Taking People with You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen
The Founder of Inspire Leadership & focuses on unlocking people’s potential by providing them with programs; mentorship and coaching into high performance
By David Novak
According to Novak, you have failed as a leader if you cannot get people to be aligned, enthusiastic, and focused relentlessly on the mission. This does not matter on the size or nature of the organization but is an important facet of leadership. The book looks into how we do that; taking people with us!
Novak provides us with a step-by-step guide that starts us up by setting big goals, building strong teams around those goals, ensuring that the goals and targets are Big Hairy and Audacious Goals (BHAGs), and celebrating after achieving those goals.
He then suggests that this should be the way of life, and we should do it again and again until consistent excellence becomes a core element of our culture.
I enjoyed the book specifically the helpful tools, exercises, and quick evaluations that are likely to help us transition the learnings from the book to the actual situation. I hope you will enjoy it too.
David has passionately expressed himself in this book that sometimes it felt like I was in the room with him, learning the concepts in a live classroom environment.
How I wish we can all be able to grab this book. It has the potential of making us better when it comes to dealing with people.
Some of the lessons from this book include:
- Tips on how to understand your people and be in their position. This will help you convince them as you cannot convince them of anything unless you see the world from their perspective.
- The book will also enlighten you on how to think big; how to develop BHAGs in our lives, and how to achieve them without the fear of failure.
- The importance of practicing extraordinary authenticity. This is part of emotional intelligence; how vulnerable are we and how regularly we do admit when we do not have the answers.
- Always have an open mind to finds gems and ideas in the most unlikely places. It calls for a shift in our mindset.
- The winning mindset is that of a "can-do mindset”. This should be the gospel that we preach to our people. It is all about us. "We can do this!"
- Naysayers and the cynics have no part in our lives. We need to do away with them. These are the people who reject our values and spread negative energy.
The book is a great read that I will recommend to anybody serious about improving their working relationship with others.
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Country Director, Uganda, Strathmore University Business School
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