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Title: The Linkage Toolkit for Developing Leaders - Developing yourself, individuals, teams, and organizations for high-impact leadership by Louis Carter, Rick Waks, Jonathan Lehrich, Dana Davidson, Jay Alden Conger, Jay Conger ISBN: 0-9677965-6-3 Publisher: Linkage Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 2001 Format: Ring-bound List Price(USD): $159.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The Four Levels of Leadership
Comment: "No doubt you are reading the latest management books, attending seminars and conferences, and thinking long and hard about the best bosses you've had. Perhaps they offer helpful insight into your growing model of successful leadership. But day to day, despite your best efforts, such reading and contemplation are often difficult to apply to emerging situations that demand that you act as a leader. This toolkit is designed to close that gap, to provide practical advice, ideas, behaviors, assesments, skill-building activities, and methods for leading yourself and others in your daily work...If you are using this book as a development path-to build your leadership competencies-it moves concentrically from leading yourself, to individuals and teams, to whole organization. We believe an emerging leader must first develop self-awareness and personal commitment before he or she can effectively lead others. And you must be able to garner committed action from individual colleagues, employees, and your boss before you can effectively lead them collectively" (from the Introduction).
In this context, L.Carter, D.Davidson, J.Lehrich, and R.Waks (editors) divide this seminal toolkit into four major sections. As said by editors, these major sections are further divided into topical subsections. Each brief 'topic' reading is intended to provide context, background, and insight for the 'tool' that follows. Many tools are then followed by an application exercise that encourages you to 'try it out' in specific leadership situations.
I- Leading Self: "Leader," editors say, "know thyself. True leadership-leading individuals, teams, and organizations alike-comes from within, from the manager who draws from the wellspring of his own character. To trust others, trust yourself; to inspire others, find inspiration in who you are." Thus, in this section writers present tools to evaluate yourself: both your leadership behaviors (the Leadership Assessment Instrument) and your emotional intelligence.
II- Leading Individuals: "Leaders achieve results through others." Editors say, "As a leader, you owe it to your organization and to yourself-not to mention to your employees-to take responsibility for those you manage. How you treat and serve the individuals you lead will determine what you achieve, what you are accountable for, and what role you play in the future of others. With power comes obligation, and a leader accepts sober responsibility along with the power to hire, fire, and inspire. Such responsibility need not rely solely on intuition and hard-won experience." Then, in this section book gives you some ready resources like interviewing, delegation, performance coaching, managing challenging conversation, and building trusting relationship for the fundamental duties of a leader and manager.
III- Leading Teams: "Virtually all organizational work today is done in teams: project teams and quality teams, ongoing work teams and cross-functional improvement teams, virtual teams, problem-solving teams, and more." Editors write, "Individuals work interdependently on shared projects and toward a common purpose, often on more than one team at once. And for the individuals to succeed, for the groups to achieve its objectives with minimal rancor and recriminution, the team needs effective leadership. As leader you have the opportunity to watch and guide a team throughout its life cycle, from origin to deliverables, cradle to grave." Thus, in this section writers present the steps of that cycle to simplify your leadership responsibilities for choosing the team members, clarifying the group's objectives and its members' roles, facilitating effective team meetings, assessing and developing the team's processes, capabilities, and decision-making, reducing or forestalling conflict, and conducting team project reviews.
IV- Leading Organizations- "You may know yourself as a leader-your tendencies, your behavior, your principles and practices." Editors say, "You may serve as guide and inspiration for individuals, and as driving force or unseen hand for high-performing teams. But do you lead your organization? Are you an architect, change champion, teacher, and communicator on whom your company or institution can depend? An organizational leadership role demands foresight, reflection, and planning-very skills that are strongest when assisted by tools." In this section writers present techniques, devices, and systems to leading organizations.
Finally, L.Carter, D.Davidson, J.Lehrich, and R.Waks (editors) say that "Yet this single volume is not intended to be a comprehensive compendium of all the tools we could find or develop. That would be impractical and self-defeating. Instead it is meant to give you, the emerging and working organizational leader, a sampling of the range of tools needed to effectively manage the present and lead toward the future, and to apply them to the broadest span of situations you encounter."
Highly recommended.
Rating: 4
Summary: Take Charge of Your Own Leadership Development!
Comment: This Toolkit can make a tremendous difference in developing your leadership skills.
I have been to quite a number of excellent seminars and workshops on leadership, and always found the assessments, exercises, and examples to be the best part. Imagine how thrilled I was to see that this one Toolkit contains far more such material than all of the sessions combined I have attended over my entire career. If you want to be a better leader, your time would be better spent reading and applying this material in your current job than by taking on any graduate program in business that I am familiar with.
Decades ago, many young people got training and experience as leaders by serving in the military. These days, those who intend to have business careers seldom get that experience. Where is a person to learn leadership who doesn't go into the military? Probably not in business school, where a lot of the learning is associated with solving problems, learning concepts, getting background, and verbally sparring rather than moving people and an organization forward.
A very high percentage of the situations that a leader is likely to run into are handled at some level in this book, both at the individual, one-on-one, team, and organizational levels. I wish I had had this resource available to me when I had started my business career. It would have made a large difference.
Naturally, like any self-coaching guide, the benefit is all up to how seriously you take the content, how often you refer to it, and how much you try to learn. If you are reasonably committed to being a better leader, this Toolkit will take you as far as you can go short of having a personal leadership coach meet with you for an hour a week.
Each section describes briefly the theory of what needs to be done, gives you a self-assessment tool to check out your tendencies, gives you an example to make the point concrete, and suggests how to proceed to get better.
I was particularly pleased to see that this Toolkit encourages developing a better network of relationships, learning how to foster innovation, shaping your own leadership learning, coaching others, managing challenging conversations, influencing without authority, interviewing to select the right people for a job or a team, locating organizational stalls, and planning a business case to lead a specific change. Most leaders I know in organizations would candidly confess to lacking background in at least two of these areas.
The only thing I was disappointed in was that the Toolkit ducks the issue of leadership versus management as being "moot." I don't agree. To oversimplify the point, leadership is about going in the right direction, and management is about efficiently getting to whatever direction you happen to be aiming at. Most organizations have very little leadership in this sense, and way too much management. As a result, clearly this book also has a lot of management information as well as leadership information, but the area of picking the right direction probably could have used more attention.
Reading this Toolkit also made me think about the reasons why I wanted to be a leader, which is to make a positive difference. I wonder how leaders can prepare their own motivations for serving more than their own career desires. Stephen Covey has written about this subject in Principle-Centered Leadership if you are interested.
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Title: The Resilience Factor: 7 Essential Skills for Overcoming Life's Inevitable Obstacles by Andrew Shatte, Karen Reivich ISBN: 0767911903 Publisher: Broadway Pub. Date: 08 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Team Handbook Third Edition by Barbara J. Streibel, Brian L. Joiner, Peter R. Scholtes, Peter R Scholtes, Barbara J Streibel ISBN: 1884731260 Publisher: Oriel Inc Pub. Date: 24 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $39.00 |
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