Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Brad Desmond, Hybrid Publishers, $25.00.
The Matilda Principle offers a coaching approach that builds positive teams regardless of organisational culture. That’s known as covert team building.
It builds trust, motivation and positivity without attracting attention or rocking the boat. The sub-heading elaborates further: Covert strategies for building positive teams in difficult environments, with negative people and stressful workloads.
In fact, award-winning psychologist and corporate trainer Brad Desmond combines his wealth of experience, with cutting-edge studies, into coaching and team building.
With The Matilda Principle you will better connect with your people and bring out their best, leaving others to guess your secret. If you are responsible for the work of other people, then this book is for you.
According to Gallup’s ongoing research across 142 countries, 60 per cent of employees are ‘not engaged’ at work. This means they lack motivation and enthusiasm for their current job and are unlikely to invest discretionary effort towards team goals.
If you are ‘actively disengaged’ (16 per cent), it means the workers are unhappy and unproductive at work. That means only 24 per cent of workers describe themselves as ‘engaged’.
“Despite how much we talk about staff engagement, wellbeing, job satisfaction and staff retention, the lived experience for most people does not match the rhetoric. If we are serious about building positive teams, we can’t just keep doing more of the same.”
Part I of this book shows how individual managers are better placed to build positive teams than they realise. Part 2 presents a series of strategies for building positive teams in negative environments; Part 3 shows how to recruit and retain positive staff;
and Part 4 presents new approaches for dealing with difficult people. The 5th part is for CEOs and other senior people wanting to achieve positive cultural change across their organisation.
