recommended by Leaders who Library Book Club book club

Career non-fiction -- what it says on the tin, executed well with very clear take-aways and a lot of synthesis of the best ideas of the currently in-vogue leadership style. Feels like the sort of book that would be worthwhile in a employer-based book club for new managers. There's nothing wrong with it. I've rated it 3 stars only because it didn't particularly impress or surprise me (most in this genre doesn't). ( )

I read this as part of a book club at work. I was pleased to see that humor was used since emotions make me squeamish. Ha! There were helpful bits and more common sense that you learn over time bits. Worth a read. ( )

In No Hard Feelings, Fosslien and Duffy take down the myth that emotions are never appropriate at work. Their argument: humans are human, and there will always be emotions in play. The trick is to recognize which ones are appropriate to express in which context, and how to channel them in the best possible way.

I really enjoyed this. It’s more of a 4.5 for the content, but I’m bumping up to 5 because I need to buy my own copy (in contrast to another very good read, The Power of Habit, which I liked the same amount but I’m not in the same hurry to own a copy). The book is divided into eight chapters: an introduction and one chapter for each of the seven “new rules of emotion”. Each chapter is liberally illustrated with cute cartoons—one of my favourites was “Teamwork would be so much easier if I could just do it by myself!”—and ends with “takeaways” that you can start doing right away to put the ideas into practice. The authors’ website also includes an assessment of emotional expression and psychological safety in the workplace that can help you figure out which of the new rules of emotion might be most useful for you. And I liked when the authors acknowledged the limits of their own experiences and pointed readers toward other resources that would discuss the topic.

My favourite chapter in this book was the one on “microactions”, which the authors describe as the opposite of microaggressions—tiny positive actions that spread a positive emotional culture out from you. It spoke to me because it’s something I’ve been working on most actively in my workplace: passing along compliments whenever I can, and saying hello to everyone when I visit our other offices.

I found the chapter on task conflicts versus relationship conflicts to be the most illuminating in telling me where I need to do more work—I tend to take everything personally, which is not ideal, so it would be nice to wrestle my emotions back down and keep the conflict at the task level, and not hold grudges when I don’t have to.

I’d recommend this book if you liked books such as Ask a Manager, Quiet, or Thanks for the Feedback. In fact, the book Difficult Conversations, which is co-authored by one of the Thanks for the Feedback authors, is mentioned in this book. That’s another book I’m going to have to grab a copy of. ( )