BOOK REVIEWS
Leadership Bones: 5 lessons to lead anyone, anywhere, anytime
The bones of leadership support the muscles and neurones that enable it. Without the bones, leadership cannot be applied. This short book lays out the bones that support good leadership.
WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT:
The author introduces leadership concepts through the technique of a dialogue between a teacher and student. The teacher is a stereotypical mentor who guides their protege through lessons on leadership via a socratic questioning session. It’s short, and I would say concise. I did appreciate that the temptation to bulk the storyline out wasn’t overwhelming, so the story flows quickly. It’s a bit cheesy, but I think still really good overall. It gets to the point and makes it well.
FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS:
1. Leadership is simple in practice, but hard in application.
2. Leadership is never about the individual leader, but always about the team, the goal, and the greater good.
3. Leadership requires people to choose to take the hard right over the easy wrong. And that this choice will be repeated and required constantly.
4. Authority and leadership are inherently different. One does not confer the other.
5. Leadership is an applied practice. You can study it, but knowing the theory and carrying it out are very different.
THINGS TO GUIDE A NEW LEADER:
You will need to put your needs last, and to resist the temptation of status and privilege. This isn’t easy!
THINGS TO REMIND AN EXPERIENCED LEADER:
The trappings of leadership are only as useful as the ability they confer to improve your team and achieve the goal. By themelves, they constitute only the glorification of individual ego.
THE QUOTE I’D TWEET:
“Leadership is based on influence-through-persuasion at the front end, combined with accountability at the back end”
3 THINGS TO PUT INTO PRACTICE:
1. Look for subtle signs you’re not holding people accountable. Leaders hold others accountable. Tyrants punish though - don’t stray into that territory.
2. Take stock of your personal goals. Are they aligned with the team’s goals? If not, what’s the delta and how are you going to realign your goals?
3. Remember that self-leadership is still leadership. You can influence yourself.
INSPIRED READING
The author, Timothy R Clarke, sounds fascinating. I am going to do some research and see if there is anything else out there by the same author.
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How to Win Friends and Influence People
The seminal text on interpersonal relationships. But is it still relevant in the modern age?
HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE BY DALE CARNEGIE
WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT
Deception in marketing was clearly not a thing in the 1930s. This book is exactly what it says it is - a guide to winning people towards you and your way of thinking. There is a reason it is so popular. Despite the better part of a century having elapsed since it was written, it is still amazingly relevant. Carnegie does a fantastic job of distilling his observations of human relationships and providing advice for how to better relate to others. One of the best things about this book is seeing the advice that was developed by Carnegie through observation and practice validated by modern neuroscience and psychology.
FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS:
1. People work better under a spirit of approval than a spirit of criticism. Our need for self-esteem is as potent as our need for physical nourishment.
2. People are interested in their own wants over those of others. If you want to get someone to do (or guide them away from doing) something, help them see it as being in their own interest.
3. Everyone wants to feel important. If you listen to them, take interest in them and demonstrate an empathy for their concerns, you will provide this sense of importance. If they can’t get a sense of importance through inter-personal validation, they may well seek it through other actions (like complaining).
4. People will never attribute malign intent to their own actions. It is futile to try and convince someone that they are acting in a manner that is inherently bad - they will never accept that they act out of anything other than good intentions.
5. Actions and feelings are mutually reinforcing. Putting a smile on your face lifts your mood, and lifts the mood of the team around you.
THINGS TO GUIDE A NEW LEADER:
The sound of our own name is, to us, the sweetest sound of all. Get to know your team, and take a real interest in them as people.
THINGS TO REMIND AN EXPERIENCED LEADER:
You will never understand someone if you can’t empathise with them. You need to look at things from their point of view, which means letting go of your own and admitting when you are wrong. Unless you have proof to the contrary, assume people act with good intentions and that they are trustworthy and competent.
THE QUOTE I’D TWEET:
Any fool can defend their mistakes, and most fools do.
3 THINGS TO PUT INTO PRACTICE:
1. Listen attentively. Phones weren’t a distraction when this book was written, and if they had been around, I think Dale Carnegie would have changed very little in his book. Put away your distractions and listen to people.
2. If you don’t know them already, learn about your team. Learn their names and what they are interested in - and make sure they know you are genuinely interested.
3. The hardest one for me personally - don’t criticise. No-one was ever scolded into changing their beliefs, and at best, they can be cajoled into temporary alterations of behaviour. Instead of pointing out mistakes, look for and call out effort, improvement, and successes.
INSPIRED READING
This inspired me to go back over the neuroscience and psychology books about leadership. It’s amazing how much of Carnegie’s work is reflected (and repeated) in modern research.
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Quiet Leadership
David Rock is a legend in the field of neuroleadership. This book is a distillation of his in-depth research and deep experience.
Quiet leadership by david rock
WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT
This is a user manual for the brain. But, there’s a twist - it’s not a user manual for YOUR brain. It’s a user manual for everyone else’s brain. We know that everyone thinks differently. Quiet Leadership is a guide to understanding how people think, and more importantly, that only you thinks the way you do. This is a fact that is hard to recognise, and we tend to overlook it most of the time. David Rock draws out all the ways that fact affects our interactions with other people, and gives some guidelines for recognising and adapting your interactions with people who aren’t you.
FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS:
1. When we are trying to help a colleague think anything through, we make the unconscious assumption that the other person’s brain works the same as ours. So we input their problem into our brain, see the connections our brain would make to solve this problem, and spit out the solution that would work for us. We then tell people what we would do and are convinced it’s what they should do.
2. Diversity isn’t important only because it’s the right way to grow as an organisation. If you need a transactional justification, remember that the different wiring of other people’s brains means they see things from a fundamentally different position, and therefore will bring value that you could never have contributed.
3. You can’t advise someone to get out of a problem you didn’t advise them into. You cannot form the neural pathways in someone else’s brain that are needed for them to solve a problem. Instead, you need to help them think through it themselves, and let their brain forge the connections needed to arrive at a solution.
4. Negative feedback is easy for people to give, and hard for people to receive. Positive feedback is hard to deliver - we tend to overlook those areas where people are performing well - and it has an uplifting impact on people’s performance. Positive feedback is more powerful, and more useful, than negative feedback.
5. Email is not a good form of communication where emotions are involved. You have no way at all of knowing how the message will be interpreted.
THINGS TO GUIDE A NEW LEADER:
Challenging people’s contributions, rather than their thinking, is a challenge to their social status. This is integrated mentally as an attack, and they will defend their position rather than concede to the attack. Determining how the contribution was determined as appropriate, and altering the path from through to action, will avoid the challenge and the automatic defence.
THINGS TO REMIND AN EXPERIENCED LEADER:
People usually know when they’ve made a mistake. They can deliver that feedback to themselves. Leaders need to recognise when their team are already in a place to improve, and help them move on from there. Offering another critique on the past performance helps no one. Instead, focus on what was learned. This reinforces the mental map that people develop to avoid the mistake in the future, and increases the chances of not repeating a mistake.
THE QUOTE I’D TWEET:
If we want people to think better, let them do all the thinking, then help them think.
3 THINGS TO PUT INTO PRACTICE:
1. Stop critiquing your team’s performance. Focus instead on what was learned, and reinforcing the positive aspects of performance.
2. If your email is more than five sentences, use another form of communication.
3. Use visual metaphors to describe problems. This helps offset the difference between your approach to a problem, and someone else’s. You can both build new mental models to interpret the issues, and to develop solutions from a common understanding.
Inspired reading
The Good Listener by Hugh Mackay
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Your Brain at Work
This book is an absolute must for anyone looking to improve their knowledge about why we act the way we act and do the things we do. Rock’s SCARF model is something every leader should keep in mind.
YOUR BRAIN AT WORK BY DAVID ROCK
WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT
David Rock takes the reader on several journeys through their own neuro-circuitry to discover how our brains deal with the world around them. There are a plethora of insights in here, from the limits of working memory, to the physical effects of emotional events. David Rock uses a narrative to draw together a framework of the five things that are most important to us in life - Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness. This SCARF model can be applied to every interaction we have in life.
FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS:
1. The SCARF model. We instinctively move towards rewards and away from threats - but the away reponse is far stronger than the toward response. We will move away from threats to our relative status, for example. The components of the model could be five takeaways and a reader will have gained so much from the book.
2. The usefulness of working memory, and how distractions affect our ability to concentrate. Spoiler: you can’t multitask very well.
3. Everything you perceive is filtered before you absorb it. You have non-conscious filters that determine how you respond to everything around you without you being aware of it - but you can make a decision about your actions that overrides your initial responses.
4. We are constantly affected by - and affecting - the emotions of those around us. We unconsciously mirror the perceived emotions of others in a group. You can use this to help lift a tense mood.
5. Emotional pain is physical pain, and emotional threats are physical threats. We don’t have separate neural pathways to deal with pain. Sticks and stones may break my bones, and words will hurt too, using the same brain chemistry and neural networks as the physical injuries.
THINGS TO GUIDE A NEW LEADER:
Remember that a threat to status - me big, you small - is perceived by our brain as a physical danger. Our cognitive processes close down in order to prepare for a fight or to flee. If you start a conversation in a manner that highlights a difference in status, it’s already going to be an uphill battle. The words “can I give you some feedback” will provoke a reaction that makes the recipient anxious.
THINGS TO REMIND AN EXPERIENCED LEADER:
Advising people out of a problem is rarely as effective as we want it to be - or expect it to be. Our individual perception of problems, our desire for autonomy, and a desire to be right all combine to undermine the effectiveness of advice-giving. Instead, we are better off helping people solve their own problems, even though it’s rarely easy to do. It’s hard to avoid giving advice because it’s so easy, and our brains are hard wired for ease over effective.
THE QUOTE I’D TWEET:
A feeling of being less than other people activates the same brain regions as physical pain.
3 THINGS TO PUT INTO PRACTICE:
1. Remind yourself often of the SCARF model. People will naturally move away from any perceived threat to status, so if you want real engagement with others, reinforce their sense of importance and bolster their self-worth.
2. This book explains why Tim Ferriss’s ‘fear-setting’ works so well. Our brains are prediction engines, and fear of the unknown threatens us. By giving voice to our fears and acknowledging them, we can decrease uncertainty and dampen our ‘away’ response. Google fear setting for more.
3. Find a way to focus on one thing at a time. Distractions literally make you dumber. You can’t multi-task, and the dopamine hit from your phone is making your decisions questionable.
INSPIRED READING
Quiet Leadership by David Rock. This book was so good, I had to read his other one!
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Turn the ship around!
This is one of the best books I’ve read as a practitioner’s guide for doing leadership. It challenges many of the assumptions we tend to make, especially about followers.
Turn the ship around! By L. David Marquet
WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT
This might be one of the best books about leadership I’ve read in along time. It is the thoughts of a US Navy submarine commander who dared to take a different approach to leading a nuclear submarine as parent of the US fleet. The book describes the different approach taken, what worked about it and why it worked. This is a practitioner’s guide to leadership.
FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS:
We tend to operate from a paradigm of leader-follower. If we adopt a paradigm that there are no followers, only leaders, it shapes a new way of approaching our role.
If we link performance of an organisation to the leader, we forgo the opportunity to develop a long-term, sustainable platform of excellence. It can’t be a cult of personality for long term success.
Performance follows measurement. If you measure success by the number of mistakes, then all you’ll get is a culture of mistake avoidance and adherence to regulations.
We tend to act as though passing on information is the same as having someone act on that information. Rather than just passively taking information, challenge your team to interact. Rather than having a presentation, hold a question session, where everyone needs to prepare - because they know they are going to be engaged.
Think deeply about the questions you ask. Are you asking to be heard, or asking so that you can hear? If you already know the answer, don’t ask the question.
THINGS TO GUIDE A NEW LEADER:
The best takeaway from this book for a new leader - and there are MANY - is that the best way to lead is to treat everyone in the team the way you would want to be treated in their shoes. Think about the times you were overlooked or not trusted, when you knew you were ready to step up. Then give your team the opportunity to step up. If you treat people like followers - not leaders - then when they are in charge, the only pattern of learning they have to fall back on is as a follower.
THINGS TO REMIND AN EXPERIENCED LEADER:
The most poignant reminder for an experienced leader might well be that you can’t empower a team from the top. It’s an oxymoron - if you have to empower them, then you have the power, not them. Don’t empower; delegate and trust. And engage with your people at every level.
THE QUOTE I’D TWEET:
People who are treated as followers treat others as followers when it’s their turn to lead. A vast untapped human potential is lost as a result of treating people as followers.
3 THINGS TO PUT INTO PRACTICE:
Stop briefing people. Ask questions instead.
Treat your team like leaders. Expect them to behave like leaders.
Engage with everyone on the team. If you don’t know their job - ask them.
INSPIRED READING
The Language of Leadership by L. David Marquet.
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Neuroscience for leadership
This book takes the most complex organisation in the universe - the human brain - and explains how it relates to leadership. It explains both the details, and the concepts, for how and why leadership works the way it does in our brains.
NUEROSCIENCE FOR LEADERSHIP: HARNESSING THE BRAIN GAIN ADVANTAGE
By T. Swart, Kitty Chisholm and Paul Brown
WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT
This book is a deep dive into the science behind how our brains react to leadership. It looks at the brain in depth, from the molecular level of neurotransmitters, the physical areas of the brain and how it all evolved to act as a leader of follower. It is not a textbook on chemicals in the brain; far from it. The authors have done a fantastic job of taking a detailed topic and explaining how is can be practically applied by any leader.
FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS:
Trust is fundamental to leadership, because it is fundamental to interpersonal relationships.
The brain can be compared to an organisation, with higher level functions requiring more resources and having more control over outputs, while routine processes are handled easily - until something goes wrong.
Our brains have evolved to prioritise the negative in any situation, so we need to clearly communicate when we are trying to make a positive change.
if a brain can’t find meaning, it will construct meaning. Be careful what you might accidentally construe.
Emotions are not a bad thing. They are critical to motivation and meaning, and will enhance a leader’s communications.
THINGS TO GUIDE A NEW LEADER:
The brain looks for shortcuts. Be aware of your biases and mental gaps when you think you understand a complex situation.
Change is perceived by our brain as bad. You need to influence others to show why it isn’t.
We trust our own experience more than we trust external messaging. This makes it hard to simply explain a change and expect engagement.
THINGS TO REMIND AN EXPERIENCED LEADER:
Communication occurs at every level of your brain. Be aware of the message you send when you think you aren’t sending a message.
If you aren’t aware of your values, you can’t communicate them. This means you can’t align them to your organisation, or align others to your values.
Theory isn’t enough. To improve as leader takes deliberate practice.
THE QUOTE I’D TWEET:
“We do not like the word follower. It gives the wrong impression, implying that the leader is in front, forging one path, and the rest are behind.”
3 THINGS TO PUT INTO PRACTICE:
Trust my stories, and develop ones for expressing what’s important to me. Stories are influential at the most fundamental level of our brains.
Be clear. Subtlety and inference are a sure way to have someone construct a meaning I didn’t mean to impart.
Don’t downplay my emotions. Use them to connect and influence, but be aware of the fact they can have through mirroring.
INSPIRED READING
Your Brain at Work by David Rock.
LINK TO BUY
Dare to Lead
This book had a surprising impact on the way I look at both leadership, and myself. Brene is a thought leader in the leadership domain, and her expertise combines with a self-effacing and easy writing style. Definitely worth a read.
DARE TO LEAD BY BRENE BROWN
What the book is about
I was surprised by this book. Going in, my sum total of knowledge about Brene Brown was that Reese Witherspoon plays her in a movie. And to be 100%, completely, and totally honest, the cover of that movie put me off reading anything by Brene Brown. If you’re as obtuse as I was, get over it. This book is about leadership, plain and simple. It’s a great book for cutting to the core of some important concepts and for promoting some of the foundation skills and attitudes for leaders in every context. Sometimes it’s a pleasure to be wrong - this book is proof.
Five key takeaways:
Vulnerability is not a dirty word. You can’t be courageous unless you’re vulnerable, and you literally cannot establish trust without vulnerability.
If you have more than three priorities, you have none. If you have more than three core values, you have none.
Feedback needs to be clear to be useful, and you don’t do any favours by sugarcoating it. You need to be courageous and embrace the suck – acknowledge the vulnerability – to do the right thing.
Failure needs to be an option. There are no perfect leaders. Acknowledge when you’re down and out and come back when you’re together.
Perfectionism is not a strength for a leader. Perfection is subjective – if you seek it, only you can define it so only you can achieve it. Your team is useless, so you aren’t the leader.
It’s the man in the ring that matters, not the crowd or commentators.
Things to guide a new leader:
Understand how you come across to others, and what effect that can have.
You need to learn to trust your team
Learn to give and receive feedback – not about performance, but about personality.
Things to remind an experienced leader:
Trust is essential, and requires vulnerability
You can only have one main effort
If you don’t know your values, you can’t practise them
The quote I’d tweet:
‘If you have more than three priorities, you have none’. (N.B. this is not originally Brene’s quote, but the thoughts she uses in this section are too good not too use, and this quote sums it up perfectly).
3 things to put into practice:
Trusting my team – I don’t need to be the chokepoint for decisions or collaboration.
Deciding what my core values are, whittle the list down from 7 to 2
Seek honest feedback about how I come across to others
Inspired reading – The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek.
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Leading Minds: An anatomy of Leadership
This great book blends several leadership concepts with historical examples of powerful leaders.
Leading Minds: An anatomy of leadership. By Howard Gardner.
Synopsis and ‘Mabo’ of the book:
An analysis of 12 leaders through history. It starts with a great explanation of leadership, but the chapters on the actual leaders tend to focus heavily on the what happened rather than on showing the examples of the theory from the first part of the book.
I found the first part really, really useful, and then skimmed the actual meat of the book being the discussion of the actual leaders themselves.
Three things in this book for a new leader:
1. Stories are really powerful for influencing people
2. Leaders communicate powerfully, but more importantly, they embody the stories they employ as influence tools
3. Part of the power of stories is the sense of identity they impart to the listener
Three things in this book for an experienced leader:
1. We identify who we are in part (or in large part) by understanding which groups we belong to, and the stories that resonate within that group
2. Stories will appeal to both our rational selves and our emotional selves
3. To be a leader means helping people understand, in part, who they are.
A quote that captures the essence of the book:
“…stories speak to both parts of the human mind - its reason and emotion. Further, it is stories of identity - that is, narratives that help individuals think about and feel who they are, where they come from and where they are headed, that constitute the single most powerful weapon in a leaders arsenal.”
Three lessons that can be put into practice:
1. Listen for the stories that get told on a daily basis, and what they say about the groups they are being told in
2. Understand the context of the situation, and how the group would see an influential person within that group, in that context
3. Tell my kids more stories
Any further reading that it prompted:
Storytelling for Leaders