Clear Leadership: How Outstanding Leaders Make Themselves Understood, Cut Through the Mush, and Help Everyone Get Real at Work - Hardcover

Bushe, Gervase

3.87

15 ratings by Goodreads

9780891061526: Clear Leadership: How Outstanding Leaders Make Themselves Understood, Cut Through the Mush, and Help Everyone Get Real at Work

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0891061525 ISBN 13: 9780891061526

Publisher: UNKNO, 2001

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With anecdotal stories and sample dialogue, Bushe details the four key skills needed for honest, effective teamwork and uncovers the barriers to clarity that hamper performance and impede learning, endless cycles of lunchtime gossip.

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From the Author:

I've been on the front lines of creating new organizational forms for over 20 years. In the '80s, most of my work was on creating new, team-based structures in large, command and control companies. By the '90s it seemed to me that our organizational designs had outstripped our ability to manage them. Many of the potential benefits of delegation, decentralization, and team structures were going unrealized because of the inability of people to operate in them.

I became fascinated with what was going on, under the surface, that made what should be great organization designs produce, at best, only good results. I started to question our assumptions about leadership, teamwork, and "people skills" in general and began to pay close attention to those who seemed to be able to thrive in unstructured environments. What made the difference in people who were consistently able to produce outstanding results outside of command and control cultures? I came to see that they were able to produce a climate where people were willing and able to tell each other "the truth." The key that unlocked their secrets for me is when I finally understood the difference between being "open and honest" and what in the book I call "being descriptive." That difference is essential. Open and honest often leads to hard feelings and acrimony while being descriptive leads to trust and productive working relationships.

I am personally committed to helping to create new forms of organizing that are good for people, for profits, and for the planet. I hope that the ideas in CLEAR LEADERSHIP help to move us in that direction.

From the Inside Flap:

Why is it so hard to get people to be real--to say what they mean and mean what they say, and to tell the boss what they tell one another? As this book explains, it may be because they are stuck in interpersonal mush--a prevalent disorder that stifles learning, hampers collaborative teamwork, and shuts down communication. This debilitating condition persists whenever people are not real with each other, whenever managers offer lip service but withhold support, and whenever team members paper over differences but keep their agendas hidden. For too many of us, that's just normal life in our organization. But it doesn't have to be that way.

CLEAR LEADERSHIP explores what it takes to eliminate interpersonal mush and create a climate in which people can feel free to say what they really mean, where goals and plans are truly agreed to, teams genuinely pull together, and real learning takes place. Author Gervase Bushe shows leaders at all levels--from the individual in charge of a maintenance crew to senior executives implementing a strategic initiative--how to create honest conversations that strengthen their team's ability to solve problems, make decisions, deal with conflict, assess performance, serve customers, and manage change.

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