From those difficult conversations to everyday leadership challenges, navigating workplace dilemmas takes confidence and reflection. Steph Charlesworth reviews Anne-Maartje Oud’s practical guide to handling everyday professional challenges, exploring how its bite-sized advice, relatable stories and flexible strategies can help readers develop new skills and find solutions throughout their working lives.
Book: What To Do If…?: How to Handle Any Situation at Work and Come Out Winning
Author: Anne-Maartje Oud
Anne-Maartje Oud has distilled her extensive career on workplace behaviour into 268 pages of concise stories that cover the most commonly asked workplace questions. She offers ideas on tackling these common stumbling blocks in a self-styled guidebook to the modern workplace.
Less of a book in the traditional sense and more of a practical and handy guide to the contemporary career
Whilst not specifically aimed at the learning and development community, the book is well placed to help those in the industry simply due to the nature of the questions asked. They underpin a lot of the behaviour and personal development tracks that so often come with the territory. What To Do If is less of a book in the traditional sense and more of a practical and handy guide to the contemporary career.
Jump start your thinking
Whilst the author sets the stall out for this in the introduction, it’s also clear that this book doesn’t claim to be the one stop shop to fix all of the modern workplace issues someone may face during their working life. Instead, the reader is presented with several strategies and ideas for each question to kick start the process of improving a skill, thinking differently about a dilemma or just given the headspace to consider how you might want to approach the situation at hand.
The structure is very well thought out and clear, making it easy to use. The book is divided into five key themes:
- Self-development
- Communication
- Working with others
- Leadership
- Difficult Situations
Within each theme are several questions that are related to the topic, then answered. They have several optional strategies that might help the reader to answer the question in a way that is suitable for their specific situation. That there are several options offered for each question I think works well, it shows that the author understands that a myriad of factors can introduce nuance for a real world situation that can’t always be accounted for in writing.
Pocket reading
This structure also makes it really easy to dip into. I found I could gain some quick insights whilst in the middle of a busy day. The book is configured in such a way that you don’t need to read it in a linear fashion and can skip back and forwards as needed for the question you’re looking to have answered.
There is no presumption that you would need to wait until a certain stage in your career to read a particular section. The book offers in-the-moment answers to provide an expedient response to an urgent problem whilst also suggesting strategies that could be applied long term to boost growth and self-development to either avoid, or handle differently, some of the questions or problems that are covered.
Stories for learning
The tone of the book is relaxed and informal and offers up ideas with plenty of anecdotes that go along with the different strategies to bring ideas to life, as well as provide context or examples where needed. There are some clear signposts for further reading as well, which I found helpful as I wanted to dig a little deeper on some of the questions I was reading about.
I could clearly see how I could apply some of the suggestions in the real world without too much research or having to make great changes, making the strategies tangible and practical. It also provided plenty of opportunity to build up your own self-reflection skills, which, if you were reading this book, you would need to be open to in order to gain real benefit from it.
The book that keeps on giving
I can see this book working well as a companion throughout a career. The sections are really easy to peruse, and you can revisit in the moment to gain different insights at different times depending on where you were coming from. It would make for a great book to keep close to your desk so you could reach over to grab it when you’re feeling stuck or puzzled.
Whilst I don’t think that this book generally offers anything particularly ground-breaking in terms of the advice that it offers, I also don’t think that is the point. It’s the quick check and nudge that is a starting point for the reader to then build on in the real world.
Steph Charlesworth is Growth and Partnerships Lead at First Media UK
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