The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey - Ken Blanchard, William Oncken Jr and Hal Burrows If you feel overwhelmed by managerial responsibility and feel as though nothing will get done unless you supervise it personally, I highly recommend this book - I’ve lost count of the number of managers who have told me it has removed a huge amount of stress from their lives. One of several sequels to The One Minute Manager, this book has two main virtues: 1. It’s short - 130 large-type pages. 2. It makes a powerful idea very memorable and easy to apply in practice. The Monkey is the responsibility for the next move on any given task. As a manager, you are accountable for everything, so it’s only human nature to want to take responsibility for everything people are doing in your team - i.e. to ‘pick up the Monkey’ and start making decisions for them and telling them what to do. Unfortunately you are not superhuman* so you can’t do everything. You have plenty of Monkeys of your own, without trying to deal with other people’s. And when you take away people’s capacity to decide for themselves, you risk demotivating them and training them to depend on you for everything. This book does an excellent job of showing how you can reverse this cycle, empower your people by delegating tasks and decisions - and ‘insure’ yourself and your team members against failure.
Why Employees Don’t Do What They’re Supposed to Do - and What to Do About It - by Ferdinand Fournies If you are a manager trying to deal with ‘difficult’ people in your team, this book is for you. I’ve never worked with a group of managers who didn’t become very animated when I asked them Fournies’ question ‘Why don’t people do what they’re supposed to do?’. Unfortunately, many of the ‘obvious’ answers to the question - ‘because they’re difficult, lazy, stupid, prima donnas’ etc. - actually make your problem worse. After all, if someone is plain lazy, what can you do about it? Not much. Fortunately, as Fournies points out, to be an effective manager you don’t need to rebuild their personality - just influence their behaviour. To help you do this, he gives 16 answers to the question that actually give you practical options for solving the problem. Some of my favourites are ‘They think they are doing it, ‘They think their way is better’ and ‘They are rewarded for not doing it’. This is fairly typical of Fournies’ direct and prescriptive writing style, which some people find annoying. Personally I find it entertaining and he’s got the ideas to back it up. This is a book that has saved me a lot of frustration - hopefully it will do the same for you.
