Personal development Resources
Feel HR books
Doing Agile Right
Authors: Darrell
Rigby, Sarah Elk
and Steven Berez
Publisher: Harvard
Business Review
Best
of
Press
Price: £23.00
To answer the question ‘how can
companies become nimbler without
falling prey to toxic mistakes?’, Rigby,
Elk and Berez use anecdotal evidence
from hundreds of their own clients,
diagnostic surveys and the collective
experience of more than 40 senior
executives. Together the results create
an empirically-grounded practical
guide to setting up agile teams, scaling
up, and achieving the ultimate goal of
creating an adaptive enterprise.
How to Go
to Work
Authors: Lucy
Clayton and
Steven Haines
Publisher: Penguin
Price: £9.99
From making an impression on day
one, to building resilience and
managing mistakes, How to Go to
Work provides valuable advice to help
jump-start working life. The book
also offers key learnings from some of
the most influential business theories
and draws on the collective wisdom
of cross-sector CEOs, creatives,
scientists, activists, entrepreneurs
and professionals.
People Like Us
Author: Hashi
Mohamed
Publisher: Profile
Books
Price: £16.99
Barrister Hashi Mohamed writes from
experience about living in Britain as a
young refugee and what it can teach us
about social mobility in the country.
He explores Britain’s deep divisions
that block children from deprived
backgrounds accessing the advantages
available to others from birth.
Mohamed believes that we live in a
society where the single greatest
indicator of what your job will be
is the jobs of your parents. His
book investigates our society’s
most intractable problem: the
social spectrum.
Will it Make the
Boat Go Faster?
Authors: Ben
Hunt-Davis and
Harriet Beveridge
Publisher: Matador
Price: £12.99
Part memoir, part self-development
manual, in this book Olympic gold
medallist Ben Hunt-Davis shares how
to apply a winning sporting approach
to achieve business performance
success. Twenty years on from taking
first place at the Sydney Olympics in
2000, the book details the principles
followed to achieve gold such as highperformance
conversations and
performance under pressure.
Shorter
Author: Alex
Soojung-Kim Pang
Publisher: Penguin
Price: £14.99
Shorter provides a
business and wellbeing case for a
shorter working week. Soojung-Kim
Pang writes about the origins of our
work culture and the effects of
overwork, sharing stories of how
companies around the world are
redesigning the work week to increase
the efficiency, health and happiness of
their workers. He argues that our work
culture is breaking, and uses case
studies to show how it can be fixed.
In this series of
wellbeing
columns
KAREN BEAVEN
offers advice
to others in HR
In all my years of coaching I’ve seen fear kill more
dreams and ideas than lack of talent or ambition
ever will.
It’s a basic facet of being human and there’s
no getting away from it. It’s completely normal to
experience fear in a number of different forms. If left
unchecked it can have a huge impact on our ability to
get things done and to achieve all that we want to in
our careers. Did you know that chronic stress is actually a
low-intensity variety of fear?
This month I thought it was worth delving into the world
of fear and sharing some ideas that might help you
manage it.
A certain degree of fear is healthy; it does have a
purpose and that usually relates to protecting us and
keeping us safe. It can be instinctive, for example the
kind of fear that would have driven our ancestors to run
from a sabre-toothed tiger.
If we have a negative experience when doing
something fear imprints in our mind and makes us wary
about doing the same thing again.
This form could also relate to a cultural norm in the
way that a social group or society have shared beliefs
about certain activities and outcomes.
Fear can be taught; in the way a child might observe
a parent who’s afraid of spiders and then grows up
with that same fear without ever having personally
experienced a negative event connected with them.
This is usually a good place to start if you’re aware
that you have a fear that’s holding you back. Start by
defi ning what exactly it is that you’re afraid of, and
then work it back and establish if that fear is instinctive,
learned, cultural or taught. This can give you a whole
new insight into what’s driving it.
Think about what the underlying belief behind the
fear is and then start the process of separating the
story you tell yourself from the facts of the matter. Be
super clear on whose story this is. Is this genuinely your
fear or is it something you’ve picked up from someone
else? It can be easier to let things go when you realise
that they were never yours in the fi rst place.
If the fear stems from a negative experience
consider if you are able to learn something from what
happened. How has the thing you learnt now benefi tted
56 HR April 2020 hrmagazine.co.uk
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