A summary of things you should know about The Hidden Leader according to Scott Edinger: Introduction In this episode Scott Edinger takes a deep dive into his and Laurie Sain’sRead More
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]]>In this episode Scott Edinger takes a deep dive into his and Laurie Sain’s book, The Hidden Leader, where they reveal a unique way to develop greatness within a company.
In their book Edinger and Sain provide a systematic blueprint of a new style of leadership called Reverser Mentoring where senior leaders are mentored by their employees. The goal of the book is to show you how to recognize true leaders within your company, effectively utilize highly talented employees, and build valuable, long-lasting relationships with any employee.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who lead their organizations with a creative mindset and are looking for a way to effectively make the most of under-utilized employees.
There are thousands of books on leadership but the majority of them all seem directed at people who are in positions of leadership but there are very little directed at people who are your average citizen.
I designed the book to be read from front to back but if you want to cherry-pick information along the way you can do that too.
I want the reader to know that leadership has nothing to do with position or title; it’s what your actions are.
Hidden leaders look for what the outcome is or how success is defined in any given endeavor and then they figure out how they are going to do something. I am not saying they are renegades to the process but they are willing and able to look for the result that we are seeking and understand it. Another thing I see a lot of from hidden leaders is that they lead through relationships. They can’t boss anyone around or tell people what to do so they are really good at leading through relationships and that does not mean they are the popular person. Usually these hidden leaders have some kind of great technical expertise. They secondly understand the organization broadly and know way more than just their function and are able to knit teams together when they need to get things done. Thirdly, they are able to make a connection with people. The last thing that I wanted to share that I think is the heart of everything is the idea that hidden leaders demonstrate integrity.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 05:47
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, and become more you are a leader. “ – John Quincy Adams.
Companies like AT&T, Lenovo, and Los Angeles Times hire me to work with their senior leaders. I start with senior leaders because as the senior leaders go so goes the organization. I work with them on creating growth strategies and how to create differentiation in their business as well as how to lead effectively.
A few years ago I was talking with a former colleague of mine and he was telling me about a project he was working on called Reverse Mentoring. The notion here was that instead of senior partners mentoring, the associates would mentor the senior partners. And those senior partners learned a great deal not only about technology but also about client services and some new ways to approach that. I thought that was such an interesting idea and then the next day I read an article about reverse innovation. I ended up thinking about it all when the hidden leader concept was born and then I found my publisher.
High Performance Sales Organizations by Darlene Coker and Ed Gaizo
Buy The Hidden Leader by Scott Edinger and Laurie Sain on Amazon today
Visit EdingerGroup.com to learn more about Scott and his exclusive content
Visit TheHiddenLeader.com to learn more about the book
Follow Scott Edinger on Facebook and Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
The Prosperous Leader by Jacob Engel
The Discomfort Zone by Marcia Reynolds
The Best Place to Work by Ron Friedman
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Characteristics of A Great Leader
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Anticipate according to Rob-Jan De Jong: Introduction In this episode Rob-Jan De Jong reveals all his insights on his book, Anticipate, whereRead More
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]]>In this episode Rob-Jan De Jong reveals all his insights on his book, Anticipate, where he discusses the 2 skills that are key to mastering the art of leading others.
In his book De Jong provides a guide with practical techniques and inspirational stories that are designed to show you how to expand your visionary capacity when it comes to leadership. The goal of the book is to help you see things more clearly, rejuvenate your imagination, and manage from a birds-eye view in order to develop a strategic advantage on your competitors.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are managing the operations of a business and need help realigning their management strategy to predict the future of an organization.
My book not only tells you how important having a vision is in a leadership role but more important I explain how you go about developing that vision.
You can read the book straight through or jump in and out where needed.
The core takeaway is that vision is not something you are born with, it’s something you can develop.
The book is broken down into four areas.
The first area is your visionary content – how you go about trading ideas.
The second area is your visionary development – how you go about growing that capacity. Here I propose a developmental framework that really consists of two different dimensions, one is your ability to see things early and the other is how to in a responsible way put that together in a big picture story. I talk about the importance of envisioning multiple futures as you’re developing your big picture through techniques such as scenario planning.
The third area is about yourself and the productive behaviors that you must master in order to make this work. So there are things that you need to reflect on in terms of what builds my capability of doing this from a behavioral and mindset point of view. As you are reflecting on yourself it is equally very important to understand what it is that you stand for as a leader and the things that you truly believe in.
We bring it all together in the fourth area of the book and look at what it requires in order to make your vision fly as you communicate about it. In order for a vision to become powerful you have got to look at three different dimensions which you will find in the book.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 07:06
“Everything is the same until it is not.” – Ellen Langer
I am the father of twin 10 year old boys to whom I am also their soccer coach so I do a lot of work with leadership and put it to practice with 10 year olds. Professionally I work a lot with leadership teams and trying to get them to engage with their strategic agenda. The second thing I do is teach about this subject and I am involved in various executive education programs.
My inspiration comes from about seven or eight years ago while I was doing a lot of work in the field of leadership and at some point I asked the audience what’s the one word you find in the definition of leadership. Immediately they fired back the word vision. From there I asked all these leaders what their vision was and nobody could raise their hand and tell me because they didn’t have one. I didn’t understand how it could be that something we all know is important to have as a leader but yet we don’t have one. That fascinated me and was what inspired me to look into this subject and I wanted to share my discoveries of what I found over the eight years.
Mindfulness by Ellen Langer
Buy Anticipate by Rob-Jan De Jong on Amazon today
Visit RobJanDeJong.com to learn more about Rob-Jan and his book
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
The Prosperous Leader by Jacob Engel
Winning the Long Game by Steven Krupp
Own Your Future by Paul B Brown
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Characteristics of a Great Leader
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Credibility according to James Kouzes: Introduction In this episode James Kouzes reveals all his insights on Credibility where he discusses how successfulRead More
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]]>In this episode James Kouzes reveals all his insights on Credibility where he discusses how successful leaders gain credibility, lose their credibility and why people demand credibility.
In his book Kouzes and co-author Barry Posner provide you years of research, case studies, and data that uncover 6 disciplines that build true, long-lasting credibility that leadership experts are good at gaining. The goal of the book is to help you understand the basics of building credibility and why it is important for the growth of your personal and professional success.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are involved in every aspect in managing a business yet need help reinforcing their leadership abilities and building trust with others.
Many people talk about integrity and honesty as a leadership quality and intuitively that makes sense. But a couple guys at a university take that question to be also an empirical one. As so we decided to do research on that topic and found that’s one of the fundamental differences between our work and other people who write on leadership. Our work is evidence based and backed by many interviews with people who are practitioners. This book also specifically addresses what leaders can do to earn and sustain credibility.
It’s important that you start with the first couple of chapters and take a look at how we arrived at the conclusion that credibility is the foundation of leadership. From there you can read what is most relevant to you at the moment.
Remember the phase credibility is the foundation of leadership and behaviorally that is defined as do what you will say you will do.
How we came to the conclusion that credibility is the foundation of leadership is we asked people what they look for and admire in leaders. So in the opening of the book we talk about what we discovered. We discovered that there are four qualities which people consistently and globally have selected as the most important qualities that they would look for in a leader they would willingly follow. At the top of the list is honesty and that’s followed by being forward looking, then competent, and then inspiring. Three of those four words that people look for and admire in a leader make up what researchers call source credibility which is defined as trustworthiness or honesty, competence or expertise, and dynamism or being inspiring and upbeat. Those three comprise source credibility or what it takes for you to believe in someone who is delivering a message. And when they are speaking you have to believe that the person has integrity, that they are expert in what they are talking about, and that they have some energy that they put behind it. With that as the foundation we asked the people that were involved in our research to answer the question what is credibility behaviorally, how do you know it when you see it. People look for somebody who does what he/she says they will do and that observation about behavioral credibility lead then to us taking a look at what one does to sustain credibility. We came up with a framework that has three parts to it. And from that there were six disciplines which are discover yourself, appreciate continuance, affirmed shared values, develop capacity, serve a purpose, and lastly is to sustain hope.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 04:37
“If you don’t believe in the messenger you won’t believe the message.” – Kouzes and Posner first law of leadership.
I am co-author of The Leadership Challenge with Barry Posner which was our first book. I am also Dean’s Executive Fellow of Leadership at The Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University.
Barry and I wrote our first paper together at Santa Clara University where we met on shared values make a difference and that was in the early 80’s. And as part of that research we asked the question what do you look for and admire in a leader. And we found then, and when we did research on our second publication together, we asked that same question again and found a similar response. And that response was that essentially credibility is the foundation of leadership and so we decided that our second book together would be about that topic.
Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer
Give and Take by Adam Grant
Buy Credibility by James Kouzes on Amazon today
Visit LeadershipChallenge.com to learn more about James and his books
Follow James Kouzes on Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
The Prosperous Leader by Jacob Engel
Powerhouse by Mike Clayton
Pocket Man by Scott Jordan
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Fairness is Overrated according to Tim Stevens: Introduction In this episode Tim Stevens takes a deep dive into his book, Fairness isRead More
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]]>In this episode Tim Stevens takes a deep dive into his book, Fairness is Overrated, where he shares over 50 leadership principles that will revolutionize any workplace.
In his book Stevens provides you with a manual of tools, practical lessons, real truths, and relevant case studies that discuss the effective pillars of leadership that very successful leaders display. The goal of the book is to teach you how to increase your integrity, surround yourself with successful people, effectively manage a crisis, and develop a culture of true leadership at your organization.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are building a public figure persona or manage a team of people at an organization and want to take their leadership to a stronger, empowering level.
One thing that makes this book different is that it’s highly practical. I tried to make this book very reachable and easy to implement.
This book can be read from front to back or you could use it as a reference.
It’s possible to be a leader of any kind and not be an ego driven narcissistic leader. It’s possible to be a humble leader and to be very effective.
I broke my book down into four big categories and these are big categories because they are the huge portions of what is involved in leadership.
The first section is Being a Leader Worth Following and to me that’s where it starts. Because if you don’t have a place of character of integrity from which you lead then good chances are it’s going to unravel. In this section I talk about living a life with margins, just making sure that you build space in. I talk about being a lifelong learner and not getting to a place where you stop learning and stop growing. I talk about guarding your family, paying attention to your marriage, and your children. I think great leaders are those who not can manage their work life but also have a great marriage and manage their family life.
The second section is about finding the right people. The first chapter in this section is called A Resume is Worthless, and I break down and talk about the fact that resumes contain very little of what is important to me when I am hiring staff. One thing I don’t think employers use enough is social media. This is where you take advantage of their ‘social media scrub’ and looking for things that are important that will determine their future productivity as an employee.
Section three goes into building a healthy culture. You can have the right people but if you don’t pay attention and keep your eye on culture it can become toxic very quickly. As so there are 10-14 topics on building a healthy culture that I think are really important. One is as a leader you have to make a commitment to believe the best about your employees. Another one is that you have to let your leaders lead. You can just give them responsibility; you have to give them authority too. A lot of times, as leaders, we want them to do the work but we don’t want them to make the decision, and that’s dis-empowering.
The final section in the book is called Leading Confidently Through a Crisis. How we lead in those times is going to make concrete how we are remembered as a leader and how people follow us. So in this section I talk about dealing with resignation and how to let people go when they aren’t right for the company. I talk about what to do when you have e-mails flying back and forth and you are upset and how to back down from that. I talk about the pain of growth and the stages of failure that we can go through.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 05:29
“The success of a leader will rise or fall on the decisions that he or she makes about the people around him or her.” – Tim Stevens
I spent my first nine years of my adult life working for a nonprofit organization and was able to stretch my leadership skills there. From there I went into a very small startup local church that had just began going and was meeting in rented space. I was able to jump on the team with five others and see it grow over the next 20 years. Most recently I have joined an organization called the Vanderbloemen Search Group and we get to come along side churches and nonprofit organizations and help them find staff.
One of the inspirations behind writing this book was my own leadership growth. Being able to pass along some principles that had served me well over the years that someone along the way passed to me. Secondly I wanted to help people address startups and adventures while maintaining their personal values and integrity. That is a tough thing to do and I don’t see a lot of people writing on that particular subject.
Multipliers by Liz Wiseman and Greg Mckeown
Buy Fairness is Overrated by Tim Stevens on Amazon today
Visit FairnessIsOverrated.com to learn more about Tim and his book
Follow Tim Stevens on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Lead to Succeed by Chris Roebuck
The Prosperous Leader by Jacob Engel
Winning The Long Game by Steven Krupp
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Characteristics of a Great Leader
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Prosperous Leader according to Jacob Engel: Introduction In this episode Jacob Engel reveals all the insights on his book, The ProsperousRead More
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]]>In this episode Jacob Engel reveals all the insights on his book, The Prosperous Leader, where he provides a comprehensive look into how smart people can achieve success independently.
In his book Engel gives you 24 simple, actionable steps to realistically analyze your personal strengths and weaknesses so you can create your own path to economic success. The goal of the book is to help you maximize your strengths while developing the actual skills you need to strengthen your own leadership and management abilities.
This book is perfect for aspiring entrepreneurs who are having trouble cultivating their own unique abilities and need help maximizing their strengths to become effective leaders and smart managers.
I would say what I bring to the table is a few different things. Number one I’ve ran a business myself and been involved in growth so I’ve got the practical experience. The other thing is that everything in my book is practical, useful, and step by step doable for the reader.
Every chapter stands on its own so you can jump around.
If you did not make it through college or didn’t make the A/B grades don’t despair! Read!
One of the greatest challenges that I see with entrepreneurs and business owners is that they seem to be going around and around in circles. Meaning they start a business, have a good concept, they build on it, and then all of the sudden things start to fall apart and they are back to square one. Many entrepreneurs have not figured out what it is that makes them successful or prosperous.
In the beginning of the book I write about the foundations that a person needs in order to build a successful enterprise or organization. I start off with the concept that you have got to know yourself and understand your strengths, abilities, and weaknesses.
The second chapter that I go into is nature vs nurture. Are we nature or do we learn and acquire things as we go through life? What I argue here is that there is a third component and that is called choice. I try to define the different choices that a person can make.
In the third chapter I move over to effective communications. I walk through the three types of communicators which are passive, aggressive, and assertive and each one has its own issues. What you really want to achieve is assertive and effective communication.
In chapter four I talk about emotional intelligence and what that means is when you hire people there a two parts to the hire. There are technical skills and then there are the soft skills. And as a business owner you must know how both of those work.
In chapter six I talk about time management. Time management is a challenge for almost everybody and it’s a great tool for effectively managing your time for yourself and others.
Chapter seven I discuss smartphones and if they are really smart in the work place.
In chapter eight I speak about a very interesting subject which is known today as ADD/ADHD. Many business owners have it; some of them realize it and other don’t. I help coach business owners and managers through the issues of ADD.
In chapter 10 I talk a lot about goals and creating them.
Chapter 11 I speak about critical thinking and how people don’t like to think too much.
I also cover how to be the right type of boss, why every business owner needs a coach, and how to build trust with your people.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 08:57
I was born in Brooklyn New York and still live in New York. My father came to this country with no family, money or language and was lucky enough to find a job in a little spice shop. My dad eventually moved to Brooklyn to open up his own spice shop in 1955. I joined the business in 1975 and we were doing about 10 million dollars in sales which was very significant at the time. My dad passed away in 1995 when the business was doing over a hundred million and eventually the business grew close to two hundred million. I realized that I was in the people business and that intrigued me. Entrepreneurs have great advantages but it also comes with disadvantages and I figured out how to build on our strengths and how to mitigate our weaknesses. And that’s how I got into understanding everything about starting a business, running a business, and building a business.
I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d be a writer or a speaker. I was really motivated and inspired by my mentor who is probably one of the greatest people that studied and understands entrepreneurs. He told me to write a book and share my experiences and tips. So I spent about two years writing and rewriting.
Buy The Prosperous Leader by Jacob Engel on Amazon today
Visit TheProsperousLeader.com to learn more about Jacob and his book
Follow Jacob Engel on Facebook and Twitter
For questions contact Jacob via email here
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Lead to Succeed by Chris Roebuck
The Front-Line Leader by Chris Van Gorder
Winning the Long Game by Steve Krupp
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Characteristics of A Great Leader
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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