Shaping the New Normal: Help Your Team Survive and Thrive

As we adapt to the rapid, widespread changes because of COVID-19, what does living in “the new normal" mean? Emerging from this pandemic will require that we take care of each other and reshape our organizations, communities, and society to serve the many. Here is a list of resources on how to create positive and inclusive organizations, have productive conversations aimed at solving our world’s most pressing issues, encourage leadership that puts people first, and build a world that works for all.

Humble Leadership

Ed Schein and Peter A. Schein

Humble Leadership upends the vertical hierarchy of traditional leadership and instead focuses on the high levels of trust and communication that must first exist in relationships. Traditional leadership demands formal, transactional relationships, professional distance, and that all guidance comes from the top - all of which are hopelessly inflexible and outdated. In a complex and volatile world, humble leadership builds upon humble inquiry which encourages asking before telling - a skill that can strengthen relationships as our personal and professional lives go through major destabilization. This book tells how such humble leadership has built effective cultures across a range of sectors: health care, government, the military, tech and innovation, and more.

The Positive Organization

Robert Quinn

The Positive Organization shows how to defy convention and create organizations where people feel fully engaged, continually rewarded, and people are able to both individually and collectively flourish. The problem is that leaders are following a negative and constraining “mental map” that insists organizations must be rigid, top-down hierarchies and that the people in them are driven mainly by self-interest and fear. In a time of transformation and constant change, organizations have to be agile, not rigid. But leaders can adopt a different mental map, one where organizations are networks of fluid, evolving relationships and where people are motivated by a desire to grow, learn, and serve a larger goal.

The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

Timothy R. Clark

4 Stages of Psychological Safety is the first practical, hands-on guide that shows how leaders can build psychological safety in their organizations, thereby creating an environment where everyone feels included, fully engaged, and encouraged to contribute their best efforts and ideas. When it becomes emotionally expensive to say what you truly think and feel, that lack of psychological safety triggers the self-censoring instinct, shuts down learning, and blocks collaboration and creativity. Clark draws deeply on psychology, philosophy, social science, literature, and his own experiences to show how leaders can, and must, set the tone and model the ideal behaviors. This thoughtful and pragmatic guide demonstrates that if you banish fear, install true performance-based accountability, and create a nurturing environment that allows people to be vulnerable as they learn and grow.

Conversations Worth Having

Jackie Stavros and Cheri Torres

Conversations Worth Having uses appreciative inquiry to frame conversations as growth opportunities and finding hope - and each other - even in the most tense and fraught circumstances. Conversation is a crucial part of everything we do. It influences our well being—a good conversation can leave us ready for anything, a bad one can ruin our whole day. But most of us are unaware of the nature of our conversations, let alone how to make them consistently affirming and empowering. This book shows how to use Appreciative Inquiry, one of the most effective and widely used approaches for fostering positive change, to dramatically improve the outcomes of our conversations. By focusing on what we want to happen instead of what we want to avoid, and asking questions to deepen understanding and increase possibilities, we expand creativity, improve productivity, and unleash potential, at work and home.

Feedback and Other Dirty Words

M. Tamra Chandler

Feedback (and Other Dirty Words) advocates for open streams of communication built into everyday organizational functions, rather than pushed to the backburner or worse yet, feared. When it's done right, feedback has been proven to be the most effective means of improving communication and performance for you and your organization. But for many of us, feedback is a dirty word that we associate with bias, politics, resentment, and self-doubt. However, if we take a step back and think about its true intent, we realize that feedback needn't be a bad thing. After all, understanding how others experience us provides valuable opportunities to learn and grow. During a time where organizations and teams need to be able to pivot quickly to respond to continual changes, feedback is our best tool for making sure everyone is working together effectively.

We Can't Talk About That at Work

Mary-Frances Winters

We Can’t Talk about That at Work! shows how to deal with sensitive subjects in a way that brings people together instead of driving them apart. Conversations about taboo topics happen at work every day. And if they aren't handled effectively, they can become polarizing and divisive, impacting productivity, engagement, retention, teamwork, and even employees' sense of safety in the workplace. The only way we’re going to survive this period of transformation and loss is in supporting and caring for one another - and the best way to do that is through having productive and inclusive conversations across differences.

Humility is the New Smart

Edward D. Hess and Katherine Ludwig

Humility Is the New Smart paints an intricate portrait of the inevitable and immediate future - a world in which we work alongside technology and AI as if there were our teammates. Industries have been unalterably changed by the pandemic, and we’re facing the continual threat of more job loss. But there is something we can do - if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. To stay relevant, we have to play a different game. Hess and Ludwig offer us that game plan. We need to excel at critical, creative, and innovative thinking and at genuinely engaging with others—things machines can’t do well. The key is to change our definition of what it means to be smart, what the authors dub as the NewSmart. In this extraordinarily timely book, they offer detailed guidance for developing NewSmart attitudes and four critical behaviors that will help us adapt to the new reality.

Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go

Beverly Kaye and Julie Winkle Giulioni

Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go is filled with practical tips, guidelines, and templates, as well as nearly a hundred suggested conversation questions. Study after study confirms that career development is the single most powerful tool managers have for driving retention, engagement, productivity, and results. Nevertheless, it’s frequently back-burnered. But there’s a better way: frequent short conversations with employees about their career goals and options integrated seamlessly into the normal course of business. The authors identify three broad types of conversations that will increase employees’ awareness of their strengths, weaknesses, and interests, and most importantly for this moment, point out where their organization and their industry are headed.

Erasing Institutional Bias

Tiffany Jana and Ashley Diz Mejias

Erasing Institutional Bias scales up the framework from the revelatory book Overcoming Bias, which focused on personal bias, to impact systemic change in organizations. This pandemic has highlighted how certain communities are disproportionately affected, and this is due largely to institutional bias. This book confronts specific topics such as racism, sexism, hiring and advancement bias and retribution bias, meaning when organizations develop a culture of aggression, and offer solutions for identifying and controlling them. In a world divided, Erasing Institutional Bias is designed to raise awareness about imbalances and help us hold ourselves accountable for creating a world that works for everyone.

Humble Leadership

Ed Schein and Peter A. Schein

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The Positive Organization

Robert Quinn

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The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

Timothy R. Clark

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Conversations Worth Having

Jackie Stavros and Cheri Torres

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Feedback and Other Dirty Words

M. Tamra Chandler

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We Can't Talk About That at Work

Mary-Frances Winters

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Humility is the New Smart

Edward D. Hess and Katherine Ludwig

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Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go

Beverly Kaye and Julie Winkle Giulioni

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Erasing Institutional Bias

Tiffany Jana and Ashley Diz Mejias

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