A focused, practical toolkit for managers seeking deeper employee engagement.
A how-to for managers looking to build stronger relationships with their team members.
In this guide, Smith provides managers with a practical framework for engaging with employees, coaching them, and developing their skills for a more productive and positive work environment. The engage, coach, develop (ECD) framework’s foundation is a human interaction model that provides guidelines for effective interactions, specifies the context in which these interactions occur, and outlines the desired behaviors and outcomes. Coaching consists of open and honest dialogue about what employees are doing well and which areas need more attention. Engagement involves consistent, meaningful interactions that build trust and support. Developing employees means making an intentional investment in their growth so they can thrive professionally. Smith discusses “mindset regeneration,” or the process of replacing strength-based thinking with effort-based encouragement and swapping self-criticism for self-compassion. He also recommends regular, casual conversations and expressing curiosity about employees’ personal and professional lives. The author suggests tactics to stave off negative reactions and wariness among employees; to promote ongoing learning, Smith recommends managers create a written personal development plan for employees that analyzes business needs and required skills and provides a skills gap assessment, methods for filling the gap, milestone markers, a timeline, and progress check-ins. Essentially, Smith stresses engagement as a manager’s top priority. The author includes many actionable strategies (and examples demonstrating how to implement them) in the book; for example, he provides sample scripts for engaging with employees, including lines such as, “I know you speak Spanish, so I’m wondering if you’ve visited any Spanish-speaking countries.” His recommendations consider employees’ personality differences—he touts asynchronous communication, like email, for connecting with introverted workers. While the book’s concise format makes for a quick read, readers may have benefitted from end-of-chapter, bulleted takeaways. A “further reading” reference list (rather than in-text book recommendations) would have also improved the narrative’s flow.
A focused, practical toolkit for managers seeking deeper employee engagement.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781663251190
Page Count: 94
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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