The Leader Within: Learning Enough About Yourself to Lead Others [Hardcover]

Drea Zigarmi (Author), Ken Blanchard (Author), Michael O'Connor (Author), Carl Edeburn (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0131470256 | ISBN-13: 978-0131470255 | Publication Date: September 5, 2004 | Edition: 1

The first step towards becoming an outstanding leader: know yourself. This book will help you understand yourself as a leader... so you can change, grow, and become powerfully more effective. Authored by four world-renowned leadership experts, including the legendary Ken Blanchard, it draws on an extraordinary seven-year research study on how successful corporate executives exert influence. The authors begin by presenting self-change as your must urgent leadership challenge, and showing how your values and personality govern your actions, even when you don't realize it. You'll examine the inner self you're currently bringing to your "moments of influence," discovering how your disposition, values, beliefs, and persona are contributing right now to your success -- or failure. Throughout, the authors present proven, values-based approaches to leadership in both group settings and one-to-one contexts.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Discover the leader inside you!

• Become the leader you've always wanted to be
• Understand how you behave at your key 'moments of influence'
• Reinvent your approach for better results -- and happier people
• Build more effective teams and organizations, without compromising your values
• Co-authored by Ken Blanchard, co-author of The One Minute Manager

If you lead... if you intend to lead... if you work with leaders... you need this book.

You need it to discover why...
...self-change is your most urgent leadership challenge
...your values, beliefs, and personality are driving your success -- or your failure -- even when you don't realize it

You need it to discover how to...
... lead brilliantly, in ways that reflect your own values and personality
... connect in both group settings and one-to-one contexts
... liberate personal traits and energies you never knew you had
... rekindle your team's spirit -- and build stronger, more effective, more joyful organizations.

Liberate the outstanding leader inside you -- with The Leader Within.

About the Author

About the Authors

DR. DREA ZIGARMI is a respected management consultant, bestselling author, and powerful trainer and motivational speaker. He co-authored Leadership and The One Minute Manager, and has co-developed several Blanchard Training and Development products, including its Leader Behavior Analysis instruments.

Few people have impacted the day-to-day management of people and companies more than KEN BLANCHARD. His phenomenal best-seller, The One Minute Manager (co-authored with Spencer Johnson), has sold 9,000,000+ copies and been translated into 25 languages. He leads the Ken Blanchard Companies®, a global leader in workplace learning, productivity, leadership, and team effectiveness.

MICHAEL O'CONNOR co-founded and directs the Center for Managing by Values. He specializes in strategy, behavior, and process-driven performance. With Ken Blanchard, he co-authored Managing by Values.

DR. CARL EDEBURN has spent 25 years consulting on key management and leadership issues. A certified trainer for the Ken Blanchard Companies, he has co-developed several Blanchard instruments.

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 266 pages
• Publisher: FT Press; 1 edition (September 5, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0131470256
• ISBN-13: 978-0131470255
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #376,330 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars This is a useful book, November 16, 2005

By 

DCF - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Leader Within: Learning Enough About Yourself to Lead Others (Hardcover)

This book can be useful to any man or woman who already is, or wants to become, an effective, if not wise, leader of other people.

The book is well named; it is about self-knowledge as a prerequisite to effective leadership of others. It is written to be used, more than read and returned to a shelf. My copy is well-marked with notes and highlighting. If you're looking for a cleverly written and poetically worded book, this is not it. This sits between a textbook and an everyday quick reference guide.

While the authors are well-credentialed management scientists and consultants, they have not included a lot of data or pithy stories about the effective and ineffective leaders they have helped over the decades. There are plenty of charts and diagrams for the major subjects, however. Overall, they have written a useful overview of the emotional, psychological and behavioral inclinations and choices upon which we base our leadership decisions and actions - with tips on how to use the information.

Too many managers, business owners, executives and team leads, among others, focus on how to get more out of people with little or no meaningful consideration about what they're putting into the environment. To deeply understand others, one must understand oneself. To understand human motivation, one must be in deep rapport with what motivates oneself. To really "get" what it means to effectively lead others toward important outcomes, a leader must go beyond merely remembering what it was like to follow (though for many that would be a terrific start) and truly empathize with one's followers. All of that is only possible when one is truly in touch with oneself.

I think this book provides easy-to-grasp explanations of established assessment tools, such as the DISC model. It discusses the important differences between one's disposition, values, and persona. It describes and explores another model called TISC, which helps one understand the blend of self-focused and other-focused motivations. One's disposition and valuing point of view will substantially determine how one "shows up" as a leader. The book includes an overview of the Situational Leadership model, too.

In short, you have to understand this stuff if you want to be more than a super-manager who drives people to make the numbers. If you want to be the kind of leader who affects people in powerfully positive ways, and is effective in the everyday world, spend some time with The Leader Within.

I look at it this way; this isn't the only book on leadership to own. But, it will help if it's one of them.


David Facer
www.ActivatePotential.com

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Some gems, but over-complicated by "academic" jargon, January 5, 2009

By 

Jin Wan (Auckland, New Zealand) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Leader Within: Learning Enough About Yourself to Lead Others (Hardcover)

This book is not bad per se. It covers useful points such as knowing yourself to lead, differentiating between your natural predispositions and your projected self, DISC model to help understand your predispositions, a small smattering of useful stories to illustrate the complexities in personality and behaviour (more would've been great) etc.

Unfortunately, it is shrouded in academia speak so it's almost like reading a university text book or academic journals. A simplified version of this book - while it may seem "dumbed down" to academics - will actually be much more practical and useful.

What I ended with up after reading this book, is a lot of definitions, terms, jargon, but found very little that is practical in real life. Pity, it could've been better. I'm surprised Ken didn't make use of his writing techniques from "Who Moved My Cheese?", which is so much more practical.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Leading others by understanding yourself, June 23, 2008

By 

Rolf Dobelli "getAbstract" (Switzerland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Leader Within: Learning Enough About Yourself to Lead Others (Hardcover)

Ken Blanchard is the draw in this group-authored book, even if he doesn't get top billing. The author of The One-Minute Manager and his co-writers Drea Zigarmi, Michael O'Connor and Carl Edeburn explain how to understand and shape your personality to become the kind of leader or manager you want to be. Their book is not a tract on cognitive science but rather a business text with useful exercises and insights - in particular, the notion of personality as layered, complex and malleable rather than hard and unchanging. The authors' charts are a bit of a hodgepodge; they occasionally strain for an image and their presentation of ideas can be confusing. However, getAbstract recommends this book to Blanchard fans and others who are striving to enhance their charisma and brush up their leadership style.