Jane E Dutton

Caring Is a Competitive Advantage Suffering in the workplace can rob our colleagues and coworkers of humanity, dignity, and motivation and is an unrecognized and costly drain on organizational potential. Marshaling evidence from two decades of field research, scholars and consultants Monica Worline and Jane Dutton show that alleviating such suffering confers measurable competitive advantages in areas like innovation, collaboration, service quality, and talent attraction and retention. They outline four steps for meeting suffering with compassion and show how to build a capacity for compassion into the structures and practices of an organization-because ultimately, as they write, Compassion is an irreplaceable dimension of excellence for any organization that wants to make the most of its human capabilities.

Positive leaders are able to dramatically expand their people's - and their own - capacity for excellence. And they accomplish this without enormous expenditures or huge heroic gestures. Here leading scholars - including Adam Grant, author of the bestselling Give and Take; positive organizational scholarship movement cofounders Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn; and thirteen more - describe how this is being done at companies such as Wells Fargo, Ford, Kelly Services, Burt's Bees, Connecticut's Griffin Hospital, the Michigan - based Zingerman's Community of Businesses, and many others. They show that, like the butterfly in Brazil whose flapping wings create a typhoon in Texas, you can create profound positive change in your organization through simple actions and attitude shifts.

Corrosive work relationships are like black holes that swallow up energy that people need to do their jobs. In contrast, high-quality relationships generate and sustain energy, equipping people to do work and do it well. Grounded in solid research, this book uses energy as a measurement to describe the power of positive and negative connections in people's experience at work. Author Jane Dutton provides three pathways for turning negative connections into positive ones that create and sustain employee resilience and flexibility, facilitate the speed and quality of learning, and build individual commitment and cooperation. Through compelling and illustrative stories, Energize Your Workplace offers managers, executives, and human resource professionals the resources they need to build high-quality connections in the workplace.