Practice What You Preach: What Managers Must Do to Create a High Achievement Culture

by David H. Maister

Are employee attitudes correlated with financial success? Unequivocally yes! according to consultant and bestselling author David H. Maister. Based on a worldwide survey of 139 offices in 29 professional service firms in numerous lines of business, Maister proves that companies perceived by their employees to practice what they preach in matters of client commitment, teamwork, high standards, and employee development are more successful than their competitors. Put simply, employee dedication causes improved financial performance.
Through in-depth interviews, Maister explores the crucial role of the individual manager in promoting high morale among employees. Practice What You Preach boasts specific action recommendations from the managers of these "superstar" businesses on how to build an energized workplace, enforce standards of excellence, develop people, and have fun -- all in the name of profit. As a result, Practice What You Preach can help any manager increase profitability, and provides proof that great financial rewards come from living up to the standards that most businesses advocate, but few achieve.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Janet · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Practice What You Preach" preaches to the choir. Those who already believe in creating a genuinely respectful, fun, and challenging work environment, and managers with zero tolerance for slackers, abuse or any kind of disrespectful, bad behavior will find support in the survey results and anecdotes here. Sure, it's great to hear that companies with exceptional financial performance credit treating co-workers well as critical to their success. And it's worth the emphasis on how much more office culture matters than goals and vision statements. I think this book can help managers to recommit to their goals to be all that they can be. But it felt a bit overblown to use an entire book to describe one self-report survey. One survey taken at one time point only seems like enough data for one chapter of a Ph.D. thesis. Maister claims that the brave commitment to training and positive, effective people management is enough to improve financial performance. Fantastic, but fancy statistics don't turn correlation into proof. It would be more convincing if he had data over time, showing that companies see finances improve as they improve management and office culture. A second important limitation of this study is that the main advice it gives with regards to individual differences and psychology is to avoid them; Maister simply recommends hiring to fit office culture, which could be interpreted as intolerance of diversity. This is not practical for many fields. For example in sciences and engineering, successful managers need to learn how to effectively manage both introverts and extroverts and how to help bridge the differences between cultures in teams.

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

The lessons of this book are simple. And they are things we already know. But they are important and worthy of repeating. “Treat your employees with respect. Expect excellence. Challenge employees. Keep work interesting. Turn down work that is boring or not in your area of expertise.” And so on. Written primarily for the manager of a professional services firm, it would be of some value to all managers. Unlike the typical management self-help book, this one is packed with hard data to back up its analysis. This is a strength that gives it credibility, but also a weakness that makes it tempting to skip many a page. That said, it was still worthy of a read.

[Bassel · Rating 4 out of 5]

read the full book and found it to focus mainly on how to keep your employees happy and motifated. although i am not into statistics i could not judge if the information is constructed preperly or not. its a good book though.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my all time favourite management text book.

The title says it all.

[Elizabeth]

As seen in FYI: For Your Improvement.