Category: Books

Situational Leadership – Dr. Paul Hersey

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I once took an interview for a role that was well above my skills, experience and background level, during one of the rounds, the interviewer gave me some constructive criticism and suggested I read this book. To this day it sits on my shelf, and think back to at the lessons I learned from it, and the experience it has now given me to manage teams and people more effectively.

If you have or don’t have a leadership role, looking to advance your career or simply understand a workforce better, I would highly encourage giving this a quick read.

Book – Leaders Assemble

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Here are a couple of notes from the book which really resonated with me.

  • Everyone is a leader, if you do something, it makes an impact on others around you.

Key take aways which I should look further into:

  • Task conflict and relationship conflict are interesting topics I should look into further.

5 strategies to encourage task completion:

  • Power to implement – will
  • Avoiding approach – hope something will force choice
  • Accommodating – lack of decisiveness
  • Compromising – give and get, everyone might be dissatisfied
  • Collaborative – recently experienced this
    • read more

    The puzzle of motivation

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    • The puzzle of motivation – Daniel Pink
      • https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_the_puzzle_of_motivation
        • When – the scientific secret of timing
        • @DanielPink

        Here are a few key take aways from this short Ted Talk:

        Higher incentives led to worse performance

        Mechanical skills = the higher the skill the higher the pay
        Cognitive skill = opposite

        3 items:

        • Autonomy
          • Self direction works really well
            • Atlassian (Jira)
            • Hackathon
            Fedex days

          • 20 Percent Time
          • I think its something we have tried to encourage with “meeting free fridays”
          • ROWE (Results only work environment) – no schedules, just get the work done, meetings optional = productivity up, work satisfaction goes up
            • read more

    King Kullen

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    It’s a relevant and intriguing story of how one employee at Kroger, Michael Kullen, wrote a 6 page letter to a Kroger VP, encouraging them to consider a different business model. He was not taken seriously, resigned from Kroger and opened his own grocery chain called King Kullen. It is considered Americas First Supermarket due to it having separate departments; self-service; discount pricing; chain marketing; and volume dealing. In 2007 King Kullen had revenues of $800 million and operates 32 stores in New York state.