Author: Julian Birkinshaw
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
Reviewer: John Fisher, managing director and author, FMI Group
Professor Birkinshaw has plenty of hands-on experience with global companies and has channelled this knowledge into numerous business books during his academic career.
The big idea is that too many development courses for managers are ‘manager-centric’. If you want to know how to be a better boss, ask the staff being managed.
So far so good. Birkinshaw states early on that he is not going to provide a simple tick-box list of what to do as that would suggest managing individuals is easy. He then goes on to list ‘the seven deadly sins of management’ and the ‘hero or zero’ rating tool, among others. His conclusion is that none of these lists help.
The solution is, of course, to explore employee engagement with their line managers and ‘get to grips with your employees’ self-identity’. This is not dissimilar to Eric Mosley’s concept of ‘crowd-sourcing’ performance reviews (The Crowd Sourced Performance Review, published by McGraw Hill) by asking lots of people what they think of your performance rather than just one person…your boss. The Net Management Promoter Score, developed by Roche in 2010 was the result, with a score out of 10 being the metric was one practical outcome.
It’s a good read and discusses many of the familiar issues that crop up when trying to get human beings at work to do what you want.
The only criticism is there are so many instances of theories not working mentioned here that in the end the advice seems to be ‘keep on trying different things’ rather than ‘here’s the definitive answer’.
Star rating:
4/5