Books & publications
Book "Ermutigende Führung" – Winfried Berner
"Ermutigende Führung": Encouraging Leadership for a Culture of Growth
Picture two business owners. The first leads his people in a way that makes them smaller over time: more anxious, less sure of themselves, less able to stand on their own. The second uses his leadership to help them grow larger over time: bolder, more confident, more self-reliant.
Which of the two companies will do better against the competition? Which will be more productive? Which will respond to customer enquiries more competently, and which will cope better with unexpected shifts in the market? Which will be more innovative? Which will have the better working atmosphere? And in which will the owner be more satisfied with his firm, his team and himself?
Courage and encouragement make the difference
An encouraging culture as a competitive advantage
Anyone who manages to give a person courage helps them grow beyond their previous limits. Anyone who manages to encourage a whole company opens up new perspectives for it. Anyone who succeeds in building an encouraging corporate culture gives their firm a competitive advantage that is hard to attack and extremely hard to catch up with. Those are the guiding ideas of our new book "Ermutigende Führung – Für eine Kultur des Wachstums" (Encouraging Leadership – For a Culture of Growth). An encouraging leadership culture is the way to bring business success and "quality of life at work" together: for business success to grow, the people who run the business have to grow. This book shows how you can actively encourage that and bring it about.
From practice – for practice
Starting point: a sales project
This book grew out of a successful project. Before the financial crisis of 2008/09, Dr. Achim Kassow, at the time the Commerzbank board member responsible for retail sales, recognised that the existing sales model, with its detailed targets and extremely tight controlling, had no future. Everyone was doing it by then - and if Commerzbank did what everyone else was doing, it would also end up performing like everyone else. No competitive advantage was to be had that way.
From pressure and control to encouraging leadership
A critical analysis of the situation as it stood gave rise to the idea of building retail sales on a different view of people and a different approach to leadership: encouraging leadership. Staff were not to be driven to higher performance by hard targets, pressure and control, but through a kind of leadership that helped them recognise their own potential, take on challenges they had avoided until then and so build up more and more skill and self-confidence, step by step. "If we really do succeed in building an encouraging leadership culture and thereby becoming a steadily bolder sales organisation, we will create a competitive advantage that is hard to catch up with and extremely hard to imitate."
Implementation despite the financial crisis
It worked. On the eve of the financial crisis the Encouraging Leadership programme was ready, including the training design and detailed roll-out planning. And although Commerzbank was badly buffeted by the crisis - and by the simultaneous takeover of Dresdner Bank and the restructuring that came with it - encouraging leadership was implemented rigorously in one important sales division, Wealth Management, under the responsibility of divisional board member Gustav Holtkemper.
From pressure and control to encouraging leadership
And although Commerzbank, badly shaken for a time after partial nationalisation, legacy problems that surfaced unexpectedly and heavy write-downs, was certainly not the bank to which wealthy private clients would spontaneously bring their assets, Holtkemper achieved considerable growth in his area of responsibility year after year - and he puts that down, as he told us in an interview, not least to encouraging leadership. The approach thus passed its test under the most difficult conditions and made an important contribution to stabilising the bank. Today Gustav Holtkemper is probably the German senior executive with the most extensive practical experience of encouraging leadership done well, and the interview with him is a chapter of our book well worth reading.
The authors: the core team of the Encouraging Leadership project
Project manager Thomas Vetter
One of the five regional branch managers who made the concept of encouraging leadership a success under Holtkemper's aegis was Thomas Vetter, head of the Encouraging Leadership project and co-author of this book. As head of the South-West sales region, he and his team set out to prove that encouraging leadership is not merely an attractive but "sadly, sadly" unrealistic idea, but a leadership approach that works in practice even under extremely difficult circumstances.
Regula Hagenhoff, Encouraging Training lecturer
When, after the initial review, encouraging leadership emerged as the focus of the project, we brought in an expert in individual psychology and encouragement, Regula Hagenhoff, head of the Adler-Dreikurs Institute (Sibbesse / Hildesheim) founded by Theo Schoenaker. As a long-standing encouragement trainer she has a great deal of experience of bringing encouragement home to parents, teachers and educators and helping them to put it into practice. That made her the best possible expert for designing our training programme.
Dr. Meik Führing, head of the project office
Dr. Meik Führing, at the time a consultant and today a principal at Commerz Business Consulting, headed the project office – an unspectacular but important role in a project of this size – and was at the same time always a critical questioner who did much to keep an eye on system and rigour, to clear up inconsistencies and to ensure that the material was set out clearly and comprehensibly.
Winfried Berner
I myself took part in the project as an external change consultant and an expert in corporate culture and culture change.
The book's main themes
Part I: Courage and encouragement – key questions in our lives
"Ermutigende Führung" is divided into four parts that build on one another. Part I, "The key role of (social) courage and encouragement", explains why courage and encouragement are not just one interesting subject among many but a key question of our existence, one that has a decisive bearing on both our private path through life and our professional success. Here you will find information on what exactly is meant by encouragement, what its psychological background is and how it works in practice.
Part II: Learning to lead encouragingly
In Part II, "Encouraging Leadership", we present encouraging leadership as a particularly important field of application for encouragement. There you will find out why encouraging leadership has a considerable influence not only on the team climate but also on business success. This part helps you to understand encouraging leadership not only conceptually but also to learn it and put it into practice, and that not just for the easy cases but for the difficult ones too. Here we also present a whole series of exercises with which you can learn to apply encouraging leadership in your own practice.
Part III: From individual leadership to an encouraging leadership culture
Part III, "Building an encouraging leadership culture", takes the step from individual behaviour to the organisation. It shows how to build an encouraging corporate culture and why it is worth doing so: not only because it promises a better quality of working life, but also because it translates directly into higher performance and better results. In times of globalisation and digitalisation in particular, the future does not belong to the fearful companies, nor to those driven to success with incentives and tight controlling, but to the courageous ones.
Part IV: Encouraging leadership in practice
Finally, in Part IV, "Encouraging leadership in practice", we introduce three companies and organisations in interviews. Some of them have systematically made encouraging leadership a core element of their corporate culture; others use it more intuitively, because it matches the personality, the view of people and the sense of identity of the entrepreneur or of the long-serving chairman. Alongside Gustav Holtkemper of Commerzbank, mentioned above, these are Volker Kronseder, for many years chairman of the board of KRONES AG, a "hidden champion" in the MDAX, and, from the non-profit sector, Prof. Dr. Hubert Weiger, chairman of BUND e.V. and of BUND Naturschutz in Bayern e.V., both of whom lead in a markedly encouraging way in everything they do.
Table of contents
Introduction: what is "Ermutigende Führung" for?
Part I: The key role of (social) courage and encouragement
- Courage and discouragement shape our lives
- What encouragement is and how it works
- Encouragement in practice
Part II: Encouraging leadership
- The benefits of encouraging leadership
- Learning to lead encouragingly
- Encouraging leadership beyond the hierarchy
- Dealing with conflict courageously
Part III: Building an encouraging leadership culture
- The benefits of a courageous leadership culture
- How to change a culture
Part IV: Encouraging leadership in practice
- Gustav Holtkemper, Commerzbank AG: "Our people should dare to take new paths"
- Volker Kronseder, KRONES AG: "It gives me pleasure when our people succeed"
- Prof. Dr. Hubert Weiger, BUND e.V.: "The celebrations have created a new sense of community"
Bibliography
Index
Sample extract
You can download the detailed table of contents and a sample chapter from the publisher's website.
"Deserves pole position" – extracts from reviews
"The worst that can be said about the book is that the title does not 'catch fire at first glance' and does not inevitably stand out from the mass of average leadership guides. The book would certainly have deserved pole position. (...) Management-Journal verdict: the rules of excellent leadership have rarely been described so simply, so soundly and so close to practice. Recommended!"
ManagementJournal
"… aims to support others and oneself in developing more courage and more self-confidence, in facing challenges with assurance and thus in realising more and more of one's own potential. That includes encouraging an employee who is intimidated by the difficulty of a task to take the next step with courage."
"…So the book – thanks also to its pleasant, clear style and even though it is very text-heavy – reads very well and often offers starting points that go far beyond working life."
"getAbstract recommends the book to all managers, but also to parents and teachers who want to get as much as possible right from the very start."
And this is what readers say
Extracts from Amazon reader reviews
"... what they are after is a basic stance, the basic stance of encouragement. Encouraging employees to take heart even when things are difficult and to get over the hurdle in front of them – at the first, the second or even the third attempt. Encouragement by the manager as a contribution to growth, step by step, to make more of one's possibilities. (...) My verdict – as always with books that Winfried Berner has (co-)authored: read it, without fail!"
"What stands out is the matter-of-fact description of questions, problems and ways of solving them without any judgement; instead they reflect observations, point out fields of action and guide the reader through exercises to join in. This creates a willingness to reflect on oneself of one's own accord and tempts one to try out an encouraging attitude (...)"
"… worked up concretely and very vividly for practice (...) In doing so it conveys deep impressions rather than just superficial banter. (...) I find the personal content presented in the book, and the fact that what is written has really been implemented in a DAX group and lived in practice beyond the status of a project, very impressive indeed."
"… anyone interested in the subject should get hold of it without further ado! (...)
A book that stands between grey theory and all too colourful practice, neither a work of theoretical scholarship nor a collection of best-practice cases. In my view, exactly the right mixture of the two. Easy to grasp, with learning examples that help put encouraging leadership into practice."
Where can you get the book?
Bookshops
The quickest way is to order it from Amazon or from the publisher's online shop. (Ordering directly from the publisher earns both the publisher, a mid-sized firm, and us as the authors a considerably higher return.) But of course you can get it just as easily from a bookshop or another mail-order retailer.