Do You Hear What I Hear? Parents and Professionals Working Together for Children with Special Needs

Rating:
Summary: great perspective!
Review: This book is an excellent resource for any parent or professional involved in the life of a child with special needs! It is a must have! Written with the personal perspective of a parent, it provides an invaluable insight for professionals working with families on any level.

Rating:
Summary: Developing Effective Partnerships
Review: Working on business issues involves sharing your thoughts and mental work load with others (partners, employees, suppliers and customers). No longer can you personally or corporatively keep all the balls up in the air by yourself. Collaboration and partnership is the name of the game.

The process of sharing with others clarifies and enhances your original vision of the business opportunity. Talking it out generates some breakthroughs that can have a major impact on your future direction. Communicating your thoughts with others, who have different experiences and skills, will allow you to discover things you didn't know that you didn't know.

Although collaberation is important today, effective partnerships can be elusive and hard to crasp for most people. A new book, "Do You Hear What I Hear?", by Janice Fialka and Karen C. Mikus published by Procter Publications, LLC, explores the journey to creative partnerships. Although written to parents and professionals who help children with special needs, this book guides us all in understanding how to strengthen our partnerships with others. Here are some points the authors make regarding misunderstandings about the nature and evolution of partnerships:

"...there is often the expectation that parents and professionals immediately are full partners simply by sitting together at a conference table to discuss the plans and goals for a child. Our experience has been just the opposite: that partnershps evolve over time, go through various phases and involve different interactions during various points of working together. For these reasons, we believe that a developmental approach to partnerships is both realistic and useful. This way of thinking helps us to view challenges and struggles in the relationships as normal, universal and to be expected, rather than as hopeless indicators of a doomed relationship."

When sharing your vision and strategy with your partners, good things begin to happen. You no longer have to be the go-to-guy or gal for every decision. Those who work with you begin to understand the basis for past decisions and now feel empowered to make some appropriate decisions on their own. Their self-directed work activity can free you up to concentrate on the important, rather than the urgent, issues facing your organization.

If you are really passionate about your business venture, the sooner you begin to involve others in your business decision making process, the sooner you will foster their commitment to continuously improve your business. Business relationships with suppliers, partners and customers will improve since they know where you are headed and how they can help you get there.