Therese Huston

Giving great feedback–whether recognition, coaching or evaluation–is a game-changer when it comes to helping each other do our best work. We know that. And yet, it’s incredibly difficult to do it well, in a way that’s useful, fair, and strengthen relationships. Let’s Talk breaks down giving feedback with the latest research, relevant stories, and actionable frameworks that we can all apply to turn feedback into a personal superpower.

Imagine being known as the person who makes those around them both successful and happy. Mastering how to give good feedback is essential. This book helps you navigate through the competing theories to become a feedback-giving maestro.

It’s easy to go your whole career giving well-intentioned but useless feedback. This brilliant book identifies the most common mistakes managers make with surgical precision, and empowers you with ninja listening skills, emotional management techniques, and whip-smart scripts to create real behavior change and lasting trust.

If you’ve ever been afraid to deliver constructive criticism, this book is for you. It’s full of practical examples and tactical tips to show you how to become an expert on giving feedback that works, and the type of leader that everyone will want to follow.

I was impressed by Let’s Talk’s treatment of unconscious bias. The recommended practices allow managers to bypass influences of gender stereotypes that  hinder the careers of strong women.

Therese Huston delivers a pep talk, toolkit, and decoding of employee behavior, all in one. Using both stories and science, she leaves us wiser, braver, fairer, and better. This book is a gift that belongs within arm’s reach of every manager at all times.

Rarely does an author make research so readable–and enjoyably instructive! You’ll learn more about how you give feedback now versus how you can get better at it, engaging with people of all kinds. Therese’s structure, descriptions, practices, and nuanced stories covering sensitive situations achieve something rare for a management book–entertainment, education, and humanity rolled into one.

Let’s Talk belongs in the hands of every supervisor who wants to give effective feedback. Full of practical suggestions undergirded by workplace research, this user-friendly guide will give you the tools you need to bring out the best in the people you work with. Highly recommended!

If you’ve got hard feedback to give and want to strengthen a relationship, not test it, Let’s Talk is your go-to guide. Therese Huston provides a better way to cultivating a positive, supportive environment, one where you don’t write people off but see them instead as individuals with potential, resulting in helping them become the best version of themselves.

One could imagine [How Women Decide] becoming required reading on Wall Street.

I thought I had read everything I needed to read on gender differences, but, as a CEO, this book showed me a new and critically important area in which we need to be very aware of our biases and take the steps Huston recommends to address them.

Huston’s book is illuminating even for those teaching within their expertise.

As [Huston] demonstrates, teaching outside your area of competence is almost the norm in the U.S. academy… The hints and tips provided here will be valuable perhaps everywhere that there is a higher education system… Teaching What You Don’t Know will find a good audience as a rescue manual for the young, as it assuages the anxieties facing the postgraduate or the postdoctoral teacher. The book, which clearly draws on a wide range of teaching experience on the U.S. scene, offers good advice and outlines some useful strategies. Huston does, moreover, dig up issues that have become ever more pressing over the past few years.

Have you ever been asked to deliver a lecture at short notice on a topic that is outside your comfort zone?… If so, read this book. In fact, ever found yourself wondering how you could improve your teaching, even of topics well within your expertise? Again, if so, read this book.

When top-down support and open communication become the norm, teaching outside one’s expertise can cease to be the nightmarish experience many feel it to be and become the illuminating and rewarding experience that Huston describes. While this is undoubtedly important, Huston’s consistently optimistic treatment of this subject and her clear suggestions for struggling teachers remain the book’s greatest strengths. Teaching What You Don’t Know is a pleasure to read and should be required reading in graduate pedagogy classes across disciplines.

Moving behind the reassuring public image of professorial expertise, Huston exposes a growing but still largely hidden academic reality: university teachers—sometimes even full professors—teaching outside of their field. Interviews with dozens of university faculty convincingly establish the prevalence of the practice and clarify the institutional reasons that it will likely increase in the years ahead. But many readers will quickly move past the analysis of why university faculty must teach outside their specialty to consider the helpful advice on how to do such teaching well… It may surprise librarians how many teachers and administrators seek out this book.

Sometimes teachers might find themselves filling in, and Teaching What You Don’t Know is a handy book to help them deal with unexpected situations.

This is one of the best books I’ve read on university teaching and learning in a long time. It addresses an issue that’s seldom discussed, in a book that’s both carefully researched and wonderfully sparkling in style. The author makes a strong case that teaching outside your area of expertise is a serious and extensive problem, and she offers some highly practical advice about how to meet the challenges. I would make this book a standard text for both our new faculty program and teaching fellows program, and I suspect that many other programs will want to do the same.