Leading the Leaders

This book was written to help you discover your basic management style and compensate for your weaknesses so you can work better with others - subordinates, peers, and those you report to - whose management styles are different from your own. It does this by providing prescriptions to follow for each management style, based on my experiences in coaching executives around the world for the past 30 years.

The prescriptions are intended to enrich management styles, not to achieve a total personality change in managers.

The purpose of coaching is to make managers more flexible so they can work with others whose styles are different.

My premise, which I fully developed in The Ideal Executive and reiterate in Chapter 1 of this book, is that the ideal leader, manager, or executive does not and cannot exist. No one can excel at all of the roles expected of leaders or managers. A person may excel in one or more roles but not in all of them under all circumstances.

Different people organize, plan, and motivate --differently. Simply put, different managers manage differently. What is needed is a complementary team. So how can we work together?

The first step is to understand that the different styles speak different languages; they infer different meanings from different words and gestures. While conflict between the different styles is unavoidable, learning to speak the language of the people we work with allows us to build and nourish a complementary team and prevent conflict from becoming destructive.

Pay attention to how your behavior affects others. If you know your style, you also know that your style of communicating is apt to be problematic for the other styles. If you know how it is problematic, you can compensate. This is the purpose of the book: How to compensate for your style so you can work with others, and how to coach them so they can work with each other.