It’s Okay to Manage Your Boss

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: It’s Okay to Manage Your Boss: The Step-by-Step Program for Making the Best of Your Most Important Relationship at Work

Competencies: self-development, achievement orientation, performance management, empowerment, accountability, two-way communications

Who benefits: employees, supervisors, managers

Consultant Usage: executive coaches, career development specialists, trainers

What’s it about? This is the oddest review I have ever written.  Why?  Because when I wrote this post the book was not going to be available until next week.   In the interim, the publishing date was moved up and this book became available last week.  I have had no chance to read it.  Yet I felt the topic is way too important to wait.  Many of you will want to get this book into the hands of a client or into a training program.  Two of you will want it for yourselves. 

Why am I recommending a book I haven’t even previewed?  Well, to begin with it is the answer to the most frequent complaint I “suffered through” in my nearly 40 years as a consultant, coach and trainer.  Allowing for slight variance, I absolutely burned out on employees saying over and over, as if it was the only possible conclusion to any problem, “But my boss won’t let me.” 

If this book is a good as I think it will be, I would have answered the complaint with “Here, read this and get back to me.  Next person.”

Bruce Tulgan, author of this book, is also the author of the well received and bestselling book “It’s Okay to Be the Boss: The Step-by-Step Guide to Becoming the Manager Your Employees Need”.

In that earlier book he sets the stage for this one.  He writes how in this age of flattened organizations it is all too common for managers to demonstrate a lack of guidance, direction, feedback, and employee support.  This in turn leads to what he calls a breed of managers who “empower” employees to failure.

For those whom this rings true, there is a giant sucking sound associated with a vacuum … and thus, I presume, this new book.

The publisher of both books is Jossey-Bass, which I have cited recently as a publisher that I have faith and trust in.  This book should be a good read for any employee, supervisor or manager.  However, if you are by chance a consultant or trainer in management or career development, you are being advised here to be the first on your block to get a hold of this new book.

Catch you later.
[tags]managing up, managing the boss, self-development, achievement orientation, performance management, empowerment, accountability, bruce tulgan, tulgan, bill bradley, william bradley, bradley[/tags]

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.