Product Description

The first step towards becoming an outstanding leader: know yourself. Thisbook will help you understand yourself as a leader...so you can change, grow,and become powerfully more effective. Authored by four world-renownedleadership experts, including the legendary Ken Blanchard, it draws on anextraordinary seven-year research study on how successful corporate executivesexert influence. The authors begin by presenting self-change as your musturgent leadership challenge, and showing how your values and personalitygovern your actions, even when you don't realize it. You'll examine the innerself you're currently bringing to your "moments of influence," discovering howyour disposition, values, beliefs, and persona are contributing right now to yoursuccess -- or failure. Throughout, the authors present proven, values-basedapproaches to leadership in both group settings and one-to-one contexts. TheLeader Inside will help you connect to facets of yourself you've neverdiscovered, and liberate personal energy you never knew you had. And it willhelp you rekindle your team's spirit, so you can work together to build stronger,more effective, more joyful organizations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #289773 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 266 pages

From the Back Cover

Discover the leader inside you!

• Become the leader you've always wanted to be
• Understand how you behave at your key 'moments of influence'
• Reinvent your approach for better results -- and happier people
• Build more effective teams and organizations, without compromising your values
• Co-authored by Ken Blanchard, co-author of The One Minute Manager

If you lead... if you intend to lead... if you work with leaders... you need this book.

You need it to discover why...
...self-change is your most urgent leadership challenge
...your values, beliefs, and personality are driving your success -- or your failure -- even when you don't realize it

You need it to discover how to...
... lead brilliantly, in ways that reflect your own values and personality
... connect in both group settings and one-to-one contexts
... liberate personal traits and energies you never knew you had
... rekindle your team's spirit -- and build stronger, more effective, more joyful organizations.

Liberate the outstanding leader inside you -- with The Leader Within.

About the Author

About the Authors

DR. DREA ZIGARMI is a respected management consultant, bestselling author, and powerful trainer and motivational speaker. He co-authored Leadership and The One Minute Manager, and has co-developed several Blanchard Training and Development products, including its Leader Behavior Analysis instruments.

Few people have impacted the day-to-day management of people and companies more than KEN BLANCHARD. His phenomenal best-seller, The One Minute Manager (co-authored with Spencer Johnson), has sold 9,000,000+ copies and been translated into 25 languages. He leads the Ken Blanchard Companies®, a global leader in workplace learning, productivity, leadership, and team effectiveness.

MICHAEL O'CONNOR co-founded and directs the Center for Managing by Values. He specializes in strategy, behavior, and process-driven performance. With Ken Blanchard, he co-authored Managing by Values.

DR. CARL EDEBURN has spent 25 years consulting on key management and leadership issues. A certified trainer for the Ken Blanchard Companies, he has co-developed several Blanchard instruments.

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface

The Book's Origin

The Leader Within is the result of our many years of experience training, consulting, coaching, and researching American business managers and leaders. At the heart of this book is a seven-year, in-depth, statistical study of the influence behaviors used by American corporate executives. Although the report's statistics are not included (to reduce reading time and save space), the conclusions presented in this book are sound and substantiated.

The Book's Purpose

This book is a self-development resource; its purpose is to help you learn more about yourself so that you can change, grow, and become a better leader. Its primary objective is to present some well-developed models that help you re-create or reinvent your leadership approach so that you can bring about better organizational results and greater human satisfaction.

Knowing yourself is key to being an effective leader. The models explained in this book can help you examine the inner self that you bring to your organizational life's frequent "moments of influence." Examining how you presently behave as a leader, and then contrasting and comparing those behaviors with possible alternatives, can provide you with invaluable insights for becoming a more effective leader.

The Book's Intended Audience

We wrote this book for managers and leaders--people who earn a living by influencing others within organizational settings. However, other audiences will also find it informative and helpful. Consultants can utilize the information within this book to better understand the executives they coach. Human resource professionals can use this book as a tool for broadening and refining their executive development programs. College and university faculty can use this book as a challenging and stimulating text for their own leadership teaching or research, and the research formulated by the students they advise.

The Authors' Frame of Reference

The working definition of leadership used in this book is, of course, values based, as is any definition of worth. We define a leader as anyone who acts to arouse, engage, and satisfy the motives of the follower--within an environment of conflict, competition, or change--that results in the follower taking action toward a mutually shared outcome or vision.

As you will see, that vision must be growthful for the follower, ultimately societal, and also contribute to the well-being of all involved. The values inherent in this definition involve the follower's growth and development; they imply the follower's eventual independence and autonomy of action when serving the (organizational) outcome or vision.

The term servant leader might come to mind. The leader who is a servant judges his or her success not only in the accomplishment of the outcome, but also by the effects the accomplishment has on those who do the accomplishing. Are those who are led healthier, happier, committed, and more apt to become leaders themselves? The true intent of the servant leader is to serve both the vision and all those who seek to achieve that vision. The servant leader's inner intent is not self-oriented, but other-oriented. Such a leader ensures that other people's high-priority needs are being served.1

The Book's Organization

The book is organized into seven chapters, which move from a discussion of an individual's inner makeup or personality dimensions, to the role of a leader, to the implications inner personality has on an individual's potential to carry out the leader role. Each chapter is divided into two sections that help organize the seven key chapters.

• Chapter 1 discusses the leadership challenge of self-change.

• Chapter 2 defines the parameters of personality and leadership.

• Chapters 3, 4, and 5 present in-depth discussions and models for understanding the three key aspects of personality: disposition, values, and persona.

• Chapter 6 discusses leader behaviors in a one-to-one context.

• Chapter 7 makes the important connection among disposition, values, and leadership behaviors. This chapter examines the relationship between personality and leadership behaviors that may help you become a more effective leader.

The Authors' Hopes

We wrote this book with the hope that increased self-awareness would result in better leadership and fewer negative personalities in organizations. We hope for less ego, politics, personal hurt, and psychological turn off on the part of all people in organizations; and we hope for more organizational go, action, personal joy, and liberation of personal energy and motivation for organizational purpose. Our dream of healthier organizations will happen more readily if leaders become more self-aware and elicit more self-awareness from their followers.

Discovering who you are and what you can be is a lifelong challenge. Connecting to the "lost" or as yet undiscovered facets of your humanness will make you a better leader and will go far to rekindle the spirit of the people you lead.

D.Z., K.B., M.O., C.E.
March 2004

Endnotes

Greenleaf 1991.

Customer Reviews

This is a useful book
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

Some gems, but over-complicated by "academic" jargon
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.

Leadership Analysed From Within Oneself
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.