Useful advice for getting disparate personalities to work well together.
A debut business book offers a technique for understanding and working with different personalities.
In this volume, Cooper and Kerrigan present the DISC-EQ framework they use in advising businesses. The construction is based on a standard psychology model that divides people into four personality styles (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness, each abbreviated to its first letter), combined with an emotionally intelligent understanding of how those types interact. The book provides basic guidance for determining which style best fits a person (readers are also invited to complete a more substantial analysis on the volume’s companion website) and describes the primary characteristics of each. Subsequent chapters explain how the different types often conflict with one another, and how leaders can overcome those clashes and improve team performance by being aware of how personalities drive behavior, understanding the perspectives of others, and modifying their own interactions as a result. The authors use a combination of client testimonials and case studies drawn from their work to illustrate the DISC-EQ concepts and their real-world applications (“We discovered that I was an outgoing, results-driven D, whereas Jerome wasn’t a pessimistic naysayer; he was just a strong C-personality,” one manager reports). While the concepts Cooper and Kerrigan discuss are not groundbreaking—psychologists have used the DISC framework for nearly a century, and emotional intelligence was described decades ago—they cover the familiar territory effectively in the book, giving readers a substantial number of ways to turn ideas into actions. What the volume does particularly well is explore the communication styles and mental models of each personality type, accompanied by specific potential problems that arise as each type interacts with another and strategies for responding to those difficulties appropriately and productively. For instance, the authors explain how a detail-oriented C can successfully communicate with a D who prefers a big-picture overview to painstaking analysis. The book’s emphasis on the need for emotional self-awareness is also a strength—and an important message underlying the entire text.
Useful advice for getting disparate personalities to work well together.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0836-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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