Suggested Reading

Citation

Rao, M.S. (2015), "Suggested Reading", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 23 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/HRMID-03-2015-0049

Suggested Reading

Article Type: News round-up From: Human Resource Management International Digest, Volume 23, Issue 3

Follow Your Conscience: Make a Difference in Your Life and in the Lives of Others

Frank Sonnenberg, 2014, ISBN: 1502345137

Frank Sonnenberg’s Follow Your Conscience: Make a Difference in Your Life and in the Lives of Others deals with such aspects of life leadership as attitude, purpose, courage and ethics.

The book outlines tools and techniques to: achieve peace of mind; strengthen trust; build a solid reputation; reduce anxiety; increase leadership effectiveness; build confidence; become a positive role model; live a purpose-driven life; and build a strong business.

It outlines ways to adopt a positive mental attitude, such as surround yourself with positive people; be positive yourself; consciously resist negative thinking; be nice to yourself; set realistic, achievable goals; keep a sense of perspective; turn challenges into opportunities; and count your blessings.

The author shares examples of people who live by the philosophy, “Do as I say, not as I do”. They include:

• The emperor: The emperor is all talk, no action. Everything is centered on show rather than substance. The emperor talks a good game, but do not expect any action or follow-up from this empty suit.

• The politician: The politician will say anything to win a vote of confidence. This person is great with words but poor on accountability.

• The hypocrites: The hypocrites have a hard time keeping their own stories straight.

• The drifters: The drifters have no backbone. They make statements one minute and change their positions the next.

• The professor: The professor speaks eloquently about theory, but that is where it ends.

• The zombie: The zombie is so oblivious to reality that he does not even realize that his words are out of step with his actions.

The author suggests that, when you visualize a goal, it makes you more likely to take the actions necessary to reach it. Visualize yourself winning the race, getting the promotion, accepting the award or landing the new account to help to bring about situations in which these will actually happen.

Although everyone is different, there are common threads that bind a life with purpose: live by your beliefs and values; set priorities; follow your passion; achieve balance; feel content; make a difference; and live in the moment.

Courageous people follow their intuition. If information required to make a good decision is not available, they follow their instincts. Courageous people know that it is not enough to talk about doing something – instead, they act.

If you want to be successful, suggests the author, you must possess the knowledge, character and determination to win. Success is a journey, not a destination. When you become successful, do not rest on your laurels. As soon as you take your eye off the ball, you risk losing your edge.

Sometimes we create an “imaginary” plan and hold ourselves accountable to it. Be flexible. There is nothing wrong with deviating from the plan.

Trust is the cement that binds relationships, keeping spouses together, business deals intact and political systems stable. Without trust, marriages fail, voters become apathetic and organizations flounder. Trust must be carefully constructed, vigorously nurtured and constantly reinforced. Although trust takes a long time develop, it can be destroyed by a single action. Moreover, once lost, it is very difficult to re-establish.

Do not be so busy that you do not have time for something new, counsels the author. Expand your horizons. You will not know what the world offers unless you give it a try.

There are few times in life when we hit a wall so hard that we do not recover from it. We pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and move on. The difference is, if you take a pledge to be positive, and start reducing your emotional baggage, you are going to lead a happier, healthier more fulfilling life.

Being a role model carries responsibility. If you are a teacher, clergyman, actor, executive, athlete, politician or parent, people look up to you as a role model and imitate your behavior. Are you proud of the signals that you are sending? If not, says the author, it is time to get your act together. No one is asking you to be a saint, but living a life of commendable ethics and values is a good place to start.

This is a world in which people go to great lengths to protect their family name and leaders see their first responsibility as strengthening the trust and credibility of their institutions. In this world, people do the right thing not only because it is considered acceptable behavior, but because they know their every action affects another action.

If you want to get anywhere, says Frank Sonnenberg, you have to make things happen. It is easy to criticize others instead of sticking your neck out; it is painless to second-guess others from the sidelines instead of getting in the game; it is easy to blame others for your circumstances instead of accepting responsibility for your choices and actions. The fact is you have the ability to fulfill your dreams – if you care.

Follow Your Conscience: Make a Difference in Your Life and in the Lives of Others is a well-organized book covering various aspects of life and leadership. It implores you to set the bar high to grow as a leader. The author shares anecdotes, examples and illustrations that arouse interest from chapter to chapter. It is an inspiring book that provides meaning to life.

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

Top-Performance Leadership: A Dynamic and Achievable New Approach to Delivering First-Class, Sustainable Results

Graham Jones, How-To Books, 2014, ISBN: 9781845285739

If you want to acquire in-depth knowledge about performance, read this book. If you intend to acquire tools and techniques to grow as a top performer and achiever, read this book. If you want to fast-track your career and grow as a great leader, read this book.

Graham Jones’s Top Performance Leadership: a Dynamic and Achievable New Approach to Delivering First-Class, Sustainable Results challenges conventional leadership thinking and practices. It will make a real difference to how you lead. It will also help you to: deliver top performance which is sustainable; create an environment where your people can thrive; transform teams into top-performance teams; understand the motives that drive top-performance leaders; and develop the know-how that underpins top-performance leadership. The book draws on the vast experience and research of its author.

There are three core elements to get right in any organization – the leadership, the environment and the performance. Top-performance leaders ensure that they recruit and develop individuals with not only the necessary ability but also the required self-awareness and self-regulation skills to perform their roles.

There are four essentials that leaders must ensure are in place for the team to become top performing – trust, care, resilience and excellence. As the team explores ways of working in the quest for cohesion, there will inevitably be things that get in the way of progress. Some of the more common ones include:

• Paralyzers: People who fail to take action because of their fear of failure and also those who are comfortable and wish to keep things as they are rather than be agents of change.

• Elephants: The unspoken yet all-consuming things that block effective team-working.

• Hermits: People who want to do things on their own, thus threatening cohesion and creating silos.

• Renegades: Dissidents or mutineers who either loudly disagree or quietly operate in the background to influence opinion and build barriers to the team’s cohesion.

• Donkeys: People who are unable to say no and are the saviors of the shirkers who pass on some of their workload to willing subservients.

The book differentiates between safe and real leaders. The impact of real leaders in organizations is much more a function of how they are than what they do.

The text outlines inspiring stories of, for example, of how British helicopters operating during the Iraq war were not equipped with a basic infra-red device to enable pilots to see at night. The absence of this piece of Vietnam-era kit resulted in the deaths of several British troops.

During the same war, there were widespread reports of British troops being sent into battle without proper protection from chemical or biological attack. Soldiers were reportedly issued with dangerously ill-fitting protective suits and respirators and detection alarms that did not work. Tanks and armored vehicles were never fitted with special air filters to protect their crews from such attacks. And thousands of troops were without even the most basic equipment, in the form of desert clothing and boots.

The author shows that there is nothing complex about top-performance leadership; in fact, it is quite straightforward provided that leaders start in the right place. The whole book is based on the simple PEL (performance, environment and leadership) model. Leaders who address these three in the right order and get them right will ensure the current and future health of their organization.

The obvious difference between effective and top-performing teams is the consistent delivery of excellence. Top performance does not just happen. On the rare occasions when it does, the likelihood of repeating it is small, as awareness and understanding of how it was achieved are lacking. Instead, top performance is the result of clearly defining what top performance will look like, whether in the form of a vision or perhaps outputs, outcomes and impacts.

Most organizations are likely to claim that they aspire to creating top performance but relatively few know what it takes and where to begin, while others lack the necessary commitment and perseverance. The volume of obvious and not-so-obvious components, elements and layers of detail that must be factored into any intent to create a top-performance organization demonstrates how challenging it can be.

Top-performance leadership is about how motives, support and know-how are directed, used and adapted to create, maintain and continually enhance the right environment.

Real leadership is less about what leaders do and more about the mindset and behaviors that help to give people the confidence to let go, the willingness to make mistakes, the courage to make and own tough decisions, the conviction to do the right thing and the capacity to accept accountability when things go wrong.

Team leadership involves creating a top-performance team and requires understanding, patience and skill on the part of the leader but the rewards of getting it right are considerable. Top-performance leaders have team members around them who are passionate about what they do, accountable and reliable and, above all, loyal.

Sustainable leadership brings a requirement for powerful personal resources in the form of resilience, strength of character, optimism balanced with realism and self-belief. Knowing how to turn the environment to the leader’s advantage and, crucially, how to deliver the performance expected and demanded are also necessary.

Leaders must identify the performance indicators that are critical for success, then either find ways of measuring them or identify processes for maintaining an intense focus on them.

Graham Jones points out that, no matter how meticulously performance has been defined and designed, the road to success is seldom smooth.

Among the most challenging stages in any senior leader’s career path to the boardroom is the shift from leading a team in close proximity in a single location to leading team members and multiple teams across several geographical locations, often in different countries and across continents.

The book concludes that leaders do not have to know too much about the sector they are operating in to oversee the delivery of top performance. Neither do they have to be the best performers.

This is a great book on performance with inspiring examples and illustrations from different sectors. It explains concepts with diagrams that convey the ideas and insights easily. It is written in a conversational tone. The book contains summary at the end of the each chapter to ensure effective take aways are absorbed quickly. It helps you to grow as a great performer, achiever and leader. It is worth investing your time in.

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

Competing Values Leadership

Kim Cameron, Robert Quinn, Jeff Degraff and Anjan Thakor, 2014, Edward Elgar, 2nd ed., ISBN: 9781783477128

Kim Cameron, Robert Quinn, Jeff Degraff and Anjan Thakor’s Competing Values Leadership is divided into two parts. Part I emphasizes value creation and Part II techniques for application.

The authors explain the competing-values framework as a value-creation tool. The framework was developed in the scholarly organizational-studies literature as a way to evaluate organizational effectiveness, organizational culture and individual leadership behavior. The authors have significantly extended the framework, however, to encompass various forms of value creation in organizations.

The key insight of the competing-values framework is that leaders must recognize the inherent tensions that exist in different forms of value creation and that focusing too little or too much on a particular aspect will impede effective value creation.

The competing-values framework has been used in various organizations and for various purposes. Change projects, assessment tasks, leadership-development opportunities and turn-around assignments have all relied on the competing-values framework as an approach for achieving organizational effectiveness.

The author argues that competing values, preferences and priorities exist in every organization. Effectively managing the tensions creates value and makes the organization more effective.

Competing values and their resulting tensions exist in every leader as well. Effective leadership and personal value creation depend on being aware of and managing these contradictory tensions.

The competing-values framework helps to categorize, organize and simplify complex phenomena. In particular, it highlights the competing demands that exist in all organizations and leaders.

Two types of tensions are fundamental in organizations. There are trade-offs to be made between flexibility and dynamism and stability and control, and between internal dynamics and external positioning.

There are also trade-offs to be made between major transformation of the organization versus minor incremental change, and between fast versus slower change.

In the competing-values framework, the “collaborate” quadrant is competing with the “compete” quadrant and the “create” quadrant is vying with the “control” quadrant.

For successful value creation, it is necessary to align different levels of analysis, namely, external outcomes, internal organizational activities and individual leadership behaviors, so that each of the four quadrants is pursued at each level of analysis.

The competing-values framework helps to map organizational culture, says the author. Different sub-units in an organization may have different sub-cultures. However, an overall, fundamental culture – unique to the entire organization – should be present in each sub-culture. Sub-cultural congruence leads to higher levels of effectiveness and value creation than incongruent sub-cultures. Managers’ competencies must be congruent with their organization’s dominant culture.

To create values, organizations and leaders must possess at least average competency in all four quadrants of the framework. They must not have blind spots or major areas of weakness in any of the quadrants. This does not mean that they possess dominance and strength in each of four quadrants, but they must have skills and capabilities to at least a moderate degree in each of the four quadrants.

The competing-values framework can help to establish a comprehensive measurement system. Objective measures in each of the four quadrants – for example, financial measures, outcome measures, process measures, capability measures – should be assessed in every organization. The organization’s strategies can then support and sustain those objective measures. Unfortunately, most organizations do a better job in identifying objective measures in the bottom two quadrants – control and compete – than in the top two quadrants of collaborate and create.

Individual leadership competencies in each one of the four quadrants are associated with high personal and organizational performance. High personal competency does not, however, predict individual salary increases or financial remuneration. Significant value is created for the organization, but most forms of remuneration system do not seem adequately to reward personal competency.

The competing-values framework can help to change organizational culture. Because organizational culture is a major predictor of whether or not attempted organizational changes actually succeed, it is an important element for leaders to understand. An assessment instrument as well as a proven process for changing organizational culture have been widely applied and are available from the authors. This culture-change process can help to provide a rational way to approach what is often an intractable issue in many firms.

The success or failure of mergers and acquisitions can be predicted with more than 95 per cent accuracy on the basis of cultural congruence. That is, when the cultures of two merging firms are congruent, the probability of success is high. When they possess incompatible cultures, the probability of success is low. This result holds regardless of industry or size of the organizations.

The book contains case studies, diagrams and tables that help the reader to understand the theory easily. It is useful for scholars and practitioners.

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

Story-Telling Organizational Practices: Managing in the Quantum Age

David M. Boje, 2014, Routledge, ISBN: 9780415815475

David M. Boje’s Story-telling Organizational Practices: Managing in the Quantum Age points out that story-telling is everywhere, done by everyone in every organization. It is not only about recounting history but also about forecasting. It is a combination of retrospective and prospective sense-making. It includes individuals’ living stories and organizations’ narratives.

Competence in story-telling depends upon being able to stop, look and listen to the undercurrents of gossip and rumors and takes lots of practice, says the author. Pragmatic story-telling combines reflection and action to transform organizations. It is not always ethical.

Some organizations have story-telling meetings, which enact a daily practice of story-telling in organizations. Allowing plurality in story-telling, rather than defining a single corporate story, is a way of opening an organization to the democratic process. It can explode such myths as, for example, that an organization is ethical when it is not.

Restorying, says the author, is a process for overcoming a dominant narrative, by reassembling otherwise marginalized and forgotten little “wow” moments into a new story.

Story-telling Organizational Practices: Managing in the Quantum Age is a well-researched book, useful for researchers, scholars, business people, learners and leaders.

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