Product Description

A human behavior expert reveals that what leaders know about themselves is more important than their leadership skills and job knowledge.

Who we are on the inside can determine leadership success more than what we do or what we know. In Leadership Beyond Reason, Dr. Townsend explores the critical role of the leader's internal world, the world of passion, emotions, intuition, creativity, values, self-awareness, conscience, and spiritual life. Unveiling links between personal and organizational success or failure and the contents of a leader's "heart," the author shows that leaders excel not just through skill and smarts but by connecting with others using  competencies, like curiosity, attention, reality assessment, distortion detecting, relationship building, ownership, and living with ambiguity. This is the leadership book only a world-respected psychologist could have written, and it is revolutionary in its insight.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #109380 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780785228776
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

About the Author
Dr. John Townsend is a psychologist, popular speaker, and the best-selling author and co-author of numerous books, including the Gold Medallion Award-winning Boundaries and God Will Make a Way. He is co-host of the nationally syndicated New Life Live! daily radio programme. He holds a doctoral degree in clinical psychology from Rosemead Graduate School of Psychology at Biola University.

Customer Reviews

A Good Book on the "Internal World" of Leaders
Leadership is influence. And influence is a rational process. Leaders analyze their situation, strategize a way forward, and incentivize others to move in the right direction.

Influence also draws upon nonrational factors, however. Nonrational does not mean irrational. The former is against reason, the latter beyond it. In Leadership Beyond Reason, John Townsend addresses the nonrational side or leadership by looking at values, thinking processes, emotions, relationships, and the experience of transformation.

Townsend is a Christian clinical psychologist and author of several best-selling books, including Boundaries, Who's Pushing Your Buttons?, and It's Not My Fault. His interest in emotional well-being is evident throughout the book. Indeed, the book's thesis is that "[g]reat leaders succeed by harnessing the power of both the external world and the internal world," that is, "the world of objective reality and the world of subjective response."

In my opinion, the chapter on emotions is worth the price of the book. Feelings, Townsend writes, "alert you that something is going on, something you need to pay attention to and deal with. That something may be an event outside of you or one inside." Whether negative or positive, emotions signal you that something needs to change. A successful leader listens to his emotions and makes the right changes.

Most of Townsend's examples in this book are drawn from the business world, but what he writes is applicable to leaders in all kinds of organizations, including churches and non-profits. To be successful, leaders should know their "business," but in addition, they must know themselves.

Tepid Leadership Advice
Leadership Beyond Reason by Dr. John Townsend is a book that deals with a leader's internal world of values, thoughts, emotions, and relationships. I found that the material on values and relationships lined up will with what I have read from James Kouzes and Barry Posner in The Leadership Challenge and A Leader's Legacy. The chapters on thoughts and emotions were areas about which I had not read a lot previously. The section of the "Thoughts" chapter on intuition was pretty interesting to me. Most of you have had an instinct about something that you couldn't explain whether it was to hire a person or take on a project. Townsend asserts that our intuition points us in the areas in which we need more information. The chapter on emotions was also helpful. As he says, our emotions have causes, and both good and bad emotions tell us something. Thus it is important for a leader to explore the cause of their emotions rather than the prevailing wisdom to merely control them. For example, if you find yourself annoyed every time you are in a particular person's presence, spend the time to figure out why rather than avoiding them. The final chapter on Transformation should have been a "closer" that really drives things home for the reader. However, I found this to be more scattered, and I had to really concentrate to keep going. I especially disliked the section on spirituality. Townsend wastes space speaking about God in generic terms that won't offend (almost) anyone, but it is clear where he stands with this book being published under the Thomas Nelson imprint. It would have been more meaningful to acknowledge that spirituality is a matter of conscience on which each person must make their own decision while then going into specifics on how his own faith has made a difference to him. What the reader is left with in this section is tea that is neither warm nor hot, and it makes you want to spit it out.

Overall, Leadership Beyond Reason should be better than it was. The difference making subjects are there, but the delivery is so so. I found Townsend's writing style hard to take for more that 20 or so pages at a time. This should have been an afternoon event, but it lasted for over a week. I would recommend Kouzes and Posner's material as being much more fruitful and engaging.

Overall: C-

Leadership from a different perspective
John Townsend takes a different approach to leadership in Leadership Beyond Reason. He advances the theory that to truly be effective as a leader you must develop the relationship skills to supplement the management by reports, graphs and charts. In other words, instead or relying solely on the numbers, you must lead people based on values, thoughts, emotions and relationships.

The other major point of the book is that leadership is an internal as well as an external process. You must be comfortable with who you are and what you stand for. Far too many leaders try to lead from a goal oriented perspective. They focus on the externals and overlook the fact that they are leading humans and that humans are emotional beings.

While the book has a few interesting insights and does make a point or two about good leadership, for the most part it is a rather shallow treatment of the subject. It is written from the self-help, feel good standpoint rather than delving deep into the psychology of the subject.

I generally read with pen in hand to underline passages that I feel are profound, that make a really strong point. It is not unusual for me to highlight between 30 and 50 passages in a book. In this one I only marked two passages.

The book is extremely easy to read with lots of white space. It really does not introduce a lot of new thought or challenges.

If you are looking for an easy book to read that treats leadership in rather general terms, then you might find this book helpful. In my opinion, it is not a real serious study in leadership.

John does suggest coaching and mentions his other books and programs quite often. If this sort of self-promotion bothers you, you have been warned.