DK Essential Managers: Maximizing Performance

During a recent business trip, I stopped by an airport store and saw a display of several volumes of the "Essential Managers" series. I purchased this one as well as Andy Bruce and Ken Langdon's Strategic Thinking, read both while en route home and was surprised, frankly, to find each to be remarkably comprehensive within a 69-page narrative. Obviously, the subject of maximizing performance is vast and complicated. No single book could possibly cover everything, nor do Seymour and Shervington make any such claim. What they offer is a focus on fundamentals, as do the volumes which comprise the "Harvard Business Essentials" series. Seymour and Shervington divide their material within four sections: Thinking about Performance, Improving Your Performance, Helping Others to Improve, and Continuing to Improve. Note the use of direct address (.i.e. "Your") which correctly indicates the direct and personal rapport that Seymour and Shervington establish and then sustain with their reader. In effect, they are saying "Here is what we have learned about maximizing performance. We hope it will help you and your associates, individually and together, to produce more and better work in less time." In the Introduction, Seymour and Shervington duly acknowledge their high regard for the skills that Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) can help to develop. (To those who wish to obtain more information about this methodology, I recommend NLP: The New Technology of Achievement, co-edited by Steve Andress and Charles Faulkner.) Obviously, there are several different types of under-performers. The two most familiar to me are those who are able but unwilling, and, those who are willing but unable. For managers, the challenge when supervising those in the first group is to inspire self-motivation; when supervising those in the second, the challenge is to do everything possible (and appropriate) to help them to increase their strengths while reducing their weaknesses. The principles and techniques of NLP can help managers to respond effectively to either challenge but, alas, "you can't win them all." Or as Jason Jennings has so concisely suggested, "If it's DOA, bury it." I quite agree with Seymour and Shervington about the importance of emotional intelligence. (Daniel Goleman has written several immensely informative books on the subject, most recently Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence, co-authored with Richard E. Boyatzis and Annie McKee.) The most effective managers recognize emotions as "fuel" that, if carefully processed and properly controlled, can create the energy needed to solve especially serious problems. If change initiatives are involved, for example, emotional intelligence enables those who possess it to respond effectively to resistance...to what James O'Toole has aptly characterized as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." There is always room for personal improvement, of course, and that is as true of man