My Hub History of Activity

We will shortly need to start doing some mentoring of new engineers across some of our departments. Those that will be doing the mentoring, myself included, have little experience doing this.

I am interested to know if anyone has any recommendations for books on the subject. They need to be real world books, fairly short and easy to read. Scholarly tomes are, unfortunately, not what we need, bear in mind that a lot of the readers will have english as a second language. Allegorical books work well for this type of readership, but penguins may be going a bit too far.

Our leadership group has been running for about 9 months now. Recently the plant started regular meetings of the seniors, those who are considered successors to the management team we have now. Most of our leadership group also falls into that category.

Plant manager recently approached me and during the conversation, he asked me to try to avoid creating a group of Dissident Seniors. I quite liked that at first, but when I looked up Dissident in the dictionary, it seemed, well, too anti establishment. Dissidents are always opposed to the current order, or process etc.

This is a copy of the first questionnaire that our group is using to set the first stake in the ground. It is not based around one style of leadership, or set of behaviours. It is designed to give a broader view of a person, to be used by the person and by others to give feedback to that person. I gratefully acknowledge Peter Northouse's book on different leadership styles for some of the questions here. Please do the same if you do use any of this.

The next step is a bit of stats to see how people's self perception matches to others perception.

Our leadership group here has read several books. This one caused more change in the people in the group than any of the others. The changes it caused are visible in the people, and they apply to their personal as well as work lives (mine included by the way).

The book gets it's ideas across using a fictional tale, but the language is simple, the idea is simple, and it works.

More experienced leaders in the group say that the book doesn't teach them anything new, but for those new to leadership, this has proven to be a very good book.