A Guide to Non-cash Reward by Michael Rose

Most nonprofit organizations are operating on especially tight budgets these days. This brief, easy-to-follow book will show you how to learn the value of recognition, reward staff at virtually no cost, and improve your organizational performance. You’ll learn why recognition is important, what, when, and how to recognize people, and all about using non-cash awards. This book will help you set up recognition plans for staff, board members, and volunteers. Check it out.

Everyone’s talking about leadership so it follows that many people are writing about it. Are leaders born or made? Can you lead regardless of where you are placed within an organizational hierarchy? Is leadership better learned in a classroom (have you noticed how degree programs in leadership are proliferating at lightning speed?) or by doing? Read for yourselves what the authors of five books think, and then let me know.

Apples are Square: Thinking Differently about Leadership by Susan and Thomas Kuczmarski. This book lists six critical values that they believe are changing the way people lead, and then, succeed. Those values are humility, compassion, transparency, inclusiveness, collaboration, and values-based decisiveness. After discussing these values, the authors describe how to activate the “seven steps to change.”

Comebacks: Powerful Lessons from Leaders Who Endured Setbacks and Recaptured Success on Their Terms by Andrea Redmond and Patricia Crisafulli. You’ll read the profiles of several world-known leaders who fell from grace and rebounded, among them JPMorgan Chases CEO Jamie Dimon, HP chair Patricia Dunn, Ford Motor CEO Jacques Nasser, and many more.

Dynamic Strategy-Making: A Real-Time Approach for the 21^st Century Leader by Larry E. Greiner and Thomas G. Cummings. More of a strategic planning book than a leadership one, this book provides a no-nonsense approach on building a strategic system, assessing your organization, using guided involvement, and leading in “real time.” Many nonprofit executives and consultants will find the chapter on facilitating real-time strategy (a “new role for consultants”) particularly helpful.

Leadership is Dead: How Influence is Reviving It by Jeremie Kubicek. If you choose one book to read from this list, make it this one. Kubicek will show you how to break down the wall of self-preservation, build your credibility, and work to use your influence rather than power in order to move you and your organization forward. You’ll find the book useful on a personal as well as professional level.

Leading in Times of Crisis: Navigating through Complexity, Diversity, and Uncertainty to Save Your Business by David Dotlich, Peter Cairo, and Stephen Rhinesmith. We are most certainly living in complex and uncertain times. The authors urge leaders to destroy and rebuild their business models, focus and simplify their organizations, build for innovation, and lots more. My favorite part of this book is the final part (Part 3) where you’ll read about aligning your organization’s talent around “whole leadership” in order to navigate the stormy times.

If you like to read about leadership, you’ll love these books. If you need to grow your leadership skills (or help grow those in others), you’ll learn from these books. Check them out.