Teachers are often taught different learning styles as channels to reach other students. Workplace leaders, however, often don’t have a deep background in education. Yet they are tasked with challenges in communication that require that they address wide swaths of people, who usually think differently than them. In this book, Dawna Markova and Angie McArthur educate readers about how to apply ideas about learning styles to the modern workplace with the hope of increasing the effectiveness of collaborations.
As I grew up in a family of educators, learning styles was a regular topic around the dinner table and in car conversations, but the perspective always came from the point of view of a teacher overseeing students. As an adult, I am not a teacher by profession and simply labor as a workplace leader. Yet as a leader, educating all sorts of people has become a central part of my job. With this background, the advice in this book did not teach me any unfamiliar concepts, but it did help bridge the final connections of applying those concepts to modern business settings.
This book’s main weakness, however, is that it relies too much on categorizations and listings. While lists are helpful in a thorough scientific analysis, which this book has in spades, they are boring to read. They are even more boring to hear in an audiobook. The book needed more narrative to carry the reader through while presenting the concepts in life situations. I wished I heard more use cases as a scaffolding to the scientific material.
Overall, this book reaches the working public concerned about increasing their IQ about collaborations. Most persistent problems faced today have some kind of team component, and the need for collaborative intelligence will only increase. And for leaders, collaborative intelligence is a baseline requirement. This book offers a good start to understanding how to work better with people, who by definition are different than you and deserve empathic communication.
Collaborative Intelligence: Thinking with People Who Think Differently
By Dawna Markova & Angie McArthur
Narrated by Ellen Archer
Copyright (c) 2015
Random House Audio
ASIN B012HFU1GS
Genre: Psychology
www.amazon.com