Читать книгу Seven Disciplines of A Leader - Wolf Jeff - Страница 8

In this book, I've integrated our Leadership Development Program Design with the Seven Disciplines. Thus, by reading this book, you experience a simulation of our leadership development program, perhaps even receive 80 percent of the benefit! To achieve this high standard, we've added a new feature: each section and chapter has applications and exercises to help you learn and practice the aim of the chapter.

There's also Section III. The Eleven Practices described there aren't tied specifically to any of the Seven Disciplines but affect them all. For example, Practice 1: Hire People Like a Casting Director is a precondition that underlies achievement of the Seven Disciplines. If you hire the wrong people you simply will be unable to get the most from any of the Seven Disciplines. So while the Eleven Practices are described independently, they all are prerequisites to successful leadership.

Given this developmental design feature, you use this book best when you use it for personal, team, and organizational leadership development, either alone or with a formal leadership development program (LDP). You'll find that our paradigm doesn't compete with, but rather complements, any other LDP or process you may now be using.

Leadership development should be practical, interactive, incremental (modular), and experiential to develop mindsets and skillsets that can be transferred and applied at work. It should be aimed at all levels of the organization, and especially at the lower levels, where less experienced employees need the most guidance. (You can read the 12 components in Chapter 13.)

Seven Disciplines of a Leader is organized into three sections: (1) The first offers an overview of effective leadership; (2) the second introduces the Seven Disciplines of highly effective leaders; (3) the third focuses on Eleven Practices that sustain the Seven Disciplines.

Takeaway Exercises

At the conclusion of each chapter you'll read a section titled “Takeaway.” This section allows you the opportunity to evaluate your own leadership style through an exercise that will drive home one or more of the chapter's main points. It's designed to sharpen your leadership skills in a practical way. It doesn't attempt to cover each and every major point in the chapter. But, the benefit of performing these exercises is that you can apply the very same methodology to an entire range of issues at work.

If you do these exercises faithfully, by the time you finish this book you will have improved your leadership skills many times over.