Developing High Performance Leaders

Olympic sports present a vivid examples of how to achieve world-class performance through a special blend of management, teamwork and individual performance. This work aims to give leaders the world class skills and tools required to win in today's dynamic business environment.

Using a behavioural science perspective, practical strategies and an easy-to-follow framework, Developing High Performance Leaders will enable leaders throughout the various business sectors, to increase the yield on their organization's human capital and help their team members achieve their goals.

Build high-performing teams with an evidence-based framework that delivers results Committed is a practical handbook for building great teams. Based on research from Wharton’s Executive Development Program (EDP), this concise guide identifies the common challenges that arise when people work together as a group and provides key guidance on breaking through the barriers to peak performance. Committed draws its insights from the EDP’s living lab: an intensive two-week simulation during which executive-level participants run complex global businesses. The authors have observed over 100 teams collaborating and competing for over 100 combined years in this intense environment. It has yielded fundamental insights about teamwork: what usually goes wrong, what frequently goes right, and the methods and techniques that will help you access your team’s full potential. These insights have been distilled into a simple, repeatable process that you can start applying today. Getting teams engaged and aligned is hard. Committed will give you the tools you need to deal with all of the familiar teamwork challenges that get in the way: organizational politics, delegation, coordination, and aligning skills and motivation. Using vivid stories and examples from the worlds of business, sports, and non-profits, it will teach you how to: Understand the dynamics of successful teams Achieve peak performance using a research-backed methodology Gain expert insight into why most teams underperform Learn the critical points common to all great teams Committed gives you the perspective you need to combine the right people with the right way of collaborating to achieve extraordinary results.

Reinvent Yourself as a Leader Before Your Business Outruns You Whether you are a senior leader or aspire to be one, at some point you’ll face a paradoxical risk. As you pile up successes, your job will get bigger than you, and you may become disoriented by a world of unfamiliar challenges. What Happens Now? will help you learn how to conquer the new challenges of sophistication – rather than just navigating the greater complexity – by doing things you’ve never done before. You will succeed by achieving these goals: • Broadcasting a vision with clarity and purpose • Aligning a high-performing team • Communicating and leading change • Focusing your time and energy in the right places • Investing in coaching and creating other leaders As experienced troubleshooters for hundreds of executives and organizations, John Hillen and Mark Nevins will show you how to foresee the stalls that threaten every leader – and overcome them. JOHN HILLEN, D.Phil., is a leadership and strategy professor in the School of Business at George Mason University, a consultant, and a director for many companies. MARK D. NEVINS, PhD, is an advisor to top executives, teams, and organizations. He has consulted from the C-suite down at Fortune 500 corporations, high-growth startups and private equity portfolio companies, and elite professional and financial services firms. “A practical and enriching guide for leaders.” WALTER ISAACSON International bestselling author “Will help leaders at all levels grow and develop.” MARSHALL GOLDSMITH International Bestselling Author

The scale and complexity of today's corporations dictates that teamwork is essential to realising high performance. This book clearly identifies six critical stages to becoming a world class team, making this a must read text for ambitious and aspiring managers.

What makes a truly exceptional leader? Discover the practical, fail-proof tools that will help you to fine-tune your leadership skills, solidify respect among your workforce, and ensure your company’s lasting success. When Martin G. Moore was asked to rescue a leading energy corporation from ever-increasing debt and a lack of executive accountability, he faced an uphill battle. Not only had he never before stepped into the role of CEO; he also had no experience in the rapidly evolving energy sector. Relying on the practical leadership principles he had honed throughout his thirty-three-year career, he overhauled the company’s culture, redefined its leadership capability, and increased earnings by a compound annual growth rate of 125 percent. In No Bullsh!t Leadership, Moore outlines these proven leadership principles in a clear, direct way. He sweeps away the mystical fog surrounding leadership today and lays out the essential steps for success. Moore combines this tangible advice with honest, real-world examples from his own career to provide a no-nonsense look at the skills a true leader possesses. Moore’s principles for no bullshit leadership focus on: Creating value by focusing only on the things that matter most Facing conflict, adversity, and ambiguity with decisiveness and confidence Setting uncompromising standards for behavior and performance Selecting and developing great people Making those people accountable, and empowering them to do their best Setting simple, value-driven goals and communicating them relentlessly Though the steps aren’t easy, they are guaranteed, if implemented, to lift your leadership–and your organization–to a higher level. Wherever you are in your career, No Bullsh!t Leadership will help you develop the skills and form the habits needed to become a no bullshit leader.

Thrive provides leaders with a clear blueprint for building a high-performance culture. Drawing on extensive experience in change management, organizational development, and performance consulting, Andrew Freedman and Paul Elliott share their systematic approach, known as the Exemplary Performance System (EPS), in a way that enables leaders to take immediate action to shift workforce engagement and performance. Thrive teaches leaders how to create clarity and alignment around what high performance looks like and how to replicate it at scale, identify and eliminate barriers to performance excellence, effectively align individual and team priorities with those of the company, and build organizational systems and processes that accelerate business and financial results.

The definitive classic on high-performance teams The Wisdom of Teams is the definitive work on how to create high-performance teams in any organization. Having sold nearly a half million copies and been translated into more than fifteen languages, the authors’ clarion call that teams should be the basic unit of organization for most businesses has permanently shaped the way companies reach the highest levels of performance. Using engaging case studies and testimonials from both successful and failed teams—ranging from Fortune 500 companies to the U.S. Army to high school sports—the authors explain the dynamics of teams both in great detail and with a broad view. Their conclusions and prescriptions span the familiar to the counterintuitive: • Commitment to performance goals and common purpose is more important to team success than team building. • Opportunities for teams exist in all parts of the organization. • Real teams are the most successful spearheads of change at all levels. • Working in teams naturally integrates performance and learning. • Team “endings” can be as important to manage as team “beginnings.” Wisdom lies in recognizing a team’s unique potential to deliver results and in understanding its many benefits—development of individual members, team accomplishments, and stronger companywide performance. Katzenbach and Smith’s comprehensive classic is the essential guide to unlocking the potential of teams in your organization.

Teams are everywhere - business, industry, schools, hospitals and government. There are executive, management and cross-functional teams, as well as teams formed for specific tasks and projects. But when a team can succeed or fail on the quality and effectiveness of its leader, everyone will have a view on the leadership qualities that are most important. So what makes a successful team? And what can leaders do to ensure that their teams collaborate effectively and are committed to the right goals? The Leadership of Teams examines some of the most common challenges facing both teams and leaders, including: · interpersonal challenges; · working in a global context; · different roles in different teams; · multicultural teams; and · coaching and developing team members. Written by experienced academics and practitioners, The Leadership of Teams incorporates results from specially-commissioned surveys on team-working, organized by Ashridge Business School. Using examples from sport, the military, business and the charity sector, this book shows how the best leaders successfully inspire, support and work with their teams in order to produce peak performance.

The ultimate guide to leading remote employees and teams, tackling the key challenges that managers face-from hiring and onboarding new members to building culture remotely, tracking productivity, communicating speedily, and retaining star employees