Of course, nobody likes Mondays at work, or so the stereotypical tradition would have everyone believe. Writing from a managerial point of view, author Kristin A. Sherry admirably surmises that it is overall staff/business management that is responsible for this and other detrimental aspects of the common workday. It only follows that it would be management which could relieve the managed of their Monday morning blues and any other negative aspects of work a staff might face on a regular basis.
In order to do this, Sherry begins by examining the practices of bad management, citing as the first failure the frequent lack of self-assessment, a practice which itself would indicate management shortfalls. Having thus established the parameters of the low bar, Sherry naturally moves to laying out both those indicators of good management and the processes by which one could achieve those levels. Here she delves into a plethora of common team-maintenance topics such as communications, empathy, training, goal setting and organization. In fact she does quite a thorough job of pulling from most every facet of standardized management practices. And therein lies the main flaw of this otherwise comprehensive and well-meaning work. In touching on the entire gamut of common management tropes, Sherry has essentially rehashed what most readers of these types of books have seen dozens of times over. She presents neither new material nor new interpretations of such material, but rather treads the same well-worn ground of so many other books of this genre. In addition, she presents this stale material using every stale convention in the PowerPoint catalog, including charts and graphs and breakdowns and lists that spiral into rabbit holes five, six and seven tiers deep.
A great deal of highly credible work has been done in creating YOUR TEAM LOVES MONDAYS…RIGHT?, but it’s been done in the broadest of brushstrokes. Gleaning a finite number of topics and addressing them with a fine acuity would provide a more proficient payoff for all the work that’s been done and would better serve her reading audience.
Quality writing and research are overshadowed by somewhat stale material in Kristin A. Sherry’s YOUR TEAM LOVES MONDAYS…RIGHT? Upping the specificity of topics and offering a new bent on conclusitory results would most certainly make this a worthwhile read.
~Johnny Masiulewicz for IndieReader