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Women & Leadership Australia eNewsletterSeptember 2009 |
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Book review: How to Tell Anyone Anything
Publisher:McGraw-Hill
Many management self-help books have often – and often rightly – been criticised for making simple truths complex, frequently in order to pad out a whole book based on what is ultimately a single idea. I was relieved to find that How to Tell Anyone Anything is not one such book. It’s rather the opposite. Corporate trainer Richard Gallagher has taken a frightfully complex idea and fashioned a series of pragmatic tools to tackle difficult work conversations. Gallagher’s thesis is that conflict in the workplace need not be an ugly-tug-of-war exercise in point-scoring. Instead, it can be useful without hurting anyone’s feelings, and without feeling compromised. The author acknowledges the disparate array of personalities and personality clashes that can easily throw good team work out the window. But these, he maintains, can all be accommodated for in his model for conflict resolution. Gallagher’s approach is to get the opponent on side first, before finding a gentle yet firm way of bringing them over to your position. He works hard at dispelling fears from readers that offering sympathy to an antagonistic colleague would amount to serious compromise. His five-step model is conveniently based on each of the five letters of the word CANDID. The steps – from ‘Compartmentalise the message’ to ‘Disengage from the discussion’ – are in fact based on textbook psychology understandings of human communication processes. That said, Gallagher’s gift is multifold. Not only has he shaped these truths for workplace situations, but he has written a book that sets out the process in plain language with relevant hypothetical situations on the way. Quite reasonably, Gallagher also dispels some previous models for workplace conflict. In particular, he shows how the sandwich model (praise, criticise then praise) often comes across as insincere. How to Tell Anyone Anything is a clear winner. It will likely find appeal and usefulness amongst line managers, team leaders and execs who need to find better ways for either themselves or team players to communicate with each other.
Our rating: 10/10 By Ben Zipper, Co-editor, Women & Leadership Australia eNewsletter
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