The Little Book of Leadership Development: 50 Ways to Bring Out the Leader in Every Employee: Allen, Scott J, Kusy, Mitchell: 9780814437834: Amazon.com: Books

Leadership topics and encouraging reminders of what it means to lead, know and grow your team members in a positive and productive way.

Okay so I'm partial to handbooks. I just love little compact books like this one loaded with tips and tools to help you do just about anything. This one, The Little Book of Leadership Development is no exception. It is loaded with all kind of ideas, 50 of them in fact, on how to help your employees become leaders.The authors cover just about every pertinent subject from how to treat your team as a customer to showing them how to lead, to how to communicate with them, even how to have those hard communications with them; everything you need to show your people how to be the best.In today's economy we as employers have an obligation to develop win/win partnerships with our employees or should we say team members. It is our job to turn them on, to tap onto their passion. It is our responsibility to get them thinking in terms of career paths, to look at their jobs as another step on the road to a successful and productive future rather than just one day at a time.In the days of industry we looked at employees as just that, workers who were supposed to leave their brains at the door and just do their jobs. Today things are different. We have come to realize that we are paying people for their brains, for their ideas and that the more encouraging we can be in getting them to share their thoughts and ideas the more successful and productive our companies will be.Look I have to confess that in terms of meat and potatoes management there is not much new in this book, but that being said, in terms of treating people, encouraging people, and tapping into their passion it all gets down to good old common sense. It's another version of everything you need to know if life you learned in Kindergarten.But that is why this book is so good and effective. This is the kind of book that you keep at hand and look at every day because it is that reminder of those things you did learn in kindergarten.But please do not be deceived by how easy this all sounds because it's not. Taking the concepts in this book serious will make you push the envelope when it comes to challenging yourself and your teammates. When you start dealing with things like making their vision a reality and asking tough questions, it's going to take a lot more out of you than just reading those short chapters. You should undertake reading this book with a mind open to studying and implementing the tools that have been laid out by the authors. That's the best way to get more than your money's worth.As an added bonus there us a unique little exercise at the end of the book called The LD50 Snapshot where by honestly answering the questions you will develop of snapshot of your own leadership skills. I must warn you it is brutally honest and revealing. But have courage and take it. It will be worth your time.Buy this book, read it, study it, dog ear it, mark it up and yes keep it close by, you're going to need it.

By intentionally changing how you lead and manage others, you can develop leadership capacity in those around you every day, according to Scott Allen and Mitchell Kusy in this book. Leadership development is not something that primarily occurs in the classroom; it occurs on the job, and the trainee's immediate supervisor is the most important factor in behaviour modification.So what exactly is it that a busy senior leader can do to help subordinates improve their leadership skills? This book provides 50 suggestions for activities and tasks that can be included in a leadership development program, divided into the categories of modelling effective leadership, skill building, conceptual understanding, personal growth and feedback.Many of the ideas in the book are fairly standard leadership issues, such as clarifying team expectations, modelling the way, and recognising and rewarding achievement. Others, such as coaching for performance and developing emotional intelligence, really require a lot more explanation than the one or two pages afforded to them in the book--perhaps a whole book in themselves.The book is short and easy for the busy executive to read, either from cover to cover or one brief chapter at a time, as the need for inspiration in leadership development activities arises. Many senior leaders are likely to find it more useful than a shelf full of theoretical books; its benefit lies in its usefulness as a quick list of leadership development ideas, rather than as a source of original leadership concepts.