Showing posts with label harvard business review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label harvard business review. Show all posts

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Book Review: A Small Management Tips Book with a Big Punch


Management Tips by Harvard Business Review offers some important advice for managers. The book is small but gives strong advice and explanations on how to become a better manager. It is something that you put on the shelf and refer to the key principles of management when needed. It is broken into managing yourself, managing your team and managing your business. You can zoom through the book in a few hours. 

You may be interested in a few tips:

Listen: Listening is a skill that is learned over time. Truly listening means to try and understand what another person is saying and why they are saying it. You can determine a lot about the person, their goals, their motivations, and their personalities simply by listening. The book encourages readers to think about the conversation and try and understand where it is headed. 

Be Confident-But Not Really Sure: Having a strong opinion is a sign of confidence but being so sure about that opinion is mental weakness. The point is that opinions should be adjusted and changed depending on the information that is available and the feedback you get from others to make them more accurate. Ignorance is based upon opinions that are unyielding to the realities of the environment. 

Battle Change Resistance:  People are naturally resistant to change if only because it is not the way in which they view the problem and often don’t want to put forward the effort to make change. Ensure that you are using the facts/research, know their arguments, and provide them with the big picture. This helps others see the need for change and to have some ability to formalize the possibilities. 

Management is not easy but if you haven’t thought about how much of management is working with others and guiding them to higher levels of performance you are missing the big picture yourself. Management requires learning the proper skills and developing them in the context of others. Managers are influencers and should ensure that they have developed the right social, strategic, and personality resources to make things happen. 

Management Tips by Harvard Business Review.  (2011). Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press ISBN: 978-1-4221-5878