The Front Line Guide to Communicating with Employees

Here is a useful guide to communicating with employees, co-workers and bosses – packed with advice for improving the way you communicate throughout your professional and personal activities.

If you really want to become a good communicator, you can do it – with this guide. And the payoff will be immediate and obvious.

Written for new managers but full of insight for veterans as well, this book focuses on the communication abilities, skills and practices commonly associated with highly effective leaders. You’ll learn good managers must go beyond simply ordering people around. They must make the effort to listen to employees and empower them with their words. And that’s the most basic of all communication skills you’ll be reminded of throughout this book – paying attention to your people.

With personal anecdotes to back up the principles presented, the author of Front Line Guide to Communicating with Employees sets the record straight on powerful theories about working with people.

In seven chapters, author Woodrow Sears directs your attention to what needs to be done to:

• Communicate your commitment, authority and leadership
• Establish good two-way communication
• Deal with negative attitudes
• Overcome the challenges to listening well
• Be clear about your messages
• Avoid being defensive
• Identify problems
• Find a workable middle ground

In addition, a variety of quizzes, checklists and exercises will help you quickly put these principles into action.

About the Author

Woodrow H. Sears earned one of the early doctorates in human resource development, studying at George Washington University under Leonard Nadler, the man who coined the term and created the professional and academic discipline known as HRD. Before beginning his career in management, Woody was a photographer; a newspaper reporter; a Marine officer; and later an editor with the Cooperative Extension Service at North Carolina University, where he earned a master's degree in adult education. He worked at Leadership Resources, Inc., one of the country's first behaviorally-oriented consulting firms, and served as HR manager and later the director of training for an environmental company. He has provided consulting services for a broad range of industries and technologies, U.S. federal agencies, and Canadian crown corporations and provincial governments.

After extensive Civil Rights, EEO, and police training, Woody Sears shifted his focus to project management, developing project management systems for domestic and international clients and lecturing at universities. The author of Back in Working Order: How American Enterprises Can Win the Productivity Battle (Scott Foresman, 1984) and co-author with Audrone Tamulionnyte-Lentz of Succeeding in Business in Central and Eastern Europe: A Guide to Cultures, Markets, and Practices (Butterworth-Heinemann, 2001), Woody was in Slovakia as a volunteer with the International Executive Service Corps in 1998 when he was asked to go to Lithuania for a one-month assignment. He is still there.