Like other bestselling business fables, The Invisible Employee combines a good yarn with great business advice and practical guidance for managers. Following a group of people as they attempt to live and work together on a mysterious island, the book combats one of the most common negative attitudes in business--that smart employees should keep quiet, keep their heads down, and try not to draw attention to themselves. The Invisible Employee argues that this attitude undermines our efforts at building great companies and that effective leaders can break their employees of this negative attitude.The Invisible Employee guides management to learn to engage their staff by setting a clear guiding vision, recognizing the strengths in their employees, and providing a sense of visibility and connection to corporate values and goals. In short, employees feel invisible to corporate leadership because leadership allows them to. This book shows managers how to get involved and lead their people from obscurity to achievement--and reap the rewards across their entire organization.
This book has a simple message: praising employees is the "single business strategy" that meets "all your business objectives simultaneously." Praising employees generates commitment, which leads to high-level performance, which causes customer and investor loyalty, it argues. The authors' point is illustrated through a long, tedious fable about a tribe of "Highlanders" who are showered with gems by a tribe of "Wurc-Urs," until, that is, the Wurc-Urs start to disappear because they're so frustrated by the lack of praise. The book contains a list of 70 ways to recognize employees (buy them a garden statue, write them a funny song, etc.), as well as a few bits of more journalistic evidence (brief accounts of business studies, a story from the Wall Street Journal about an employee who quit when his employer gave him a gold Rolex without offering to pay the income tax on the gift, etc.). Savvy managers are unlikely to buy into the idea that lavish praise is all it takes to generate profits and make the stock price go up, but the book may provide them with a few new ideas for how to make their employees feel appreciated. - Publishers Weekly, January 30, 2006