Photograph of Jeanette James

Susan Templeton's Top Picks

As I look toward my retirement this September, it’s only natural to reflect on the influences that have shaped my practice as a consultant and trainer. Each of the books below has changed the way I work—I’ve drawn on them for content for the leadership courses I’ve taught, they’ve impacted how I’ve coached and counseled clients, and I’ve recommended them frequently to others.

  1. Transitions and Managing Transitions by William Bridges

    Transitions was recommended to me over 20 years ago by a dear colleague and career counselor, Vic Snyder, who recently retired as associate director at the UW Career Center. He shared many wise tips with me on how to deal with the emotions inherent in change, and reading Transitions was among his best advice. It helped me appreciate the time between leaving a familiar situation and starting something new. Managing Transitions is a sequel that speaks to managers and leaders on how they can best support their employees and teams to successfully manage change.


  2. Articulating Strengths Together by Jerald Forster

    In 1996 I was introduced to a narrative approach to identifying strengths, the Dependable Strengths Articulation Process, in a facilitator certification class taught by Bernard and Jean Haldane, Allen Boivin-Brown, and Jerald Forster (then a professor in the UW’s College of Education, now retired). As a result, I began to redirect career clients away from talking about all the things they don’t want to do and focusing on what they want to do, not in terms of job titles and functions, but in terms of their strengths. This shift positively affected clients’ ability to find work that is a good fit, and using the articulation process helped them describe their value in the work place in compelling ways. Years after I took the certification training, Jerald Forster wrote Articulating Strengths Together. I recommend it as a supplement to POD’s Discovering Your Dependable Strengths class or to anyone interested in trying the Dependable Strengths process on their own.

  3. Go Put Your Strengths to Work by Marcus Buckingham

    When I first started working at POD in 2007, I went to a book tour presentation Marcus Buckingham gave in downtown Seattle for his new book, Go Put Your Strengths to Work. Buckingham also recommends a narrative process for identifying strengths using a journal to record tasks that are “loves” and “loathes” at work. This book is a quick read and Buckingham addresses the frequent question I get from clients and class participants, “Focusing them on strengths is good, but what about weaknesses?” I’ve called upon the approach he describes for managing weaknesses in many POD classes that I’ve taught and in individual coaching appointments.

  4. The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins

    I frequently recommend this book to leaders for how to successfully transition into a new leadership position. It was recommended to me by Richard Wilkinson, Associate Vice Chancellor at UW Tacoma, who shared a short synopsis of it that he wrote while on a long international flight. Particularly valuable are the conversations this book recommends new managers and leaders have with their bosses in the first few days and weeks in their new role.

  5. Personal Kanban by Jim Benson

    This book has the best approach to time management and productivity I’ve encountered! I was introduced to it a few years ago when Jim came to talk with a group of colleagues gathered together to focus on organizational change. This book is another quick read, very entertaining, and the key points are simple and easily put into practice: 1) Visualize your work tasks by posting them where you and others can see what’s on your plate and 2) Limit your work in progress. Jim Benson’s website (www.personalkanban.com) details the simple steps on the Personal Kanban 101 page. His book has lots of examples and shares different ways of using this approach for more complex projects.

  6. What Did You Say? The Art of Giving and Receiving Feedback by Charles Seashore, Edith Seashore, and Gerald M. Weinburg

    I was introduced to this book during a year-long Triple Impact organizational development training I took from Michael Broom of The Center for Human Systems and the late Edie Seashore, a pioneer in the organizational development field who taught at Johns Hopkins, University of Massachusetts, Pepperdine, and other universities. The training involved meeting as a small cohort of OD professionals for two days each month over the course of a year and provided me with an invaluable foundation for sound OD practice. Perhaps the most important lesson I learned from the training and through this book was that receiving feedback is more difficult than giving it and that to do both effectively is an art and is essential for building and maintaining positive human relationships. Although reading about feedback might sound dry, this book is actually quite engaging and provides many humorous anecdotes to illustrate its points.

  7. Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery for Anticipating and Initiating Change by Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs

    Veteran POD consultant Renée Hanson introduced this book and the work of these authors to POD and the UW in 2009. She developed and taught the original SLP Level 2: Leadership Agility Series based on this book, and I was privileged to take over the teaching of the series when she retired. In their research, Joiner and Josephs discovered that most managers have not mastered the level of agility needed for consistent, effective leadership in rapidly changing and increasingly complex environments. Highly readable and thought-provoking, this book describes a developmental model for leadership that meets the challenges of today’s workplace.

  8. Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey

    Renée Hanson introduced me to this compelling book as well. It explores the dynamics of change at the personal and group level, provides insights into why change is so difficult for most people, explores how to diagnose and overcome your own immunity to change, and maps out a strategy for successful organizational change.

  9. Changing on the Job: Developing Leaders for a Complex World by Jennifer Garvey Berger

    A colleague who had studied with Robert Kegan, professor of Adult Learning and Professional Development at Harvard, recommended this book as a resource for developing leaders in a complex world. It is an excellent complement to the previous two books and offers some timely and fresh insights on leadership development, whether for yourself or as a mentor to others.

  10. The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless

    Liberating Structures offers unconventional facilitation techniques designed to foster lively participation. I learned of this concept through a series of workshops I participated in several years ago, and it changed the way I facilitate training. These novel yet practical methods are useful not just for facilitators but for leaders hoping to transform the way their team members collaborate, innovate, and problem-solve together.

Summer 2016 | Return to Issue Home