Everything You Know about Organizational Behavior You Learned in High School
Through humorous and relatable stories, Everything You Know about Organizational Behavior You Learned in High School, by author Victor P. Becker, offers a practical, management development tool using real-life experience to draw comparisons between adolescent, high school behavior and behavior prevalent in workplaces today.
Becker assists business leaders and human resources professionals in identifying and correcting adolescent organizational behaviors on the job. He examines the organizational dysfunction in the context of real challenges in areas such as employee recognition, performance management, leadership, predators and bullies, the power of teams, and more. He offers simple fixes for each area.
Everything You Know about Organizational Behavior You Learned in High School brings you on a nostalgic journey to a pleasant, albeit sometimes volatile, period in your life. It is during this time in high school that the foundation for your personality and adult behavior patterns are established. These adolescent behavior patterns remain in adulthood and find their way into the workplace. Becker teaches you to recognize the dysfunction that is caused and captures simple tips to improve your team's and company's results.
Who Should Read This Book?
Everything You Know about Organizational Behavior You Learned in High School is the must-have guide for anyone who has ever looked around the office and thought, "Why does this feel so familiar?"
Business Leaders and Managers who are frustrated by team dysfunction, struggling to motivate employees, or dealing with workplace drama that feels more like a cafeteria showdown than a professional environment will find Becker's insights both eye-opening and immediately actionable. If you manage people — at any level — this book gives you a fresh lens for diagnosing what's really going on and the practical tools to fix it.
Human Resources Professionals will recognize the behavioral patterns Becker describes in virtually every organization they've supported. This book becomes a powerful reference tool for coaching managers, designing training programs, and addressing recurring workplace conflicts with a new and disarming approach.
Executives and Organizational Development Consultants looking for a relatable framework to drive culture change will appreciate how Becker translates complex behavioral dynamics into language every employee can understand and act on — without the jargon.
New and Emerging Leaders stepping into management roles for the first time will gain an invaluable head start in recognizing the social dynamics at play on their teams before those dynamics derail performance and morale.
Anyone Who Has Ever Worked in an Office — because let's be honest, we've all seen the class clown, the bully, the teacher's pet, and the cliques. Becker's nostalgic, humor-filled approach makes this an entertaining read for anyone curious about why people behave the way they do at work, and what we can actually do about it.
Whether you're leading a Fortune 500 company or managing your first small team, this book will change the way you see your workplace — and give you a good laugh along the way.
What people are saying:
I thoroughly enjoyed Victor’s book and how scary true that the behavior patterns from high school carry over into the business world. I appreciated Vic’s take on the need to change performance management systems; the impact of gossiping in the organization; stack ranking; how to handle bullies and predators (I’ve seen way too many of them over my career); and how to manage friendships in the organization. He really hit on the social structures that exist in high school and the corporate world, and the impact these structures and hierarchies have on all of us. I loved Vic’s fix at the end of each chapter to provide some guidance to the reader on how to navigate the issue.
This book should be a required read for all new hires, and I’m going to share it with my boys, who are 27 and 24, to help them navigate the corporate worlds they are both in.
— Brian W., Partner, Waters Learning and Development LLC