 Coach Tales
Nancy's Coach Tales Issue Four
Book Review #1: Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans, Love 'Em or Lose 'Em: getting good people to stay, which may quite possibly be the ultimate source book for how to motivate employees.
Book Review #2: Michael and Deborah Singer Dobson, Managing Up: 59 ways to build a career-advancing relationship with your boss, an insightful look into the most effective ways to work with your boss.
Think About It: William James warns us against refusing to embrace opportunity.
BOOK REVIEWS
With apologies to Rodney King, we can all get along--at least at work. I have found two books that explain how, one for managers, one for employees. (Of course, this means that all you "middle managers" will have to read both books. Trust me, it will be worth it.)
Book Review #1:Love 'Em or Lose 'Em: getting good people to stay, by Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. (San Francisco, 1999)
There are a lot of books on how to manage employees. Skip all those. Get this one.
Love 'Em is quick and easy to read without being fatuous. It gets to the heart of how to motivate and retain employees. Many of the authors' recommendations are not what you'd necessarily expect. In a list compiled by the authors' own research, fair pay and benefits didn't even make it into the top 10. Instead things like "career growth and learning", "challenge", "making a difference", and great coworkers" topped the list. Even "having a good boss" was higher than "the money."
The title of each chapter begins with a different letter of the alphabet. So the 26 chapters run from "Ask what keeps you" to "Zenith: Go For It" --a self-quiz that summarizes all the other chapters and recommends revisiting those you score lower on. (In case you're wondering, chapter 24 is "X-ers: Handle With Care.") I admit, this is a pretty hokey set up. Nevertheless the authors manage to be fairly non-repetitive, covering a lot of useful areas and providing excellent real world suggestions. In addition, each chapter explains how to implement the authors' recommendations by including several "To Do" stratagems to improve your managing effectiveness. There are also a number of cautionary tales about what can push employees out the door.
The only thing I take issue with in this book is the authors' emphasis on keeping the employees they call the "stars." It implies that only the star performers are worth treating well. In reality, implementing the recommendations in this book should improve the performance of all your employees. The approach may even reveal some previously undiscovered"stars" in unlikely places! In addition, every employee who leaves for another job impacts your bottom line. The book even tells you how to calculate what this costs you in terms of such things as advertising and interviewing, overload on the rest of the employees, lost time for getting the new hire up to speed, and lowered morale and productivity (see chapter 14, "Numbers: Run Them").
So get this book, read it, and learn not just how to avoid being a Jerk (chapter 10), but how to be the kind of boss that people want to work harder for and stay loyal to, even when they can make more money at another company.
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Book Review #2: Managing Up: 59 ways to build a career-advancing relationship with your boss, by Michael and Deborah Singer Dobson, AMACOM 2000
If you have a boss from hell, get this book. If you want to climb the corporate ladder, get this book. If you've been passed over repeatedly for promotion--or been let go from more than one job--get this book!
It's straightforward and an easy read. Each of the 59 "ways" to manage up gets its own chapter with a short work sheet to help you chart where you already are and where you can make improvements in getting what you want and need at work. Some chapters are as short as two pages.
Sure, much of what the Dobsons write is plain common sense once you think about it. (Such as: you must do your work well before you can do anything else.) The truth is, many of us haven't actually thought about some of the common sense ideas the Dobsons identify. In this category, one chapter covers how you might unintentionally threaten your boss and what to do to minimize the damage. Among other suggestions the Dobsons recommend that if you make connections outside your department or higher up in the company's org chart, be sure to share the information and benefits you gain with your boss.
Then there are the suggestions that most of us would never come up with on our own but that can be very useful. One of the most powerful chapters walks you through how to make an effective complaint to your boss and still get good results! The Dobsons show us how in 5 steps:
- First, tell him or her what s/he is doing behaviorally, without any judgments, so that s/he can listen to the substance of what you want changed without getting defensive (e.g., "you spoke directly with my customer and changed my decision" instead of "you're sabotaging me").
- Once you have chosen behavioral language to describe the problem, explain the impact of the action and how you feel about it ("this undercut my bargaining position; I felt as if I wasn't trusted").
- Then, listen to your boss's view of what happened and glean out the reasons for his/her behavior.
- After that, you can negotiate the next steps to correct the problem.
- Finally, be sure to focus on the positive elements of the relationship and end with a positive, but truthful, comment to allow your boss to save face.
This chapter alone is worth the price of the book.
Different chapter will appeal to different people. About one-quarter of the chapters are specifically geared towards how to climb the corporate ladder, with appropriate ways to find and work with a mentor (sincerity please, no brown-nosing) or discover the secret rules for being promoted to the senior executives' washroom (look for what the current VIPs have in common). But this book isn't just for climbers. It's for anyone who wants to do better in their job. And just because you already have "manager" in your title, don't think you can ignore this book: what about how you deal with your own boss?
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THINK ABOUT IT:
"He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried and failed."
- William James (1842-1910), known both as "the father of American psychology" and "the father of American pragmatism."
For James' life story, see http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/jphotos.html
For the most complete listing I've ever seen of "everything James", go to
http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/james.html
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