"Have you ever felt that, despite your Herculean efforts, you aren't getting everything done at work that needs to be done? Have you ever felt out of touch with your supervisor or the employees you are in charge of? Have you had trouble retaining your best employees, despite giving them positive performance evaluations and appropriate raises?
If you've answered any of the above in the affirmative, you can garner valuable advice to deal with those issues and learn scores of other valuable management lessons from spending a couple of hours digesting David Cottrell's latest business self-help book, Monday Morning Mentoring: Ten Lessons to Guide You Up the Ladder (What You Don't Know About Leadership Is What's Holding You Back).
Cottrell is the president and CEO of the Cornerstone Leadership Institute and an internationally respected leadership consultant. He's held senior management positions with Xerox and FedEx. He's written over 20 books (apparently nothing's been holding him back!) and he's given leadership seminars to over 125,000 people worldwide.
Monday Morning Mentoring has been written in a somewhat peculiar style in that it's written in the form of an inspirational story. The protagonist, Jeff, has been a successful manager for some time, but despite early career successes, he finds himself having hit a wall and is faced with the types of management difficulties described above.
Jeff seeks out Tony, an older gentleman, a friend of his parents, now retired, who was a highly successful management consultant for individuals and organizations. The two agree to meet for ten weeks, early every Monday morning, and embark on an analysis/workshop of the difficulties Jeff is facing at work.
Had I been more closely in tune to the form the book was written in early on, I might have shied away from reading it. I mean, really - a business book told in the form of a series of Aristotelian discussions between master and student? Luckily, having paid little attention to the first names, I began the book thinking it was autobiographical, based on some career crisis Cottrell himself had suffered.
Having devoted some time under the delusion that the book was autobiographical, I decided to continue reading, as the interchanges between Jeff and Tony are actually quite interesting, if you can get past the fictional element of them. They are also far less dry than your average preachy, step-by-step, "this is exactly how you succeed" business book. As it turns out, Monday Morning Mentoring is actually not only enjoyable, but a great read for managers seeking to self-analyze and improve their management skills.
Each chapter begins with the meeting between Tony and Jeff, in which Jeff describes some difficulty he is having at work. The two then discuss what the root of the problem could be, and Jeff is left with some sort of assignment to complete before the meeting on the following Monday morning.
For example, one of Jeff's problems is that he's recently lost two star employees, despite having performed positive performance reviews and given raises. On this point, Tony opines that companies don't usually lose valued employees due to monetary factors. More often, managers themselves lose employees when employees lose trust in managers due to feeling undervalued.
Jeff feels he's done enough to meet his employees' needs by providing positive reviews and rewarding performance. Exit interviews with each employee seem to bear this out. So before the next Monday morning, Jeff's assignment is to re-evaluate his relationship vis-a-vis the two lost employees to determine more precisely why they left.
Jeff gets in touch with the former employees who are now far more up-front about why they left than they were in exit interviews. In frank discussions, Jeff learns that both of them, being star employees, felt that more and more work and responsibility was being placed on them to compensate for the shortcomings of less productive employees. Each of the employees felt that Jeff's major shortcoming as a manager was that he sometimes hired poor employees, retained them too long, and expected his best employees to accomplish more and more, while the less productive employees were allowed to get by doing less and less. They felt they were being taken advantage of and hence, not personally valued.
Through this type of directed self-analysis, Cottrell takes the reader on a series of exercises designed to awaken the reader to a better understanding of his or her strengths and weaknesses as a manager. He provides exercises designed to deal with a wide range of issues such as:
better time management
hiring better employees
dehiring (his word) less valuable employees
accountability
dealing with change and criticism
handling adversity
maintaining a positive outlook
Should readers seek further enlightenment from David Cottrell and his Cornerstone Institute Leadership Institute, the organization maintains a Web site at www.cornerstoneleadership.com, with around 40 books for sale as well as inspirational calendars and note cards. From the Web site, seminars can be downloaded as PowerPoint presentations. Finally, David Cottrell and other Cornerstone facilitators are available to conduct any one of 11 different management workshops.