These are books and audio recordings I have found inspirational and helpful in the past several years. There are Amazon.com links for those items available through Amazon.com. Please let me know of your favorites and new discoveries that are not listed.

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

by Gervase Bushe

Book Description
Today's fast-paced business environment demands managers with new interpersonal and leadership skills: an ability to get things done in the open, build real commitment to decisions, develop synergistic teams, openly discuss failures and successes, and learn from everyone's experience. Clear Leadership explores a fundamentally new way of thinking about people, human interaction, and the very nature of leadership to create a climate in which people are willing to speak and hear the truth, and workplace relationships are based on accurate understanding, not fantasies, company lore, and unexamined assumptions.

Combating what Gervase Bushe calls interpersonal mush--a prevailing disorder that stifles learning, hampers collaborative teamwork, and closes down honest communication-- Clear Leadership details the four skills that make partnership and leadership in groups possible. These four skills are self-awareness, so you know where you stand; descriptiveness, so you can communicate clearly; curiosity, so you can draw out others; and appreciation, so you can inspire top performance. Using true-to-life stories, practical exercises, and sample dialogues, Bushe identifies the barriers to truth telling and shows how to overcome them; explains exactly what clear leadership is, why it's important, and how it looks and sounds; and shows how to become more skilled at turning interpersonal clarity into action. Clear Leadership puts you on the road to improving your effectiveness as a leader.

Janet McCallen
Marybeth Fidler recommended this book to me, and like most of her recommendations, I found it extremely helpful. Bushe not only describes the skills which clear up interpersonal mush (where we each make up stories about why someone else behaves as they do, and then act as if our stories are the truth), but he also distinguishes between the kind of openness that is needed at work and that which is intimate. For those who feel self-disclosure in work situations is too “touchy-feely” this will be a relief – he shows what is vital for work clarity, but doesn’t contribute to more intimacy than you want to create.

These are books and audio recordings I have found inspirational and helpful in the past several years. There are Amazon.com links for those items available through Amazon.com. Please let me know of your favorites and new discoveries that are not listed.

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

Last modified: 12/30/05