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The Heart of a Leader By: Ken Blanchard
Honor Books; 1999 The Heart of a Leader is authored by America’s best-selling business author and acclaimed leadership guru, Ken Blanchard. It is written to help leaders and future leaders improve their leadership skills. Blanchard shares his wisdom and lessons in leadership as a business leader and educator with hopes to give us the business smarts and the caring heart needed to become an effective leader. The Heart of a Leader captures this leading training and leadership consultant’s leadership philosophies in a concise format. This book is a compilation of Blanchard’s key leadership lessons and is a quick read that can be completed in one, short sitting.
Blanchard uses motivational sayings combined with storytelling lessons to give you insight on the art of influential leadership and to encourage you to develop a heart of a leader. The Heart of a Leader can also be used for personal motivation and as a teaching aid for discovering tools to help you sharpen your management skills and develop leadership competencies. This book’s repeated one quote followed by a short story format lends itself for daily inspiration before starting your workday.
Blanchard’s The Heart of a Leader book focuses on increasing your business smarts and improving your effectiveness as a leader and manager. It also helps encourage you to develop a business heart which enhances your leadership influence. The contents of this book reveal management strategies such as: 1) catching people doing something right and being specific about the praise, 2) using ongoing feedback as an essential performance motivation tool and cost-effective strategy for improving performance, 3) utilizing the guiding principle of teambuilding to involve the resources around us to solve problems, 4) evaluating each day by asking “Have I done what is really important today?”, 5) making learning a top priority in your organization to increase value and constantly strive to adapt to new circumstances, 6) creating “raving fan” customers who become part of your sales force by bragging on your services and products, and 7) stating and re-stating core values to breed security for your people and your customers. All these and other Blanchard lessons are written in short story format preceded by a unique inspirational quote from leaders such as Blanchard, Confucius, John Wooden, Spencer Johnson, Abraham Lincoln, and more.
Blanchard has captured the essence of the characteristics and accountabilities of effective leadership in this concise storytelling format. To improve your leadership acumen and effectiveness, I recommend The Heart of a Leader be added to the resource shelf of every leader and potential leader. I have found Blanchard’s principles aid in personal and professional interactions and affirm relationships both at home and in the workplace. Blanchard takes motivational quotes from various leaders and expounds on the one-line, foods for thought using his wisdom and entertaining stories to help us enhance our integrity and insight as leaders and strengthen our effectiveness as managers. You will enjoy Blanchard’s knack for making the seemingly complex easy to understand using his unique writing style. Blanchard and Terry Waghorn, his co-author of Mission Possible, contribute the following excerpt, “As a leader, the most important earthly relationship you can cultivate is your relationship with yourself.” I encourage you to examine The Heart of a Leader, examine your heart, and use the lessons of this compassionate author to build influential “business hearts”.
Ann V. Griffith, BS, CHES |
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