Customer Reviews

The Versatile Leader: Make the Most of Your Strengths Without Overdoing It (J-B US non-Franchise Leadership)

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I approached this book with a little skepticism: Here it comes, another spin on leadership. (I read more than a hundred books a year, many of them related to management and leadership.) By the third chapter, however, I concluded that Kaplan and Kaiser are not just dressing up old concepts for a new day. They offer a paradigm shift and research to back it up. Think optimize, not maximize. Think right-sizing. This places the onus on leadership aspirants to develop the elusive skill of versatility, which is partly based in the individual's personality psychology. The authors have researched and validated an approach to measuring this skill and providing individuals with the specific marching orders they need to capture this subtlety for themselves. The book includes their research.

I was simulataneously reading a new book, "Personality and the Fate of Organizations" by Robert Hogan, Ph.D., author of the popular Hogan Personality Inventory. Hogan praises Kaplan and Kaiser's work, which is no small praise given Hogan's 30-year career studying the science of personality in the workplace.

The book is also well written, avoiding the dryness of many management books with a broad array of illustrations from literature, history, and other research. Highly recommended.

Part leadership guide, part applied research, this engaging book explores leadership through a new lens to reveal a powerful set of insights for leaders at all levels, as well as for coaches and mentors who would help them.

As a research tool, this book starts with a novel concept of leadership versatility and explores the implications. Kaplan defines "versatility" defferently from other meanings of the word. One key implication for this definition is that overdoing a leader's strengths is as much a problem as lacking the strengths. Leaders need to learn how to make the most of their strengths--but without overdoing it.

A second level is the book's new leadership model, comprising two complimentary skill sets--forceful and enabling leadership, and strategic and operational leadership. Forceful leaders take charge and make tough calls, for instance; enabling leaders, by comparison, empower others to share the limelight and so on. These dualities will describe what is required of leaders and where they go wrong.

As a leadership guide, the book operates at a third level by offering actionable advice about addressing strengths, weaknesses and strengths overdone. Here the book brims with practical tips.

Kaplan presents his cases with the candor and conviction of someone who's clearly been there--behind closed doors in coaching sessions--helping leaders to learn.

Last but not least, I recommend the book's appendix ("Research and development of the Leadership Versatility Index") by Rob Kaiser.

In sum, Kaplan and Kaiser are at the top of their game. I believe this is the best new leadership book in years.

The Versatile Leader demonstrates great insight into the challenge of practicing managers to adequately recognize their strengths and calibrate their use for best results. I have used the LVI 360 assessment tool successfully with my clients for several years and I have been waiting for this book - it did not disappoint. It is, in fact, a masterful description of both the "what" and the "how" of leadership effectiveness.

This is a great book.
Very clearly written and easy to use (e.g., end of chapter summaries provide an effective way to get each chapter's essence quickly).
Lots of good examples and case studies that bring the theory to life.
Also, the authors provide many tips on HOW to become a better leader.
Most importantly, the underlying principle of this book -- versatility is the key to effective leadership -- is not just an intuitive idea, but it is also based upon sound research.
If you really want to become a better leader, then this is a book you'll want to read. Guaranteed.

There are many management "aha's" in this book. Kaplan and Kaiser draw on extensive formal research to give down-to-earth, practical advice to people leading organizations of all sizes. A key insight is that strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin -- the core capabilities and behaviors of a leader. Another insight is the notion of using "the right amount" of a managment attribute and avoiding "overdoing" and "underdoing." I'm buying copies for the top 30 leaders of my company.

Randy Battat, President and CEO, Airvana, Inc.

Kaplan and Kaiser's new book "The Versatile Leader" is definitely NOT the latest "me too" leadership book for an already overcrowded bookshelf. It's a great piece of work and the only really new and significant add to leadership thinking in a VERY long time. This is one you'll want to keep handy to refer to, and to refer to friends and colleagues. It explores a new view that leadership effectiveness and ineffectiveness is tied to Leadership "lopsidedness", the tendency of leaders to "over-do" some things and "under-do" others. K and K urge "volume control" and a kind of leadership flex along two crucial dimensions of leadership behavior: Being strategic v. operationally focused and being forceful v. being enabling. Instead of the "either/or" frame, Kaplan and Kaiser suggest it's a "both/and" solution with lots of tips on how to be a versatile leader. It's an intelligent and practical answer written to leaders and based on years of sound research.

Kaplan and Kaiser assert that leaders must be able to master styles of leadership that seem to be opposites; they must be both enabling and forceful, while also being operational and strategic. Most leaders tend to prefer one style from each of these pairs, but the best leaders use the right amount of each style at the right time. The authors also introduce an innovative approach to using 360-degree survey data and explain why many leaders tend to overuse or underuse some of the leadership styles. This terrific new book expands on the concepts first outlined by Kaplan and Kaiser in their article, "Developing Versatile Leadership," which was published in the Summer 2003 issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review.

Too many leadership books are just plain fluff. On the other side of things, too many academic leadership books are inaccessible to most readers. Just as Kaplan and Kaiser demonstrate convincingly on the need for leader versatility, their overall approach demonstrates their own versatility in terms of taking the results of their rigorous research and presenting them in ways that are helpfull to leadership scholars as well as practicing managers. This is a really great book!

With Rob Kaiser, Bob Kaplan has written a book in which he explores a business topic that does not receive as much attention as it deserves: the need for a reliable tool by which to measure strengths overused. As one adage suggests, "If all you've got in your tool kit is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." However, that's only part of what proves to be an especially complicated problem. All organizations are involved in some form of leadership development each day, ranging from formal seminars and workshops to on-the-job training of direct reports. Countless strengths become weaknesses when taken to excess: specialization can become narrow-mindedness, confidence can become arrogance, reflection can become indecisiveness, etc. Kaplan notes that gifted leaders with whom he has been associated and of whom he had made (and shared the results of) an assessment were often the last ones to know about their gifts. "For years I had taken it for granted that, if they didn't already know they were strong in a given area, they simply welcomed the good news like a refreshing drink on a hot day." Not so. Therefore, "much of the work of development is getting the strengths to sink in. Half of leadership is on the strengths side."

Note: In this instance, I agree with Tom Rath and Marcus Buckingham that time and effort devoted to human development should focus almost entirely on an individual's strengths.

Kaplan's capstone concept in this book is versatility. That is, the ability to structure and balance aptitudes in complementary pairs. This is precisely what Howard Gardner recommends in Five Minds for the Future as does Roger Martin in The Opposable Mind. Kaplan includes in his concept the importance of proportionality. That is, use in the workplace of what is characterized as "excessive force" in law enforcement can be as much of a problem as, for example, tolerance of inappropriate behavior. Kaplan asserts (and I agree) that excesses as well as insufficiencies should be considered when assessing a leader's performance, and, that development of a leader's "versatility" should focus on improving balance and use of "pair-wise capabilities." The excesses of some leaders (whom Jean Lipman-Blumen describes as "toxic") and the damage they cause are immeasurable. Such leaders are probably beyond redemption.

The book is presented in ten chapters, organized within three Parts: In the first, Kaplan examines what he characterizes as a "disconnect between what is generally known about leadership and the way they are being assessed in most organization." He offers suggestions to correct various oversights. In Part II, he shifts his attention to two of the oppositions/dichotomies/polarities/dualities/etc. that are (arguably) the most important to a leader's effectiveness: forceful and enabling leadership, and, strategic and operational leadership. Then in Part III, Kaplan suggests ways to correct overdoing it, underdoing it, and a combination of both, lopsidedness. In Chapters 7-9, he describes the "outer/behavioral" work of development and the "inner/personal" work of development. In the last chapter, Kaplan reiterates all of his key points when offering a profile of "the multi-versatile leader" and suggests how to "boost" an individual's "pair-wise capabilities," notably the dualities of strategic-and-operational leadership and forceful-and-enabling leadership.

Kaiser wrote the Appendix in which he reviews the research and development of the Leadership Versatility Index (LVI), "the 360-degree measure of versatility that is integral to this book." I especially appreciate his skillful use of two reader-friendly devices, a series of 13 "Tables" and four "Figures" that conveniently organize a wealth of key points, notably Tables 2 and 3 (i.e. conceptualizations of the "how" and "what" of leadership) and Figure A.2 (i.e. "Structural Model of Forceful and Enabling leadership"). In the Appendix, Kaiser offers comments that I think should be noted: "Self-ratings of versatility [such as the LVI enables] are not related to coworker ratings of overall effectiveness. In other words, the extent to which managers view their own leadership as versatile has almost nothing to do with how their colleagues see their overall effectiveness. This emphasizes the importance of feedback: lopsided leaders don't see the link to ineffectiveness that is so apparent to those around them."

Of course, none of the material in this book can do more than provide "scaffolding" for a leadership development program that each reader must build in collaboration with her or his own associates. The blueprint and construction materials are for them to select but Bob Kaplan and Rob Kaiser can provide valuable assistance when completing that process.

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Gardner's aforementioned Five Minds for the Future, Martin's The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking, and Lipman-Blumen's The Allure of Toxic Leaders: Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt Politicians--and How We Can Survive as well as Rath's StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup's Now, Discover Your Strengths. Buckingham's Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance, Dean Spitzer's Transforming Performance Measurement: Rethinking the Way We Measure and Drive Organizational Success, Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution co-authored by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson.

I had been looking for some time for a truly valuable book on manager effectiveness. With Kaplan's "The Versatile Leader," I finally found it! The analysis set out in this book is applicable to any manager seeking to improve his/her effectiveness, regardless of the size, culture, age, or style of the organization. Far superior to other recent books on management, and many management development courses, this book does not advocate a "right way" to manage. Instead, it teaches individual managers how to assess their own unique traits, and then how to act on the results of that analysis to achieve a much higher level of functioning. Better yet, this book's emphasis on the positive (it's entire premise is putting managers in a position of greater strength) makes it a pleasure to read.