Take a successful employee, promote them into management but give them no management training and there’s a very good chance you’ll create a defensive, insecure, unsuccessful, dick manager.
Here is the management training you never got! This honest, straightforward guide reveals the things nobody talks about–knowledge that only comes from real-world experience in the management trenches. It will change the way you look at yourself, your job and your career and it will enable you to be a successful leader and mentor.
Most importantly, it will help you avoid becoming a dick manager (or, if it’s too late, to reform) so you can enjoy the personal and financial rewards of being a great manager.
Discover the power of the Laws of Management and understand the personal characteristics you must have to excel as a manager. Learn how to deal with non-communicative, mean, micromanaging, bully bosses, and how to figure out when it’s time for you to leave an impossible situation.
Find out how to deal with ambitious employees and how to turn around hostile, jaded ones. And be warned about the one type of employee who must go, no matter what.
Filled with anecdotes from more than 20 years of management experience, this book takes a frank look at the author’s mistakes and triumphs, his great bosses and his dick managers and the lessons learned from all of them.
Assessment:
Idea: Being a great manager can mean a happier, more successful, and productive workforce, Monroe asserts in this fine tuned guide. With clear expertise, the author lays out the ways to lead responsibility, fairly, and honorably.
Prose: Monroe’s prose is candid and good humored, nicely mirroring the text’s emphasis on humility, self-awareness, and personal accountability.
Originality: It’s a rarity for a self-help book to call out the dick managers of the world. Monroe excels at cutting to the chase and urging readers to better their leadership skills, while also offering compassion and understanding to those who recognize themselves in the title.
Execution: Frustrated employees may wish they could get their managers to read this book. Monroe offers a concrete set of real-world skills for both recovering dick managers and employees learning to better make their needs and concerns known.
Date Submitted: October 01, 2020
Oh, my gosh! I love this book. I absolutely adore nonfiction that comes from the author's own life, hard work, and experience (including the mistakes and embarrassing moments). This is just such a book. He has been a manager for 20 years for a variety of companies. In his dedication, he apologizes to those who have worked under him for it taking him so long to get it. Love that! The author's personality shines through in this book. Right away, he admits that most managers don't deserve their position and don't know what to do. Having been an employee in several settings, I would agree. I certainly saw some of my bad managers reflected in these pages; in fact, I would love to slip this book under their doors… LOL!
The book lives up to the title. It's a fast and often funny no nonsense read about avoiding the pitfalls most managers seem to fall in. Namely, being a dick. Intentionally or not. I really wished I would have read the book BEFORE taking the promotion and managing lots of people under difficult circumstances. It could have given me some badly needed tools to take the emotion out of difficult situations. Learning to manage UP is something that is so covered in an equally practical and helpful way. And please, if you even SUSPECT you are a dick manager, do the working world a favor and read this book.
While I'm not a manager myself, I've certainly suffered under a few terrible ones, so I thought this book sounded interesting. And it was! I also appreciated the humble tone set by the author as well as that it covered aspects of teamwork that I had never considered. I warmly recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn how teams work, how to deal with personality issues, avoid inadvertently lowering morale, and inspire people to want to do their best.
I received a free copy of this book, but that did not affect my review.
