Growing Great Employees: Turning Ordinary People Into Extraordinary Performers

For nearly a decade, we have been the lucky beneficiaries of Erika Andersen's wisdom and counsel. Her communication style is clear and engaging, and we only wish we could type fast enough to memorialize all her wisdom. We consider having all her great insight in one book as not just a gift to us, but to anyone who wants to sharpen their own business skills and create an outstanding team.

Growing Great Employees is a helpful, engaging and powerful tool for managers to use in building building their staff and their departments. Erika's writing style pulled me in and kept me engaged in this concept of growing great employees. By the time I was finished reading the book, I felt empowered and prepared to better develop people and help them to develop themselves.

Clearly written, full of actionable insights and comprehensive. If you want to gain an understanding of what it means to be an effective manager of people, and come away with a framework for putting this knowledge into action in realistic and sensible ways, this is the book for you.

I purchased this book for all of my managers. It reads so well and leaves you wanting to continually pick it up again and again. I would recommend this book to anyone where challenging personalities are involved or if you need to inspire independent contractors to rise to their full potential.

I review books for major business magazines, so I see virtually everything published. As anyone who reads business books knows, there is very little 'new' out there. This book breaks the mold. The author has a wonderful personal style, so the ideas are quite accessible, and the garden metaphor never gets tired. I particularly enjoyed her emphasis on the importance of listening, as so many male managers are taught that THEY are supposed to have the solution to every problem when in fact outcomes are often decided in tandem or in teams. If you can check out the companion website to the book it can be eye-opening.