Customer Reviews

Squawk!: How to Stop Making Noise and Start Getting Results

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(35)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Squawk gives you three simple and easy to implement steps to becoming a more effective manager. The book presents these steps in a very engaging story form.

But first let's review some of the reasons you need to take Squawk seriously.

Thirty-two percent of employees spend at lest twenty hours per month complaining about their bosses. Probably a lot of those twenty hours are on company time.

More than 66% of employees are actively considering leaving their current job.

Employers suffer in excess of $360 billion in annual losses due to employee dissatisfaction.

Most managers believe their focus should be in bringing in the numbers ... but most get fired because of poor people skills.

Travis Bradberry uses the seagull as a symbol for today's manager. All too often today's manager swoops in, fails to get complete details of what is happening, squawks up a storm, deposits/dumps on the workers and leaves a mess for others to clean up.

The seagull manager is showing up more and more in today's workplace.

Bradberry gives three simple but effective techniques to shift the way you manage.

1. Set full fledged expectations - make sure the employee's efforts are spent doing the right things the right way. Let them know what is expected and how they will be evaluated in the future. Be sure to get agreement and commitment to work toward established goals.

2. Communication that clicks. Too often managers do not communicate enough and only communicate when things go wrong. Observe what employees say and do and speak openly with them about their work. Communication clicks when it is frequent and in a langauge everyone understands.

3. Paws on Performance - pay attention to each employee's performance - offer praise as often as constructive feedback. Keep your paws on performance.

This is a delightful little book, it can be read in a couple of hours. But the lessons, if implemented, will last a lifetime. It is very simple and straightforward. Anyone can understand and implement the principles.

While so many self improvement books are written with supposedly real scenarios and people to demonstrate a point, I've always found it tough to want to trust the results, as they seem rather staged or manipulated to simply prove the author's point. Often times a reader's skepticism sets in and taints the learning environment.

With using zoo animals and seagulls, rather than people as this book does, the characters don't have that "agenda" feel to them, and I was much more open to learn and trust the subject matter-as crazy as that sounds. Who doesn't enjoy a trip to the zoo and want to be close to the animals and understand their needs to be well cared for and valued? I think that is the key to this book's intriguing lessons and their absorption as has you leaving all prejudices behind and gives you an open frame of mind to learn and understand. As a book about talking seagulls and animals, it is not corny, nor over done, but very well written and a breeze to read.

I think you will find value in looking at your managerial skills from a new angle with the three important lessons seagull Charlie learns from his flock and the zoo's wise animal friends. What can be perceived as poor results or grumblings in employees may actually relate more to your job as a communicator and as a teacher, than some unfixable or resistant flaw they may have. These lessons empower you instead of building resentments or disappointments to the point you blow up or "Squawk". I found this book a real treat to read, quite clever, and think you will find it enjoyable and very valuable as well.

SQUAWK
by Travis Bradberry Ph.D.

I'm guilty of squawking, the most ineffective method of management imaginable. SQUAWK shows me why I need to change and how I can change. SQUAWK can benefit all of us, even those of us who do not consider ourselves managers. All of us play different roles, sometimes as managers and sometimes as those being managed.

The natural way to react to people we need to manage is to go off and sulk and then to swoop down and squawk. The final step is to leave everyone else on the team to clean up the mess. By observing the behavior of a mother otter and her young, we learn that much more time is required to train people than we ever believe.

As I read SQUAWK, I realize the ways I have failed as a manager. I find myself identifying with Charlie, the competent but ineffective seagull, who carries a stubby pencil and scraps of paper in his feathers. The concepts are simple adjustments of working methods. The manager is often the manager because he can do the job the best, but once he becomes the manager his job is no longer merely doing his job. It is managing to get others to do the job well. Communication is required to be an effective manager.

Reading Charlie's notes, it's easy to identify with this competent seagull, who is an incompetent manager:

--You have to reveal exactly what needs to be done before you can expect to see it happen!!
--If you aren't staying in touch, you aren't doing your job!!
--Pay attention to each employee's performance, and offer praise as frequently and emphatically as you do the constructive feedback.

Bradberry makes it all sound simple with the use of an entertaining fable with a glorious finale; yet the concept is profound. The author stays around and offers an explanation at the end to make sure that all of us understand that the people are the most important asset of a successful business. He outlines and expands the three key principals:

--Full-Fledged Expectations
--Communication that Klicks
--Paws on Performance

In conclusion, Bradberry says something profound:

"People may join companies, BUT they will leave bosses." SQUAWK has the message of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't couched in simple terms. If you work as an employee being managed or as a manager, if you play a role in any organization, if you, or if you are a student readying yourself for employment, read this book!

Aesop had plenty of fables with animals, of course, but I don't recall animals being big in business books prior to Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles' excellent Gung Ho (1997). Since then, there have been serious efforts like Our Iceberg is Melting and parodies like The Way of the Cockroach. And it's really a hit or miss genre. Squawk! is a hit.

Squawk! is not going to revolutionize the way we conceive of business or foster organizational change, but it could do something more important: Make excitable managers sit back and take a deep breath before they jump into the crisis du jour at make it a bigger mess still. The premise of Squawk! is that too often managers only get involved when there's a problem, and because they're not close enough to their people or the day to day challenges those people face, all they can do is make a fuss, dispense some formulaic advice and hope their efforts will pass as leadership.

Squawk! offers a vivid image of the seagull manager, and three things managers can do to avoid being one. What's more, the seagull, the otter, the pigeons and the turtle actually seem appropriate to the ideas they represent, not just generic types applied to generic animals (the dolphin and the dog are a bit more of a stretch).

I should acknowledge that this is not a groundbreaking book. The lessons it teaches are not so much new as too often forgotten. But it's a quick and fun reminder of those lessons, with some great visuals to make sure well-meaning managers - maybe you! - set clear targets, communicate them and follow up productively, not just make a fuss when things go wrong. Have a laugh and manage your people better! What's not to like?

Before choosing this book, i somehow missed the small sub heading: "A little fable about how one seagull manager...'

Like other fables, Squawk is amusing and well-written. There's a certain irony in running with the term "seagull manager." It just doesn't hae a clear target. The book's front cover doesn't really help.

This fable would be perfect for a management training group. The message gets presented in a light-hearted way - almost a satire of the fable genre. For exampe, in some fables, the behavior of the animals remains faithful to their species. If they're mice, they scamper. But Bradberry goes for humor. Charlie Seagull carries around a pencil, talks to dogs and sea otters and takes notes.

The management lessons aren't especially new. They're labeled in amusing ways. For example, "Paws on Performance" means praising work that's well done, getting wayward performers back on track, and fostering both independence and interdependence.

If I had to go to corporate-sponsored management training, I would probably welcome this book as a relief from the usual boring meetings. I can't imagine a real seagull manager actually learning from this book. Mor likely those who work for a seagull manager will experience some wishful thinking.

I have the paperback version, which is about 120 pages (8 chapters), with a 9th chapter and a few more pages asking you if you are this type of person, and it provides points to some other resources. This is the first Travis Bradberry book I've read. It's a management book, aimed at a few management behaviors (3 that are called out, and a few others between the lines). Johnson's "Who Moved My Cheese" uses mice to help us see the story and the issues. Bradberry uses seagulls in his fable. This is a quick read, he makes his points well, and doesn't overly dwell on them (some management books hit the same point a number of times, to help them sink in, but sometimes it feels like the author thinks we are slow). "Squawk" keeps things moving and makes its points, the story helps us relate in a non-threatening way.

Without a doubt, there are tens of thousands of business and management books on the market. Some of them are volumnous monsters that try to cover every aspect of the managerial world, while others like "Squawk!" are a short, enjoyable read that, while it doesn't teach you anything new, makes a great flight companion or light read book for any managers office.

The book tells you a story of how a rather ineffective manager transforms into an effective leader through a story of a group of seagulls who live near a large aquatic park. Covering three major problems that every manager faces in his/her career -- listening, leading and communicating effectively -- the book lets you follow the transformation of the leader, Charlie, as he helps his flock of feathered friends survive and thrive despite recent challenges.

While most managers and business leaders won't find anything new in this book, it does make for a very light, entertaining read. This book would be the perfect gift for that hard-to-buy for friend who is in a leadership position, or a great hand out for companies to give all their managers and supervisors as a refresher in basic leadership skills.

This book features a story of a Seagull (Charlie) who evolves as an effective leader of his flock through the teachings by a group of Otters.

At the end of each chapter is a summary page outlining the salient points. The second part of the book is a succinct summary of the model of the 3 Virtues of Great Leadership.

I have to admit that the novelty of the parable is different but the last 1/4 of the book summarizes the salient points.

Entertaining and helpful, this book is soon to become a classic for the curriculum in leadership courses and organizations of various sizes.

I highly recommend this book.

At first the book seemed kind of silly. It reads like a children's book in some respects, and I'm not just talking about the anthropomorphic personalities of the various animals.

After a couple of pages though it had thoroughly charmed me. It tells a story that would be uninteresting in a normal (human) setting in an amusing and informative way.

What it does really well is show how "management" is more then just what you do at work. (For instance, it gives a management lesson from a parent's point of view.)

I got this book because I'm an MBA student. I'm interested in the subject and this seemed like an amusing quick read. I sort of wish I had read it before I started my program; if I had been younger when I read this book I might have decided to go for a business degree a little earlier then I did. I went through the book nodding my head a lot. It covered a lot of what I got out of my management focused classes in a very unpretentious way.

This book would be great for anybody who can get over the fact that they're reading about sea gulls swiping garbage. But I think it would be best in the hands of first time parents and younger readers who are interested in achieving a position of leadership.

Dr. Bradberry's book is very brief which is encouraging and the usage of animals/mammals to get the point of "Squawk" across is promising but very little new ground is covered.
The three steps of 1) Full-Fledged Expectations, 2) Communication that Clicks & 3)Paws on Performance are sketched out with a flock of seagulls and their manager Charlie. Charlie has to learn to communicate with his flock to get better results in food gathering and in getting his flock to trust him again. His animal/mammal counterparts give him advice which he applies and it shows him results and gets his flock more food so they don't want to abandon Charlie's efforts.
While the premise was good the execution of the chapters was somewhat dull and uninspiring. The material in this book was basic Management 101 and more stories of how HUMANS applied these suggestions may have been more helpful.