BOOKS / AUDIO / VIDEO / DIGITAL DOWNLOADS / WEBINARS
Dr. Johnson has books to cover topics in greater detail, audio CDs to remind participants what they learned in sessions, and a video case.
Her products will be available for digital download soon.
Webinars are in the works.
Articles are on the way.
BOOKS
DANCE OF LEADERSHIP: Mastering the art of making a difference using your unique style
The Myth: The Heroic Strategist. Our current image of a masculine, take-charge heroic leader with a visionary strategic plan who goes unerringly for the goal.
The Reality: Chaotic change and influence without authority. We have multicultural women and men often leading in chaos, in situations with limited authority, or by influencing others from behind the scenes.
The Solution: Inclusive definition and role models. An inclusive model of leadership that looks at a wider range of traits, skills, and situations that inspire actual and potential leaders to be more effective in today’s world.
Dr. Robin offers practical ways to discover, develop, and use your unique leadership style. Using Roth’s five rhythms from dance as a metaphor for leadership styles, the book describes five ways to lead and the situations in which each is likely to be called:
- Flowing (planning, taking things one-step at a time, controllable-planned change),
- Staccato (command-control-direct-protect, crisis-emergency-time bound situations),
- Chaos (emergent order without predictability, paradigm/frame busting required or control impossible),
- Lyrical (relational and emotionally intelligent, need to influence without power/authority or control),
- Stillness (being the change you wish to see, values/beliefs change where powerful present role modeling needed).
These five styles are linked to personality information and leadership research. There are multicultural male and female examples to show you how you can lead in your unique way. The book also provides a questionnaire to help you assess your leadership style.
An abridged version of Dance of Leadership is available as an audio CD.
CAREER BY DESIGN: Tips and tools for re-inventing, re-focusing, and re-balancing your work-life
No matter how far people go in their careers, if they feel they are not being the true to themselves, not doing what they love, not fulfilling their purpose, or somehow being inauthentic – the cost will have been too high. In this third edition of her popular Career by Design Workbook, Dr. Robin provides Tips and Tools for re-inventing, re-focusing, and re-balancing your Work-Life. The workbook helps you:
- ground your career choices in your unique personality
- choose and live according to your core values
- articulate and negotiate to get your needs met
- play for pay using your motivating interests
- leverage your strengths and develop your best work skills
- avoid taking energy draining jobs
- develop people and delegate away tasks that use your supporting skills
- negotiate in your performance reviews to focus more on what you do well and skills you want to develop
- balance/harmonize work with other aspects of your life
- make time for your priorities
- craft a 2-minute career contribution statement delineating your contributions to your organization, mentioning your top skills with data, sharing the direction you want your career to take, and asking for support for the next career steps
This third edition of the Career by Design workbook has the Mission Statement, Career by Design Matrix and Career Statements tools that were popular in previous editions, but has additional tools including a mission-based decision matrix, work-life balance assessment, and a time-mastery scheduling matrix. It also references and integrates information from the MBTI, the Birkman Method, Lominger VOICES 360 feedback, and Strengths Finder assessments.
By using the CAREER BY DESIGN system you manage your performance, seek-use-give feedback more effectively, focus more on your contributions to your organizations, work better with co-workers/bosses/team members, and manage your relationships with peers and mentors. As a manager, this workbook is a good guide to helping you develop your direct reports and discuss the direction they want their careers to take.
EMPOWERED LEADERSHIP: ACT! Authority, Competence, Trust
Leadership is a relationship – a relationship between those who choose to lead and those who choose to follow. In this handbook, Dr. Robin talks about some of the ways you can make that leader-follower relationship an empowering one. She discovered through research that empowerment, as defined in practice, includes three relational concepts – Authority, Competence and Trust.
• Authority is the right to make decisions appropriate for your work role.
• Competence is the skills you need to carry out your job tasks, as well as the ability to learn to do your work better.
• Trust includes fairness in a respectful relationship between you, your managers, your co-workers and your company.
You have to have all three in the work relationship for people to experience it as empowering.
The Leadership Trait Questionnaire included with this handbook helps you gain insight into your experience of authority, competence and trust at work.
She shares the practical results from robust research about decision making biases to watch out for when you have authority; she explains the difference between achievement orientation and perfectionism when developing competencies; and she shares three different kinds of trust so you can decide who, when, and how much to trust others in your work context. There’s also information about trust in the multicultural context that encourages thoughtful reflection and conversations. The combination of practical research-based suggestions within this interactive handbook makes it a helpful resource.
This handbook is also available as an audio CD.
The Leadership Trait Questionnaire is available to take online.
MULTICULTURAL TEAMS: Creating and sustaining an environment for learning from perspective diversity that maximizes team effectiveness
Multicultural Teams outperform other teams when you need creativity, commitment and buy in – but only if they are designed and managed well. This handbook will explain how to design and manage your multicultural team well, and how to create and sustain a learn-from differences environment. It provides practical suggestions from research on how to design your team for success, and then explains how to leverage diverse perspectives within your team to maximize creative problem solving, specifically:
- A clear, motivating focus that requires team members to engage in conversation about why the mission is important strategically to the organization and personally to them
- An understanding of how important designing the team well is, while knowing how to make the right intervention into the group process at the right time
- Metrics that measure output, learning and satisfaction
- The right degree of empowerment and the right type of team given your task and members’ skills
- The soft-skills tool kit every manager needs to maximize learning on the team
– Transformational listening skills (not just active listening)
– Inclusive behaviors, particularly connecting names with ideas to encourage participation
– Giving timely, specific, culturally competent feedback to motivate progress towards goal achievement
– Minority influence strategies to make all contributions count, avoid dis’ing, and keep groupthink at bay
– Communication skills to move from conflict to collaboration
Multicultural Teams is also available as an audio CD
AUDIO
The audio CDs are available as part of the materials packets given to participants in Dr. Robin’s programs. If you would like to purchase extra copies of these CDs, please contact us with the request.
DANCE OF LEADERSHIP
In this abridged 72 minute summary of the five leadership styles from the Dance of Leadership book you will review leadership research streams, take the leadership styles assessment (included with the CD), understand the energy and situations appropriate for each of the five styles – Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, and Stillness – and hear a short profile of multi-dimensional leaders who demonstrated each of style. Leaders profiled on this CD are Dona Fela, Michael Jordan, Madame CJ Walker, Sun Tzu, Margaret Cho, Einstein, Hopi Spider Woman, Sargent Shriver, Byron Katie and Gandhi.
Tracks
| 01 | Introduction | 11 | Lyrical Leaders |
| 02 | Leadership Research Streams | 12 | Stillness Style |
| 03 | Style Assessment | 13 | Stillness Leaders |
| 04 | Flowing Style | 14 | Style Profile |
| 05 | Flowing Leaders | 15 | Flowing Leadership Situations |
| 06 | Staccato Style | 16 | Staccato Leadership Situations |
| 07 | Staccato Leaders | 17 | Chaos Leadership Situations |
| 08 | Chaos Style | 18 | Lyrical Leadership Situations |
| 09 | Chaos Leaders | 19 | Stillness Leadership Situations |
| 10 | Lyrical Style | 20 | Review |
Contact Dr. Robin to buy the Dance of Leadership Audio CD.
EMPOWERED LEADERSHIP
The audio CD contains all the information in the Empowered Leadership handbook, including the Leadership Trait Questionnaire (LTQ).
Run Time 59 minutes
Tracks
01 LTQ Preface
02 LTQ Introduction
03 LTQ Questions
04 Scoring Authority
05 Decision Making Biases
06 Scoring Competence
07 Achievement vs. Perfectionism
08 SMARTER Goals
09 Scoring Trust
10 Betrayal-Violating VABEs
11 Multicultural Trust Issues
12 Summary
13 Conclusion
Contact Dr. Robin to buy the Empowered Leadership audio CD.
MULTICULTURAL TEAMS
In this two-disc audio program you learn what the research suggests are the best ways to design your multicultural team for success, and what experience shows are five top skills for leveraging diversity in teams.
| I |
Design For Success In 5 Steps | II | Five Skills That Leverage Diversity | |
| 1 | Focus = Clear, Motivating Mission | 1 | Articulating Mission With “Why” Discussion | |
| 2 | Processes = Design And Develop | 2 | Inclusive Behaviors | |
| 3 | Metrics-Output, Learning, Satisfaction | 3 | Minority Influence To Avoid Groupthink | |
| 4 | Questions = Team Type | 4 | Accountability Feedback With High Expectations | |
| 5 | Skills = Leverage Diversity | 5 | Culturally Competent Collaborative Behaviors | |
| TRACK | TRACK | |||
| 01 | Introduction | 01 | Five Interlocking Skills – Mission | |
| 02 | Defining Teams | 02 | Inclusion | |
| 03 | Multicultural Teams Research | 03 | Minority Influence | |
| 04 | Maximizing Teams 5 Steps | 04 | Accountability – High Expectations | |
| 05 | Mission | 05 | Feedback | |
| 06 | Design For Success | 06 | Giving Feedback | |
| 07 | Understand Group Development | 07 | Giving Feedback Example | |
| 08 | Consensus Decision Making | 08 | Receiving Feedback | |
| 09 | Motivating Metrics | 09 | Collaborative Behaviors | |
| 10 | Mark Progress | 10 | Conflict Behaviors | |
| 11 | Four Team Types | 11 | Adding Culture | |
| 12 | Conflict To Collaboration | |||
| 13 | Conclusion | |||
Contact Dr. Robin to buy the Multicultural Teams audio CD set.
Dr. Robin’s Reminders are short audio CDs that review information she presents in keynotes and seminars. Dr. Robin’s Reminders provide a convenient way to remember and share core concepts from her leadership development experiences. These CDs are currently available through her programs. If you wish to have a copy, contact us. They will be available soon as digital downloads.
SIX SECRET SOFT S.K.I.L.L.S.
Using any one of the skills in this acronym will boost your leadership effectiveness:
Solution seeking
Kudos,
Inclusion
Listening
Learning, and
SMARTER goals
Solution Seeking explains why you want to value people with answers and team members who engage others in the process for finding solutions. Kudos shares the motivation research that says the best Kudos:Constructive Criticism ratio is 3:1 and explains how to give feedback effectively using that research. While there are many inclusion strategies, using names with contributions is high-leverage inclusive behavior that works really when leading diverse-multicultural teams. Listening is a meta-emotional intelligence competency that demonstrates respect, balances cultural and personality-based communication styles and helps you learn fast. Learning from different perspectives is core benefit of diversity, according to state-of-the-art Harvard Business School research. While many people managers already know to make SMART goals (Specific, Measured, Actionable, Results-Oriented and Timed, the motivation research suggests that adding Engaging and Reinforcement to your goals, e.g. making them SMARTER goals, boosts your team’s effectiveness.
Tracks
01 S-Solution Seeking (value people with answers and a process for finding solutions)
02 K-Kudos (motivation research says best Kudos:Constructive Criticism ratio is 3:1)
03 I-Inclusion (using names with contributions is high-leverage inclusive behavior)
04 L-Listening (meta-competency to demonstrate respect, balance communication styles, learn fast)
05 L-Learning (from different perspectives is core benefit of diversity)
06 S-SMARTER goals (Specific, Measured, Actionable, Results-Oriented, Timed, Engaging, Reinforced)
07 Conclusion
Audio CD Run Time 18 minutes
Contact Dr. Robin to buy the Six Secret Soft Skills audio CD.
TRANSFORMATIONAL LISTENING
Transformational Listening demonstrates respect behaviorally, helps you collaborate, builds trust, balances extraversion-introversion and direct-indirect communication styles, and is one of the most powerful competencies in the multicultural leaders’ toolkit. It is different from active listening since the listener refrains from asking questions or talking while listening to others. The intent of the listener is to connect, demonstrate respect, and learn from the other while the listener provides the speaker(s) with their undivided caring attention. It is one way of listening that can be used in addition to (or instead of) active listening.
Tracks
01 Introduction
02 Ancient Chinese Character
03 Questions?
04 Listener’s Mindsets
05 Talker’s Agendas
06 Listening Benefits
07 Conclusion
Audio CD Run Time 20 minutes
Contact Dr. Robin to buy the Transformational Listening audio CD.
DON’T BE A J.E.R.K. MANAGER
Jamming your ideas down others’ throats,
Embarrassing them,
Retaliating, and
Kissing Up – might cause your direct reports to consider you a JERK manager.
Dr. Robin explains why these behaviors cause problems in work relationships.
Tracks
01 J-Jam Ideas
02 E-Embarrass
03 R-Retaliate
04 K-Kiss Up
Audio CD Run Time 10 minutes
Contact Dr. Robin to buy the Don’t Be a JERK Manager audio CD.
VIDEO
The Gamma Project team video case is a multicultural team interacting over a 5.5 minute time period. Dr. Robin uses this case to help participants observe effective and ineffective behaviors within a work context. Her debriefs can focus on different aspects of the interaction — conflict behaviors, collaborative behaviors, race-ethnicity-culture-gender dynamics, effective-ineffective feedback, verbal vs. non-verbal communication issues, team effectiveness assessment, soft/relationship skills that leverage participation, etc.
Please contact Dr. Robin to arrange a private preview of the Gamma Team video if your organization is considering a professional development program where observing a multicultural work group followed by soft skill development for participants would add to the learning experience.
DIGITAL DOWNLOADS
Coming Soon
WEBINARS
Coming Soon