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Hardcover
272 pages
ISBN 9780743201148 Published Jan. 2001
Free Press
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Posted Jan. 12, 2009 4:05 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
Strengths Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, Gallup Press, 266 pages, $24.95, Hardcover, January 2009, ISBN 9781595620255
Gallup has been producing great strength-centric books for the past decade. It all started with Now, Discover Your Strengths, released by Simon & Schuster in 2001, and the series continued with last year's bestselling Strengths Finder 2.0.
Up until this point, these books have been focused on the individual, whether it was learning about and focusing on your own strengths, or managers leveraging the strengths of their reports. Strengths Based Leadership shifts that focus and takes the step into the larger realm of teams, showing that they perform at their best when the group possesses a variety of strengths. Or, as the authors sum it up neatly, "Although individuals need not be well-rounded, teams should be."
Part One of the book refocuses on concentrating on your individual strengths as a leader, Part Two breaks those leadership strengths into four domains (Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building and Strategic Thinking), and Part Three takes on the crucial task of understanding why people follow.
The brilliance of Gallup is their ability to look at issues from simple, yet revolutionary angles. The strengths-based approach itself is a radical departure from the more traditional approach of self-improvement that focused on improving one's weaknesses to be more effective. Similarly, Gallup ignored traditional approaches to leadership books. Rather than doing a round of interviews with successful leaders to gather their insights and impart that wisdom to the rest of us, they went directly to those who are followers and asked them what makes a good leader. By going to those who follow, they discovered four key traits great leaders inspire: Trust, Compassion, Stability and Hope.
This is a book every leader should own, and like Gallup's other strengths books, it's not done with you even when you're done with it. You're invited to take the web-based "StrengthsFinder" test again to reinvest in your strengths, and to take a new leadership version that will help you form teams and lead others based on their strengths.
Jack Covert Selects: StrengthsFinder 2.0
Posted April 17, 2007 3:25 a.m. by jack
StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup's Now, Discover Your Strengths by Tom Rath, Gallup Press, 192 Pages, $19.95, Hardcover, February 2007, ISBN 9781595620156
I have been writing about the Gallup Press a lot in the last six months. I reviewed Vital Friends in August and their book 12 in December. I am back to tell you there is another outstanding book from Gallup to start looking for on bookstore shelves.
StrengthsFinder 2.0 is an expansion of the franchise started by the book Now, Discover Your Strengths. Originally published in 2001, Now, Discover Your Strengths has become a mainstay on bestseller lists, spending 50 weeks on the Wall Street Journal list in 2006. If you have not read Now, Discover Your Strengths or used the first version of their online assessment too, the premise is that most people spend their professional lives trying to improve on their weakness instead of working within their strengths. The StrengthsFinder assessment is meant to help guide you toward optimizing your talents. Gallup has written other strengths-based books for salespeople, teachers, and faith-based groups.
StrengthsFinder 2.0 is meant to be the most accessible of all the books, to be used with employees at all levels of an organization. Gallup has identified 34 strengths for individuals ranging from "Achiever" to "Woo" (Winning Others Over). Each book comes with unique code which allows the reader to take the web-based self-assessment. The results from the assessment highlight your five talents in ranked order. Each strength is accompanied by an explanation, anecdotes from others with that strength, and a to-do list with actions you can implement to help you develop your talents.
I am a big believer in putting people where they can excel. StrengthFinder 2.0 is a great way to help find the right fit for the people in your organization or for yourself.
Jack Covert Selects - The One Thing You Need to Know
Posted March 9, 2005 8:41 a.m. by jack
The One Thing You Need to Know:About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustaining Individual Success by Marcus Buckingham, The Free Press, 280 Pages, $29.95 Hardcover, March 2005, ISBN 0743261658
Marcus Buckingham has written two of the best selling business books in the past five years: First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover your Strengths . The books continue to sell and I wouldnt be surprised if their sales increase each year, like Jim Collins books do. When I received the advance reader's copy of his new book it automatically went to the main To-Be-Read pile.
As the subtitle states, Buckingham has written a 3-in-1 special on leadership, management, and career development. You might expect that he shortchanged one of these subjects. I didnt think so. He really boiled the subjects down to their meaningful essence.
What made his previous books so good, carries over to the new one seamlessly. He really tells interesting storiesespecially his recounting of the coal mine potential disaster in Pennsylvania in 2002. But his writing is more than just interesting stories; it illustrates his belief with meaning and purpose.
Buckinghams description of a great manager:
The chief responsibility of a great manager is not to enforce quality, nor to ensure customer service, nor to set standards, nor to build high performance teams. Each of these is a valuable outcome, and a great manager may well use these outcomes to measure their success. But these outcomes are the end result, not the starting point. The challenge: to figure out the best way to transform these talents into performance. This is the job of a great manager.
The Table of Contents is detailed enough to help you get to wherever you want to go. When you get there I suspect that you, just like me, will use a complete highlighter on this book. Trust me when I say that this is the one book you need to read!
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SUBSCRIBE TO MY MONTHLY BOOK REVIEWS PLEASE SEND AN EMAIL TO JACK AT 800-CEO-READ DOT COM.
Jack Covert Selects - Now, Discover Your Strengths
Posted Jan. 7, 2001 4:05 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham & Donald Clifton, The Free Press, 260 Pages, $26.00 Hardcover, January 2001, ISBN 0743201140
One of our best sellers from 1999 was First, Break All the Rules, a book we continue to sell in large quantities. So, I was excited to hear that Buckingham and Clifton were coming out with a new book. Not only would I love to have another great seller on my hands, but I also looked forward to reading the book myself. I truly feel that people are the heart of an organization, and that the best organizations utilize their people to their utmost potential. That potential is the focus of Now, Discover Your Strengths.
To begin, the authors posit that businesses (and personalities) are built on two faulty assumptions:
1. Each person can learn to be competent in almost anything.
2. Each person's greatest room for growth is in his or her areas of greatest weakness.
The author's claim (and it sure makes sense to me), that the best managers lead using these alternate assumptions:
1. Each person's talents are enduring and unique.
2. Each person's greatest room for growth is in the areas of the person's greatest strengths.
So, if these claims are correct, how do you go about identifying your strengths and getting them to work for you? Buckingham and Clifton offer a solution for this dilemma. Working with data gathered by Gallup, who conducted interviews with over 2 million people, the authors present the reader with thirty-four basic "themes", or strengths. There are hundreds of combinations of these individual strengths, and in order to find out what your 'combination of strengths' is requires you to take a test on their website. When you buy the book, you are given a password and a URL. The test is serious, extensive, and comprehensive. It isn't short, it takes a commitment from you, but I also think the rewards are significant. I took the test and according to the people in my organization who judged the results, the test was dead-on, nailing me and how I manage. Think about it. Self-knowledge is often hard to come by.
In addition to the valuable test, Now, Discover Your Strengths offers you supporting information regarding the results of your test, defines the thirty-four strengths, and help you along with any questions you may have regarding the test. I really had fun with this test and book. Learning something about yourself that you can immediately apply for $26.00 is a good thing.
