A useful, pithy guide to a respectful and welcoming workplace.
Helbig and Norman declare that it’s time to make the office friendly to dissenting ideas, diverse employees, and human foibles in this leadership primer.
The authors, leadership consultants who were formerly a management consultant and a corporate executive, introduce readers to the corporate “psychological safety” movement, which seeks to enable employees to fully participate in the organization, speak their minds, and pursue novel initiatives without fear of punishment, enabling them to counteract the tendencies toward groupthink and institutional sclerosis in organizations that are rigidly hierarchical. Helbig and Norman present a series of “plays” that can be developed by learning practical skills. These skills include “communicating courageously” with underlings about uncomfortable issues; listening attentively; managing one’s reactions and avoiding getting defensive and angry when co-workers disagree with you; tolerating risk and failure as the necessary prices of learning new things; admitting when you need help and thanking people for their contributions; and knowing how to “design inclusive rituals”—like appointing an “Inclusion Booster”—to make sure that everyone gets heard. The authors convey all this with a mix of concise theory, bullet-pointed tips, and Helbig’s sprightly stick-figure illustrations. The book in large part boils down to a hands-on manual for running team meetings, a central institution of corporate life, in a productive fashion. Writing in lucid, evocative prose, Helbig and Norman offer a deep analysis of the manager’s leadership role in meetings, covering everything from individual psychology (“notice your feelings and your bodily reactions”) to the nuances of group dynamics (“Be aware of people who look as if they want to contribute but are having trouble figuring out how to jump in, and invite them to speak”). The authors provide simple, deft scripts (“Rhonda didn’t get to finish what she was saying; I’d like to hear what she has to say before we move on”) that leaders can use to keep everyone involved in the conversation. The result is an enlightening look at improving corporate cultures at their roots.
A useful, pithy guide to a respectful and welcoming workplace.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2023
ISBN: 9781774583098
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Page Two Press
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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