Customer Reviews

People Follow You: The Real Secret to What Matters Most in Leadership

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Bad bosses are oblivious to the fact that leading people requires humility, savvy, authenticity, and keen interpersonal skills, according to Jeb Blount in this book. Many organizations have elaborate incentive schemes in place designed to improve employee satisfaction and retention, yet fail to deal with the one thing which causes most employee dissatisfaction: poor leadership.

The book provides a broad range of leadership wisdom, including:

* Leadership success is directly related to the quality of the relationships that leaders build and sustain with the people they lead.
* You need your people more than they need you.
* Because you are the boss, people watch and analyse your every move, looking for meaning and clues as to what you are thinking.
* If you put the interests of your followers before your own, that helps you build an emotional connection which opens them to accepting your coaching and directing.
* Leaders maximise their own performance by doing whatever it takes to help their followers be more successful.
* Trust between leaders and followers is built by leaders doing what they say they will do, keeping promises, and behaving in a consistent and professional manner.
* Positive emotional experiences strengthen a relationship and engender loyalty sufficient to withstand difficult conditions.

There are many different books on leadership, offering many different opinions about what leaders should and should not do. In my opinion this book is one of the better ones. Instead of prescribing a broad variety of different actions that leaders are supposed to take, it concentrates on the critical aspect of leadership which is most often overlooked: the relationship which a leader has with his or her followers. I would recommend this book to anyone who is responsible for supervising someone else.

I have had the privilege of working with Jeb twice in my career and am better because of those experiences. His ability to frame what many would suggest are basic ideas into a series of suggestions and examples makes this book worth the time. As a leader, you have a great responsibility and Jeb is helping you understand how to be better. Nothing complicated but it all requires discipline and a continual focus. Every minute of every day. Perhaps the best way to think about that is his comment that "normal people" would not want to do what it takes. Normal people want to have balance and be able to relax. As a leader, you are always on stage and no normal person wants that. So while not complicated, the ideas that Jeb asks each of us to focus on are hard work. Simple yet hard. Read the book (simple) and then act (hard).

Jeb has outlined the five key levers that will give an aspiring leader the blueprint to become a successful, proven leader. I have been following Jeb's teachings for about nine years, and I must admit that my career has benefited from his series of books and podcasts. I'm a firm believer of "the proof is in the pudding" and I can truly say that when I started listening and following Jeb's teaching, my career went from an individual Sales Rep in Birmingham, AL to a Regional Sales Manager managing half of the country in New York City. I highly recommend this book.

First off, thanks for writing "People Follow You" Mr. Blount! This is a must read for anyone in a leadership position.

We all have worked for bad bosses at one time or another, but we also get that one person who is not a boss and is a leader that we would run through walls for to get the job done. This book provides the secrets on how to be one of those leaders.

As a leader, people must believe and trust in you first, and they must believe that you have their best interest at hand to make them succeed in their current role and their career.

"People Follow You" not only reinforces that concept but also provides so many insights on how to be a better leader, manager and coach. In the book, Mr. Blount shares with you the "Five Levers of Leadership" and much more to enhance your performance as a leader. Most leadership books focus on theory, this book focuses on the interpersonal skills necessary to be successful as a leader and build stronger connections and relationships with your people.

One of the biggest "AHA" moments for me was in chapter 6 "Position People To Win". The chapter opens up with the following "....leadership is simply one person (the leader) helping another person (a follower) win. Otherwise, what is the point? Helping others win is accomplished through leading, managing, and coaching." Wow - that hit home for me and reminded me of my mentor who once said to me "You role is to make people successful".

I recommend "People Follow You" by Jeb Blount to anyone in a leadership position looking for the winning formula to help him/her be a better leader and to help their team succeed in today's competitive environment.

It is about building trust through action. It is about human relationships. The best leaders are the best relationships builders. As a leader you serve your people. A must read for anyone in a leadership position. It is about people first and not numbers. People make it possible to deliver the numbers.

this was a great read in not only learning to be a leader but to garner respect in all the relationships around you, work related or otherwise. i highly recommend it for one and all.

Sometimes I review books. Most of the time, I have no relationship with the author and feel free to write whatever I want. For those of you who've been reading this blog for a while, you would agree that I am, generally, not afraid to say what is on my mind.

But, this book is different. I know the guy who wrote it. We're not best buddies and we don't hang out but I've contributed to his blog (salesgravy.com) - the most important sales blog on the internet. That means that if his book is garbage and I say so, he could use his influence to crush me, and my modest success, like a garbage truck running over a grape.

Luckily for me, Jeb Blount has, once again, provided the business world with something extraordinarily useful. His book, People Follow You, provides direction to business leaders - especially sales leaders - through a pleasing combination of wisdom, guidance and anecdotes.

Let's take a look under the hood:

Jeb's first chapter sets up the reason he wrote the book. Bad leadership causes more damage to companies than any other single factor - and it is often ignored as the root cause of a lack of employee production. From this theme, he takes us down the path of explaining how business leaders can achieve greater employee production .

I loved the descriptions of the Seven Essential Principles of Leadership:

1) You need your people more than they need you:
2) Follow the Golden Rule
3) You are always on stage
4) People don't do dumb things on purpose
5) People do things for their reasons, not yours
6) Change behaviors, not beliefs or styles
7) You are not normal

Jeb explains the importance of each and he provides examples of real-life managers that have made the mistakes that inspired the passages. These anecdotes make the book very easy to read with a pleasant cadence and a sense that Jeb is actually sitting with you telling stories in your favorite reading room.

Some books simply reflect the opinions of their author - based on the author's experiences and their interpretation of those experiences. Jeb does some of that in the book, but he also has put in the hard work of interviewing business leaders to glean their insights and build statistical significance for his conclusions. For this reason, you'll especially enjoy the discussion of the Five Levers of Leadership:

1) Put people first
2) Connect
3) Position people to win
4) Build trust
5) Create positive emotional experiences

The rest of the book builds on the foundation established in these early chapters. Jeb demonstrates clearly how others use the Essential Principles and pull on the Five Levers to achieve greatness in their organization and he shows you how you can do it, too. What's cool is that his advice is applicable to any size business in any industry category.

In this excellent book, Jeb Blount successfully (and appealingly) makes the case that there's a high cost to poor leadership, and then offers five critical points of leverage for providing a far-too- uncommon but all too necessary level of leadership if the modern organization has any hopes of surviving the roller coaster ride of change.

He offers a plethora of actionable advice on a wide range of interpersonal topics: positioning employees for their best chance at success; how to build enough loyalty into employee relationships to keep top performers loyal; and how to help people grow and thrive, individually and together.

My favorite moment comes early on, when he makes a key distinction between leadership, management and coaching. Honestly, that's the clearest set of distinctions I've ever read on the matter!

I'm keeping my review short, so you can use this time to read the book! Two thumbs up, highly recommend. [...]

I'll admit that I am a Jeb Blount fan. I loved Power Principles and People Buy You is the best sales book I've ever read. But People Follow You blew me away! As a sales manager I manage 8 salespeople. It is a hard job and there are days that I wish I was just selling because it would be easier. This book inspired me to want to keep leading. It reminded me why I chose to be a sales manager in the first place. Any person who manages people should read this book. It is fantastic.