By Rex Huppke
 

When I first received a copy of The Manager’s Phrase Book, I laughed.I laughed long and hard.
The book is a collection of more than 3,000 canned phrases a manager can use in different situations, rated on sliding scales such as “casual to formal” or “encouraging to punitive.”
For example, in the category How to Boost Your Team’s Confidence, the most subtle phrase is: “I’d like to see you guys projecting a bit more confidence.”
Well, that sure is handy!
One of the tenets of my workplace philosophy is that every office should have a soft-serve ice cream machine. But equally important is that workers, bosses and managers should not be afraid to act like human beings.
A reference guide of pre-fabricated comments would be useful for programming a Roomba to become vice president of sales, but not for getting people in the workplace to loosen up and be themselves.
Keith Murnighan, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, said he, too, bristles at anything that drives business leaders away from authenticity.
“Young people, what they’re looking for is people who are authentic,” Murnighan said. “I think that’s a perfect word for the way leaders need to succeed and deal with people. You have to be authentic; you have to tell people the truth.”
This applies to more than just the authenticity-seeking millennials now entering the workforce. I’m not sure who decided people in leadership positions should adopt personas different from their own, but it’s more common than not, leading workers of all ages to demand greater sincerity.
“You have to sincerely care about the people you work with,” said Murnighan, who wrote a book called Do Nothing! How to Stop Overmanaging and Become a Great Leader. “If you don’t care about them sincerely, they will read that. They’re not fools. You don’t have to like them; you just have to let them know you care. You care about their careers, and you care about their families, and of course you care about them getting the job done.”
In short, be a decent human being.
Unfortunately, that seems to come hard for some people, so they seek shortcuts, such as a book of phrases to dish out as needed.
“What I’m seeing is a movement toward books like this,” said Jamie Showkeir, an Arizona-based leadership coach. “The longing is to simplify leadership or management to the point that people can do it with a collection of phrases and techniques. But good, long-lasting leaders manage from a perspective of intention and authenticity.”
Showkeir co-authored the book Authentic Conversations: Moving from Manipulation to Truth and Commitment with his wife, Maren Showkeir. She said people are often afraid to be themselves at work, fearing “there will be some negative consequence to that.”
“It’s the (workplace) culture that creates this notion that we can’t be who we are,” she said. “We don’t even see each other as people sometimes; we see people as tools that are there to get a task accomplished.”
That, Jamie Showkeir said, is because most companies still operate under some form of the “command and control” model that dates to the Industrial Revolution:
“It goes like this: ‘I don’t trust you, I don’t believe you can do a good job, and my role is to make sure that I’m clear about what I tell you and follow up on everything and give you praise if you do it well and slap you on the hand if you don’t.’ It’s all about the parenting model of leadership that creates this whole dysfunctional set of relationships.”
They’re dysfunctional because we’re interacting the way we think people in the working world should interact instead of interacting like normal people. We morph into the caricature of how a manager or employee should behave.
None of this is to say that everyone needs to gather each afternoon for hugs. But we do need to be more open about who we are and, at the risk of sounding too technical, chill out.
Because I’m a decent human being (most of the time), I reached out to Patrick Alain, the French-born author of The Manager’s Phrase Book.
I told him my concerns, and we had a thoughtful conversation in which he said the book grew out of his experience coming to the United States in 2004 and struggling to find the right words in business situations.
He said his previous book — The Leader Phrase Book — has sold well in the States and internationally, reflecting the need for such a resource.
“Who would’ve thought there was such a need?” Alain said. “It sells both in the translated version and its original English version. It shows there is a market for people who don’t know what to say. Many of the readers are shy. It doesn’t come naturally for them. There are also many people that are not very creative, people who are very introverted or reserved.”
I could argue that those people might be better off if they weren’t in management positions, but I suppose that’s splitting hairs.
I understand Alain’s intentions and certainly credit him with filling a void.
But I’d love to see managers spend less time looking for the right thing to say and more time saying what they think is right. — Chicago Tribune/MCT

Samples from The Manager’s Phrase Book
* When an employee wants time off: “I don’t see any problem with that.”
* When an employee is burned out: “I see some symptoms of burnout here; I sure hope I’m wrong.”
* How to close a meeting: “Alrighty, let’s get out of here!”
* When you need to instil calm: “Everybody here needs to take a chill pill.”
* How to say no to a superior: “No.”


Know your brand and protect it

By Diane Stafford
 
 
You are a brand. Just like Coke or Nike or Starbucks.
People think of you in a certain way. It’s how you look and what you wear. It’s how you act and what you say. It’s what you’ve done.
You’ve heard “Your reputation precedes you.” That’s true even if you don’t have a reputation — or so you think.
The idea that you have to create and cultivate a personal reputation, or brand, isn’t new. As far back as the 1930s, workplace experts were talking about it. Management consultant Tom Peters made a big splash about it in 1997 in a Fast Company essay.
“Your most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You,” Peters wrote, initiating a flood of “free agent” advice.
Ever since, it’s a given that you — just like your start-up business or your established organisation — have to be able to succinctly and clearly identify your brand.
What do you stand for? What do you do? Who are your customers? And “customers” means potential employers, if you’re a job hunter.
But you don’t just need a brand. You need to protect it. You need to know what’s being said about you in social media and other forms of communication.
Just ask Jennifer Flood, who manages the Kansas City office of IntegriShield. I spoke with her a few weeks ago about her company’s monitoring and compliance work to help clients protect their brand identities. The company works for big corporations, entrepreneurs, non-profits — you name it. It scours the media for illegal and incorrect use of names, websites and other brand information. Flood’s big order of business is to make sure the wrong parties aren’t making money off her clients’ names — by misdirecting consumers to confusing websites, for example.
Individuals need to do similar scaled-down brand protection missions. Do you have an identity in the online world? Is it the one you want to convey?
And that means you know what it is you want to convey. If you don’t know what you stand for — your brand — others will fill in the blanks. — The Kansas City Star/MCT