Suggested reading

Citation

Rao, M.S. (2015), "Suggested reading", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 23 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/HRMID-07-2015-0134

Suggested reading

Article-type: Suggested reading From: Human Resource Management International Digest, Volume 23, Issue 7

Exploring Internal Communication: Towards Informed Employee Voice

Kevin Ruck (Ed.), Gower, 2015, ISBN: 9781472430670

Kevin Ruck’s edited book Exploring Internal Communication: Towards Informed Employee Voice is divided into two sections. Part I deals with internal-communication theory, and Part II with research, planning and management.

Part I reflects the importance of drawing upon established academic thinking for theory. The style of writing in Part II is less academic and more practical. The book is therefore structured in a way that stresses the importance of a theoretical underpinning for practice.

The book is a collaborative project involving 14 contributors who are academics and practitioners. It provides practitioners and students from different backgrounds – such as media relations, public affairs, crisis communication, social and digital communication, HR and marketing – with a dedicated perspective on internal communication.

The book explains that stories can be used effectively in the most complex business situations. Research undertaken at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrated that students had a higher information-retention rate when information was presented to them in the form of a story.

In the research, a class of MBA students was divided into three groups. Each group received the same information presented in different formats. One group received the information verbally; another through charts, graphs and figures; and a third group received the information embedded in the story of a little old winemaker. Three weeks later, the class members were tested on their retention of the information. The students who had been told the story had the highest retention rate. When the groups were asked to rate which information they found most credible, they said the information that was embedded in the story was the most believable.

The book outlines that clear writing is the starting point for everything you do as a communicator. There are six basic principles to get the advantages of clear communication and each has specific techniques to help you achieve your objectives: focus on the audience; set a clear goal; get the tone right; use words that have a clear meaning; structure the communication to make your point; and adapt to the medium.

The book shares some techniques to get the right tone as follows: use motivating language, not controlling language; talk about a positive result; talk to one person; use stories and examples; adapt your tone to the situation; and define the tone of voice for your organization.

The book describes how only around half of all employees say that their manager usually or always keeps them in touch with what is going on. This applies to both the public and private sectors.

Only about a third of the employees are likely to be satisfied with chief-executive communication, compared with two-thirds with immediate-manager communication.

Senior managers play a vital role in providing important information to employees on a regular basis. Many employees do not know enough about organizational plans, achievements and changes, and this inevitably leads to less trust in management and less engagement with the organization. Employees want to hear about important organization-level information from senior managers, not line managers. Line-manager communication is better focused on topics relating directly to the specific team.

Not all changes will affect the whole organization. Incremental change usually targets specific departments or particular problems, while quantum change affects the entire organization.

There are three reasons why change communication fails: not communicating early enough, relying too much on technology and not talking about outcomes.

A big part of a chief executive’s job is motivating his or her employees and winning hearts and minds. To do this, the chief executive must engage employees’ emotions, and the key to their heart is story-telling.

As human beings, we naturally want to work through stories. Cognitive psychologists describe how the human mind, in its attempt to understand and remember, assembles the bits and pieces of experience into a story. Stories are how we remember; we tend to forget lists and bullet points. Individually and collectively, stories help us to make sense of our past and understand possible futures. Studies have shown that people remember stories 30 per cent better than just facts.

The enemies of effective communication are acronyms, jargon, gobbledygook, technical terms and business-speak.

Exploring Internal Communication: Towards Informed Employee Voice is a widely researched book with lots of references. The contributors are experts in their areas, thus adding an immense value to the book. It contains case studies, quotations, diagrams, examples and illustrations. This book is useful for practitioners, academics, students and professional communicators.

Reviewed by Professor M.S. Rao, available at: www.amazon.com/M.-S.-Rao/e/B00MB63BKM, msrlctrg@gmail.com

Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader

Herminia Ibarra, Harvard Business Review Press, 2015, ISBN: 9781422184127

Herminia Ibarra’s Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader is divided into five chapters giving practical advice on how managers and executives at all levels can step up to leadership by making small but crucial changes in three areas: redefine the scope of your day job by plunging into new projects and activities; form relationships and interact with people who see the world differently; and experiment with unfamiliar and playful ways of connecting and engaging with others to get things done.

The author advises investing in activities that will increase your network as follows: use projects and assignments strategically; invest in extracurricular activities; create your own communities of interest; use lunches and business trips to connect to people you do not see often; favor active rather than passive networking opportunities; and use social media to broadcast your interests and cast a wider net to people who share them.

To step up to leadership, you have to learn to think like a leader. The way you think is a product of your experience. Doing things rather than simply thinking about them will increase your “outsight” into what leadership is about. Outsight comes from a “tripod” of sources: new ways of doing your work (your job); new relationships (your network); and new ways of connecting to and engaging with people (yourself). Sustainable change in your leadership capacity requires shifts on all three legs of the tripod.

Success creates competency traps. We fall into a competency trap when these three things occur: you enjoy what you do well, so you do more of it and get yet better at it; when you allocate more time to what you do best, you devote less time to learning other things that are also important; and over time, it gets more costly to invest in learning to do new things. To act like a leader, you must devote time to four tasks you will not learn to do if you are in a competency trap: bridging across diverse people and groups; envisioning new possibilities; engaging people in the change process; and embodying the change.

It is hard, says the author, to learn these things directly and especially without the benefit of a new assignment. No matter what your current situation, there are five things you can do to begin to make your job a platform for expanding your leadership: develop your situation sensors; get involved in projects outside your area; participate in extracurricular activities; communicate your personal “why”; and create slack in your schedule.

As you embark on the transition to leadership, networking outside your organization, team and close connections become a vital lifeline to who and what you might become.

The only way to realize that networking is one of the most important requirements of a leadership role is to act. If you leave things to chance and natural chemistry, your network will be narcissistic and lazy.

You need operational, personal and strategic networks to get things done, to develop personally and professionally and to step up to leadership. Although most good managers have good operational networks, their personal networks are often disconnected from their leadership work, and their strategic networks are often non-existent or underutilized. Network advantage is a function of: the breadth of your contacts; the connectivity of your networks; and your network’s dynamism.

Enhance or rebuild your strategic network from the periphery of your current network outward as a first step toward increasing your outsight on yourself. Seek outside expertise and elicit input and the perspectives of peers from different functional or support groups.

Many of the typical challenges of stepping up to leadership make people feel like fakes: taking charge in a new role; selling their ideas; managing their higher-ups; working in an alien culture; and learning from negative feedback. Chameleons are comfortable shifting shapes and styles to fit each new situation; true-to-selfers, on the other hand, tend to feel inauthentic when asked to stretch outside their comfort zone.

Authenticity traps really get you into trouble when you are stepping up to leadership, because what feels like the authentic to you is the old self that you are trying to shed. One way to escape the authenticity trap is to think about experimenting with new behaviors such as playing around with your sense of who you are instead of working on it. The new behaviors might feel unnatural in the beginning, but they help you to work out who you might want to be without your actually committing to become it. Playing gives you outsight on yourself.

Stepping to play a bigger leadership role is not an event; it is a process that takes time before it pays off. It is a transition built from small changes.

Most methods for changing, says the author, ask you to begin with the end in mind – the desired outcome. But in reality, knowing what kind of leader you want to become comes last, not first, in the stepping-up process.

Making major, external moves like changing jobs and careers, however, does not necessarily take you to a better place. More important is to grow by questioning where you are today, actively entertaining alternatives and eventually committing to making changes. The changes can be external, like job moves, or internal, like changing the way you think about what you do and why.

Herminia Ibarra is an exceptional leadership scholar and intellectual. She authored this book based on her 25 years of teaching experience that includes executive education. The book contains a summary at the end of each chapter and offers self-assessment exercises, case studies, quotes and diagrams.

This is one of the finest books I have read in my lifetime. It is an inspiring and thought-provoking book to grow as a great leader. It is well-researched, with both scholarly and practitioner application. It is an insightful and inspiring book worth investing your time in. It is useful for educators, scholars, leaders and chief executives to grow as great leaders.

Reviewed by Professor M.S. Rao, available at: www.amazon.com/M.-S.-Rao/e/B00MB63BKM, msrlctrg@gmail.com

Authentic Leadership: Discover and Live Your Essential Mission

Bas Blekkingh, Infinite Ideas Limited, 2015, ISBN: 9781908984357

Bas Blekkingh’s Authentic Leadership: Discover and Live Your Essential Mission is divided into eight chapters outlining seven layers which make up all human beings. The seven layers are environmental, behavioral, skills, norms, the ego, values and authenticity layer. The eight chapters are about moving “from ego to authenticity”.

The environmental layer consists of your environment as you perceive it. In other words, it is not your actual environment, as you only perceive the things that are important to you because of selective perception. Because a filter prevents an information overload, you fail to perceive many things that really exist.

You can divide the world in two: the world around you and the inner world you create in your mind. You have stored all kinds of past experiences in your inner world as stories. Every story has its own emotional charge or label: good, cold, safe and so on. Your experience in dealing with various situations has gone into creating a certain story about yourself, which is your self-image. You have self-image stores in your inner world.

The more important a story is for you, the more you will filter in information related to the story. Once information has been filtered in, a number of processes will take place. First, you make associations; you ask yourself where you have come across this before. You will evaluate all these stories once you have collated them. After this evaluation, you will eventually choose to behave in a way that produces the greatest rewards. The entire process takes place in fractions of seconds, largely without you being aware of it.

You seek rewards, consciously and subconsciously, through your behavior: staying alive; avoiding pain; gaining sensory stimulation; being right; achieving financial security; and proving that you make a difference.

Your behavior is driven by norms. A norm is a specific rule of conduct, judgment, standard or assessment. You are continually (subconsciously) labeling your environment. Every environment has its own set of norms or rules of conduct. Norms that are dictated by your environment are called external norms. Because you spend time in different environments, you may observe different external norms.

Values are more deeply rooted than norms. A value can be defined as a fundamental principle you stand for. It forms the basis for your internal norms. The combination of norms and values in a particular environment is referred to as its culture. Every environment has its own culture. It appears that norms, not values, lie at the heart of cultural clashes. It is therefore good to clearly distinguish between norms and values. You can solve many problems by first reaching consensus about the values and then jointly defining the norms.

The success or failure of cultural-development programs depends on the model behavior of the management, involving staff members at an early stage and demanding ownership, translating the values into restrictive and stimulating norms and making cultural development measurable.

A vision can be defined from a mission. You define a vision by asking yourself what the environment will look like after a few years if your mission was always the determining factor. The good thing about a vision is that it is easy to convey to others. Once you have defined a vision, you can make a step-by-step plan for how you can realize it. You have a mission, you create a vision. Then you focus on the here and now throughout the step-by-step plan. It is important here not to be afraid to receive gifts from others. By being able to receive, you make it possible for the other person’s creations to be accepted, thereby sharing the good feeling.

Forgiving, says the author, is a form of authentic giving. When you forgive, you give back your trust. If you can forgive someone, this means that you no longer hold the incident or the person responsible for your further development. You can also ask for forgiveness, or offer your apologies. Authentic leaders can admit their mistakes and offer their apologies. Their positive intention to do things better in the future strengthens them here.

You can influence another person’s egos by dispelling his or her fears through reacting from your own values or your own mission or by giving the other person recognition for the desired position and asking for help. Always do this for the right reasons; otherwise, it will have the opposite effect.

Your egos form an integral part of you. They automatically reappear when your environment becomes too unsafe. That is not a problem; egos benefit you, but you should not let them get the better of you. The rules for moving from ego to authenticity remain the same, no matter how unsafe the environment. Your growth is reflected in the fact that you have less need of your egos in increasingly difficult or unsafe environments, and not in the fact that you need to get rid of your egos.

The book contains a summary at the end of each chapter to enable readers to digest the key ideas and insights and apply them effectively. The book is useful for coaches, leaders and learners.

Reviewed by Professor M.S. Rao, available at: www.amazon.com/M.-S.-Rao/e/B00MB63BKM, msrlctrg@gmail.com

Extraodinary Leadership in Australia and New Zealand: The Five Practices that Create Great Workplaces

James Kouzes, Barry Posner and Michael Bunting, Wiley, 2015, ISBN: 9780730316695

James Kouzes, Barry Posner and Michael Bunting’s Extraordinary Leadership in Australia and New Zealand: the Five Practices that Create Great Workplaces outlines the five practices such as modeling the way; inspiring a shared vision; challenging the process; enabling others to act; and encouraging the heart can help you achieve amazing outcomes.

The book demonstrates the authors’ experience and research and their passion for leadership. They analyzed around the globe more than 5,000 interviews and case studies and more than five million survey responses from all kinds of organizations, industries, functions, levels, occupations, ages and ethnicities. This book emerged from their global research.

The authors argue that you can move mountains if you are prepared to involve people, and listen, and help them to find a way.

Being an exemplary leader means that you will have to clarify values by finding your voice and affirming shared values, and set the example by aligning actions with shared values. Articulating your values and beliefs clearly gives your team a framework for understanding what is important. It guides team members to make the right decisions.

When the lyrics and the melody of a song go together, you have got synchrony; for leaders, when words and deeds go together, you have got credibility. This is the foundation of leadership. People will only willingly follow you when they believe in you. If people do not believe in the messenger, they will not believe the message.

Two of the most important things leaders can do to drive engagement are communicate and reinforce with employees the organization’s vision and values, and ensure that day-to-day managerial behaviors, actions and decisions are consistent with the core organizational values.

Exemplary leaders foster collaboration by building trust and facilitating relationships, and strengthen others by increasing self-determination and developing competence.

You cannot, say the authors, expect others to trust you if you are not willing to trust them. If people feel trusted, informed and listened to, they are going to be far more productive in their jobs because they feel like there is something good happening.

If you want to boost employee engagement, you have to encourage the heart of the people you work with. People will not sustain high levels of energy and productivity if they believe that nobody else cares about the hard work they are doing.

Leadership engages people and brings out the best in them. Engagement, in turn, drives higher levels of performance and more outstanding accomplishments. This virtuous cycle begins with you becoming the best leader you can possibly be.

People will never follow you unless they know where you are leading them and they are inspired by that destination, those results, that future.

Leaders do not sit around waiting for things to happen; they make things happen. They are constantly looking for ways of innovating and improving their processes and results. They are never content with the status quo. They despise mediocrity.

Leadership is never easy. It is easy to read about leadership. It is easy to attend a leadershiptraining program. It is not easy to actually apply what you learn.

This is a well-researched book illustrating leadership behaviors with practical applications. It contains case studies and inspiring stories of successful companies and leaders. It helps ordinary leaders to grow as extraordinary leaders.

Although the book is written from the perspective of Australia and New Zealand, the basic leadership principles can be applied in other countries as well.

The book is useful for leadership scholars and leaders at levels.

Reviewed by Professor M.S. Rao, available at: www.amazon.com/M.-S.-Rao/e/B00MB63BKM, msrlctrg@gmail.com