| Name of Book: | Whale Done! The Power Of Positive Relationships |
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| Author: | Ken Blanchard, Thad Lacinak, Chuck Tompkins & Jim Ballard | |
| Review By: | Claire Brown | |
| Title: | Office Manager | |
| Company: | Arram Berlyn Gardner | |
| County: | London | |
| Rating: | Recommended |
This is an inspiring book. It explains a way of managing relationships at home and at work using praise to gain positive results and ignoring or redirecting undesired behaviour.
“Usually attention is focused on poor performance rather than on good performance. We reinforce the very behaviour we don’t want! Attention is like sunshine to humans, what we give attention to grows and what we ignore withers.”
Ken Blanchard, co-author of The one-Minute Manager has written this book with Chuck Tompkins the head trainer at Orlando SeaWorld and Chuck’s boss Thad Lacinak, along with Ken’s old friend Jim Ballard.
“Whale Done” tells the story of how an American businessman discovered that killer whale training methods used in SeaWorld could be applied to his home and his work and how it changed his life around.
Because the book highlights situations that are very true to life I was encouraged to believe that this new way of managing relationships will work!
“If you ask staff in an organisation what are their goals, then you ask their managers, what are their staff’s goals you come out with two sets of goals which are completely different. As a result staff are criticised by their managers for not doing what they didn’t know they were supposed to be doing in the first place.”
Doesn’t this make you want to check that you know exactly what your goals are and want to make sure that your staff have no doubt what theirs are?
“When you do something right at work, what kind of response do you normally get?…nothing. The most frequent response people get for their performance is no response. Nobody notices or comments until…when? When things go wrong.”
This point made me think, am I as guilty of this sort of behaviour as my managers are?
At first I was a bit dubious about the idea of ignoring or redirecting undesired behaviour and wondered how practical it would be, but when reading the book it gave me the inspiration to have a go.
“Redirection is the best way to turn countless low-morale situations around. You will find this response will work in 99% of the cases where you might be tempted to use a negative response. It gets the person back on track, maintains respect and trust by not calling attention to the off-course behaviour in a negative way”
The book used this as an example of redirecting negative behaviour:
“The youngster has not been doing a good job feeding the animals -
• I’m switching your chores from feeding the pets to doing the vacuuming. I know you like to do that and we need it done. (Later) The house looks so nice since you took over the vacuuming!”
Overall
• This is a very interesting and easy read that has inspired me to have a go and try out it methods.
• After having read the book I find myself stopping to have a think before I give my normal response at work when things don’t go to plan and more importantly before I retaliate back to my partner at home.
• If there is one thing that it has made me more conscious of, its to praise people when they are doing things right as I know the positive effect that it has on me, it can only be a good thing for everyone concerned.
Whale Done! The Power of Positive Relationships
Published by Nicholas Brealey Publishing
ISBN 185788326-8
Price: £7.99
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