Leading the Leaders (How to Enrich Your Style of Management and Handle People Whose Style is Different From Yours)

By IchakAdizes

Business, Money & Investing

Professional & Technical

Self-Help and Personal Development

Language: English Not Rated (NR)

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Overview Ratings & Reviews

This book was written to help you discover your basicmanagement style and compensate for your weaknesses so you can workbetter with others – subordinates, peers, and those you report to –whose management styles are different from your own. It does this byproviding prescriptions to follow for each management style, notes fromthe battleground based on my experiences in coaching executives aroundthe 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, whatever theirpersonal style, more flexible so they can work with others whose stylesare different. Granted, this represents more of an incremental,continuous improvement than a revolutionary change or paradigm shift.But that’s life. I do not believe people can change their innatecharacter. People do not change, but since they can get worse, they canalso get better, and that might be all that’s needed to be able to workwith them.

My premise, which I fully developed in The Ideal Executive andreiterate in Chapter 1 of this book, is that the ideal leader, manager,or executive does not and cannot exist. All the literature thatattempts to teach us to be perfect managers is based on the erroneousassumption that it is possible. No one can excel at all of the rolesexpected of leaders or managers. A person may excel in one or moreroles, but not in all of them under all circumstances.

Classic management theorists prescribe nostrums based on theassumption that all managers have the same style and can be trained tomanage the same way. But this overlooks the fact that different peopleorganize, plan, and motivate --differently. Simply put, differentmanagers manage differently. What is needed is a complementary team.But how can different management styles complement each other and worktogether when they are so unlike each other?

The first step is to understand that the different styles speakdifferent languages; they infer different meanings from different wordsand gestures. While conflict between the different styles isunavoidable, learning to speak the language of the people we work withallows us to build and nourish a complementary team and preventconflict from becoming destructive.

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

Praise and Reviews

“Over a quarter of a century spent in the field of organizational transformation has provided Dr. Adizes with a unique base of knowledge and expertise that floods the pages of Leading the Leaders. His insights cut straight to the heart of what it means to effectively manage and lead others”.

—Anthony Robbins, Author, Awaken the Giant Within and Unlimited Power

“The Adizes approach to developing trust and mutual respect in an organization is the most effective tool that I have encountered for building strong leadership teams and getting results.”

—LYNN L. ELSENHANS, President and Country Chair, Shell Oil Company

“Dr. Adizes has brilliantly captured the hows and whys of management and organizational function and dysfunction. In this enlightening book we learn why people and organizations behave as they do and what we can do about it.”

—Dennis Alter, Chairman and CEO of Advanta Corporation

“The most thought-provoking book I’ve read in a long time. There are any number of writings that give you simplistic thoughts or nice slogans regarding business, but they miss the mark when it comes to getting you to seriously analyze and reconsider what you’ve been doing and how you might improve yourself and your business.”

—George Lilly, President, SJL Broadcast Management Corp.