Competencies at Work: Providing a Common Language for Talent Management

$21.99

Check out an article by the authors in the latest issue of TD Magazine!

Competencies At Work will equip readers to understand, build, and implement competency models as a foundational and integrating element in talent management systems. Readers will understand how competency models have evolved to be the current best practice in defining criteria for all talent management applications such as selection interviews, promotion panels, assessment centers, job descriptions, and learning objectives. Specific guidance is provided in the steps needed to establish a sustainable model, with research results on universal competencies contained in most contemporary models. Also discussed are the challenges and issues in building and implementing models, such as the need for proof of efficiency and effectiveness, that is, reliable measures of competence and proof of validity.

Competency models will be placed in the greater context of the complete talent management system needed to effectively recruit, select, orient, train, appraise, reward, motivate, and promote high-performing employees. The most popular competency applications of interviewing, assessment centers, survey-guided development, job modeling, and training criteria are specifically explored and explained. Finally, recent case studies bring competencies to life in real organizational settings. Questions for reflection will help readers review and summarize important content in each chapter.

Digital Leadership Framework: Cultivating the Four Key Competencies

$31.99

In the digital age we are currently living in, customer needs change. Industry dynamics change. Business models change. Competence requirements change. Project parameters change. However, the leadership required to drive these changes has not changed much. Most leaders continue to drive digital transformation using the old pre-digital style of leadership. As per a recent study by McKinsey, 70 percent of digital transformation projects fail. The main reason for failure is a lack of Digital Leadership.

Digital transformation is the main driver behind digital leadership. Digital leadership is the set of behaviors a leader must demonstrate in the digital age, which are: learning new skills, connecting with people, leveraging data, and delivering results. To demonstrate them successfully, one must develop the following four key competencies:

  • Growth mindset
  • Empathy
  • Informed decision-making
  • Fast execution

Each of these competencies uniquely maps to a behavior: Growth mindset enables learning, Empathy enables people connections, Informed decision-making enables leveraging data, and Fast execution enables delivering results.

This book contains a complete framework for digital leaders to develop these competencies. They can be an executive or a manager leading a team, a transformation driver, or a change agent in an organization.

The success of this book lies in how effectively the leaders cultivate the competencies and apply them at their workplace. This book is not just about information…. It’s all about transformation!

Lean on Civility: Strategies for Changing Culture in Manufacturing Workplaces

$37.99

In Lean on Civility, the authors explain how incorporating civility can drive success in your business. As a key component of workplace training, civility can have a significant impact on workplace culture and also increase measurable outputs related to continuous improvement—including but not limited to quality, efficiency, and cost.

When organizations are deliberate and strategic about increasing supervisors’ and managers’ civility competencies in four key skill areas, they experience almost immediate improvements in interpersonal relationships, communication, morale, retention, trust, and productivity.

Lean on Civility offers a practical tool kit—complete with strategies and tools (like the Masotti Feedback Method)—that you can take back to your workplace and implement immediately.

Unleashing the Startup Unicorn: Breaking Through Constraints to the Entrepreneurial Spirit

$37.99

It is well known that high-tech startups need to innovate to survive, yet the failure rate for innovation is shockingly high. Nearly three out of four new products or services, i.e., their startups, miss their revenue and profit goals–or fail entirely.

It’s a misconception that high-tech startups fail only because of the failing products or finances. The failures could also be because of erroneous choice of technology platforms, development teams or methodology, or even the project execution. Accordingly, this book takes a holistic view of a startups’ aesthetics that enables it to become attractive for all stakeholders especially investors in all aspects of its operations at all stages of its lifecycle.

This book:

  • Looks at aspects of venture capital financing and what investors look for in a contemporary startup.
  • Shows how only an overarching aspiration for a startup to become a Unicorn is sufficient to explain the typical characteristics of legendry Silicon Valley Unicorns like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
  • Covers major application areas of current/future interest, namely, intelligent systems, intelligent assistants, wireless sensor networks, Internet of Things (IoT), and blockchain systems.
  • Introduces the contemporary skills-set in demand for Startups.

To succinctly cover all aspects of a contemporary startup, Unleashing the Startup Unicorn is organized to reflect the natural grouping of competencies that are essential for entrepreneurial ventures–from conception to successful exit. To understand and analyze these competencies, the book uses an extended 9S model inspired by the pioneering McKinsey 7S model.

Warp Speed Habits: A Brain-Based Roadmap for Leveraging Change in Organizations

$34.99

What if you could adapt rapidly to change, design your destiny, plot your own North, systematically design the roads you wish to travel and go the distance, improving your health, your work, and your life?

Change means that you will have to create habits, and as both individuals and organizations have found, this is an extremely challenging venture. You may feel that procedures and methods, allied with inspiration, willpower, and motivation will be enough, but the up and down nature of the latter qualities can lead to repeated failed attempts.

For individuals, leaders, managers, or anyone who wishes to build or change habits and behaviors and acquire new competencies, the answer lies in Warp Speed Habits, a revolutionary brain-based strategic-tactical approach to creating habits and changing behaviors.

Intersecting neuroscience and psychology, this guide leverages business management lessons at an individual level, promotes the development of a “habit mindset” and reshapes environmental contexts. In this quest, as you learn to design, build, and implement sustainable habits, you will travel to worlds and dimensions in different realms.

Ready? Begin your first voyage, but make no mistake, as you execute missions in your travels to different worlds, do not illude yourself by biographies of overnight success—these are myths that blur the mindset of energy and resilience you will require.

But with the Warp Speed Habits practical and pragmatical roadmap, you will overcome brain traps and obstacles along the way, and ultimately contribute to thriving behaviors that deliver results!

Hidden Challenges: Human Dynamics in Organizational Change and Recovery

$34.99

“A new lens is offered that sheds light on hidden challenges in periods of organizational change and reveals them in a creative and constructive way. This approach supports a better-informed diagnosis of the pain in the organization when change takes place.” –Claudia Zarate, Managing Director, Consumer Products Coverage, BNP Paribas

Going far beyond a purely rational-structural way of looking at change in organizations, this book contributes well researched insights into often-overlooked organizational blind spots.

The authors share their own experiences in clear and accessible language, exploring recovery from cumulative crises; nostalgia and postalgia; victimization of leaders; dealing with narcissistic leaders; and a writing process for reducing anxiety through self-reflection.

Anyone who works in an organization—large or small—will gain new perspectives on the most difficult challenge of all: understanding human behavior in times of change.

Achieving Success as a 21st Century Manager

$34.99

Becoming a Successful Executive Won’t Require Spending Thousands on Training or Years Studying in a Degree Program!

This book is about taking personal control of your management career by planning for your development outside of training sessions or university degree programs. Careers and organizations are changing rapidly so personalizing your own training and competency development is critical.

Talent management is what your employer offers you but action learning in the workplace is building your own managerial competencies without losing a single day on the job. Use this book to spot your best learning opportunities within your current job and then learn how you can plan your job assignments to build valuable, portable, and job-relevant skills.

Included in this book are self-evaluations for cognitive competence, virtual competence, emotional competence, cross-cultural competence, socialization competence, health competence, and competencies in spotting leadership differences and situational recognition.

You will find sound applied strategies in each chapter for building these competencies into strengths that will further your career in management, such as:

  • How Do I Know What Competencies I Need?
  • What Are My Strengths and What Are My Weaknesses?
  • How Do I Build Valuable Skills On-The-Job?

The Truth About Collaborating: Why People Fail and How to Succeed

$31.99

Now, more than ever before, organizations are encouraging work collaboration both in-person and remotely to increase productivity, enhance innovation, and attain the best results. However, leaders and teams often lack the essential knowledge, tools, and techniques required to avoid failure and achieve optimal outcomes.
This book offers a refreshing approach that provides unique insights, examples, tools, techniques, checklists, and templates for successful collaborations. It opens with a review of the ten essential collaboration competencies, a self-test to reveal strengths and gaps, and practical tips to apply. Then, collaboration mindfulness is explained and guidelines based on the COIN model explain how to put this crucial mindset into action. Next, practical advice is offered for how to both encourage and manage discussion and dis- agreement throughout all four phases of the collaboration process.
Having a clear focus for the collaboration topic as a problem or an opportunity is reviewed in detail, with tips on how to decide and discuss most efficiently. Guidelines for how to manage conflict and deal with challenging people are offered, based on strategies for each of the four conflict stages. Additionally, whole-brain techniques are explained to help collaboration teams invent the most unique options and solutions for innovation and change. The book concludes with proven strategies for how to overcome eight common obstacles to collaborations with confidence.

Human Resources As Business Partner: How to Maximize The Value and Financial Contribution of HR

$21.99

In current “what’s New” topics this is the biggest. Just how does HR become a business partner? This book is a step-by-step guide to becoming a business partner and showing the financial benefit of HR participation. The book contains six chapters and includes a self-diagnostic for HR functions to complete. In addition, the key competencies needed are explained together with worked examples of how HR Can add financial value. The methodologies will work in Public and private sectors and is the future direction for any HR function This book is focused on providing those interested with a “how to do it” approach to lift HR and to transform it into an effective unit with the capacity of becoming a true business partner and possibly a profit value centre.

Business Models and Strategic Management: A New Integration

$21.99

Finally, a book comes along that provides a unique yet simple and powerful approach to understand the business model and the critical role strategic management has in supporting it. Its value is in business model thinking. It brings you a combination of the best contributions of academe and industry that will help build business model-centric organizations. Inside, you’ll learn about strategy from a business model perspective. What does that mean? It means that you’ll first have to think rigorously about your value proposition; your current or future competencies; and your revenue streams and cost structure before developing, adopting, or modifying your strategies. What is the difference between a business model and a strategy? A business model is how a company operates, and a strategy is how a company competes. When the basis of competition changes because a new model disrupts the economics in the industry, it requires an adjustment in business models before any new strategy can work. This book adds a business model level to the traditional strategic management process that is more consistent with current ‘real-world’ practices in strategic thinking and analysis. It takes you deeper into the intricacies of what constitutes a business model and how current strategy derives from it, and offers 7 modules that will show you the key components to manage your business model, to help conduct business model analysis, and to assess the financial viability of a business model, just to name a few.