Are you one of those #hr professionals who constantly wants to question the commonly held beliefs & practices?
– What exactly is corporate culture?
– Why teams are not succeeding despite a well-defined goal?
– When the global workforce engagement percentage is 20%, how can I make my engagement score high?
Then you’d love this #bookrecommendation.
Book Name: Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World
Authors: Marcus Buckingham, Ashley Goodall
Who are They: Goodall is Senior Vice President of Leadership and Team Intelligence at Cisco. Buckingham is a New York Times bestselling author and head of People and Performance research at the ADP Research Institute.
Year of Release: 2019
Why I Recommend this Book: It’s full of Research based findings which have been viewed in line with real-life employee behaviours. It has interviews, data, what works & what doesn’t- A gold-mine!!
Here are some lines from the book that I loved:
– What is the “culture” of this three-person team-within-a-team? Is it different from the “culture” of the bigger, fifteen-person team, and if so, how?
– When we ask someone to rate someone else on an abstract quality such as empathy or vision or strategic thinking, their responses tell us more about the person doing the rating than the person being rated.
– Experience varies more within a company than between companies.
– When people choose not to work somewhere, the somewhere isn’t a company, it’s a team.
– Companies almost universally miss the importance of teams, as evidenced by the fact that most companies don’t even know how many teams they have at any moment in time, and who is on them, let alone which are the best ones—we are functionally blind to teams.
– You may not care which company you work for, but since you do care about which company you join, these signifiers (perks & benefits) are crafted to help a company attract a certain kind of person by highlighting what the company thinks this kind of person values.
– Teams simplify: they help us see where to focus and what to do. Culture doesn’t do this, funnily enough, because it’s too abstract.
– McChrystal, describing the system he ultimately created in Iraq, makes this same point: “In the old model, subordinates provided information and leaders disseminated commands. We reversed it: we had our leaders provide information so that subordinates, armed with context, understanding, and connectivity, could take the initiative and make decisions.”
If you read this book, do let me know. I’d love to have a book summary discussion with you.
Liking the book recommendation series? Do share it with young #hr professionals in your network who can benefit from this.