Fiona Dent – författare

Shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year 2011, Practical Manager Category

The Leader’s Guide to Influence will show you how to step up your people skills and improve working relationships so you can get the business results you want.

Combing the hugely popular areas of influence and leadership, this book will show you how to step up your interpersonal effectiveness by learning how to work more successfully with those around you, be they people you manage, colleagues, client or business partners.

Through a combination of practical exercises, case studies and no-nonsense advice, this book shows you how to:

Increase your confidence and impact.

Communicate more effectively.

Learn different tools, techniques and approaches when working with different types of people.

Listen and question effectively.

Develop rapport and empathy.

Give better feedback.

Deal with difficult situations and cope with conflict.

Coaching, motivating, team building and influencing are all essential tools for getting the most out of the people around you. Commonly described as ‘soft skills’, there’s nothing soft about the impact they will have on your business performance.

This book is your toolkit for managing yourself, facilitating team performance and surviving and thriving in times of change.

Step up your management skills now to get the business results you need.

The Leader’s Guide to Coaching & Mentoring is a highly practical handbook that helps managers get the most out of their people. It includes grounded advice on the practicalities of both coaching and mentoring – such as how to structure a session – as well as core content on:

·    The skills required for coaching and mentoring,  including listening, questioning, observing body language, challenging and affirming

·    The established processes for coaching and mentoring, such as GROW, relational coaching, reverse mentoring and solution-focused coaching

·    The scenarios in which coaching and mentoring skills are particularly appropriate, for example, coaching under-performers, coaching star performers and coaching for career development

There is also a handy section on the 10 pitfalls to avoid when coaching or mentoring.

Written in the no-nonsense and engaging style of the other Leader’s Guide books, this is the best tool on the market for managers wanting to coach their people to optimum performance.

'In this hands-on book, Mike and Fiona highlight the real difference between conventional management and effective leadership: management is a profession, while coaching is much wider; it encourages  social interaction  and a focus on  human relationships at work. That’s what new generations expect and respect.'

Laurent Choain, Chief People & Communication Officer, Mazars Group

'It’s not always easy for managers to recognise what real coaching is, let alone its value.  This book makes a compelling case for the Manager as Coach and contains real, usable examples of how to go about it.'

Ian Johnston, Chief Executive, Dubai Financial Services Authority

Discover the secrets to high performing teams from the success stories of sport, military and restaurants – and what to do if your team isn’t working.

Teams are everywhere: At work we are part of many different teams: the department team, the sales team, the planning team and the project team. At play we join the football team, the netball team, the swimming team, the bridge team and the dance team. Socially we support teams, watch teams and are served by teams in restaurants, hotels, shops and at events.

But how much do we really know about them, what makes a successful team and why do teams fail?

Effective teamworking is a perennial issue – there are so many difficulties and traps. We have all worked in teams and seen these problems at first hand and have suffered from them. This book will help you to

We will look at how sports and business teams are developed and work, as well as giving examples and learning lessons from specialist teams in the many different areas such as the military, restaurants, orchestra’s, aerobatics and many more. These examples will be woven in throughout the book, and lessons drawn about what we can learn for our own teams.

Developing high performance teams and effective teamwork is a perennial issue for team leaders and team members alike. Most of us work in teams yet few of us have the capacity to fully assimilate what it takes to resolve common issues such as conflict, low engagement, lack of purpose and accountability in teams.

This book is for team players, team leaders and anyone who is setting up and supporting a team. It sets out all that you need to know to create a successful team and how to fix it if things start to go wrong.

We think the combined experience of the authors and their direct experience of working with both sports and organisational teams is unique. The combination of an academic perspective with a high level practical experience of coaching and leading high performance teams brings clarity and understanding to the concepts , balanced with a pragmatic perspective on how to put these into practice The book draws together the combined experience of Nigel Melville as a High Performance sports coach and Chief Executive , and Mike Brent as an academic, author of several bestselling business books and specialist in team dynamics.