Books For Positive People

FACE IT,  Recognizing and Conquering The Hidden Fear That Drives All Conflict at Work, by Art Horn, Amacom  2004 Coach and consultant Art Horn identifies six business types:  the worrier, the controller, the fake, the attention-seeker, the victim and the prisoner in Part I “The People in Your Neighborhood.”    Part II, “Hell  Is Not Just Other People” explores the meat of the challenge, separating our feelings and reactions to what we think we are seeing in those other people (and ourselves), from  the facts, just the facts, m’am. Finally, Horn throws us a lifeline and encourages us to start swimming in Part III, Moving from Fear to Freedom.

Let’s take a look at the lightest threat, worrying.   Horn actually offers a list of solutions to endless uncontrolled worrying, including the tough one I can’t get over - like facing down the Expert ski slope when you accidentally got on the wrong lift – “2.  Embrace the fear.”    This is a biggie, but the reasoning makes sense.  Horn warns us that for many, worry stems from a long-buried pain.  Harley, one of Horn’s disguised clients, struggled with two aspects to his business situation – first the tangible business problem – the facts, ma’m – and then the emotions that accompanied them.  Hartley’s stated concerns were the spiraling aftershocks that MIGHT occur if his business fell down.  He WOULD miss payroll, his employees would be angry and destitute, he WOULD go bankrupt and disappoint his family, and finally, he would definitely be judged worthless, and probably abandoned by anyone he loved.  But Horn dug deeper into Hartley’s dilemma, believing that an earlier trauma kicked in when he was feeling an emotionally similar crisis and that his current excessive worrying was really out of scale with the facts.

And indeed, as Hartley broke down, he confessed that this terrible, persistent financial worrying paralleled the awful feelings of helplessness that arose as his mother delivered the news that she was leaving him and his father.  As a child Hartley was beyond powerless; as an adult, that same fear crippled his executive decision-making. 

The last two chapters of Face It are personal and revealing because the author intends for them to be a method to work through painful habits and pre-judgments that may be interfering in your business life.  As such these last chapters deserve slow and thoughtful reading time – they are not designed to offer ten quick fixes or diagnostic checklists that pinpoint individual sensitivities, but they are the kind of material that lingers.  This book is a fun read at the beginning, and a slow and useful read at its end.

The Power of a Positive Attitude, Discovering the Key to Success, Roger Fritz, Amacom  2008 Cranky Bitch says “Who cares?”  When I smile at the Registry of Motor Vehicles “I let my license expire window” people think I’m deficient or hopped up.  When I respond to my tennis partner’s gripe about line violations, she replies “It’s time for a new set of contacts.”  But when I retreat to the couch to nurse my negative feelings, only my dog Nikki understood and sympathized.  So where’s win here?

Well, author Roger Fritz assures us that positive people – the ones who smile their way through the Registry of Motor Vehicles long lines, live longer and stronger.  This is a quick and chastening read, one that you will feel so successful to have processed in 1 – 2 hours max, perfect airport reading.  Other than obeying my mother’s advice, “You’ve got to smile more, Patricia – you look too serious, like the weight of the world is on your shoulders,” Fritz offers great perspective and alternatives to Burnout and stress, including being kind to others and using your own positive attitude to help others.  I’ve learned through observation that showing compassion to other people lifts us.  Fritz’s final chapter list of “Criteria for Successful Leaders”  helps us aim higher and consider the obvious challenges that maybe holding us back, including all the things I love about corporate life:

1.        Risk-taking Mavericks

2.       Controlled workaholics

3.       Fearless delegators

4.       Dreamers with common sense

5.       Sacrificial performers

This is an incomplete list that Fritz could have used as the basis for his entire book.  Each of these characters walks the corridors of power, and some of them are pretty wild and crazy, but that’s reassuring.  The question remains, however, at the last few pages of this book, where and how the workaholics and fearless delegators and dreamers show their positive habits and attitudes.   I want more!

Increase Your Influence at Work, by Perry McIntosh and Richard A. Luecke, Amacom, 2011 Let’s get real here.  Everyone knows there are proven techniques to building workplace power, starting with land grabs, taking the best or the biggest or the most windowed office for your very own domain.  Or there’s the more subtle approach I recall from a research jaunt with a lean six sigma team.  We were visiting a big appliance plant in the South, and the executive assistant to one of our team members decided that to protect the In-crowd from the Newbies, she would not reveal the location of the nearest management bathroom.  As an outsider embedded on the plant kaizen team, I later discovered that the mass washroom located one flight down and ½ an acre over by the stockrooms,  the one with the crazy fire hose foot-pedal spray sink, was not the nearest or the “nicest” restroom.   Amazingly, she thought that sending us Outsiders downstairs and practically into the parking lot was pretty powerful and it was… sort of.  But what she didn’t realize was that even after we “discovered” the closer facilities, we continued to make the long dark trek across the building, billing, billing, billing all the way.  So much for low-level power plays.

Co-authors McIntosh, and my friend Dick Luecke, a former HBR editor, and a lifelong observer of corporate shenanigans, offer us  more civilized, acceptable methods to increase influence at work.  I like these tips for building influence in two directions, upwards toward your boss, and sideways and down for fellow workers:

1.        Understand how your boss makes decisions

2.       Suggest alternatives

3.       Provide objective analysis of decision alternatives

4.       Understand the political dimensions

5.       Work out plans and a timetable for implementing the decision.

But even more helpful is the authors’ list of guaranteed ways to lose influence with your boss:

1.        Being a habitual bargainer when assignments are given

2.       Upstaging

3.       Self-promotion

4.       Failing to check in.

The Good Girls Revolt, How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace by Lyn Povich, Public Affairs, 2012 I never read women’s books, neither am I a member of NOW, nor do I ever talk about the early difficulties of gender integration – it’s salt in the wound - but they were there, and fortunately for us survivors, some pioneers were able to challenge and win a few critical battles.  Lynn Povich joined Newsweek in 1965, well before Affirmative Action, yet Povich and forty-five of her female colleagues – forty-five…. Forty-five!   - in March 1970 gathered to launch a complaint charging their employer – their employer, can you imagine, their employer! – with “systematic discrimination” against them in hiring and promotion.  Well of course, it had to be systematized to work! 

Forty years later Newsweek is a different publication now ironically headed by a woman, although the author claims that other major magazines’ ratio of male to female editors stands at  7 to 1.   In the same year, Ms Magazine, which nobody I know reads anymore, debuted under the guidance of Gloria Steinem.  An era that the uninitiated identify with the TV drama “Mad Men” was a hostile landscape where women would find it difficult to get the kind of money that they needed to pay a mortgage, buy a car, or meet the New York rent. 

I love the high drama of these good girls in revolt.  I have no doubt that their plans were aided by the absolute shocking cluelessness of their bosses response – “they what?  But that’s not the way we do things.”  Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to be the first, because by the time the second one rolls around, the opposition is waiting and more ready.  The Good Girls Revolt is a tough story with a few great pointers about how to out-maneuver and out-class your boss.  Scary.