Publisher's Synopsis
This practical book offers you a cornucopia of exercises to help you on your journey towards becoming the leader of your dreams. In this book, you will find a wide variety of exercises offering challenges related to leadership. These challenges are opportunities to grow your skills in demanding situations, to adapt to those around you, and to overcome personal challenges. The exercises also offer you guidance for reflecting on and learning from those experiences and action plans to help you practice what you have learned. Many of the exercises have been developed and polished over a period of about 20 years of use by hundreds of developing leaders. These are supplemented by exercises that provide a taste of more comprehensive discussions of leadership developed by other authors. I hope that this "taste testing" will whet your appetite for these amazing resources. When people think of leadership, they often focus on individuals influencing others towards a common goal. They don't realize that awesome leadership is built upon several foundational prerequisite layers. Before being able to lead others, we need to build effective interpersonal relationships with them. It's equally true that we must be able to lead or manage ourselves before being able to lead others effectively. Moreover, to lead ourselves, we must know ourselves very well. Each of these elements serves as a foundation of this book. Some people might prefer to skip the bottom layers of the iceberg and focus simply on getting others to follow their orders. I have organized this book according to the following five foundations of leadership:1.Understanding what leadership means to you. This foundation helps you understand and learn from your past experiences related to leadership. These experiences greatly influence your expectations and perceptions about leadership as well as how you approach it. This foundation will help you answer the question, "What does leadership mean to me?"2.Building self-awareness. This foundation invites you to carry out exercises for developing your self-awareness. Developing a good sense of who you are will help you plan courses of action for becoming an awesome leader. As Laurent Lapierre says: "We manage as we are." This foundation will help you answer the question, "Who am I, and how might this influence me as a leader?" 3.Exercising self-leadership. Healthy self-leadership allows you lead from a position of strength and confidence. You need to be able to manage yourself well before you can manage others. This foundation offers you exercises aimed at integrating elements of healthy self-management in your personal and work lives. This foundation will help you answer the question, "How can I manage myself effectively?"4.Investing in interpersonal relationships. Good relationships are at the heart of leadership. This foundation presents exercises for building healthy, positive relationships and helps you reinforce your communication skills such as listening, questioning, and offering and receiving feedback. This foundation will help you answer the questions, "What do my relationships say about me?" and "How can I enrich my relationships with others?"5.Developing your team leadership. This foundation helps you work out your own approach to leadership, including how to increase your adaptability and effectiveness as a leader. This foundation will help you answer the question, "How can I help my team become successful and energized?"
