Book review: The 5 Essential People Skills: How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts
 Book author: Dale Carnegie Training
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia
Before most of us were born, way back in 1936, Dale Carnegie wrote his now-renowned self-help book How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Even amongst those who haven’t read it, the book’s title alone evokes an image of the cornerstone of personal development literature.
During the 1950s Carnegie laid the foundations of Dale Carnegie Training®, an institute that stands strong today with training programs in more than 80 countries.
It is from Dale Carnegie Training® that a steady stream of books such as The 5 Essential People Skills arise.
Oddly without an individual author, The 5 Essential People Skills is clearly written in the vernacular, and via the paradigms, that Carnegie set out over 70 years ago.
As if channelling the institute’s founder, The 5 Essential People Skills cannot but be heavily influenced by those original ideas.
This, though, is both the book’s strength and weakness.
You won’t find a Dale Carnegie Training® book that’s half-baked, ill-conceived or replete with padding around a single salient point. Evidently the authors of The 5 Essential People Skills know their stuff.
Building on the two forces that Carnegie himself saw as preventing him from real personal success – worry and fear – the authors have structured the book around five key people skills: rapport building, curiosity, communication, ambition and conflict resolution.
For the most part the book’s arguments articulate wise old truths – often fleshed out with modern hypothetical situations.
But there are occasions when the arguments seem outdated. The sections on dealing with conflict (including being assertive) are framed in particularly ‘modernist’ dimensions.
The Carnegie model is effectively based on emphasising the facts (as if there are facts independent of perspectives), expressing thoughts and feelings, and clearly stating wants and needs.
It sounds reasonable enough, except that it fails to utilise contemporary thinking around breaking down us–them absolutes.
It’s an important point, spelled out much more convincingly by corporate trainer Richard Gallagher in How to Tell Anyone Anything (McGraw-Hill, 2009; read our review). In that book, Gallagher shows how to get the opponent on side first, before finding a gentle yet firm way of bringing them over to your position.
More so, the Carnegie method inadvertently slips into the ‘sandwich’ model: praise, criticise then praise. It’s a model that too often comes undone as the recipient reads the behaviour as insincere.
To be sure, these criticisms of The 5 Essential People Skills are highly subjective. At least some readers may not read the book with this critical eye.
All said, The 5 Essential People Skills presents broadly solid methods for developing crucial people skills – ones that will last a lifetime and translate across a multitude of circumstances.
After all, it’s hard to be too critical of a model that’s proven itself for more than 70 years.
The bottom line: Broadly useful
Good for: Anyone who wants a good grounding in key people skills for life Our rating: 7/10 |
By Ben Zipper, Editor, Women & Leadership Australia eNewsletter
 Also recently released by Dale Carnegie Training:
Leadership Mastery: How to Challenge Yourself and Others to Greatness
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