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Jill Geislers writing mirrors her compelling workshops. WORK HAPPY is a smart and substantive book that offers meaningful, practical advice to leaders at all levels in any organization.
Robert M. Steele, Ph.D., Director, Janet Prindle
Institute for Ethics, DePauw University
Want to be a Great Boss? Then read WORK HAPPY, which explains with detailed work plans and assessment tools how to create a great work environment that gets results. Get one book for yourselfand another for your boss too. Youll both be happier for it!
Charlene Li, author of Open Leadership
and co-author of Groundswell
Want to love your job and reap the rewards of a productive staff? The secrets to achieve that are found in the pages of WORK HAPPY, as Jill Geisler challenges everything you know to manage yourself in order to lead others to success.
Susana Schuler, Vice President of News, Raycom Media
Jill has a talent for making great leadership seem slap-your-forehead simple. Thats because her work in WORK HAPPY sits atop mountainous research and real-life experience that has been honed and scrutinized by some of the most exacting leaders around. The result is practical, rock-solid advice that youre ready to act on before shes done talking.
Keith Woods, Vice President, NPR
In a crisp, clear, upbeat style, Geisler cracks the code for what it takes to lead and to manage, even in times of change. Her experience as a leader, a coach, and a trainer of leaders comes through on every page. If you face the complex challenge of being your best as a leader and manager, WORK HAPPY puts a management guru by your side.
Peggy Holman, author of Engaging Emergence
Simply put, this book is a gift. A gift to any young manager in a new stretch assignment. A gift to any senior executive seeking to inspire a workforce. A gift to anyone driven to learn how to become a better leader. Jill Geislers intelligence and warmth, captured within these pages, offers the reader an indispensable blend of best practices and comforting thoughts. She has created a safe place to think about becoming a better bosswhich makes her something of a gift, too.
Robert King, Senior Vice President, ESPN
WORK HAPPY is an accessible, useful encyclopedia of managerial guidance artfully drawn from Jill Geislers years as a master boss, learner, teacher, and coach. I just wish she had written it forty years ago. would have saved me lots of angst.
Marty Linsky, Cambridge Leadership Associates, and faculty, Harvard Kennedy School
Geisler, head of the Poynter Institutes leadership and management faculty and voice of the popular podcast What Great Bosses Know, has distilled years of management experience and study into this practical step-by-step guide to improving leadership skills. Covering topics including types of power, how to give and receive constructive feedback, coaching versus fixing, self-awareness and self-management, Geisler provides useful quizzes and assessments to help the reader translate the concepts into personal learning. This positive, useful work is sure to be a go-to manual for those new to management.
Publishers Weekly
Jill Geisler has an uncanny ability to unravel the most complicated workplace problems and come up with creative solutions to resolve them.
Bob Schieffer, CBS News
For Neil, Noah, and Macthe soul of the Real Me, who make work and life happy
I believe in you.
This book is proof of the power of those wordsspoken in many ways by the leaders, colleagues, and loved ones in my life. Its time to spotlight those speakers.
The leaders of the Poynter InstitutePresident Karen Dunlap, past President Jim Naughton, Dean Stephen Buckley, Senior Scholar Roy Peter Clark (writing guru extraordinaire), and Managing Director Butch Ward (my peerless, fearless teaching partner) have been nonstop sources of positive feedback. As the Director of Poynter Online, Julie Moos was my co-conspirator in the creation of the management columns and iTunes U podcasts that inspired this book. She is as gifted and generous an editor as she is a friend. Other Poynter colleagues helped with their talents and encouraged with their hearts. My sincere thanks to Ellyn Angelotti, Jacqui Banaszynski, Jessica Blais, Cathy Campbell, Aly Coln, Rick Edmonds, Gregory Favre, Howard Finberg and the NewsU crew, Kenny Irby, Maria Jaimes, Kelly McBride, Regina McCombs, Bill Mitchell, Steve Myers, Paul Pohlman, Sara Quinn, David Shedden, Bob Steele, Mallary Tenore, Al Tompkins, Wendy Wallace, and Keith Woods for their work and their words. They and all my Poynter colleagues share a passion for excellence, not only in journalism that informs a democracy, but also in the practice and promise of leadership.
Im grateful to my gracious Center Street editor, Kate Hartson, who knows the magic sentence every author needs to stay motivatedYoure a really good writerand to literary agents Jane Dystel and Miriam Goderich for bringing us together.
I am indebted to the many managers who have listened, learned, and laughed with me in seminars, workshops, and workplacesand who reach out when they have successes to share or need a coaching ear. My special thanks to those unnamed but invaluable bosses whose 360-degree feedback excerpts in this book provided a clear window into the joys and challenges of leadership.