Book Review: Management Culture: Innovative & Bold Strategies to Engage Employees by Denise Moreland

I worked in a number of large organization, and I have seen the world of management from both the manager and the employee side. I have read many books on management and found "Management culture" by Denise Moreland to have a unique approach and be very specific about how to improve many management styles. She starts each chapter with a situation which does not go well: the employee is not happy at the end or the manager is not happy with the result. She dissects each situation to figure out why each person involved feels the way they do, then has specific suggestions for both the manager and the employee. She ends each chapter with the same situation but where the manager uses a different approach to handling the problem and how that changes the behavior of everyone in the scenario. The situations she chooses for each chapter are very common. I recognized almost every one of them as something I have seen or heard or felt first hand.

Part 1 of the book is about ownership. The manager has a lot of control of the job itself and the worker. The author discusses verbally abusive bosses, slave drivers, micro managers, and other behaviors that result in negative changes in the organization. Then she proceeds to give advice for employers and leaders of a different behavior that achieves the desired result in a positive way. Another important ownership is control of information. Secretive bosses produce gossip and grapevines of information. Bosses who know how to share information promote trust and respect. Ms Moreland helps to find the right balance in the information sharing.

Part 2 of the book is about superiority. Managers have a lot of control, this results in situations where the employee can feel coercion even if the boss did not intentionally mean to do exsert this force. She covers areas from making job assignments to socializing with the boss in after work situations. She talks about bosses who are abdicators, bullies, or control freaks. She also talks about employees who are bullies - emotionally or intellectually. As always she has suggestions for both employees and managers.

Part 3 of the book is about dynamics of the organization. In this section the author draws parallels between business organizations and families. She discusses the problems of treating employees like children. She also explains how protecting employees from news and "controlling the message" weakens the organization. She contrasts it with sharing the information to promote trust and reduce time spent on discussing rumors. I also found the discussion of "family support", "family loyalty" and "family pride" interesting. Even though they sound like they would be a good thing, they often are not.

I enjoyed the books approach of dissecting situations that commonly go wrong. I enjoyed an approach of having suggestion for both employees and bosses. I did not always agree with the suggestions on what an employee can do. For example, when you think your manager is not sharing enough information with you Moreland suggests to tell the boss that he does not need to buffer the truth from you. When I think back to my secretive bosses, I don't think that would have been enough to change them. Never the less, I enjoyed reading the suggestions as many of them were realistic.

Overall, I really enjoyed the stress on inter-personal dynamics and concrete suggestions to managers and employees on how to handle specific common situations. I am recommending this book!


You can find this book on Amazon by following this link.



Ali Julia review ★★★★★