A Practical Guide to Leadership: Be Inspired by Great Leaders (Practical Guide Series) - Softcover

Introducing Leadership: A Practical Guide is a leadership book that will show you not only how to be an effective good leader, but how to become a great leader.
 
Within this leadership book you'll discover the ideas, strategies and tried and tested winning solutions of some of the world's most famous leaders, which can be applied to the opportunities and challenges that you face in your own life as a leader.  This leadership book will reveal many important areas of good leadership that you need to know in to order to become an effective and successful leader.
 
Through our research and our work in developing successful leaders, we have come to realize that leadership is like using an artist's palette. The colors represent the strengths that support leaders to excel, such as great oratory skills, calmness under pressure and the ability to make effective decisions. But no two leaders will ever paint the exact same picture. No leader uses the same combination of colors as another leader. And, just like art, although some pieces are clearly better loved than others there is rarely unanimous agreement of brilliance. Even the most popular leaders can have their critics.
 
You can think of this leadership book like an artist's painting box. We've covered the key colors that make leaders effective, for you to explore and practice applying with your brushstrokes. You will use some colors more than others and you may not use some at all. You can experiment by consciously applying these leadership skill 'colors', as you to attempt to create your own masterpiece.
 
In this leadership book you'll discover how to set yourself up to succeed as an effective leader:

• The key differences between management and leadership, so that you know best when you should be focusing on being a manager and when to be a leader.
• How leading business organizations, such as NASA, Google and Virgin Atlantic, create a vision for leadership and the three things that your leadership vision must include to work.
• How famous companies and good leaders like Walt Disney used their network and their achievements to gain vital support for their vision.
• The six essential components that powerful leadership speeches like those of JFK and Martin Luther King have, which you can use to engage audiences, energize others to deliver your leadership vision and leave people remembering your speech for a long time afterwards.
• The fundamental steps that Steve Jobs took that made his leadership vision a reality and developed Apple into one of the world's most successful businesses.
• How to set about turning your leadership vision into a reality, including breaking down the steps you need to take for even the largest scale visions.
• How to manage key stakeholders so that they not only support your leadership vision but actively contribute to it and want to make it a success too.
• The vital qualities that you need to have as a leader in order to be successful and avoid those personality traits that can bring your leadership down.
• The two key behaviors that you need to put at the heart of your leadership in order to gain people's trust and support.
• Use the approach taken by Princess Diana and Rudy Giuliani so that people understand what your leadership is about and that enables others to behave in a complementary way.
• The ways that good leaders take steps to avoid defeat of their leadership vision and prepare to take tough decisions.
• Understand the leadership life cycle and why some leaders are successful at handing over at the right time and some leaders aren't.
• How you can develop your leadership by preparing your successor so that you can undertake new challenges.

You'll discover in this leadership book how to be a good leader that is able to get the best out of your people:

• Enable underperformers to become top achievers through your effective leadership, where you'll infect them with your beliefs and lead them to play to their strengths.
• The techniques you need to employ as a leader that enable you to listen and learn effectively, so that you can overcome people's objections to change, and remove the roadblocks to achievement.
• The five important factors that can mean you as a leader can motivate anybody, get the best out of them and lead them to do a great job.
• How great leaders like Winston Churchill can help their people overcome stress and pressure, so that they can stay calm and deliver on their mission.
• The key principle that will enable you as a leader to move people outside of their comfort zone, so that they grow and take on new challenges.
• How to inspire others to buy into and progress change, whilst through your leadership making those changes successful ones.
• Appreciate the differences between generations of people so that you can harness their abilities and enable them to perform to their best. 

You'll also discover in this leadership book how to be a good leader that is able to get the best out of teams:

• The key ingredients in bringing together world-beating teams and leading them to work together brilliantly as a team.
• How to harness business values and use them to unite the team around the business culture.
• How to heal conflicts and tensions, uniting split people, through the leadership approach taken by great leaders like Nelson Mandela.
• How to inspire peak performance so that your team try harder and perform better through your good leadership.
• The working environment that you as a leader can create and Google leverages that will enable your people to perform better, be more productive, take less time off sick, be more resilient and creative, and generate more sales.
• How to lead your team back from failure, by refocusing your leadership energies, overcoming negativity and reuniting the team.

By employing the winning techniques and strategies in this leadership book that have worked for good leaders, you'll be on you way to developing yourself into a great leader in your own right.
 
Nothing gives us greater pleasure than hearing how readers of Introducing Leadership: A Practical Guide are benefiting and becoming even better leaders. We invite you to submit your success stories, whether large or small, so that we can hear how our readers are improving their leadership skills.
 
We hope you enjoy reading our leadership book and we wish you the very best for your leadership journey.

Introducing Leadership: A Practical Guide draws on the ideas and strategies of successful leaders from business, politics and wider society to give you tried-and-tested solutions to the conundrums of modern business leadership.
 
BUILD A WINNING STRATEGY for achieving your aims
 
INSPIRE OTHERS to perform at their very best
 
BRING YOUR TEAM TOGETHER into a coherent and purposeful whole
 
DELIVER RESULTS even in the toughest situations
 
Alison Price is a specialist in leadership development, a Chartered Occupational Psychologist and a university lecturer in Business Psychology. David Price has led award-winning teams, is qualified in coaching and management, and is a member of the Chartered Management Institute.