actions, decisions, and failures, but also those of everyone on their team. By practicing Extreme Ownership, great leaders achieve victory by prioritizing the team above all else and focusing on constant improvement—and in this guide, we’ll show how you can, too.

Authors Jocko Willink and Leif Babin are former US Navy SEAL officers who served in one of the most dangerous areas of Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. They honed the principles of Extreme Ownership on the battlefield, then applied the same tenets to the corporate world as business consultants. In this guide, we’ll add broader context from other leadership books such as Built to Last and Team of Teams to better illustrate how to apply Willink and Babin’s leadership principles to your life.

Transitioning into a leadership role is a time of excitement and uncertainty. According to leadership development consultant Michael Watkins, whether you thrive or falter in your new role depends on your actions early on. In The First 90 Days, Watkins provides a roadmap for making your job transition smooth and rewarding. You’ll learn how to avoid common pitfalls by gathering critical information, building strong relationships, and achieving initial successes. If you follow Watkins's advice, you’ll be ready to ease into your new role with confidence and start creating positive momentum for your career and your company.

In this guide, we’ll review Watkins's guidelines on quickly assimilating and making an impact in your new role. We’ll also consider how other business leaders’ perspectives on management compare with Watkins's—including ideas from Gino Wickman in Traction and Julie Zhuo in The Making of a Manager.

In Nine Lies About Work, Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall argue that many of our workplace norms and practices are flawed. As a result, a majority of workers aren’t engaged at work and productivity growth is lagging. Thus, these typical practices prevent people and organizations from flourishing. To build thriving organizations, they assert that today’s leader should be a freethinking leader, one who questions established systems and beliefs and who values individuality over conformity.

In this guide, we explore why people don’t need feedback, why organizations shouldn’t invest in people who have “potential,” and why we should forget about work-life balance. We’ll also compare the authors’ ideas with those of other leadership experts, discuss research that supports or counters their arguments, and include tips to help you replace the lies with truths.

In The Great Game of Business, businessman Jack Stack and writer Bo Burlingham propose that the best and most efficient way to create a successful business is by encouraging employees to take ownership—by encouraging them to see the company as theirs rather than just somewhere they work. If employees see the company as theirs, its success becomes their success as well—and people will work harder to ensure their own success than that of others.

In this guide, we’ll explore the principles of fostering employee ownership that let Stack take a failing division of International Harvester and turn it into a corporation comprising over 60 businesses. We’ll examine the benefits and difficulties of implementing these principles and the authors’ advice on how to do so. In our commentary, we’ll compare the authors’ ideas to those of other business experts such as John Doerr and Tony Hsieh and examine how their suggestions intersect with psychological principles.

Want to motivate your employees and teammates to do a better job? Does your team seem unhappy, unmotivated, and distrustful of your organization?

In Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work, Paul Marciano argues that engagement stems from respect. Employees don’t want to be treated like cogs in a chain. Instead, they want to feel empowered, have autonomy, receive supportive feedback, and be treated considerately. Learn what components of work people really want, and simple actions to take today to engage your team.

When your organization is facing changing conditions or never-before-seen challenges, the only way to survive is to adapt. But for leaders to successfully guide their organization through the process, they need to themselves adopt a new mindset. In The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky offer practical strategies to help leaders navigate these kinds of complex challenges—challenges that require innovation, experimentation, and a departure from techniques you’ve grown accustomed to.

In this guide, we’ll look at how Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky define adaptive challenges as well as their advice for diagnosing them in the context of your organization’s needs. We’ll also discuss some of their strategies for guiding your organization through these kinds of challenges. Along the way, we’ll compare their ideas to those from other experts on leadership, business strategy, and psychology, including Simon Sinek, Daniel Kahneman, and Angela Duckworth.

In Leading Change, John P. Kotter argues that in a fully globalized and ever-evolving economic environment, successful firms are those that can implement successful long-term change. Successful organizational change, Kotter argues, depends on the quality of leadership―people who can articulate a vision, inspire belief and confidence in it, and empower mid-level and junior managers to implement it on a tactical level. He outlines a set of strategies and techniques to help change leaders shape and direct organizational transformation, including establishing a sense of urgency, articulating a clear vision, setting measurable benchmarks to gauge success, and changing the culture to ensure that the new way of doing things lasts.

In this guide, we’ll explore these strategies, and we’ll examine how they compare to advice from other management experts who weigh in on similar ideas.