The Healing Manager: How to Build Quality Relationships and Productive Cultures At Work / Edition 1

by William Lundin, Kathleen Lundin

Overview

This is the first book to squarely face the tough emotional and relationship issues in the workplace-anger, fear, distrust, conflict, resentment-and to provide practical and proven methods for creating more productive work environments. Based on fifteen years' experience using these methods inside workplaces, Bill and Kathy Lundin show how to:
o Replace anger and suspicion at work with caring, trust, and cooperation;
o Unlock the goodwill, learning, and creativity of everyone in an enterprise;
o Empower all employees to facilitate productive relationships at work.
The "Healing Manager" that the Lundins describe is any employee-whether CEO, first-line supervisor, or hourly worker-who helps others grow emotionally and intellectually, and who cultivates caring relationships on the job. The Lundins show that such well-being is the real secret to productivity, quality, and service.
The Lundins draw on counseling techniques, improvisational theater, and common wisdom to offer practical tools to help all managers and employees change their workplace behaviors, attitudes, and relationships.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781881052135
Publisher:	Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Publication date:	03/07/1995
Edition description:	1st ed
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.38(w) x 9.44(h) x 0.83(d)

About the Author

William Lundin is a clinical psychologist who has held such positions as Executive Director of the Illinois Psychological Association. He has worked as a consultant to such companies as Continental Bank, Ford, Marsh & McLennan, Midas, Union Oil, NEC, McDonalds, and numerous family-owned businesses.
Kathleen Lundin is a professional facilitator, trainer, and focus group leader. She began her career as a journalist and then served as an administrator of community mental health programs. For the past ten years she has collaborated with her husband on consulting and relationship workshops. She is coauthor, with her husband William Lundin, of The Healing Manager.

Table of Contents

Part I: Telling the Truth and Talking Straight o Management in the Broadest Sense o What's a Healing Manager?
o How It Feels to Be an Employee o How We Learn to Make Mistakes o Leaders, Not Systems, Set Our Agendas

Part II: Total Quality Relationships o Miracles in the Workplace o Enriched Environments o Women in the Workplace

Part III: Rehearsals for the Healing Manager o Anger o Affection o Trust o Helping Others grow o Caring 1
o Caring 2
o Mistakes o Conflict o Living the New Values o Working with Employee Groups

Part IV: How Pervasive and Deep the Healing Manager?
o Employee Groups and Lead Workers o Empowerment o Can People Change at Work?

Editorial Reviews

This husband-and-wife team develop the provocative thesis that the first, necessary step toward increasing worker productivity and quality must be to address pain, resentment, suspicion and distrust among employees. The response of the authors (business partners in a Wisconsin-based consulting firm) is ``Total Quality Relationships'' (TQR), a strategy designed to instill human values in the workplace, to create a healing manager ``who helps others grow emotionally and intellectually'' and to ``convince leaders who are imbued with a belief in success through cost-cutting and people-cutting to embrace more enlightened values.'' The Lundins provide the reader with clear procedures for implementing TQR, and for handling anger and conflict in the workplace. Their approach, while intriguing, relies on a tremendous amount of employer-employee cooperation and faith, which one might assume are in short supply in the companies that most need TQR. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The notion that relationships make the workplace work, though certainly not novel, debuted in the 1990s with the publication of James Autry's "Love and Profit: The Art of Caring Leadership" (1992). Since then, scores of authors have announced that the true source of high-quality productivity is a satisfied, happy employee. But no one has addressed the how-tos, until the Lundins. Using a combination of theatrical and counseling techniques, these psychologists/trainers sincerely believe in their philosophy that quality relationships must be established before there can be productivity, profit, and quality in business. Disguised case histories as well as personality profiles support their points; further, they provide exercises and examples for allowing employees to express anger and feelings of conflict. Though occasionally preachy and often self-promoting, the Lundins nonetheless effectively document both the need to change corporate cultures and the ways to effect that change.

Barbara Jacobs