Customer Reviews

The Leader Within: Learning Enough About Yourself to Lead Others

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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

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.

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.

I found this book to be very helpful for any one looking to improve their leadership skills. The authors ably and logically point out 'who you are (inside) governs, to a large a large extent, how you act and react (outside)'. This book helps with one's inner development that would pave the way to acquiring the skills necessary to be a leader.