Suggested reading

Citation

Rao, M.S. (2015), "Suggested reading", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 23 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/HRMID-06-2015-0103

Suggested reading

Article Type: Suggested reading From: Human Resource Management International Digest, Volume 23, Issue 6

Motivate Your Team in 30 Days

Bob Urichuck and Dave Urichuck, Impackt Publishing, 2014, ISBN: 9781783000265

If you want to achieve leadership effectiveness, read this book. If you want to acquire leadership tools and techniques to build successful team within 30 days, read this book. Bob Urichuck and Dave Urichuck’s Motivate Your Team in 30 Days is the ideal book for leaders who seek a higher level of self-discipline and self-motivation, resulting in improved productivity and performance.

The book asserts that one of the toughest parts of being a leader is giving and receiving feedback. Keep your feedback positive and, if anything, consider using the “hamburger technique” for areas of improvement. Think of a hamburger – a soft bun with the meat in the middle. The soft buns represent positive behaviors and the meat represents the areas of improvement. You start by giving positive feedback, and move on to indicate the areas for improvement and end with more positive feedback.

The book shows that if we keep images of success, pleasure and gain in our mind, we will be motivated toward them. However, if we keep images of failure, pain and loss foremost in our mind, we will be motivated merely to stay away from them, or just not be motivated at all.

Most of us go through life accepting too many external comments that lead us to believe that we are not good enough, attractive enough, strong enough, experienced enough and the list goes on. Until we realize who we really are, we can fall into these traps and stay there.

Attitude is the key success factor and the foundation to success. Your past and present are a result of your past attitude. However, your present attitude will determine your future.

Success is based on good judgment. Good judgment comes from experience. And how does one get experience? Sometimes we have to fail often to succeed once. But that fear of failure can stop us from even trying; that is one of the reasons we procrastinate.

No one in the world has succeeded without first trying, failing, learning, making changes and moving on. When people fail, they have a tendency to beat themselves up through their self-talk. When you do this, you are lowering your self-confidence, self-esteem, self-respect and self-worth.

By asking questions you not only learn a lot, but also uncover needs and make the other person feel important, and that contributes toward building an empowering relationship.

The authors show that recognition is the most powerful motivator. There is a choice that you and your team can make – accept or reject change. If you reject it, you refuse to grow. To grow, you must flow with change and grow with it.

A dream will remain a dream until you write it down. Once it is written down, it crystallizes the dream and increases its chances of becoming a reality.

Keep in mind that people go to work to make money. However, it is not truly money that motivates them, it is the lifestyle dream that they have deep down inside. Work is nothing but a stepping stone to help you get where you want to go. When you know where you want to go, you become more excited and motivated to go to work. Your job is to help your team members to realize that each day of work brings them closer to the realization of one of their internal and personal dreams. That is the foundation to permanent self-motivation.

In order to reach your ultimate goal, you must form a group of people with ambitions like your own, but differing in specialized knowledge. Together, the group can solve problems that no one person alone could solve.

Motivate Your Team in 30 Days is a good book with lots of leadership wisdom. It is written in a conversational tone. It is a simple and straightforward book that converts theory into practice to build strong teams. It contains diagrams, charts, examples, illustrations and activities to ensure team take-aways. It offers tests, assessments and summaries at the end of each chapter. The book is useful for learners and leaders at all levels to build inspiring teams successfully, and to grow as successful leaders.

Reviewed by Professor M.S. Rao, available at: www.amazon.com/M.-S.-Rao/e/B00MB63BKM, msrlctrg@gmail.com

Management’s Fatal Flaw

DeAnne Rosenberg, Tate Publishing, 2014, ISBN: 9781631852893

DeAnne Rosenberg’s Management’s Fatal Flaw advocates a new foundation for the relationship between manager and employee, based on coaching.

It begins with a questionnaire with answers to evaluate. It shows that the key to coaching for better performance without criticism is to encourage people to learn from their own experience by using a questioning strategy.

This is done with a seven-step process as follows: observe behavior; discuss it immediately after it occurs with the person; revisit the situation with the person by asking questions that cannot be answered with a yes or no; build on and use the person’s own data as much as possible; do not make the person wrong; allow the employee to discover his or her own answer; and end with the employee’s commitment to do something different next time.

The book describes the basic purposes of performance feedback as follows: to increase employee effectiveness; to ensure that only the best performers are promoted; to provide feedback for career-development efforts; to secure a legal foundation for personnel actions; to create a financial connection between performance and compensation; to excite people about their work and motivate them to higher levels of performance; to uncover and resolve problems that are preventing optimum productivity; and to clarify expectations of employee performance and illuminate managerial objectives.

The book outlines the truth about “constructive criticism” as follows: criticism is not a motivational technique, it is designed to focus the employee’s awareness on something you believe is important; criticism does not teach or show the employee how to correct or change or do anything; the employee cannot correct or change something unless he or she fully understands what the problem is and the effect it is having on colleagues, the department and themselves; the employee’s perception of the issue is his or her reality; and criticism overpowers all other forms of feedback.

The book explains that most people hate work, passionately, completely and very intelligently. Yet on the other hand, they love achievement. If you make a list of the differences, you will find that there is a great disparity between the terms work and achievement. Work is drudgery. It has no end; it just goes on and on and on. Achievement, by definition, has an end. Work gives us a sense of plodding through life; achievement gives us a sense of purpose in life. Work is how we earn a living; achievement makes us feel our efforts are worthwhile. Work often lacks meaning or direction; achievement is what gives our work life meaning and direction. Work is often imposed by others; achievement is something we embrace for ourselves. Work is a process and a means to an end. Work lacks motivational power. Achievement fills us with motivation. Achievement is the end. Work helps us to measure the passage of time; achievement helps us to measure our successes. The difference between the two concepts is dramatic. The difference between work and achievement is goals.

The author shows that improvement does not come from forms but rather from the dialog the manager has with the individual, one-to-one, and the commitments that are made as a result of that conversation. This dialog should be based on the issues and problems that both employee and manager see as limiting the employee’s ability to get the job done.

What counts, in the final analysis, is not what you tell the employee, but rather what the employee accepts. The difference between hearing a criticism and hearing valued advice is often a difference in understanding and timing.

Motivation is not triggered by external factors but by internal ones. As a manager, you have to find a way to excite people about their work rather than bribe them into doing it. Ordinary people can do extraordinary things when they have to. A parent will rush into a burning house to save a youngster; a small child will bring a car to a safe halt when a parent has a heart attack. The capacity for extraordinary effort is there. The crisis is the catalyst.

As a person in a leadership role, you must alter your mind-set regarding a person’s potential. Instead of believing that you and the organization are providing an employee with the potential for greatness, you must understand that the potential is already there.

Delegation makes it possible for a manager to take vacations, secure in the knowledge that things will not fall apart in his or her absence. The author says: “Delegation is also an expression of trust by the boss that the employee can handle a particular assignment. In this way, the act of delegation nurtures self-confidence in the employee and his or her ability to take on something new and succeed at doing it”.

Leadership maturity is about recognizing that you, as a boss, do not control everything. You may believe that your title gives you a certain amount of power over your staff. However, it is critical to understand that such power must be carefully implemented.

The book deals with coaching, motivation, delegation, goal setting and feedback to improve your performance and behavior. It contains diagrams and presents ideas and insights in bullet points. It elaborates on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. It offers lots of tools and techniques on motivation and shares secrets and strategies on goal setting.

The book is written in a conversational tone. It is useful for learners, leaders and coaches.

Reviewed by Professor M.S. Rao, available at: www.amazon.com/M.-S.-Rao/e/B00MB63BKM, msrlctrg@gmail.com

Leadership and Mindful Behavior: Action, Wakefulness and Business

Joan Marques, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, ISBN: 9781137405609

Joan Marques’s Leadership and Mindful Behavior: Action, Wakefulness and Business describes various aspects, including sleepwalking, wakefulness, reflection, mental models and soft and hard skills. It shows that leadership should not be restricted to professional settings but rather should be seen as having much wider scope.

The book advances the view that self-reflection can bring the following advantages: self-awareness, allowing you to better understand your emotions and drives, improve your strengths and address your weaknesses; self-leadership, allowing you to adapt more quickly and better to changes and to resolve challenges without taking them personally; transformational-leadership skills, enabling you to become more transparent and honest, develop more trust in your relationships and acquire a positive outlook; and social skills, enabling you to connect better with others and understand their motivations, thus understanding the surrounding dynamics and decision-making processes better.

The book shows that to attain a mindset that ensures personal and professional excellence, you should become a lifelong learner to ensure personal and professional mastery. Renew your skills regularly through internal and external training and discipline. Help others, which will help you to develop your capacity to be loving, conscious, and filled with awe and wonder. Work hard, because hard work leads to more experience and hence, greater excellence. Maintain good physical and mental balance, because both matter for your overall well-being.

The book asserts that personal and professional excellence do not happen overnight and do not occur on a single level. If you want to maintain personal and professional excellence, you have to become familiar with the idea that you will have to renew your paradigms constantly. A broad mindset requires a lot of effort, because it is not something you acquire at some point in your life and then hold forever.

There are many people and companies who once performed at the top of their line because they were zestful and adventurous but then lost out. Some realized their mistake and reinvented themselves once they experienced the drawbacks of their myopia. Others never managed to do that.

The book outlines inspiring examples of self-renewal. Self-renewal can drive us to great heights and the beauty of it is that there are no age boundaries to it. Here are some memorable examples: Cervantes wrote Don Quixote when he was 53 years old, and did so in a prison after a life of misery and failures. Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of Great Britain at the age of 66. Colonel Harland David Sanders founded the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise at the age of 65. Joshua Millner of Britain won an Olympic gold medal at age 61.

The book advances the view that, when you work with people, they may not tell you everything, but they observe, read and talk. Your moral footprint is one they will quickly assess.

Respect is something you earn through your behavior. It is shaped when you keep your promises; when you serve beyond the call of duty; when you are genuinely involved in the highs and lows of your colleagues and customers; when you take responsibility, even if you do not have to; when you invest that extra effort, go that extra mile, and put that extra dedication into your conversations or actions.

Many leaders complain about their misfortune in business but fail to take a critical and reflective look at what their successful competitors are doing.

If you do not know what your motives are, you will pick up just anything and exhaust yourself with things that may not be meaningful to you. Many people make the mistake, especially when they are young, of comparing themselves to others. They admire a celebrity or someone they know from one of the environments they frequent (school, work, social circles or home) and try to mirror his or her qualities, looks, behavior and even habits.

When we sleep-walk in our professional environment, we engage in activities that may give us brief episodes of excitement but that cannot grant us any real contentment.

Regret and guilt are mental stages that only inhibit the courage you need for future decision-making. The best you can do after a poor decision is to move on, doing the best you can to improve the situation.

Choices and decisions are closely related. We need choices before we can make decisions.

People with high self-leadership competencies and high emotional intelligence are able to manage their own thoughts and behaviors, achieve their goals and be productive because they have learned to guide and regulate themselves through intrinsic motivation and constructive thinking.

The best way to earn respect is to show that you care. If you do not care, people will only stay around you as long as they do not have another place to go to. As soon as an alternative surfaces, they will be gone.

How you perceive the world is based on your mental models. It is important to understand this, because doing so can help you to understand that there are multiple ways of considering “the truth”.

A person who applies soft skills focuses on a combination of interpersonal and social skills. Both soft and hard skills are important for leaders, because they complement one another.

The book concentrates on leadership, personality development, success and self-improvement. It contains lots of case studies, inspiring examples and anecdotes. It is a well-researched book with lots of references and is written in a conversational tone. The book is useful for learners and leaders at all levels.

Reviewed by Professor M.S. Rao, available at: www.amazon.com/M.-S.-Rao/e/B00MB63BKM, msrlctrg@gmail.com