The Perfect Leadership Book for You
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If you want to get better at being a boss, you've got a problem. Books are everywhere but not one is a perfect fit.
Eleven thousand business books are published every year. Amazon currently lists more than 60 thousand books on leadership alone. There are also magazines, web sites, e-books, audiobooks, podcasts, and blogs. They all offer ideas on what to do.
But nothing's a perfect fit. You're in a specific situation with unique experiences and your own personality. So while you can get some good ideas from those books, you've always got adapt what you read.
The only solution is to write your own leadership book. It will be something like a journal and it will help you critique your performance, reflect on it, and improve it. Here are some things to include.
Write about your challenges at work. Reflect on what you can do to improve things and on things you want to try.
Write about your results. Reflect on what worked and what didn't and how you can do better next time.
Write about your reading and formal learning. Reflect on the ideas they spark and how you might put those ideas into practice.
Write about other people and their actions. Reflect on what you can learn from them.
Write about your heroes and mentors and role models. Reflect on how you want to be like them and how you want to be different.
Make this a bound book. That's provides some permanence. I've still got some of mine from thirty years ago.
Take a little time every day to write whatever you're concerned about. Take a little time once a week to review what you've written.
You'll wind up with a book that will never make the best seller list. No problem. What your book will do is accelerate your learning and development.
Boss's Bottom Line
Feedback, reflection and adjustment are the keys to learning and developing faster. Your own leadership journal will help you do all three in just a few moments a day.
Check out the following related posts
Becoming a Great Leader is Up to You
Leadership Development: Big Company Programs and You
Leadership Development: Getting the Most from a Class
Leadership Development: Crafting Your Personal Development Plan
Leadership Development: When to hire a coach
Leadership Development: How to hire a coach
Leadership Development: Starting Your Personal Reading Program
Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.
Categories: leadership development
Tags: Leadership Development
Wally, coming from me this may seem odd, but this post left me speechless for a few moments. Such a simple, yet profound idea. As you know, one of my soapboxes is to restore thoughtfulness (not to be confused with politeness) into business, leadership and management.
The way you have expressed this concept, integrating thoughtfulness, reflection, analysis, and learning is so powerful.
Great post, thanks for reminding me!
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Thanks for the kind words, Dave. I'm with you. We've created a world where measurement is often used as a substitute for judgment and where thinking deeply or reflecting on our experience is deemed a waste of time by many.
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This is an excellent piece of wisdom, Wally!
So many leaders spend too little time in reflection. Your advice allows for the development of a tangible discipline that action oriented leaders could not possibly confuse with "wool gathering". Bravo.
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<bowing> Thanks, Gwyn. The only way to get better results is to do things differently. And the only way to get an idea of what that might be is to reflect on what you've done and what the results were. Reflection also helps you move past the first good idea to others that might be better.
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Love the idea.
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Thanks, Katrina. If you truly love it, you will try it to find out if it fits into your life.
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Sound advice, Wally. Thanks for (inadvertently) backing me up on this one. Most of my new clients get a leather-bound book to do just what you suggest. Many never use it. Since they won't take my advice, perhaps I'll just refer them to yours.
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Good idea, Mary Jo. I could be archetypal consultant, getting off a plane and charging a high fee to tell you what your people have been telling you for years.
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What a great idea! . Very therapeutic. Also I agree that reflection is part of growing your on leadership skills, otherwise how to you go from managing yourself to managing a few people to managing a business? You have to broaden your thinking as you broaden your span of control. See my recent post "Managers I have Known."
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Thanks for stopping by. I liked the vision of progression in thinking to match progression in responsibility.
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Good idea. I also would suggest the Leader's Handbook by Peter Scholtes
I must say I like the idea of doing it as a blog versus a bound book myself. It does lack something of a bound book but has lots of other value.
Another option is to do it as a wiki (even if you are the only author) which lets you easily update as needed and provides better structure than a blog.
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Thanks for the book recommendation, John. You make a good point that there are other ways to do the "book" part of the process. Since I started out before personal computers were invented, I used a bound book and wrote things out by hand. That's still a more reflective method for me than any digital form. In the end, I don't think form matters as much as finding a way to gather observations and descriptions and then reflect on them. I think some kind of permanence is good, so you can go back and look at things. Thanks for the insights.
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