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Contact: Timeless Stories and Strategies for Management
Hardcover
ISBN13: 9781068244605
Publisher: Contact Consulting
Published: Nov 14 2025
Pages: 252
Weight: 0.94
Height: 0.63 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
I've known Graham for years and been a repeat client of Contact Consulting in a number of different roles in the luxury industry. I never found anyone with a better understanding of group dynamics, motivation and leadership. The impact he has made on the teams that have worked with him is profound. His long-awaited book will bring you the self-awareness to simply and humbly ask what you could do better.
--Christopher Zanardi-Landi, Executive Vice-President, Louis Vuitton 2012-2017
Contact is a modern field guide for managers who lead in the Employee-Centric Era. Drawing on decades of global work, Graham Stickland shows how today's best managers stop over-controlling and start enabling-creating environments where people feel safe, trusted, and motivated to do their best work. Through vivid stories and practical moves, he translates big ideas into everyday habits: let go so others can step up, design opportunity (not threat) environments, run better conversations, coach with simple loops, align teams around purpose, and build healthy cultures that perform without burnout.
Organised in four parts (It Really Is All About Others; Connect and Build Strong Relationships, Team Up, Level Up; and Simplify, Don't Complexify), the book replaces command-and-control with repeatable rhythms any manager can use. Each chapter ends with Making Contact reflection questions and tips that will make you an effective manager everyday.
Inside you'll learn how to:
- Shift from expert-doer to enabling manager who multiplies others
- Turn meetings into high-trust, high-candor conversations
- Use a two-question coaching loop that builds ownership
- Pace change to your team's true capacity, not wishful timelines
- Run listening tours and public commitments that align execution
- Replace rational bias with momentum-based sequencing-start where the energy is
- Build happy people, healthy culture with clear norms, feedback, and care
Whether you lead a store, a startup, or a global division or function, Contact gives you the questions, practices, and proof points to turn everyday interactions into lasting results.
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