Ian Cook Articles

BOOK REVIEW: Influencer: the Power to Change Anything (By Kerry Patterson et al., McGraw Hill, 2008, ISBN #978-0-07-148499-2) - Click To Read Article
I like this book because its six strategies are comprehensive. They provide an excellent road map for managers who want to induce change in an individual employee, a unit or, indeed, an entire organization.

Delegation: The Forgotten Management Tool - Click To Read Article
Six reasons why managers resist delegating tasks and decisions, three excellent benefits that will accrue when they do delegate, followed by a six-step approach to doing the hand-off effectively.

Dealing With Resistance: The 4 + 2 Method - Click To Read Article
Six steps for responding to resistance. Combines principles from both Aikkido and Gestalt Psychology into a practical approach that first acknowledges an employee's resistance (and power not to cooperate) and then opens him/her up to consider and accept the rationale for your position or performance expectations.

Choice & Accountability: The Bedrock of Superior Performance - Click To Read Article
Employees who resist taking personal accountability for their work and career success cost organizations a lot. This article speaks to staff members, offering three ways to operate in a fully accountable manner in their own job.

Down the Slope and Up Again: Seven Strategies to Lead Your Team through the Recession - Click To Read Article
Seven strategies to provide highly effective leadership at all levels of your organization, leadership that keeps employees engaged, focused, and productive during turbulent economic times.

What to Do When Your Team Gets “Stuck”: 7 Ways to Get It Moving Again - Click To Read Article
When a team becomes "stuck" it saps energy, costs money, and hurts results. How do you know when your team is, in fact, stuck? And what can you do to turn it around? Here are seven most common pitfalls teams and working groups encounter and a practical strategy to overcome each one.

Kickstarting a Brand New Team - Click To Read Article
Especially for a project team or cross-functional task force, there is great downline benefit from addressing, right at the beginning, group process fundamentals such as purpose, leadership, members' agendas, and team operating guidelines (norms).

Want Greater ROI From Your Meetings? Six Questions That Will Make The Difference - Click To Read Article
Six questions to ask yourself before you call a meeting so that you maximize the time invested by attendees and generate the results you want from the event. Make you meetings more satisfying, productive and shorter!

What’s Your Current Edge for Development? - Click To Read Article
This article challenges you with a single question: What is the one skill area—at this point in your career—where improving your competency will have the greatest impact on your overall effectiveness in your job? Your response will guide your continuous development this year.

Ouch! It Hurts To Think This Much! Communicating Performance Targets - Click To Read Article
Why are so many managers unclear about what performance results they expect from their employees? The prime reason: it requires concentrated mental effort and time, upfront. Make that investment. It will be worth it.

What if We Brought in a Facilitator? - Click To Read Article
Suggests four meeting situations when it pays to use a facilitator, explains what a facilitator typically does and offers five criteria to use in selecting one.

Executive Coaching on the Rise - Click To Read Article
Covers why one might engage the services of an external coach, how a typical coaching process works, when to consider using a coach and what to look for when selecting one.

The Other Way… Beyond Technology to Leverage Your Investment in Your People - Click To Read Article
Proposes a comprehensive learning curriculum to enhance so-called soft skills and attitudes at three distinct leverage points in an organization: managers, teams, and individual contributors.

Raise Your Gaze: Staying Energized in the Daily Grind - Click To Read Article
Presents two remedies when you get bogged down at work. One is to visualize your work completed and how good it will feel. The second is to remind yourself of the bigger picture, of how what you are working on will positively affect others.

You Gotta Get’em To Wanna: 6 Roles the Modern Leader Plays - Click To Read Article
The "leader" aspect of being a manager in today's competitive market for top talent has become absolutely critical. Managers, therefore, must master the skills and attitudes that support six specific roles that an effective leader plays.

A Lesson For Managers From The World Of Sales - Click To Read Article
Just as successful sales people identify their customers' needs, managers must learn their employees' motivators—wants and fears—and then try to satisfy these, in return for the required performance.

BOOK REVIEW: Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence (By Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis & Annie McKee, Harvard Business School Press, 2002, ISBN #1-57851-486-X) - Click To Read Article
While a leader's technical and cognitive skills can be developed in a fairly straight forward manner, the critical competencies based in emotional intelligence (EQ) take longer and require more persistence and, frequently, courage. This book offers steps to enhance your own EQ so that you create greater resonance—vs. dissonance—in your dealings with your staff and others in your organization.

BOOK REVIEW: Why Should Anyone Be Led by YOU? What it Takes to be an Authentic Leader (By Rob Goffee & Gareth Jones. Harvard Business School Press, 2006, ISBN #1-57851-971-3) - Click To Read Article
People want to be led by a person, the authors contend, not by someone with a fancy job title or a manager who has amassed a vast chunk of organizational turf. Employees will choose to follow only a real, live, breathing human being who reveals at least some of their humanity, values, personality and, yes, vulnerability.

BOOK REVIEW: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (By Carol S. Dweck, Random House, 2006 ISBN #1-4000-6275-6) - Click To Read Article
The author presents the "fixed" and "growth" mindsets, the "internal monologues" that accompany each of them, and how they can either limit or boost a leader's potential effectiveness. She chronicles the tales of several noted growth mindset leaders: Jack Welch (GE), Lou Gerstner (IBM) and Ann Mulcahy (Xerox). The book offers a useful lens through which to appraise your managers–and, of course, yourself–and focus their development.

BOOK REVIEW: The Dynamic Path: Access the Secrets of Champions to Achieve Greatness (By James M. Citrin Rodale, 2007 ISBN #978-1-59486-358-5) - Click To Read Article
Drawing from the world of athletics and the success (or not) of superstars in their lives after sports stardom. The major “dynamic path" shift they had to make was to now apply their fame and wealth to something beyond themselves. Sports stars find this especially difficult but so do star individual contributors, professional specialists, salespersons, etc. when they move into a significant leadership role.

BOOK REVIEW: Quiet Leadership: Six Steps to Transforming Performance at Work (By David Rock, HarperCollins Publishers, 2006, ISBN #978-0-06-083590-3) - Click To Read Article
A thorough and disciplined presentation of on-the-job, real time, coaching techniques to lead employees through the discomfort of new learning and back to comfort again, n the process growing them to a higher level of competence, self-understanding and confidence. These approaches merit a place in every manager’s “coaching toolkit.”

BOOK REVIEW: True North: Discover your Authentic Leadership (By Bill George with Peter Sims, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2007 ISBN #978-0-7879-8751-0) - Click To Read Article
How do you become and remain an authentic leader? Author Bill George tracks a number of remarkable leaders who have a number of things in common. They experienced what he calls a "crucible," a significant event or challenging situation earlier in life that set them on their purpose, and primarily, they successfully made the mindset transition from "I" to "WE," dedicating themselves to a deeper cause beyond their own self-interest. This is the "True North" compass setting, the source of authenticity. Provocative food for thought for all leaders.

BOOK REVIEW: A Leader’s Legacy (By James M. Kouzes & Barry Z. Posner, Jossey-Bass, 2006, ISBN #978-0-7879-8296-6) - Click To Read Article
As a leader, would you say one of your goals is to leave a legacy? If so, this book speaks to you. Two very well known and respected experts on leadership offer up their own legacy, sharing some conclusions that comes from their research, consulting and writing on the subject for over several decades.

BOOK REVIEW: Joy at Work: A Revolutionary Approach to Fun on the Job (By Dennis W. Bakke, PVG, 2005 ISBN #0-9762686-0-4) - Click To Read Article
An engaging saga about one corporate leader who decided to operate genuinely according to some universal beliefs about people and about what he felt was important in a corporation. So many of us talk this stuff. He lived it! As a result, the company experienced great business achievement and he encountered stiff push back from his Board…when economic times got tough. If nothing else, this book will challenge your thinking: what does your organization say it values? Does the enterprise really believe it? Do you?

BOOK REVIEW: The Extraordinary Leader: Turning Good Managers into Great Leaders (By John H. Zenger & Joseph Folkman, McGraw Hill, 2002 ISBN #0-07-138747-1) - Click To Read Article
This is an important contribution to the field of leadership development. It presents pivotal research that shows how investing in just a few current strengths (note, not the so called "weaknesses") of your average managers can rapidly move them toward becoming extraordinary leaders. In addition, the authors make a strong case for how this shift pays off handsomely in terms of business and organizational performance results.

BOOK REVIEW: Abolishing Performance Appraisals: Why They Backfire And What To Do Instead (By Tom Coens & Mary Jenkins, Berrett-Koehler, 2000, ISBN #1-57675-076-0) - Click To Read Article
Abolishing Performance Appraisals boldly presents the skepticism shared by a growing number of managers, human resource professionals, consultants and researchers: appraisals don’t do what they are purported to do and they cause a lot of other damage in the meantime. As the authors make a strong case for getting rid of formal appraisals altogether, they also address obvious concerns around rewards, compensation, and documentation to support legal action. This is a provocative and convincing read. Prepare to have your paradigms poked.

BOOK REVIEW: The Set-Up-To-Fail Syndrome: How Good Managers Cause Great People to Fail (By Jean-François Manzoni & Jean-Louis Barsoux, Harvard Business School Press, 2002, ISSBN #0-87584-949-0) - Click To Read Article
Totally unaware, managers can become complicit in the failure of an employee. Describes the negative self-fulfilling cycle where an employee's mistake or lapse begins to shape his/her manager's overall negative view of him/her. In turn, the manager starts treating the employee as if they fit that image of a poor performer. The employee lives up (down?) to those expectation and and the relationship spirals down and down. The book offers some suggestions for managers who see the situation in action and want to "crack the syndrome."

BOOK REVIEW: Why Pride Matters More Than Money: The Power of the World’s Greatest Motivational Force (By Jon R. Katzenbach, Crown Business, 2003, ISBN #0-609--61065-1) - Click To Read Article
The book's thesis, in a nutshell: an intrinsic feeling of pride based on the relentless pursuit of worthwhile endeavors is a lasting and powerful motivating force. Reveals the powerful connection between employee pride and the effort they expend, even more the case the farther down you go in the hierarchy. Some good business examples and stories are included. Offers a valuable perspective for managers who are wondering how to motivate individual performance in their unit or enterprise.

BOOK REVIEW: Finding Our Way: Leadership For an Uncertain Time (By Margaret J. Wheatley, Berrett-Koehler, 2005, ISBN #978-1-57675-317-0) - Click To Read Article
Finding Our Way challenges us to see the enterprises we lead in new light. It presents our organizations as living, substantially self-organizing systems of interacting human beings, not elaborate machines. Tools such as performance standards, metrics, missions, goals, project plans and job descriptions can certainly guide and influence employee behavior but they cannot force it or control it. This reality can frustrate the control-oriented manager. Wheatley offers several strategies to lead effectively in such systems.

How to Build Accountability in Your People - Click To Read Article
Every manager wants his or her employees to take on personal accountability for their work performance. Here are seven concrete actions you can take to foster that sense of responsibility in your staff. The benefits of this include greater productivity, confident, engaged employees who more rapidly reach their full performance potential, and less stress on you because you know you can count on them. The big bonus benefit is that you will have more time to focus on tasks that are strategically critical to the success and growth of the enterprise.

BOOK REVIEW: Leadership from the Inside Out: Becoming a Leader for Life (by Kevin Cashman Berrett-Koehler, 2008, ISBN #978-1-57675-599-0) - Click To Read Article
The bottom line of recent research–and of this book–is that to achieve a significant degree of mastery as a leader we must attend to mastering ourselves. This book provides a lot for all of us to consider…and then take action upon!

BOOK REVIEW: The Practice of Adaptive Leadership (By Ronald Heifetz Et Al, Harvard Business, 2009) - Click To Read Article
Dealing with change and problem solving–these tasks are at the core of what leader/managers do. But there are two distinctly different types of challenges that precipitate change and bring on problems for managers.


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