Agile talent is a new and exciting development in staffing and workforce management. What’s the upside of agile talent? Younger and Smallwood research’s points out five principal reasons executives give for increasing their reliance on agile talent as a source of critical expertise, including reducing costs and increasing the speed of getting things done. They describe how the field is evolving and how to integrate into your workforce strategy.

We often treat leaders as if they are a special class of individual. Thousands of books are written about leaders and how to be a better leader. But are leaders really that special? If the question surrounds impact, then yes. But in terms of their performance, the answer isn’t as clear. Harms investigates what leaders really do, if anything, to increase performance.

In an exclusive excerpt from their new book Learning Leadership, Kouzes and Posner describe why “Leadership is not some mystical quality that only a few people have and everyone else doesn’t. Leadership is not preordained,” and show us the “five myths that inhibit learning to lead and contribute most to the misunderstandings about what leadership is and isn’t.” In doing that, they bring the label of “great leader” within the grasp of all of your organization’s employees.

Adler and Segal describe how performance management practices in most organizations are not specifically structured to attract, motivate, and retain stars. But they should be, according to the authors, who make a powerfully persuasive case for sharply differentiating your company’s investment in your highest performing and potential talent.

Differentiation isn’t the secret sauce for organizational success, says well-known author and professor John Boudreau, who urges us to identify the (often) hidden few whose job performance truly drives organization outcomes. He says we should only differentiate if: 1.Differentiation makes a pivotal impact on valu¬able outcomes 2.Differentiation can be achieved with sufficient precision, reliability and accuracy 3.The cost of measurement does not exceed its value

90% of organizations fail to execute their strategies. That simple statistic has driven the authors’ professional interest for the past 20 years, leading to management tools such as the Balanced Scorecard, Strategy Maps, and Strategic Job Families. Norton, Kaplan and Frangos offer four clear processes to ensure your organization is among the 10%, including #1: Engagement: ensure that everyone understands the strategy.

Dave Ulrich tells us that performance management faces a conundrum. Don’t do any performance management and accountability sloughs and performance lags; or build and implement complicated processes and frustration ensues and performance lags. His solution is to resolve the paradox by focusing more on positive accountability through conversation more than process.

If you want to improve performance management, stop playing with the parts of the process and focus instead on measuring and managing those doing the ratings. Beatty offers practical advice including, 1. Identify the goal of performance management and, 2. Don’t assume employees don’t want a process just because it currently doesn’t work well.

Gautrey describes that Political Capital is the theoretical value of goodwill that you have within your network of relationships. It includes your reputation, people’s positive experience of working with you, the amount of time and attention they will award you, and ultimately, the degree to which they are prepared to be influenced by you. Gautrey tells you how to manage all of those elements for maximum career impact.

Organizational Citizenship Behaviors are those that make us nicer to work with and create a more pleasant work environment. But recent research shows that engaging in OCBs maybe emotionally taxing, harder for women to manage and the domain of those who want to get ahead.