Healing Manager: How to Build Quality Relationships and Productive Cultures at Work

This husband-and-wife team develop the provocative thesis that the first, necessary step toward increasing worker productivity and quality must be to address pain, resentment, suspicion and distrust among employees. The response of the authors (business partners in a Wisconsin-based consulting firm) is ``Total Quality Relationships'' (TQR), a strategy designed to instill human values in the workplace, to create a healing manager ``who helps others grow emotionally and intellectually'' and to ``convince leaders who are imbued with a belief in success through cost-cutting and people-cutting to embrace more enlightened values.'' The Lundins provide the reader with clear procedures for implementing TQR, and for handling anger and conflict in the workplace. Their approach, while intriguing, relies on a tremendous amount of employer-employee cooperation and faith, which one might assume are in short supply in the companies that most need TQR. (June)