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Books to aid development of both rookie, veteran managers

As with last year’s column, I have enlisted my son Dan in recommending books for the young and aspiring leaders on your gift list. I am recommending the last two books here for those of us at the beginning or in advanced stages of gray.

Young Leaders

Hopefully everyone knows that you can never stop learning how to be better in your role; there is always going to be room for improvement. However, when was the last time you tried to be better at taking feedback or even being more self-aware regarding how you are perceived? I’ll speculate for the majority of you the answer is not very often. Thirteen years into my own career I still find that I just am not the best at taking feedback in the way that it is intended and putting it to the best and intended use. In the past three months, I have found two of the most valuable books to help change the way that I receive as well as give feedback and educate me to be more aware of both my actions and those of my team members:

“Thanks for the Feedback” by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen
This book discusses the three main types of feedback that we will face in any type of job: appreciation, coaching and evaluation. The authors examine the triggers that for some people create negative or defensive positions while hearing constructive or needed feedback and areas of improvement. These include truth, relationship and identity triggers.

The focus overall is largely on how feedback within an organization introduces other complicating factors (such as power imbalances, culture, etc.). The authors also couple recent research findings on emotional intelligence, nonverbal communication, and other important psychological research, with useful examples of workplace conversations, both constructive and otherwise. The book offers conversation techniques, negotiation suggestions, and lots of problem-solving tricks. You’ll walk away with a better understanding of what is going through your mind when you hear feedback and what to do about it.

“Emotional Intelligence 2.0” by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves

This is the kind of book that I have honestly avoided as it is a self-help book. The book offers a well-designed approach to deliver on one single purpose — to increase your emotional intelligence (EQ). It starts by taking a quick online emotional intelligence test (pass code included). You learn which areas are holding you back and which of the book’s strategies would increase your EQ the most.

The strategies are broken down according to the four EQ skills:

Self-awareness
Self-management
Social awareness
Relationship management

I learned a lot, especially around the area of self-awareness, and I know that I will continue to reference the many lessons and suggestions in this book for years to come.

Experienced Managers

“Creativity, Inc.” by Ed Catmull, president of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation, is my top choice, and also the top choice of my social media followers. Described as “a book for managers who want to lead employees to new heights and a manual for anyone who strives for originality,” it is also a wonderful examination of how creativity, autonomy, trust and fun can create a work environment where anything is possible. One of the most powerful learning experiences is understanding the importance of talent and culture in creating a great place to work. Recruiting people who are more talented than you are, learning to manage that talent, blending the talents together and empowering that talent is an art form, which unfortunately most of us struggle to manage.

According to Catmull, everybody has the potential to be creative and that creativity has many forms. It is the role of the manager to encourage and develop that diverse group of talent in a fertile environment, keep it healthy, and watch for the things that undermine that environment and act quickly to eliminate them. A lesson that I have learned over the years is a core of the book: The best managers acknowledge and make room for what they do not know, not just because humility is a virtue, but because until one adopts that mindset, the most striking breakthroughs cannot occur.

Managers must accept risk; trust the people they work with and embrace the reality that the model, the idea or the path might be wrong; and accept that mistakes are something we can learn from and grow.

“Getting More” by Stuart Diamond is a book about negotiating, which I find to be an essential skill in managing millennials and plurals in this day and age. Diamond, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, is recognized as an expert on negotiation. The information is presented in story and anecdote form and thus is easily relatable.

Many people look at negotiation as an exercise in power, with winning as the ultimate goal regardless of the cost to the other party involved in the negotiations. Diamond cautions that the use of power too often causes retaliation, harms relationships and costs credibility. The key would appear to be finding the right tools for each situation and having a better understanding of the other party. The book contains many of the same types of insights found in Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War,” where the art is learning how to prepare to convey self-reliance and power without having to exercise the power by going to war.

The chapter titled “Emotion” was my favorite. Diamond writes that emotion is the enemy of effective negotiations and of effective negotiators because people who are emotional have difficulty listening, understanding and responding to the points of view of the other party. Diamond, through the use of some excellent examples, illustrates effective ways to overcome your own emotion while at the same time capitalizing on the emotional nature of your negotiating partner to your own advantage.

Author’s note: I have recently published a collection of my Sutton Impact columns from SportsBusiness Journal. Titled “Sometimes It’s More Than Black and White,” the collection is available from Amazon.com. All proceeds from the book will be used to benefit students in the sport and entertainment business management MBA/MS program at the University of South Florida.

Bill Sutton (wsutton1@usf.edu) is the founding director of the sport and entertainment business management MBA at the University of South Florida and principal of Bill Sutton & Associates. Follow him on Twitter @Sutton_ImpactU. Dan Sutton (suttond@google.com) is principal brand specialist at Google BrandLab. Follow him on Twitter @thatdansutton.

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