Publisher's Synopsis
The author grew up in Hilo, Hawaii: surfing, spearfishing, and never imagined working for a multinational corporation in Los Angeles. He started as a computer programmer with Electronic Data Systems (EDS), founded by Ross Perot, and rose through the ranks to become a team leader, supervisor, project manager, then manager of EDS' 192-person Southern California Systems Engineering/Solution Center in Los Angeles.
He retired after 32+ years with the company and wrote this book to guide career people, especially new managers, to develop the skills and capabilities that earn the respect of their peers and employees, and to be increasingly valued by their management after seeing consistently positive results. The author provides hard-earned career and management advice that he gained through years of trial and error while working in the trenches with people, teams, projects, and organizations. Throughout the book, he uses personal examples that vividly describe the interactions, confrontations, successes, mistakes, and failures, and the many lessons learned. You'll get a sense of the highs of thanking and rewarding people, coaching and mentoring, and celebrating with individuals and teams on their achievements. You'll also see the difficulties in having to build up the courage to confront someone regarding their poor performance or unprofessional actions, having face-to-face performance warnings and terminations, and holding all-hands meetings to announce salary freezes and layoffs. Individual Performer to Manager has received praise as a career and management guide by:- Kirkus (among the top 10% of Indie reviewed books, Nov 2019).
- The San Francisco Book Review (Star Rating 5 of 5, Dec 2019).
- Publishers Weekly/BookLife (Jan 2020, with a sponsored author Q&A in their June 29, 2020, Edition).
Excerpts from Individual Performer to Manager:
"If your main concern is for people to always 'like' you, then you will never be a respected and successful leader. When people are not performing satisfactorily, when they are behaving in a manner that does not meet your or the company's standards, you must have the courage to confront people one-on-one to make sure they understand from you directly, that they are not meeting your expectations. If you don't take any action, or send someone else to do it, you will undermine and diminish people's respect for you...." "As a leader, you should acknowledge your people in your day-to-day interactions with them, not once a month, or during a six-month or annual review. You should seek out and always give credit where credit is due, never take credit when it belongs elsewhere, and never take credit alone for something you should be sharing with others." www.NormOshiro.com
