Book Description
"Phil Harkins has it exactly right. To be a leader is to communicate powerfully—as he does in this thoughtful book." - Robert B. Reich, Professor of Social and Economic Policy Brandeis University.
Powerful Conversations breed a powerful organization. POWERFUL CONVERSATIONS is packed with goal-oriented strategies, tools, and real-life examples from great leaders. Use its deliberate, directed techniques to achieve exceptional levels of performance, create and maintain valuable relationships, and forward the goals of both yourself and your organization with every word you speak. Mastering the three stages of a Powerful Conversation—from shared feelings and beliefs, to an exchange of wants and needs, closing with action steps and mutual commitments—will help you exercise more control over your interactions, and greatly enhance both your leadership skills and your success.
Look inside to discover:
How to plan, conduct, and measure Powerful Conversations;
Using the Tower of Power as a tool in coaching;
The four Cs of Trust—clarity, caring, consistency, and commitment
Five strategies to satisfy—and keep—your best employees
Tools to turn the company grapevine from a poisonous plant into a pathway for learning
Determining your leadership competencies through the Leadership Assessment Instrument
Targeting Passionate Champions to drive an Agenda for Change.
Leaders across the country are praising POWERFUL CONVERSATIONS:
"Phil Harkins has it exactly right. To be a leader is to communicate powerfully—as he does in this thoughtful book." - Robert B. Reich, Professor of Social and Economic Policy, Brandeis University.
"Powerful Conversations have made a real difference in the effectiveness of the Operations Senior Leadership Team. We are delivering unprecedented results thanks to the clearer communication and improved working relationships." - Larry Gundrum, Senior Vice President, Kraft Foods.
"In my business, Powerful Conversations are leading to believability and a growing sense of achievability by our employees that they can drive a massive agenda for change." - Linda Coughlin, Managing Director, Scudder Kemper Investments, Inc.
"In a fast forward world, candor and clarity are prerequisites for success. POWERFUL CONVERSATIONS is a must read book for leading into the 21st century." - Steve Ozonian, Chairman and CEO, Prudential Real Estate and Relocations Solutions.
"A powerful guide, both savvy and wise, to emotional intelligence in action. Phil Harkins has given us an essential handbook for leaders at any level." - Daniel Goleman, Author, Working with Emotional Intelligence.
Download Description
Powerful communicators are made, not born. Powerful Conversations outlines the conversational techniques and tools that leaders from all walks of life use to create a bond with their listener, motivate others to achieve exceptional performance, and achieve business goals with each conversation.
Noted leadership expert Phil Harkins packs years of research and interviews into Powerful Conversations. His step-by-step blueprint will show every reader how to conduct and control effective, productive conversations and includes:
-- The power conversation strategies of Oprah Winfrey, Jack Welch, and others
-- Diagrams, models, lessons, and tests exploring the latest conversation technology
-- A hands-on workbook for practicing powerful conversation techniques
Customer Reviews:
Learn how high impact leaders communicate.......2006-02-21
It is no secret that some leaders can inspire people to heroic levels of greatness, while others can not even stimulate individuals to the level of mediocrity. Some organizations can inspire fierce employee loyalty while others watch their top talent depart regularly. The author of this book argues that often the reason for these situations lies in the way the top leaders of an organization communicate with the rest of the organization.
The author of this book shares his insight as to how high impact leaders communicate. By sharing the stories of some remarkable leaders who use Powerful Conversations techniques to spread their voice throughout their organization, to instill trust and loyalty, and to effectuate deep and profound change when change is necessary, the author hopes to share:
· why you must always say what you will do and what you say;
· how to use the four-step Tower of Power to guide companies through Powerful Conversations that lead to action;
· how to really listen to people so that organizations hear their message and they know that you understand;
· how to create Agenda for change and implement it to create profound change within the organization.
The author shares the five competencies-focused drive, emotional intelligence, trusted influence, conceptual thinking and systems thinking-shared by all high-impact leaders.
Excellent Leadership Tool.......2003-11-24
Prior to reading Powerful Conversations: How High-Impact Leaders Communicate, I had anticipated a manual to the proper rules of conversation. However, this book turned out to be much more than a manual of sorts. Harkins not only provides ways to develop excellent communication as well as leadership skills, he also explains what powerful conversations are, how they are structured, and what types of impacts, accomplishments and outcomes they render.
Being able to communicated effectively is critical in today's corporate world. Harkins reminds us of some of the most basic skills that most of us don't even consider to be as important in communication as they actually prove to be. Skills such as the ability to build trusting relationships and listen carefully to others.
However, not all the techniques discussed are as basic. It does indeed take practice to become a master of powerful conversation. Harkins provides six tools which can be used to enhance your communication and leadership skill in order to ensure greater success. I found Tool 1: Planning, Conducting, and Measuring Powerful Conversations, to be an excellent guideline for the preparation and implementation of powerful conversations. This tool also provides a series of simple but very relevant questions that you can ask yourself to determine what type of outcome resulted from your conversation.
Harkins also includes a self-scoring sample of the Leadership Assessment Instrument (LAI) to help you gain insight into your own leadership abilities, which I found to be extremely helpful.
Overall, I found this book to be very beneficial and would recommend it to professionals, students, and anyone looking to enhance their success.
A piece of the jigsaw.......2003-07-15
The title Powerful Conversations: How High-Impact Leaders Communicate led me to believe that this book was primarily concerned with interpersonal communication. I found, however, that it is largely focussed on the ethics of leadership and the philosophy of emotional intelligence as applied to big business. The book is of high calibre in this respect, and for this reason I gave it 4 stars. But if you are looking for a hands-on manual on communication you will need to look elsewhere.
Anyone who is sufficiently motivated to read this book will no doubt be already aligned with the basic philosophy of trust, openness, honesty, and clarity. The challenge lies in implementing such a philosophy. No doubt Harkins takes a more practical approach in his corporate training programme, and it would be a very large and expensive book if it were to contain such a programme in full. However, I find it frustrating that Harkins spends far more time explaining why than he does explaining how. Some methodology is woven into the text, but on the whole, the presentation focuses largely on principles and attitudes.
All of these elements, of course, provide a necessary foundation for any system; after all, rote behaviours are largely unsustainable. But there is also a need for clear directives on the progressive action steps that need to be taken. The book must serve exceedingly well as a door opener for corporate clients, but the owner/operator of a small business will not find definitive steps that he or she could progressively implement from the book alone. I should add that I am not advocating the rigid paint-by-numbers formula that some other motivational books follow.
What I most question is Harkins' representation of trust as a primary focus, rather than as an outcome of deliberate and conscious process. Trust, far from being a subjective quality only, is an objective competency that employees as well as their leaders must progressively develop and demonstrate. For example, in his book, Leadership, Rudolph Giuliani describes the functioning of his mayoral team with great frankness. In so doing, he demonstrates clearly how trust is not assumed at the beginning; it is developed over time and established through frank and honest appraisal of each team member's verbal and practical input. I miss this in Harkins' book.
I have nevertheless reserved a place for Powerful Conversations on my bookshelves. But to round out Harkins' perspective, I have added books like Rudolph Giuliani's Leadership, Jim Loehr's & Tony Swartz's The Power of Full Engagement, Dorothy Leeds' The 7 Powers of Questions and Meryl Runion's Power Phrases. Together, they make a mighty team.
Insightful!.......2001-04-24
When you talk, do people listen? Communicating effectively is essential in the business world. It is the first step in the path toward leadership. While other business books discuss leadership as a whole, this one focuses in on one of the most basic - and often overlooked - prerequisites to leadership: excellent communication skills. While most of the suggestions presented in Powerful Conversations seem like simple common sense, the book does get you to focus on critical points that you probably take for granted, like building trust, preparing in advance for potentially touchy conversations and actually listening to what other people say. In addition, it offers some helpful conversational strategies and pointers for determining when your meeting is heading south. We [...] recommend this book to executives in leadership positions, who will be reminded to brush up on their conversational style and delivery, and to business people and students looking to talk their way to the top.
Excellent guide for impactful conversations and leadership.......2000-02-25
This book provides the necessary tools for leadership and impactful conversations. It provides real-life technologies and tools for leaders at all levels of the organization. Inspiring and educational, this book should be on the shelf of all emerging and current leaders.
Book Description
Based on research by the Gallup Leadership Institute, a proven program for developing valuable leadership ability, both in yourself and in others
Extensive research has identified specific traits that transform average individuals into authoritative, influential, and "authentic" leaders. These authentic leaders learn from the mistakes and successes of themselves and others and build a positive strength initiative within their organizations.
In The High Impact Leader, Gallup veterans Bruce Avolio and Fred Luthans show you what you can do to develop and leverage your own leadership strengths into positive, lasting improvement for both yourself and your organization.
Their findings combined with examples of wellknown leaders in action--such as Howard Schultz, of Starbucks, and Microsoft's Bill Gates--provide guidelines for accelerating leadership development in any environment. Building on Gallup's innovative "positive strengths" initiative, this results-driven book provides:
- Proven indicators for gauging personal progress toward authentic leadership
- Strategies for building a pool of leadership-ready individuals in any organization
- Proprietary Gallup poll data and innovative leadership-building tools
Customer Reviews:
A promising framework & more promising measurement system.......2007-01-16
Avolio & Luthans Meta analysis, creates a framework for determining impact or return on development for authentic leadership development. This work could be rated more highly if the the rest of the protocol were available even at the website. Most of us working in the domain of leadership development would like to know what the impact is over time. Many of us would submit data, if the inquiry elements and time intervals were known so that our data was comparable. It is this reviewers hope that High Impact Leader could be a begining, resulting in improved development processes. I have recomended this to several colleagues, they are similarly intrigued
Book Description
Written by veteran researchers in the Gallup Leadership Institute and based on innovative leadership-building models and tools, The High Impact Leader details a program for accelerating your authentic leadership development that is realistic and achievable, for individuals in virtually any personal or professional environment.
Book Description
This revolutionary book signals a new paradigm in leadership. Author David M. Traversi, nationally known executive coach, entrepreneur, and former corporate chief executive and investment banker, has worked with thousands of leaders over the course of his career. With a thesis that leadership on average is failing in most forums, and failing at an increasing rate as technology accelerates and complicates our existence, Traversi explains how existing leadership literature provides checklists of the traits that an effective leader should possess (e.g., be self-defined, forward-thinking, credible, inspiring, focused, courageous) and the functions that a leader must perform (e.g., build a values-based core, generate ideas, form a vision, build a plan), but they don't explain how leaders and potential leaders can begin to embody the those traits and perform those functions. They describe the destination, but don't address the means - the engine - to get them there.
In
The Source of Leadership, Traversi identifies and instructs how to develop eight personal drivers, energies deep within - presence, clarity (of thought, emotion, and behavior), openness, intention, personal responsibility, intuition, creativity, and connected communication - each of which drives several of the traits and functions of the effective leader. The leader who develops these personal energies will achieve maximum effectiveness as a leader, as well as a deep sense of contentment and fulfillment as a person.
With the burgeoning trend toward seeking a deeper grounding personally as a means of performing better professionally,
The Source of Leadership is the early "defining voice" of this new trend in the leadership area.
Customer Reviews:
The subtleties are, in fact, the essence of powerful leadership.......2007-10-02
The Source of Leadership is no less than phenomenal. Phenomenal in how it exposes what many leaders would call subtle personal characteristics - or drivers, as Traversi describes them - as the real core of effective leadership. As I read the book, I reflected on all the very effective leaders with whom I have worked and, indeed, they possessed the drivers described in this book. For instance, Traversi identifies personal responsibility as a primary driver of credibility, which is what Traversi uses to cover integrity and competence. I remember one manager I had who had the highest integrity, and I have to say that it was his sense of personal responsibility that makes me feel that way.
Traversi rightfully describes the ability to generate ideas as critical to leadership in this day and age, and shows how openness and creativity - as opposed to resistance and stagnation - are essential to becoming a thought leader. One of the best managers I ever had was highly respected, and hence effective, because she was always out in front of everyone else when it came to ideas. As Traversi describes, she was that way because of her openness, which in turn fueled her creativity.
What I love about this book is its practical approach. Traversi isn't on a soap box proclaiming the way things should be. He provides nitty-gritty, useful exercises for developing the eight drivers. Every person, regardless of his or her leadership role or roles (and we all have them), can benefit from this book. My guess is that it will become, perhaps insidiously, a leadership classic. [...].
Timely, Relevant, Powerful...A Must Read.......2007-09-22
I LOVE this book! The most refreshing book on leadership I have ever read, and I have read scores of them. My library includes a lot of the classics cited by Traversi, like Built to Last by Collins and Porras, The Leadership Engine by Tichy and Cohen, and The Leadership Challenge by Kouzes and Posner. Don't get me wrong...you have to read those. They define what the leader is supposed to be and do. Without them, you wouldn't know what effective leadership looks like. What The Source of Leadership does, though, is show HOW to be what a leader is supposed to be and HOW to do what a leader is supposed to do. The HOWs are in the form of personal drivers that exist in each leader or aspiring leader.
The book contains a lot of practical exercises for the development of these personal drivers. Chapter 1, for instance, provides a guided meditation. As recently as ten years ago, Traversi might have been discredited for bringing meditation into the leadership discussion, but today he is cutting edge. I started meditating a few months ago and the effects on my own leadership have been profound. I am so far better grounded. I make better decisions. I have better relationships. I have more energy. In the end, I produce better results. Thus, Traversi had me with Chapter 1. The rest of the book just builds on that. One of his endorsers (and he has a number of high-profile leaders, such as Lewis Coleman, President of Dreamworks Animation, who have endorsed the book) call it a must-read for leaders. I couldn't agree more.
How to prepare yourself to be a leader in today's world.......2007-09-20
The Source of Leadership is the first book on leadership that I have read that goes far beyond the traditional leadership theory books that provide lists of character traits, and the varoius identified styles and leadership types.
David Traversi identifies the state of leadership in today's society and then proceeds to show the reader how to incorporate the 8 drivers into his/her life to enable not just leadership ability, but to begin having a more satisfying and rewarding life.
To help in the "how to" journey, he provides tools, dashboards,and checklists to better explain and identify the areas of focus the reader determines he/she needs to work on towards reaching the overarching goals of being more content, accountable, present, and credible. By working through the exercises and activities in the book, the reader will emerge with many of the abilities and traits associated with effective leaders.
Finally, the book debunks the old generalization that leaders are born and not made. Almost anyone with the desire and drive to improve himself/herself through introspection and focus can employ the techniques offered up in this book and successfully develop into a leader in any setting.
The Source of Leadership is a wonderful "how to" practical on leadership and well worth the read!
Customer Reviews:
Excellent Resource.......2007-01-31
Excellent, sound business advice for anyone, no matter what your role or profession. Very easy to listen to.. read by the author/presenter. There are 4 tapes with 8 sides total. Amazing value!
Book Description
The Linkage Toolkit for Developing Leaders - Linkage has complied all of its proprietary methods and tools from its knowledge base, that they use to develop leaders at all levels of organizations into one toolkit. This toolkit is highly pragmatic, and has been painstakingly edited and written to provide the user with a full understanding of how to apply and use tools to the best of your leaders' advantage. It is designed with the best model of leadership development in mind - developing all aspects of leaders and managers and providing practical advice, ideas, behaviors, assessments, skill-building activities, and methods for leading themselves, others, teams, and the organization in their daily work. It is an excellent resource to create common leadership practices and lexicon across organizational boundaries in any company.
This toolkit is designed to provide managers and leaders at all levels of your organization with the right tools to become successful and effective. It provides practical advice, ideas, behaviors, assessments, skill-building activities, and methods for leading yourself and others in your daily work.
If you are using The Linkage Toolkit for Developing Leaders as a quick-reference “toolbox,” each of the four major sections is clearly labeled with tabs for easy access. These sections are:
Leading Yourself-
The first section is a baseline series of topics and tools that can help you assess and develop your general leadership abilities. Our belief is that you cannot successfully lead others until you can develop the self-awareness and maturity necessary to “lead yourself.”
Leading Individuals-
The next section focuses on your role as coach, mentor, and performance manager. Whether in a formal position of authority or not, your ability to hold powerful conversations with staff and colleagues-one-on-one-to set expectations and influence behavior is critical. This is “ground zero” for effective leadership
Leading Teams-
The engine of change and performance in the modern business enterprise is a leader's use of teams. Your roles as team sponsor, team leader, ng members' diversity to successful and innovative outcomes.
Leading Organizations-
The final section addresses the challenges some leaders face as enterprise-wide developers. The roles of organizational architect, process manager, and communicator and implementer of strategy are often the ones we are least schooled in, especially those of you with more technical (and less business) backgrounds.
Customer Reviews:
The Four Levels of Leadership.......2002-07-01
"No doubt you are reading the latest management books, attending seminars and conferences, and thinking long and hard about the best bosses you've had. Perhaps they offer helpful insight into your growing model of successful leadership. But day to day, despite your best efforts, such reading and contemplation are often difficult to apply to emerging situations that demand that you act as a leader. This toolkit is designed to close that gap, to provide practical advice, ideas, behaviors, assesments, skill-building activities, and methods for leading yourself and others in your daily work...If you are using this book as a development path-to build your leadership competencies-it moves concentrically from leading yourself, to individuals and teams, to whole organization. We believe an emerging leader must first develop self-awareness and personal commitment before he or she can effectively lead others. And you must be able to garner committed action from individual colleagues, employees, and your boss before you can effectively lead them collectively" (from the Introduction).
In this context, L.Carter, D.Davidson, J.Lehrich, and R.Waks (editors) divide this seminal toolkit into four major sections. As said by editors, these major sections are further divided into topical subsections. Each brief 'topic' reading is intended to provide context, background, and insight for the 'tool' that follows. Many tools are then followed by an application exercise that encourages you to 'try it out' in specific leadership situations.
I- Leading Self: "Leader," editors say, "know thyself. True leadership-leading individuals, teams, and organizations alike-comes from within, from the manager who draws from the wellspring of his own character. To trust others, trust yourself; to inspire others, find inspiration in who you are." Thus, in this section writers present tools to evaluate yourself: both your leadership behaviors (the Leadership Assessment Instrument) and your emotional intelligence.
II- Leading Individuals: "Leaders achieve results through others." Editors say, "As a leader, you owe it to your organization and to yourself-not to mention to your employees-to take responsibility for those you manage. How you treat and serve the individuals you lead will determine what you achieve, what you are accountable for, and what role you play in the future of others. With power comes obligation, and a leader accepts sober responsibility along with the power to hire, fire, and inspire. Such responsibility need not rely solely on intuition and hard-won experience." Then, in this section book gives you some ready resources like interviewing, delegation, performance coaching, managing challenging conversation, and building trusting relationship for the fundamental duties of a leader and manager.
III- Leading Teams: "Virtually all organizational work today is done in teams: project teams and quality teams, ongoing work teams and cross-functional improvement teams, virtual teams, problem-solving teams, and more." Editors write, "Individuals work interdependently on shared projects and toward a common purpose, often on more than one team at once. And for the individuals to succeed, for the groups to achieve its objectives with minimal rancor and recriminution, the team needs effective leadership. As leader you have the opportunity to watch and guide a team throughout its life cycle, from origin to deliverables, cradle to grave." Thus, in this section writers present the steps of that cycle to simplify your leadership responsibilities for choosing the team members, clarifying the group's objectives and its members' roles, facilitating effective team meetings, assessing and developing the team's processes, capabilities, and decision-making, reducing or forestalling conflict, and conducting team project reviews.
IV- Leading Organizations- "You may know yourself as a leader-your tendencies, your behavior, your principles and practices." Editors say, "You may serve as guide and inspiration for individuals, and as driving force or unseen hand for high-performing teams. But do you lead your organization? Are you an architect, change champion, teacher, and communicator on whom your company or institution can depend? An organizational leadership role demands foresight, reflection, and planning-very skills that are strongest when assisted by tools." In this section writers present techniques, devices, and systems to leading organizations.
Finally, L.Carter, D.Davidson, J.Lehrich, and R.Waks (editors) say that "Yet this single volume is not intended to be a comprehensive compendium of all the tools we could find or develop. That would be impractical and self-defeating. Instead it is meant to give you, the emerging and working organizational leader, a sampling of the range of tools needed to effectively manage the present and lead toward the future, and to apply them to the broadest span of situations you encounter."
Highly recommended.
Take Charge of Your Own Leadership Development!.......2002-01-11
This Toolkit can make a tremendous difference in developing your leadership skills.
I have been to quite a number of excellent seminars and workshops on leadership, and always found the assessments, exercises, and examples to be the best part. Imagine how thrilled I was to see that this one Toolkit contains far more such material than all of the sessions combined I have attended over my entire career. If you want to be a better leader, your time would be better spent reading and applying this material in your current job than by taking on any graduate program in business that I am familiar with.
Decades ago, many young people got training and experience as leaders by serving in the military. These days, those who intend to have business careers seldom get that experience. Where is a person to learn leadership who doesn't go into the military? Probably not in business school, where a lot of the learning is associated with solving problems, learning concepts, getting background, and verbally sparring rather than moving people and an organization forward.
A very high percentage of the situations that a leader is likely to run into are handled at some level in this book, both at the individual, one-on-one, team, and organizational levels. I wish I had had this resource available to me when I had started my business career. It would have made a large difference.
Naturally, like any self-coaching guide, the benefit is all up to how seriously you take the content, how often you refer to it, and how much you try to learn. If you are reasonably committed to being a better leader, this Toolkit will take you as far as you can go short of having a personal leadership coach meet with you for an hour a week.
Each section describes briefly the theory of what needs to be done, gives you a self-assessment tool to check out your tendencies, gives you an example to make the point concrete, and suggests how to proceed to get better.
I was particularly pleased to see that this Toolkit encourages developing a better network of relationships, learning how to foster innovation, shaping your own leadership learning, coaching others, managing challenging conversations, influencing without authority, interviewing to select the right people for a job or a team, locating organizational stalls, and planning a business case to lead a specific change. Most leaders I know in organizations would candidly confess to lacking background in at least two of these areas.
The only thing I was disappointed in was that the Toolkit ducks the issue of leadership versus management as being "moot." I don't agree. To oversimplify the point, leadership is about going in the right direction, and management is about efficiently getting to whatever direction you happen to be aiming at. Most organizations have very little leadership in this sense, and way too much management. As a result, clearly this book also has a lot of management information as well as leadership information, but the area of picking the right direction probably could have used more attention.
Reading this Toolkit also made me think about the reasons why I wanted to be a leader, which is to make a positive difference. I wonder how leaders can prepare their own motivations for serving more than their own career desires. Stephen Covey has written about this subject in Principle-Centered Leadership if you are interested.
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- Starting Out: Alekhine Defence (Starting Out - Everyman Chess)
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Books Index
Books Home
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- Angeles y Demonios / Angels and Demons
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General
| Puzzles & Games
| Entertainment
| Subjects
| Books
Magic Item Compendium (Dungeons & Dragons d20 3.5 Fantasy Roleplaying)
Complete Scoundrel: A Player's Guide to Trickery and Ingenuity (Dungeons & Dragons d20 3.5 Fantasy Roleplaying)
Spell Compendium (Dungeons & Dragons d20 3.5 Fantasy Roleplaying)
Races of the Dragon (Dungeons & Dragons d20 3.5 Fantasy Roleplaying Supplement)
Monster Manual V (Dungeons & Dragons d20 3.5 Fantasy Roleplaying)
