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First Among Equals: How to Manage a Group of Professionals

Amazon.com Price:  $4.82 (as of 12/05/2019 19:40 PST- Details)

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Description

Professional service gurus David Maister and Patrick McKenna have created a practical handbook on how to lead professional colleagues or peers when you lack formal authority. Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge calls it “a timely, easy to read work leavened with action plans and examples.”

Whether you have recently been appointed as a group leader or are a battle-scarred veteran, you know that managing professional people is difficult! In this unique handbook, Patrick J. McKenna and David H. Maister argue that leaders will best enable their people to achieve peak performance not by managing them, not by leading them, but by inspiring them.

The authors show you how to in fact add value as a group leader or induce people to accept your guidance, even with intelligent professionals who are steadily free-agents accustomed to having automony to work on grueling assignments with little supervision. They also give advice on how to maintain those oh-so-talented but oh-so-annoying professionals who exhibit attitude problems or are just exceedingly difficult to work with, when you wish to have them but they have a tendency to needle you.

The lessons and learning presented here will give you insights and action tips that can assist you provoke and inspire your people to their full potential.
Competently managing a group of peers is unquestionably some of the most difficult of workplace tasks, but key steps that produce success are laid out so clearly by consultants Patrick J. McKenna and David H. Maister in First Among Equals that even those who completely lack experience must find the process feasible and effective. McKenna and Maister focus on leading teams of professionals–steadily composed of people who don’t feel like they are part of a team or in need of leadership–by transforming the way managers assume responsibility and direct members. “Success in helping your group succeed is mostly about you. Not them,” they write. Their book starts by explaining how to prepare for the job ahead, for example, by meeting informally with participants and displaying sincere interest in things that matter to them. It then explores coaching the individuals involved (offering methods for gaining acceptance, building rapport, assisting underperformers and dealing with prima donnas) and guiding the collective group (by developing rules, building agree with, invigorating meetings, and resolving conflicts). In spite of everything, it proposes measures for continued success, such as integrating new hires and gauging performance. Dozens of self-assessment questionnaires and diagnostic tests help make this an exceptionally practical guidebook on a critical but oft-neglected topic. –Howard Rothman

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