Book Review: The Girl's Guide To Being A Boss (without being a bitch)

Caitlin Friedman and Kimberly Yorio are public relations and marketing professionals who started their own public relations and marketing firm. They had to learn how to set up their own business and be bosses like other women without any positive female role models. Their first book was called "The Girl's Guide to Starting Your Own Business" while this current offering is called "The Girl's Guide To Being A Boss (without being a bitch)".



The book introduces itself by explaining that managing is hard and because women are not brought up expecting to be managers of businesses, there is a limit to the number of positive female managerial role models you will meet. This means they have learnt the hard way what doesn't work and what works when being a manager, sometimes making little mistakes on the way. Their book draws from examples and the experiences of themselves as managers, other female managers and other women who have been managed by female managers to show good boss, Good Witch, and bad boss, Evil bitch, behaviour.

The first chapter gives a quick summary of the good and bad points of being a manager, a list of some bad boss behaviour with examples drawn from films and a list of 15 things that must be done now that you are a manager. This list includes simple activities such as create a to-do list to the harder activities such as sell your accomplishments to those above you.

The rest of the book mainly covers how-to's, even though they are not called as such in the book. Each chapter looks more indepth at each how-to and the reasons why you should follow this how-to like in Chapter 3 in how to build a team.

Team building is sold on the premise that to suceed in business as a leader you need to build a solid team behind you to support you. This is done by working out who you have inherited and their position in the company plus what they will be looking for from you. You also need to be prepared to hire and train new staff members without playing mind games with them. The chapter gives a summary of what is expected of you by those you lead which includes support and respect, and how you should not be taken advantaged off by those you are suppose to be leading. This section ends with a discussion covering why not only men hold women back.

I found the book a short read with some revelant examples of good boss and bad boss behaviour. The down side of the book was that it had lots of repetition of simple ideas without real expansion in the explaination and some of the case study interviews I felt didn't go into enought depth of the subject matter that was being explored.


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