Your Good Work Habits Toolbox
Crafting the Skills Now That Will Transform Your Career and Elevate Your Organizational Value
The personable business book Your Good Work Habits Toolbox is filled with appealing advice for professionals in a variety of fields.
Beck Besecker’s insightful book Your Good Work Habits Toolbox covers general workplace skills that are useful for career advancement.
The recommended work habits, Besecker says, can be put into practice in any profession. They include communicating, being consistent, and working well with others. Basic skills like grit, good judgment, and etiquette are also emphasized for their potential to lead to professional success in an ever-evolving economy. Some of the tools are of the sort that will be used on a regular basis; others are reserved for special occasions.
Organized as a helpful reference text, the book’s chapters cover broad themes: personal and process habits, communications habits, people habits, and culture habits. Still, their progression is systematic. Topics including decision-making, presentation skills, and negotiation tactics are drilled into too, fleshed out via prospective scenarios that professionals may encounter. Lists make this material even more digestible, as with those that name ways of providing constructive feedback. Methods for reinforcing and rewarding habits are also named. Italics, bold print, and bullet points are used to reinforce key lessons.
Personal anecdotes, such as about the challenges of running a supermarket rewards program, being convinced to join the theater, and getting yelled at by a college baseball coach, are used to illustrate key concepts too. Besecker’s storytelling grabs and holds attention: he discusses mortifying himself in front of an elderly man whom he failed to recognize as Neil Armstrong while working at Purdue University. These captivating asides succeed in vivifying the book’s most vital lessons about communication skills, conveying Besecker’s personality well and humanizing his advice. For example, he recalls his awed reaction to hearing Quicken Loans founder and CEO Dan Gilbert speak in a manner that makes his excitement palpable. However, the book’s recalled conversations are somewhat prolonged examples of effective communication.
Black-and-white, computer-enhanced illustrations punctuate the book, including fanciful drawings of businesspeople walking planks, flexing their muscles, and spouting jargon. Though whimsical, they are comparatively too breezy, working to sweeten professional advice that was convincing on its own merit. Further, the book ends in an anticlimactic way, running through a chapter on company culture without a proper sense of finality. Instead, it concludes on a topical note, noting how its lessons applied during the rise of the internet and declaring that they remain relevant as remote work gains popularity.
Filled with advice for professionals in a variety of fields, Your Good Work Habits Toolbox is a useful self-help text that aims to empower others to get ahead in their careers.
Reviewed by
Joseph S. Pete
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
