Are You a Badger or a Doormat?

Article Type: Suggested readings From: Human Resource Management International Digest, Volume 18, Issue 7

Rosie Miller Pearson Education, 2009, ISBN: 9780273724490

In Are You a Badger or a Doormat? the author – an international executive coach – advises how to become a balanced, focused leader who gets results.

With ten-plus years’ experience, she draws on her own work to identify and address the five most common dilemmas facing leaders. They are:

• 1.

  What is the best use of my time?

• 2.

  How can I communicate more effectively?

• 3.

  How do I interact with people to get the best from them?

• 4.

  How do I choose, delegate to and motivate people well?

• 5.

  What changes will make us more successful?

There are no definitive answers to these questions. She explains that leadership does not involve right answers, but is a dynamic art form of choosing the right balance between many – and often conflicting – priorities. The right choice depends on the individual context; however, there are tools and techniques to help leaders to make good decisions and avoid the common pitfalls. The author discusses these in the book, as well feedback from interviews with 20 successful leaders and the resulting common principles for successful leadership.

The chapters on the five most common dilemmas include highlights, which give key ideas in brief, diagnostics for helping readers to assess their own position, how-tos that give practical models and solutions, and an “in action” case-study section.

Caricatures are used to describe extreme leadership styles and to help readers to recognize behaviors to avoid and those that should be put into practice more often. It is from here that the book’s title emerged, with the badger being a busy boss doing his or her own thing and never seen by the team in daylight, and the doormat a leader who never gets anything done as he or she is at the beck and call of others.

Are you a Badger or a Doormat? is a useful and practical read for those in HR leadership roles looking to improve their own performance, as well as HR specialists looking to focus on leadership development in their organizations.

Reviewed by Sara Nolan, editor, Strategic HR Review.

A longer version of this review was originally published inStrategic HR Review, Vol. 9 No. 3, 2010.